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

Автор: Alexandra Richie

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Историческая литература

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isbn: 9780007455492

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СКАЧАТЬ to the city so that by the 1870s 80 per cent of Prussian Jews had moved to Berlin. The Jews were important in industries and services centred there; whereas Gentile millionaires tended to be in the coal, iron, steel, metallurgy and machine-building industries, Jews were particularly successful in banking, manufacturing and trade, all of which were highly represented in the Prussian capital. Berlin industrial history was shaped by important Jewish families not only in banking and finance but, like the Reichenbeims and Goldschmidts, also in clothing; the silk manufacturers the Meyers had royal patronage; the Liebermanns were an old trading family which made a fortune in calico and pioneered the use of mechanical manufacturing. Jews were also prominent in brewing and distilling and all the service industries. Thanks to the capital generated there economic decision-making came to be concentrated in Berlin, at the expense of Frank-furt-am-Main, Cologne, Hamburg and other older centres. Berlin was never free of anti-Semitism but Jews were given more freedom and were increasingly seen as important and respected members of mid nineteenth-century Berlin society. One measure of this acceptance was the increase in official recognition of their contribution in the form of orders which gave them a seal of respectability in the Gentile world. The fact that a candidate for honours like the Geheimer Kommerzienrat was Jewish was mentioned in the confidential reports as a minor flaw but not insurmountable as long as he showed Christian or patriotic ‘virtues’ – to be a liberal or even a Catholic was often seen as a more serious hurdle to advancement. One report stated that ‘the candidate, although Jewish, employed in his office mainly Christian clerks’ or ‘although a Jew, he has always acted in a Christian spirit’; of another, ‘it is precisely because he is a Jew and a traditional liberal, but in times of need a generous patriot, that his appointment would be generally welcomed’.67 It was only in the final quarter of the century, when racial anti-Semitism was on the rise, that such recommendations became rare. Ironically one of the triggers would be jealousy of increasing Jewish wealth and success which Berliners themselves had championed in the mid nineteenth century.

      The economic rise of Berlin throughout the nineteenth century is one of the most remarkable success stories in history, made all the more dramatic given the depths to which it had fallen under Napoleon. In the early part of the century Berlin had been an economic backwater languishing on the edge of western Europe; when Napoleon marched in it had only one steam engine in the Royal Porcelain Works, and even that did not work. Compared with the new English industrial cities like Birmingham and Manchester Berlin was little more than a village and, locked as it was in the midst of a sandy wasteland, seemed an unnatural place for an economic giant. And yet, within decades, it had become the mightiest industrial capital on the continent. No European city rose from obscurity so quickly, and none would be so drunk on its success. By the end of the century Berlin had mushroomed at a breathtaking pace and had outstripped its formidable rivals, Paris and London, in industrial output. The population growth was staggering: in 1800 it stood at 915,000; by 1890 it had shot up to 2 million, and by 1914 it would be nearly 4 million, making it the largest city in Europe. Berlin’s transformation was due to an explosive combination of factors which included the importance derived from its role as the Prussian capital, the coming of the railway, Otto von Bismarck’s early support of the Zollverein, and the new breed of Berlin entrepreneur determined to put his city on the map.

      But despite its success it was not a city at ease with itself. Political reforms were non-existent, social reforms were grudgingly introduced, and all this at a time when hundreds of thousands of people were moving to the city to fill the new factories and the tenement blocks. They would become part of a force so powerful that by the end of the century Berlin would act both as the conservative capital of Germany, and the centre of the German working-class movement – the ‘other’ part of the city known as ‘Red Berlin’.

       V The Rise of Red Berlin

      God help the poor.

      (Faust, Part I)

      ON A DAMP AFTERNOON in October 1836 a black and yellow postal coach pulled into Berlin and a young student stepped out on to the pavement. He had just written a short verse to his beloved in Bonn: ‘The two skies. On the journey to Berlin in a carriage. The mountains pass, the forests recede. Gone from sight they leave no trace behind.’1 It was not a promising start. After finding rooms in Lessing’s old house in the Mittelstrasse (with ‘cultured people’) the gaunt man, his face adorned by a rather unsuccessful moustache and wispy beard, set off to register at the university. Had he remained in the Rhineland the world might have been spared a great deal of turmoil and bloodshed, but his experiences in Berlin would redirect his career and change him from a drunken, duelling provincial student into the creator of scientific socialism and the driving force behind the international Communist movement. Berliners can be forgiven for ignoring the arrival of Karl Heinrich Marx, forced to Berlin by a father tired of his loutish behaviour in Bonn, but they would hear of him soon enough.2 And Marx was only one of the litany of Communist saints who would be drawn to this burgeoning industrial city; Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel, Karl Liebknecht, Karl Radek, Rosa Luxemburg and even Lenin, who visited twelve times and who later slid through Germany on his way to lead the Russian Revolution, would be drawn to the new centre of the European working-class movement. Between Marx’s arrival and the end of the First World War the sprawling industrial city became known as ‘Red Berlin’, a powerful symbol lionized by the left and feared, even loathed, by just about everybody else.

      When Marx first arrived in Berlin he found a city charged with pre-revolutionary tension. He threw himself into the radical circles at the university, joined the Doktorklub, a group of earnest young men who met over coffee and the eighty newspapers of the reading room of the Café Stehely, and was inspired by the latest works by the Young Germans like Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Karl Gutzkow and Theodor Mondt.3 But above all it was in Berlin that the young Marx came into contact with the works of Berlin’s most prominent philosopher: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.4

      ‘Only one man understands me,’ Hegel muttered towards the end of his life, ‘and even he does not.’5 The complaint was widespread; Hegel’s cryptic style, coupled with the fact that many of his works were published from lecture notes, added to the difficulty in deciphering his already obscure and abstract writing. Schopenhauer would call Hegel’s work ‘pure nonsense’ created by ‘stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses’, which had resulted in the ‘most bare faced general mystification that has ever taken place … and will remain as a monument to German stupidity’.6 It did not help that Hegel had attempted nothing less than the placement of all human knowledge into a coherent philosophy of history. Despite the savage criticism his work was, in Engels’s words, a ‘triumphal procession which lasted for decades’ and was later used to legitimate two of the most influential – and mutually exclusive – developments in history: the rise of chauvinistic Prussian nationalism, and the creation of scientific socialism. Hegel would be given the dubious honour of being invoked both by William II and by Marx.

      Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770 and struggled for many years as a poor and unknown lecturer, confiding in his friend Schlegel that he had often gone hungry. His house at Jena was stormed by Napoleon’s soldiers and he barely managed to survive while in Nuremberg and Heidelberg, but by the time he reached Berlin in 1818 he had become the well-known author of Logic and the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and his birthday was jointly celebrated with that of the other icon of the fledgling German nation – Goethe.

      Hegel was above all a product of his age. Golo Mann has said of him: ‘What Napoleon was to the political history of the period Hegel was to its intellectual history.’7 One sees in his work the desperate search for answers to the political turmoil which had ripped apart the Europe of his youth. For Hegel, the most important aspect of existence was the notion that everything – every idea and every situation – must always change, be torn СКАЧАТЬ