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

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      In the streets between the Zoo Railway and Wittenbergplatz and along the Kurfürstendamm there is a crowd of strollers at all times of day in which women predominate … here one doesn’t know; perhaps she is the daughter or wife of the man who walks beside her – for here the glittering colour of the demimonde is also the style of dress. And that plain woman over there is perhaps soliciting.⁴⁸

      As the inevitable consequence of rampant prostitution there was a spate of unwanted pregnancies. The numbers of illegitimate children rose in the mid nineteenth century. In 1750 around 4 per cent of births in Berlin were illegitimate; by 1816–20 the number had climbed to 18.3 per cent. It dropped to 14.5 per cent by 1866–70 but this was still extremely high compared to the Prussian average of 7 per cent.⁴⁹ Added to this was a so-called ‘abortion epidemic’ in the late nineteenth century.⁵⁰ Max Hirsch, the famous Berlin gynaecologist and proponent of the holistic study of women’s health, tried to reduce the pressure on women who had abortions by arguing that modern life, and in particular factory employment, with its foul air, dim lighting and loud noise, noxious fumes and glass or metal particles in the air, contributed to the high incidence of miscarriage. He also pointed out that given hard physical labour, poor living conditions and a high incidence of smallpox, influenza, cholera, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, syphilis – all hazards of the Berlin slums – women stood a high risk of not being able to carry to full term.⁵¹ But the police argued that the incidence of abortion was too high to be accounted for by Hirsch’s findings, and new health insurance records showed that 10 per cent of female recipients suffered from the side effects of illegally induced abortions. Some women broke limbs throwing themselves from trams while others had to be treated for shock or hypothermia after being fished out of the Landwehr Canal, but the vast majority were found out because they had to be treated for the after effects of quack remedies peddled by the charlatans and frauds who fed on the desperation of others. One of many dangerous common remedies for those who could not afford a good surgeon was to eat hundreds of phosphorous match heads, a practice which only stopped when the substance was banned in 1907.⁵² To add to this, many women died because of air bubbles in syringes, unsterilized instruments or internal injuries inflicted during backroom abortions; the mortality rate after complications was over 25 per cent and the Prussian Statistical Office estimated that over 2 per cent of Berlinerins died this way.⁵³ Women of all different ages and classes had abortions, but those most often caught were the factory workers, prostitutes, seamstresses and servants, for whom there was no protection even if they had been made pregnant by an employer and could not afford ‘reliable’ care. The crisis eventually became a political issue; in July 1871 even the conservative Kreuzzeitung expressed concern about the increasing number of ‘unknown graves’ being found throughout the city.

      The terrible conditions for many women from factory workers to domestic servants fuelled the fledgling women’s movement in Berlin. The concept of female emancipation first reached Berlin from France, where well-to-do women like Aurore Dupin, better known as George Sand, had called for women’s rights as early as 1830. The climate in Berlin was hostile. When in 1835 the Berliner Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow published his novel Wally die Zweiflerin about an emancipated woman, it was banned and he was imprisoned for a month under federal law for bringing the Christian religion ‘into disrepute’. Young Hegelians also began to champion equal rights in the 1840s but they offered little practical help. The first active groups were founded in Berlin by liberal women who hoped to educate girls in domestic sciences and give them skills to cope in the city. In 1848 Luise Otto-Peters, already known for feminist articles and novels such as Die Freunde and poetry such as Lieder eines deutschen Mädchens, founded the Allgemeine deutsche Frauenverein (All German Women’s Society) in 1865.⁵⁴ The group also published a journal, Neue Bahnen, which demanded education and equal work opportunities for women. In 1865 the more conservative Society for the Advancement of Employment for the Female Sex was founded to help young women to find placements in ‘respectable households’ and to train them in the new ‘women’s professions’ such as teaching. Writers such as Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer motivated women through their 1901 journal Handbuch der Frauenbewegung and Bäumer wrote a number of other feminist works, including a biography of the historian and novelist Ricarda Huch, who in 1891 became the first German woman to get a D.Phil. This described how Huch had been forced to go to Switzerland for her degree as German universities did not accept women.⁵⁵ Social Democratic groups were greatly influenced by August Bebel’s famous work Die Frau und der Sozialismus, which called for women’s rights, improved health care and a list of other improvements for women, and before long hundreds of small self-help clubs, groups and charity organizations had been set up to try to bring about change.⁵⁶ By the First World War the Berlin Social Democratic women’s movement had become the largest in the world with over 170,000 members.

      Despite such innovations the industrial workers, both men and women, endured filthy manual labour, low wages, minimal security, overcrowded housing, miserable food and dangerous, cramped and disease-ridden working conditions. As early as 1828 General von Horn had complained that the children from the industrial districts were so ‘stunted in physical and mental development’ that they would be unable to fill the ranks of the army, concerns which led to the first piece of protective labour legislation, which stated that children should work no more than ten hours a day. But abuses still took place, and many a child spent his early life with no education and no freedom, surrounded by the filth and noise of machinery.⁵⁷ The adult working day increased from twelve or fourteen hours a day in the 1840s to as much as seventeen hours a day in the 1870s and if the breadwinner became ill the dependants could quickly plunge below subsistence level.⁵⁸ The clothing industry was particularly repugnant. Women were forced to work in sweat shops for starvation wages in utterly degrading conditions; one presser, Ottilie Baader, described her life as endless grey drudgery in which years passed without her noticing that she had ‘once been young’.⁵⁹ Cheap labour kept German textiles competitive and there were nearly 500 wholesale garment dealers in Berlin in 1895 which exported goods all over the world, but the price was high. The women sewing and pressing in the Berlin sweat shops lived to an average age of twenty-six.⁶⁰

      Industrial workers made up between 55 and 60 per cent of Berlin’s population by 1900, as compared with 43 per cent in London or 38 per cent in Paris.⁶¹ And yet, few affluent Berliners knew or cared what was happening at the edge of their city. The closest most came to the slums was a glimpse from the new Ringbahn, where for a few pennies the well-to-do could look down on the dangerous but mysterious districts without having to go out on to the streets.⁶² The Bärenführer or ‘bear guide’ for Berlin recommended trips above the ‘other’ Berlin on the Nordringbahn so that the adventurous visitor could catch a glimpse of the ‘pulse’ of the ‘north’, which stretched out behind the Weidendamm Bridge where the Menschenmasse – the masses – lived. One could explore the ‘dark areas’, and as long as one was ‘tactful’ even a stranger could ‘study and experience the night life without undue fear’. Nevertheless the guide advised that it ‘would be better to leave the ladies in the hotel’, and carry valid papers ‘in case of a police Razzia’ (raid).⁶³ For most middle-class Berliners the poor were a nuisance; as Franz Held put it:

      Sick beggars with hunger in their eyes

      Stretch out an arm for a penny piece

      The satisfied public push past:

      ‘And the police tolerate this!’⁶⁴

      As Georg Hermann put it, the different areas of Berlin were ‘worlds apart’.

      But a few were looking at the vast brick barracks and the teeming mass of people below and seeing the force of the future. After a visit to the slums Engels wrote that the city, ‘the breeding places of disease … the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night’, would not disappear until the conditions which produced it disappeared also. ‘As СКАЧАТЬ