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

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СКАЧАТЬ Berlin also became a huge centre for another kind of drug – alcohol – and the brewing and distilling industries flourished. The Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation or AGFA started with aniline production but soon became a German leader in photographic materials, optical instruments and precision tools. Following AGFA’s lead the city became a centre for precision instruments such as microscopes, nautical equipment and medical supplies. Loewe turned his small machine tool factory into an enormous concern for arms and ammunition which competed with Krupps in the Ruhr region.

      At the same time Berlin became the capital of the German clothing industry. The Konfektion or ‘putting together’ had been started in the eighteenth century by Huguenots, who had produced uniforms for the Prussian army, but in the nineteenth century clothiers took modern technology from England and set up factories; entrepreneurs like Valentin Manheimer from Magdeburg and David Levin made the Hausvogteiplatz the centre of the ‘rag trade’. Berlin was heralded as the ‘German fashion capital’ although it was ridiculed throughout Europe for slavishly copying Parisian designs.

      New industries produced a plethora of goods, from rubber bicycle tyres to decorative brassware. Berliners showed great inventiveness: one hit on the idea of using puréed peas instead of meat to make long-lasting ‘sausages’ for the Prussian army; another invented margarine, ‘workers’ butter’, from pressed palm oil; a third developed the insulated Thermos flask. The city grew at an amazing rate with hundreds of new firms being set up every year. Berliners became renowned for their technical prowess: one joke described two Bavarians sitting in a bar, one madly shaking and banging at a salt cellar. A Prussian sitting nearby brashly reached over and poked the holes of the container with a fork. ‘Damned Prussians,’ the Bavarian swore to his friend, ‘but you just can’t beat them!’ The two greatest firms founded by Berlin’s most famous entrepreneurs exhibited all the know-how of their Prussian contemporaries. Their names were Werner Siemens and Emil Rathenau.

      Berliners became better informed through the inexorable growth in the newspaper industry. The titles which had been founded in the 1840s now reached mass circulation and Berlin was widely referred to as the Zeitungstadt, the ‘newspaper city’. There was a rise, too, of professional journalists and full-time editors, many of whom had broader political ambitions – the conservatives Hermann Wagener and Joseph Jörg, the liberal Eduard Lasker and the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, among others.⁵² There was criticism of the new popular medium: Burckhardt and Nietzsche were disgusted by the prefabricated relationship to the world created by newspapers and by the pretension of the readership that they were informed, when in fact they were living on superficiality and half-truths; as Theodor Fontane put it, ‘Ninety-nine among a hundred people simply parrot what they read in the paper and nothing else.’ But there was no stopping newspapers and they in turn encouraged the growth of printing and publishing – so much so that Berlin soon challenged the traditional centre of printing, Leipzig.⁵³ Communications of a different kind were also being developed in the city. Long before the telegraph was invented Berliners had transmitted messages over distances by waving flags from tops of local church steeples. Werner Siemens transformed communications in the city and in the process became one of Berlin’s most remarkable industrialists.⁵⁴

      He was born in Hanover in 1816. He joined the Prussian army as a cadet and attended the United Engineering and Artillery School in Berlin, after which he was appointed a second lieutenant in the artillery. He was always fascinated with new gadgets and inventions and began to experiment in his own time with the new force, electricity. Siemens first caught the public eye when he defied his critics and patented a galvanic process for gilding and plating in 1842; his brother sold the patent to a firm in Birmingham for a staggering £1,500. It was Siemens who realized the potential of the electric telegraph, inventing a process to insulate overhead wires so that they could be used along railways; the first of these was installed in 1847 along the famous Berlin – Potsdam line. In that year he teamed up with a mechanical engineer Johann Georg Halske and set up a small workshop with a handful of employees in the Schöneberger Strasse; by 1914 the huge firm employed more than 60,000 people. Siemens-Halske specialized in laying telegraph and submarine cables; one of the most extraordinary was the overland telegraph line which stretched from Britain to India by way of Prussia, Russia and Persia, and was completed by three Siemens firms under their London-based Indo-European Telegraph Company in 1867.

      Siemens was a brilliant inventor and came up with a number of electrical instruments, the most important being the electric dynamo demonstrated at the Paris International Exhibition in 1867. The first ever elevator, built in a New York department store, had been steam powered; but in 1881 Siemens installed the first ever electric elevator, which astounded everyone with its smooth and quiet ride. He was fascinated by transportation and built an ingenious miniature electric railway which later served as a model for a full-scale service, as well as an electric trolleybus. Siemens and Halske electric trams first glided through Lichterfelde in 1881 and soon linked the city together.

      The new Bell telephones had been invented in America, and despite official disapproval Siemens was determined to install them in Berlin. The first 200 subscribers were hooked up in 1880. Electric street lighting illuminated Berlin in the same year. Until the 1820s Berliners had lived in almost complete nocturnal darkness, and during what they called the ‘dark season’ between November and March one in three homes had to have a petroleum lamp outside the door. When gas street lamps were finally introduced they were said to have a ‘bad influence on people’s morality, undermining fear of the Lord and terror of the dark’. The introduction of Siemens’s electric light half a century later was greeted with more enthusiasm. The first lamp was put up in 1880, outside the Bauer Restaurant on Friedrichstrasse, and the first street to be fully electrified was the Leipziger Strasse. Berliners crowded around waiting for the ‘magic lights’ to be switched on, and the result was impressive. Never had the shadows been so sharp or the vision so clear. Despite the great expense – 1 kilowatt of electricity cost 40 pfennigs, more than twice the cost of gas – Berliners saw it as a matter of pride to put electric lights up throughout the city as soon as possible. The first coloured electric sign for Manoli cigarettes was hailed as a landmark, but before long all the clubs on the Friedrichstrasse were dazzling visitors with their blue and green and red lights.

      Siemens’s great rival was a charming man by the name of Emil Rathenau, whose son Walther was later assassinated under the Weimar Republic. Born in Berlin in 1838 Emil studied engineering at technical college and worked as a draughtsman at Borsig’s firm in Moabit. He travelled extensively in England and on his return to Berlin purchased a small engineering plant in a converted dance hall in the famous Chausseestrasse. His forty employees started by building steam engines, equipment for gas works and props for the State Opera House; indeed one of his first contracts was to build a ship for Meyerbeer’s Die Afrikanerin. Rathenau’s life changed in 1881 when he saw Edison’s incandescent electric bulb at the Paris exhibition. At his funeral his son said:

      when Emil Rathenau saw that little bulb alight for the first time, he had a vision of the whole world covered with a network of copper wire. He saw electric current flowing from one country to another, distributing not only light but also power – energy that would become the life blood of the economy and would stimulate its movement and growth … he vowed that he would devote his life to electricity.⁵⁵

      In 1883 Rathenau founded the German-Edison Company in order to produce Edison’s inventions in Berlin, and it was over the production of the humble light bulb that he first clashed with Siemens. Neither could outproduce the other and after a long and expensive struggle the two giants agreed that Siemens should have the sole right to manufacture white carbon filament bulbs while the German-Edison Company had the right to produce yellow incandescent bulbs. Berliners supported the two companies almost as if they were rival teams. Rathenau challenged Siemens again by designing and building power stations: the first in the city was put up by his Municipal Electricity Works, and really made his fortune. AEG was created from a number of his smaller companies and rose to fame in 1891 when it laid the first long-distance electric power cable of 175 kilometres between Lauffen and Frankfurt-am-Main. СКАЧАТЬ