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

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СКАЧАТЬ pain and bloodshed, eventually the warring parties will come to some reconciliation which will form a ‘higher stage’, a greater whole. The new status quo would not last either – it too would spawn its opposite, and the same process would be repeated again and again. This was the dialectic which swung through history like a giant pendulum, affecting everything from art to philosophy, from fashion to politics. For Hegel the great dualisms of history – the divisions between public and private or between the individual and society – would one day be reconciled through this relentless process. Only then would man achieve complete knowledge and fulfil the world spirit – Geist.⁸

      Hegel died in 1831, and his followers immediately split into two antagonistic groups known as the Old Hegelians and the Young Hegelians. The first were ultra-conservative and would eventually use his defence of the all-powerful state – the Machtstaat – to legitimate Bismarck’s unification of Germany in 1871 and to justify chauvinistic nationalism and militarism well into the twentieth century. Because of this Hegel has been called everything from the father of nationalism to the harbinger of totalitarianism, but although he defended the Machtstaat, it is ahistorical to suggest that he either foresaw or would have approved of the policies later carried out in his name. He would have been appalled to see his face staring out gloomily from the pages of Nazi propaganda.⁹

      Hegel’s other disciples, the Young Hegelians, saw his work as proof of precisely the opposite view. For them Hegel’s dialectic proved that what is ‘rational’ today is ‘irrational’ tomorrow, and that everything from religion to culture to politics must be destroyed to make way for something new, something better. Using Hegel as their guide they began to denounce their own society.¹⁰

      Hegel had been a religious man all his life but his followers set about proving him wrong. Using his own methodology they tried to show that religion was a human construct whose time had passed. In 1835, four years after Hegel’s death, David Friedrich Strauss wrote his Life of Jesus, in which he used the dialectic to ‘prove’ that the New Testament was a myth. In his Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker Bruno Bauer denied that Jesus was the son of God, and in The Essence of Christianity Ludwig Feuerbach tried to show that it was not God who had created man, but rather man who had created God, and that the deity was nothing more than a projection of human needs and desires. It was Feuerbach who coined the now famous expression ‘You are what you eat’ – by which he meant that man is not fashioned in the image of God but is nothing more than biological matter.¹¹ Arnold Ruge became the leading Young Hegelian of the 1848 era and, using Hegel’s ‘terror of reason’, attacked everything from politics to the Romantics. He called for an end to ephemeral liberal theorizing and proclaimed that democracy would not simply ‘happen’ but must be fought for using principles of science and reason. He also chided Germans for being as passive about politics as they were ‘about the weather’. In 1838 Arnold Ruge and Theodor Ernst Echtermeyer founded the Hallesche Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst, which became a rallying point for radical intellectuals; it was banned by the Prussian government in 1841 and Ruge was forced to flee to Paris, but not before he and others – above all Bruno Bauer – had influenced the young Marx.¹²

      Marx was captivated by the new ideas sweeping 1830s Berlin and wrote to his father that he was attaching himself ‘ever more closely to the current philosophy’. His father sneered that he had merely replaced ‘degeneration in a learned dressing-gown and uncombed hair with degeneration with a beer glass’, but Marx was serious and had already started to struggle with Hegel’s troubled legacy.¹³ Marx agreed with Hegel that society was moving towards a Utopia but for him human beings had to make their own history, albeit under conditions which they had not chosen. To do this they had to act politically. Marx turned Hegel on his head, transforming Hegel’s passive view into a call for action. The epitaph on his gravestone in Highgate cemetery reads: ‘Philosophers have only explained the world in different ways, what matters is that it should be changed.’

      In Berlin Marx drank in the theories of the Young Hegelians: religion became the ‘opium of the masses’; political action was necessary to create the perfect society; and it was possible to achieve an ideal world if one followed rational scientific principles. Nevertheless at this point in his development the young student showed more interest in the coffee houses, the theatres and the salons of Berlin than in the working-class districts to the north and it was only later, in Paris, that he first noticed the ‘nobility’ in the ‘toil-worn bodies’ of the workers and discovered his own ‘agent of history’ – the proletariat. Only then would the Hegelian ideas absorbed in Berlin fit into a vast system which explained how society was dominated by a class struggle between capitalists and workers and how, when the workers were made aware of their class consciousness, they would inaugurate a revolution and bring about a Communist society in which there would be plenty for all, classes would disappear, ideology would vanish, the state would wither away, and all human beings would live together in peace and self-fulfilment. It was a seductive idea and, although Marx left Berlin in 1841 as a virtually unknown academic, all of ‘Red Berlin’ would have his name on their lips by the time of his death in 1883. The city was growing, the Industrial Revolution was bringing inexorable change, and the urban working class was becoming a force in its own right. The new industrial areas north of the Oranienburg Gate would soon be fertile ground for the revolutionary ideas spread by Marx and his disciples.

      The radicals, the neo-Hegelians, and indeed Marx himself came to maturity during a particularly grim phase in nineteenth-century industrialization. Berlin was no exception. Long hours, terrible working conditions, exploitation and brutality were the rule in the early factories and even before Marx’s arrival many were beginning to understand that however prosperous industrial Berlin appeared to be to the casual visitor it was a savage and terrible place for many of its inhabitants. Contemporary posters show the city haunted by a hideous black devil hovering above the buildings, waiting to devour those foolish enough to venture through the gates.¹⁴ Mothers in the villages of the Mark Brandenburg warned their children of the evil and depravity of the ‘Demon Berlin’, and conservatives grumbled about the hazards of having such a hotbed of radicalism in their midst. But the vast majority of the new working class who made up the overgrown industrial slums had not wanted to live in Berlin at all; they were immigrants who flooded into the city after their traditional way of life had collapsed in the east.

      Berliners have created a great many myths about themselves, and one of the most enduring is the image of the ‘typical Berliner’. Every tour guide, local historian and Kneipe (bar) philosopher will expound at length about the collective wit, disrespect for authority, suspicion of leaders and tradition of tolerance which epitomizes a true Berliner. He will invariably point to medieval examples of Berliner Unwille or to Goethe’s musings about the audacious local temperament, or recall Queen Victoria’s daughter’s description of Berliners as ‘bristly, thorny … with their sharp tongues, their cutting sarcasms about everybody and everything’ as proof of this heritage. But like so many modern myths, it is largely a nineteenth-century creation. It is true that Berlin has always been a magnet for immigrants, and everyone from the Wends and the French Huguenots to the Jewish merchants and Dutch and Bohemian craftsmen left their mark on the city, but nothing could compare with the wave of people which swept into Berlin from Saxony and the east Elbian lands throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1900 more than 60 per cent of Berliners were either immigrants or the children of immigrants and this percentage skyrocketed in the years between 1900 and 1914, when the population doubled again.¹⁵ Visitors commented that Berlin looked more like a New York or a Chicago than any equivalent European city, and it developed a culture to match. A quick look through a modern telephone directory still reveals a plethora of common Bohemian, Moravian and Polish names, but these destitute strangers were brought together not by a common language or religion, but by poverty and fear, by the factory floor and the rental barrack. It was from these reluctant migrants, and not their earlier counterparts, that the caricature of the coarse, tough, witty, irreverent Berliner was born.

      The reasons for the mass migration to the city СКАЧАТЬ