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

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СКАЧАТЬ but the numbers were bound to rise, making it a breeding ground for illness and disease; indeed infant mortality in Wedding as late as 1905 was an extraordinary 42 per cent.³⁶ The complex was smashed by bombs in 1944, with the last remaining section pulled down a decade later to make way for the Ernst-Reuter development. Today the only thing that survives is the deceptively pretty mock Renaissance facade which was fastened to the front of another building nearby.³⁷

      Sanitary conditions in the slum rental barracks were totally inadequate; only a few outhouses were built for each back block and at the end of the century only 8 per cent of Berlin dwellings had a WC; even the residents of well-to-do areas would be woken at night by the sound of women clattering down the street in rickety carts, collecting sewage in large tanks and dumping it into the river. Again the officials disregarded calls for change. When residents in the Prenzlauer Berg complained that there was only one toilet for every ten flats the official Prussian response was typical: because most men were away for most of the day ‘when most stools are passed’, they were told, the toilets had only to accommodate ten or eleven women, and as ‘one sitting takes an average of 3–4 minutes or five including time to adjust one’s clothing even though this is not necessary for women … even allowing 10 minutes per sitting there should still be time in 12 daytime hours for 72 people to use the closet …’³⁸ Raw sewage ran in the streets for decades. Naturally, outbreaks of typhus and other illnesses were common. Cholera was another killer: in 1831 an outbreak killed around two-thirds of those infected, including Hegel, and it was the terrible epidemic of 1868 which prompted the liberal scientist Rudolf Virchow to promote the development of sanitary systems like the Rieselfelder sewage works.³⁹ The smallpox epidemic of 1871 struck so many that the Berlin garrison allowed health workers to set up hospital tents on their parade ground at the Tempelhof field, on the very site where the Wright brothers would soon test their planes: 6,478 people died, which was not surprising given that the only prescription for the ‘poor person’s illness’ was turnip soup. Every day, wrote Rosa Luxemburg, homeless people die in Berlin, broken by hunger and cold: ‘nobody notices them, particularly not the police reports’.⁴⁰ Venereal disease was rampant and Virchow estimated that around 3.8 per cent of men in the Prussian army and 5 per cent of the population of Berlin were infected. But the great national disease of the century was tuberculosis. For some reason this became a romantic disease, said to create ‘radiant beauty’ as it killed, and could only be ‘cured’ with opium. For the poor who were stricken, the strange potions, the blood letting, the laxatives and the poultices administered by quack healers did little good. According to Virchow, around 15 per cent of all fatalities in Prussia in 1860 could be attributed to tuberculosis, and many thousands coughed and sweated to death in conditions which bore little resemblance to the glorious sets of La Traviata.

      As the century wore on the numbers of migrants steadily increased, and even the over-filled rental barracks failed to meet the escalating housing needs. Thousands of people slept in courtyards, at train stations or under makeshift shelters; some were forced into the infamous workhouses such as the eighteenth-century Ochsenkopf on Alexanderplatz or the Rummelsburg. Homelessness surged on collection days, 1 April and 1 October, when the thousands who could not pay the high rents were forced on to the street. Eyewitnesses described families sitting dejectedly amongst their possessions or pushing them along in small hand or dog carts; streets in Luisenstadt, at the Halle Gate or by the Lustizer Platz were piled so high with furniture and belongings that it was impossible for pedestrians to get by. During the particularly bad Easter move of 1872 there were so many people on the street that the city officials were forced to build a temporary shelter in Moabit; between 1900 and 1905 the shelter on Fröbelstrasse took in 2,000 people every night. But for most the only option was to move under a bridge or into a deserted building site, a stable, an empty train carriage or a warehouse. A group of families at the Stralau Gate hauled an old river barge on to land and lived under it, a novelty which soon became a local landmark.

