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

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СКАЧАТЬ the east could not sustain a large rural population. If one journeys overland from Berlin through the Mark Brandenburg into Poland and what were then the provinces of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and West and East Prussia one passes a seemingly endless patchwork of sandy fields broken by a few straggly pine forests and small villages. It was here that the Junkers, descendants of the settlers who had accompanied the old Teutonic conquerors to the area, lived on their estates, and fiercely defended their feudal privileges. Some were as poor as the French hobereaux who had to stay in bed while their only pair of trousers was being mended, but the larger landowners had become wealthier throughout the nineteenth century as rational methods of production, Liebig’s mineral fertilizers, and modern equipment triumphed over the sandy soil.¹⁶ They would suffer later when cheap imports of Russian and American grain undercut their products, but they prospered for much of the nineteenth century and were particularly important to the recovery of Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars. The ‘agrarian revolution’ which took place after the victory was bolstered by the reforms introduced between 1807 and 1821, but although they improved production and strengthened the Junkers’ power they had unforeseen consequences. Serfs were able to ‘buy’ their freedom from the lord by returning half the land they had once worked, but they were then left with tiny plots of poor soil from which it was impossible to make a living. Few could afford to buy seeds, farming equipment or supplies, and as the lord’s woodlands, grazing areas and common fields were now out of bounds few could survive for long. A desperately poor rural substratum emerged, with ex-serfs drifting around the countryside collecting wood, poaching, begging or stealing.¹⁷ The new, large-scale agriculture was achieved at the expense of peasant ownership, and between 1811 and 1890 the number of large estates increased by two-thirds in the east Elbian region. For their part the estate owners became increasingly powerful and continued to exert an extraordinary influence on the Prussian (and later the German) government. At the same time improved efficiency saw a vast increase in the population – Prussia’s grew by 26 per cent between 1840 and 1860 alone – but as fewer people were needed to work the land unemployment rose. Many were drawn to the new industrial cities.¹⁸ By the end of the century thousands of immigrants had moved in from West and East Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania and Mecklenburg.

      To make matters worse, the crisis in agricultural labour coincided with the introduction of free trade in the North German Confederation and with the corresponding breakdown of the medieval guild system. Before 1810 only a privileged few had been entitled to become master-craftsmen, but the free trade laws did away with the strict code which required all silversmiths, jewellers, furniture makers, stone masons and a host of others to join one of the exclusive guilds. In 1820 there had been thirty masters and journeymen per 1,000 Prussians, but this had already doubled by 1850. Independent artisans were forced to work from home or to hire themselves out for menial repair work on battered furniture or church silver, and a newcomer could only hold his own against new mass-produced items by constantly increasing the length of his working day. Many simply gave up and went to the city.¹⁹

      The Industrial Revolution hit the traditional cottage industries just as hard. There were half a million small linen and wool looms and tens of thousands of spinners in Prussia alone in the early nineteenth century, but as the shining new factories began to spring up in Europe’s cities life for traditional workers became a struggle for survival. Hollow-eyed children were sent to work at the age of four; Huhn (chicken) on a menu could mean Hund (dog); and even the cannibalistic jokes running through Kayssler’s social commentary, akin to Swiftian satire about Irish children, were not considered far fetched by those who visited the region. Linguet’s observation that ‘you can be sure that [the city] where the most human beings are at the point of dying of hunger is the one where the most hands are employed in working the shuttle’ was an apt description for much of the east.²⁰ It was clear that the cottage weavers were fighting a losing battle.

      The spark which ignited the powder keg was started by famine. From 1843 Prussia experienced successive failures in both the grain and potato harvests, and food riots became increasingly common in Berlin after 1845. By this time around 70 per cent of a labourer’s income was spent on food – a dire situation when, according to the great liberal scientist Rudolf Virchow, workers’ real wages dropped by 45 per cent between 1844 and 1847.²¹ The latter was the year of the ‘Potato Revolution’, which saw violence on the streets of Berlin provoked by endless food shortages and an outbreak of typhus, a disease brought on by malnutrition.²² It was put down by the military. But the situation was worse in Silesia. There linen weavers could no longer compete with new mechanical production techniques employed in Britain and they were penniless and starving. Eighty thousand people contracted typhus and around 16,000 people died that winter. Thousands rose up in desperation against the local merchants and middlemen in a pitiful attempt to get food and to somehow reverse the course of the Industrial Revolution. The weavers blamed the wealthy middlemen, who were detested for flaunting their coaches and clothes and estates as the people went hungry. Three hundred weavers attacked their factories and homes in 1847, smashing property and burning the records of their debts. Not amused by the cartloads of ‘German Luddites’ bearing down on them with sticks and pitchforks, the merchants asked the Prussian military to intervene and the latter, nervous about the persistent whispers of revolution floating around Europe, crushed the revolt with brute force.²³

      In more settled times an incident like this would soon have been forgotten, but the story of the revolt became one of the first great rallying myths of the emerging working class; indeed it fuelled the Marxist belief that industrial capitalism must inevitably lead to the degradation and impoverishment – to the pauperization – of workers. Heinrich Heine wrote about it in his early poem of social protest The Silesian Weavers; it was taken up by Gerhart Hauptmann in his eerie, disturbing – and banned – play Die Weber (The Weavers) and by Käthe Kollwitz in her black lithographs of the same name; it cropped up in Franz Mehring’s essay Hauptmanns Weavers, in Friedrich Kayssler’s The Weavers’ Social Drama, and was later alluded to by many a left-wing Berlin writer of the nineteenth century. The frightened and starving cottage weavers would never know of their place in history, but they packed up their belongings and left for Berlin, adding to the mass of new arrivals there. Evidence of this exodus has long since disappeared under the weight of the more terrible things which have since happened in eastern Germany and Poland. Perhaps the closest equivalent one can find today are the chillingly quiet villages near Chernobyl in Ukraine which resemble the abandoned settlements that once littered the territory east of the Elbe. There the evidence of rapid departure is everywhere: small brightly painted wooden houses line the dusty roads, old bottles stand on kitchen window sills, benches where neighbours once chatted in the sun lie at the edges of overgrown gardens, and rusting wire still clings to empty chicken coops. In the 1980s the fear of radiation forced people to move; in the mid nineteenth century it was starvation, but the end result was the same: a destitute population compelled to emigrate in search of a better life.

      In 1847 400,000 peasants, merchants and artisans left the eastern provinces; by 1870 it was over 800,000 per year and over 2 million Germans emigrated in the years between 1850 and 1870. Of the 133,700 who officially registered in Berlin in 1870 (many did not) over half were young men of working age. The city population surged to 1 million following demobilization after the war of 1871; twenty years later it doubled again, and it had reached 4 million by 1914. Most continued to come from the east; in 1911 alone 1,046,162 people came to Berlin from German lands along with 97,683 from Russia; this was in contrast to the mere 7,611 who came from western countries like Holland or 3,682 from Italy.²⁴ Huge tent cities sprang up on the fringes of a Berlin bloated with desperate people hoping to get work – older men with families to feed and a few qualifications, or rural untrained youths with no idea about life in the city. Many had hoped to make enough money in Berlin to buy a passage to America but had been trapped by their poverty.

      The mass migration caught officials by surprise, but the indifferent city councils pretended that nothing was happening and refused to make provision in the hope that the troublesome people at their gates would simply go away.²⁵ In the end the Prussian government had to order the Berlin police to prepare plans for new housing developments, СКАЧАТЬ