Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ a state so powerful that it could subjugate all Germany. But the train also put Berlin at the heart of Europe, and for that reason it remains one of the city’s most cherished symbols.⁴⁶

      The military men in Berlin were not only interested in the promotion of railroads; they began to support industrial expansion, with greedy eyes fixed on the prospect of more guns, artillery, ammunition, uniforms and pharmaceuticals. In their minds, industry meant power. But the new weapons, locomotives and machinery did not bear the names of the Junkers; instead they were stamped with the signatures of as yet unknowns like Egells, Pflug, Wöhlert and Schwartzkopff. The Zollverein, economic reforms and the railroads had brought iron, steel and coal within reach of Berlin; between 1848 and 1857 pig iron production in the Zollverein increased by 250 per cent, coal production by 138 per cent and iron ore and coal mining by over a third.⁴⁷ Furthermore, freight traffic on the Prussian railways increased seven times over between 1850 and 1860. This had paved the way to success for a new breed: the Berlin entrepreneur.

      One of the first great self-made men of Berlin was the committed liberal who had spoken over the graves of the revolutionaries in 1848, August Borsig. He had started as a carpenter, moved to a vocational school in 1823 and joined a small iron foundry in 1825, beginning his own business in the courtyard of a Berlin Hinterhof or tenement block a few years later. His first contract was the installation of pump machinery in the fountains of Frederick the Great’s palace Sanssouci. In 1836 he scraped together enough money to buy a small piece of land at the corner of Thorstrasse and Chausseestrasse in the Moabit district, and by July 1837 he was producing his first pieces of iron. He managed to get a contract to supply 117,000 spikes for the new Berlin – Potsdam line and with that money immediately installed a twelve-horsepower steam engine, paying soldiers from a nearby barracks to work the bellows. He then turned his attention to locomotives.

      Borsig’s locomotives dominated the German market between the 1850s and the 1870s. He started by copying English designs but soon modified them and in 1841 became a local hero when his new engine ‘destroyed the myth of English speed’ by streaking from Berlin to Jüterbog ten minutes faster than its great English rival, the Stephenson Model.⁴⁸ By the late 1840s his main factory hall was so enormous that it could accommodate twenty-five locomotives at a time. The flamboyant coal merchant Emanuel Friedländer described it as the giant of Berlin: ‘on approach one sees about 15 chimneys belching smoke and hears at the same time the 3 colossal steam machines which set the whole works in motion. The great main hall, surrounded by dozens of buildings and chimneys, looks like a small city.’ By 1850 Borsig employed over 1,200 workers and his had become the largest private enterprise in Berlin. When the Berlin – Potsdam line was built virtually all parts had been purchased abroad. Borsig changed that. By the 1850s Berlin was supplying the world with entire railway lines complete with everything from track, cable and signalling equipment to the locomotives themselves. Borsig had proved it was possible to create a mighty industrial centre even if one had to import raw materials, and he had paved the way for the future of Berlin industry. It was said that he had gone ‘Vom Handwerksburschen zum Millionär’ – from journeyman to millionaire – but it was said with pride.

      Borsig was still deeply committed to the ideas of 1848 and saw his factory as a step in the advancement of civilization. He dreamt of the day when capital, the workers, and the natural sciences would ‘all be as one under the guiding hand of great industrial enterprise’. His famous villa, with its gardens, birds and tropical plants, was built near the factory to ‘bring beauty and harmony’ into the emerging industrial society. His ideology came through in all he did, and never more clearly than in the festivals held to mark factory anniversaries. The first great jubilee was held on 20 September 1846 to mark the completion of the 100th locomotive. The flower-bedecked engine was described as the darling of Berlin; little children looked at it in awe, beautiful ladies in enormous hats gossiped about it, and even the king and queen were shown admiring it. Such spectacles were repeated often, but the most extravagant was held on 21 August 1858 after the completion of the 1,000th engine.