      The authorities had little sympathy for the destitute families and were often remarkably brutal when breaking up their settlements. After the Easter move of 1871 dozens of people had settled around the Blumenstrasse and the Kottbus Gate, and as the fire brigade had not managed to shift them by July the police were sent in to move them on. In one street battle alone 159 people lay bleeding on the roads, having been cut down by sabres.⁴¹ The following year during another insurrection the police ripped down the white flag with the red Brandenburg eagle which a carpenter had nailed to a flagpole as a rallying mark. The carpenter took out his red handkerchief, and nailed it in its place. It became the first red flag raised in Berlin since 1848. The public prosecutor was so disturbed by this that he forced the socialists, who had not been directly involved in the fighting, to pay the revenue lost to the landlords.⁴²

      The police tended to overreact to anything reminiscent of 1848, when Berliners had torn up paving stones to slow down cavalry and infantry, carried projectiles to upper floors and thrown them at passing troops, and tried to strangle soldiers who entered their homes. But for the new working class these street battles became part of the local culture which bound the poor together against the Berlin police, and which marked the beginning of a radical split between the Berlin ‘underclass’ and the city authorities. As Ringelnatz put it: ‘Die Dichter und die Maler, Und auch die Kriminaler, Die kennen ihr Berlin’ (the poets and the painters, and also the criminals, they all know their Berlin).⁴³

      In his efforts to create the perfectly planned city James Hobrecht had unwittingly created a maze of slums, back corridors, hidden rooms and hiding places which made the new districts difficult to control. As the population soared the crime rate rose with it and a huge underclass of thieves, criminals, prostitutes, blackmailers and confidence men began to flourish in the dark areas stretching out behind Alexanderplatz to the north, the north-east, and on the outskirts of southern Berlin. Homelessness and begging were made illegal in 1843, and the Poor Law or ‘Eberfeld System’ forced people who were caught committing petty crimes to work on civic projects, but these measures had little effect on illegal activity. The slums of Berlin began to resemble Chicago in the 1920s or even Moscow in the 1990s, with extortion, black marketeering and dubious business deals becoming the norm. The city began to acquire the reputation as a ‘fount of perversion, criminality and evil’. Döblin called Berlin a ‘peculiar debauched city of sin, joined by trains, swarming with agitated worker-animals … whose lungs filled with the poisonous vapours from the factories emit the death rattle … It was rotten here from the beginning.’⁴⁴

      The Berlin authorities were slow to tackle the root cause of the problem, which was poverty and overcrowding, but they remained obsessed with political control and with reversing the decline of moral standards in the city. The Lex Heinze of 1900 was one attempt to improve morality in Berlin. It listed items to be banned, including ‘obscene literature, pictures or representations’ and ‘objects suited for obscene use’ which they found offensive.⁴⁵ Berlin’s chief of police, Horst Windheim, set up the much-derided Sittenpolizei or ‘Morality Police’ unit, which took to following suspicious characters on the streets or swooping down on rubber-goods suppliers, barber shops and pharmacies to confiscate any obscene photographs or objects which could be used for contraception or other ‘degenerate purposes’.⁴⁶

      One of their most obvious targets was rampant female, male and child prostitution which was fast becoming a feature of the industrial city. Unlike Hamburg, Paris and Vienna, brothels had been outlawed in Berlin by the mid nineteenth century so that contact between prostitute and client was made in cafés, pubs, dance halls and along the main shopping streets. A woman could register with the police and if she promised to keep away from cultural and government centres, train stations, museums, palaces and army barracks and any other ‘sensitive areas’ she might be permitted to work without being arrested, but of an estimated 50,000 prostitutes only 4,000 signed up.⁴⁷ In his book on prostitution, in which he reports that, as one woman told him, ‘only the stupid ones register!’ Abraham Flexner described the unique style of Berlin prostitution: the slow glance, the deliberate walk, the striking clothing, the longing stare into a café window. He described ridiculous scenes where innocent bourgeois women were hauled off to the station СКАЧАТЬ