      The festival was a tribute to August Borsig and the events were clearly meant to emphasize the importance of his historical and cultural mission as well as to commemorate the ‘peaceful revolution’ which the factories had brought to Prussia.⁴⁹ The local Moabit newspaper announced that the Borsigs planned to celebrate ‘in the grand style of a Renaissance prince’, and that is very much what they did; all Moabit was invited to the villa and 30,000 people ate, drank and danced at the factory. In the evening Albert, August’s son, staged an extraordinary play in the Viktoria Theatre written by the editor of Kladderadatsch. With hindsight it is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to sit through this bombastic extravaganza, but the employees of the day loved it. It took the form of a quasi-Greek drama which recounted the adventures of the busybody, Hans Dampf, amongst the gods. The terrible rivalry which had raged between the deities since time immemorial was vividly described: Vulcan, Mercury, Minerva and Venus ran around the stage in their Olympian finery brandishing weapons and fighting amongst themselves. The young man approached them and declared that, as he could harness steam, he was more powerful than they; he represented ‘the highpoint of industrial civilization’ and heralded ‘the dawning of a new Golden Age’. Only the great new force, steam, could bring the warring gods and the opposing elements into a new and happy co-existence. At the end of his demonstration Venus turned to Vulcan crying, ‘Yes! Yes! Steam now rules the world/And you and I are his loyal servants!’

      The play had a clear political agenda. Albert Borsig, like his father, wished to see the creation of a strong united Germany. In one of the final scenes Minerva, ‘the Goddess of machinery and the art of war’, appeared with all the elements needed for a ‘strong Germany’: water, wind, coal, iron, fire, Father Rhine, the four winds, along with gnomes, dwarves and a cyclops carrying various Borsig products from cables to cannon. ‘Great industry’, they sang in chorus, could ‘make Germany into one true nation using tools of both war and peace’. At the end an image of the 1,000th locomotive, Borussia, was brought in. ‘This great Borussia’ possessed ‘revolutionary properties’, it ‘welded Germany together’ and brought ‘work, a sense of purpose, and happiness to the German nation’ by ‘giving people a future and distributing material and spiritual wealth’. Borsig’s trains were driving Germany towards unification.⁵⁰

      Some did not see these developments in such rosy terms: one contemporary wrote of the ‘debasement of man’ brought by Borsig’s new heavy industry while another called his factory a ‘terrible torture chamber … filthy, noisy and inhuman’. Some saw steam as the ‘Demon Dampf’, a great enemy which was ruining the traditional way of life and which should be stopped at all costs. But these voices were few and far between and for many liberal Berliners industry was the way of the future. August Borsig’s factory became the largest in the district of Moabit – ‘la terre Moab’, as he called it – and he turned the area around the Chausseestrasse and the Oranienburg Gate into the first great modern industrial centre of Berlin.

      Borsig’s success was shared by others: in 1800 there had been 130 small firms in the area; by 1849 there were 2,000. Egells iron was joined by Schwartz-kopff torpedoes, Pflug founded his train carriage factory in 1838, Wöhlert his machine works in 1843 and his iron foundry in 1844. The new industries needed workers and the district grew twenty-five times in less than fifty years, with the population rising from 6,534 residents in 1858 to 159,791 by 1900. Locals were fascinated by the new industrial landscape, which they called ‘The Fireland’, and ‘Herculean Berlin’; a essayist wrote that Chausseestrasse was a ‘wonder of the world with ’every chimney spewing out great showers of sparks and thick billows of smoke, as if it were the fire city of Vulcan’.

      A list of firms founded in Berlin during this period reads like a contemporary Who’s Who of German industry. Schering, Borsig, AEG, Siemens, Osram, AGFA, and dozens of others took advantage of the boom and expanded to proportions hitherto unknown in Germany. The Schering concern started in 1852 as a local pharmacy called the ‘Green Apothecary’, but soon began to produce the new wonder drugs chloroform and cocaine. Schering СКАЧАТЬ