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

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СКАЧАТЬ folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question, or any other social question affecting the fate of the workers.’ The Communists believed that this teeming mass would soon realize its tremendous power, and would act.

      Before the Wall collapsed central East Berlin was a dreary shrine to a falsified version of the history of the working-class movement in Germany. On May Day plastic cutouts of proletarian leaders were paraded down Unter den Linden in front of a forcibly gathered crowd to illustrate their place in the rise of the working class. Marx and Engels, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and finally Erich Honecker himself were put high on the list of Communist heroes, and Berlin was duly portrayed as the focal point of the smooth transition from one leader to another; from effete Social Democrats to vigorous Communists; from corrupt capitalism to the workers’ state, from one stage of history to the next. Erich Honecker’s reedy voice would float down to the bored Young Pioneers who were forced to stand around holding flowers and placards and singing the Internationale, which by the 1980s had lost any of its original meaning.

      The actual history of the working-class movement in Germany was much more complex and less harmonious than the glib version peddled by Honecker and his government. East Germans could have been arrested for saying so, but it was by no means inevitable that Marx and Engels were destined to become the spiritual leaders of the Berlin working-class movement. Berlin was best known first as a liberal city; the Social Democratic Party had adopted Marxism almost by accident. Marx had been largely ignored in Berlin until after his death; his Communist Manifesto only became popular after it was re-imported by his followers, and even Das Kapital was better known abroad than at home. The political development of workers began not with the proletariat or factory workers, who were excluded from political life, nor did it start with radical intellectuals such as the Young Hegelians. The earliest champions of the workers were not Marxists at all, but well-to-do liberals who lived in the elegant centre of town, the very people who had first helped and encouraged Marx and whom he later grew to despise.

      The liberals were naive, but well meaning. Bettina, the wife of the Romantic poet Achim von Arnim and author of Goethe’s Exchange of Letters with a Child, was so shocked by the hopeless misery of the workers during the cholera epidemic of 1831 that she wrote This Book Belongs to the King, one of the first works of social criticism written about Berlin.⁶⁵ But the work was ignored by Frederick William, and it was not until the 1850s that charitable associations began to care for the destitute; a handful of fortunate Berliners received alms from the city but the 3 thalers and 2 silvergroschen per month was barely enough for food. Private citizens sometimes organized charity kitchens: Lina Morgenstern’s People’s Kitchen served out 2.2 million portions in 1871 alone and there were dozens like her, while liberal Bildungsvereine or cultural associations were set up to foster the ‘improvement of the moral and economic condition of the working class’.⁶⁶ The irony of these groups was that the object of their concern, the ‘uncouth workers’, were themselves kept at arm’s length by high fees and membership requirements.⁶⁷

      The problem of the liberal approach to workers was characterized by the kind-hearted and well-meaning Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch. He was not interested in philosophy or in revolution – on the contrary he believed in providing practical help to the workers of the city. He sought a free market economy, freedom of movement and freedom of occupation, and the destruction of old guild restrictions. Politically he supported the view that the middle class should unite with the workers to prevent the kind of failure which happened after 1848.⁶⁸ But his plans were fundamentally flawed. Schulze-Delitzsch and his associates believed that workers should not participate directly in politics until they had become educated, had been rid of ignorance and prejudice, and had earned their ‘passport to civil society’. When he talked about ‘workers’ he was referring to the ambitious man who wanted to pull himself into the middle class, not to the inarticulate slum dweller. Schulze-Delitzsch tried to bring these changes about by founding workers’ and consumer and production co-operatives to enable workers to become self-employed and financially independent. He also helped to set up the Central Association for the Welfare of the Working Class to provide support funds for company pensions. Nevertheless, most of these ‘workers” organizations had few working-class members and some, like the Nationalverein or German National Society, imposed such high membership fees that workers were excluded altogether. Schulze-Delitzsch might have referred to workers as ‘honourable members’ but in practice they had no power and no say in ‘their’ organizations. The leaders of the Fortschrittspartei or Progressive Party might have called the workers the ‘pillars of the emerging German nation’, but they insisted that workers must learn the ways of the bourgeoisie before they could have a political voice. All such groups rejected the idea of universal male suffrage. It was inevitable that, as industrialization spread, workers would become better organized, more independent, and increasingly resentful of liberal paternalism. The first groups formed by and for workers appeared in Berlin in the 1860s.

      Like their liberal predecessors the first true working-class activists were moderate and, like Schulze-Delitzsch, wanted to introduce simple, workable measures to ease life in the factories and in the slums, and to give people a chance to work their way out of poverty.⁶⁹ Two of the most prominent were Friedrich Held, who was deeply concerned about conditions for factory workers and became popular among machinists through his publication Lokomotive, and Stephan Born, who published Das Volk, the most sophisticated of the labour papers. Both had read Marx and Engels but rejected the call for a revolution, saying that it would ‘only bring anarchy’. They were the forerunners of those trade unionists who advocated careful organization, political pressure and steady improvement rather than a violent overthrow of the system. By the 1860s over sixty workers’ associations had been formed in Berlin, including education societies and bourgeois foundations for workers. It was tragic that these moderate voices were ignored by the rulers of Prussia. The reformers were practical and decent men who simply wanted to give the new underclass some kind of place in society. The ‘fourth class’ was not yet agitating for revolution and most of its members still wanted to be part of the existing system. But the elite, from the newly declared Kaiser to the army to the new industrialists, were terrified of any threat to their power and rejected change out of hand, opting for a course of ever greater repression, banning workers’ groups and arresting leaders. In the end the lack of acceptance at this early stage helped to radicalize the working-class movement. It would not be Schulze-Delitzsch or Friedrich Held who would lead them into politics; it would be the heirs of the radical tradition who as early as 1848 had hoped that the Frankfurt parliament would collapse in a second revolution. They were led by a young man who detested the liberals and who hated Schulze-Delitzsch above all – Ferdinand Lassalle.

      Lassalle was an extraordinary figure in Berlin history. He was a mass of contradictions: a working-class leader posing as an aristocrat; an activist longing for academic life, and a friend of two of the most powerful enemies of the nineteenth century, Marx and Bismarck. And it was Lassalle who defied the liberal agenda and who explained to workers that they should demand more than honorary membership of the bourgeoisie. It was he who put ‘Red Berlin’ on the political map of Europe.⁷⁰

      Even as a schoolboy in Breslau, Lassalle was convinced that he was destined for great things and confided to his diary: ‘Had I been born a prince I would be an aristocrat body and soul. But as I am merely middle class I shall be a democrat.’ At twenty-one he met Heinrich Heine, who was impressed by his wit and perception; in the same year he met the wealthy Countess Hatzfeldt, who was losing in a spectacular divorce suit against her loutish husband. Lassalle, moved perhaps less by her plight than by the social opportunities afforded by association with her, helped her to win one of the most sensational divorce cases of the century. In return the grateful countess presented Lassalle with a pension for life which allowed him to pursue his political career. He threw himself into the radical movement and set off to the Rhineland to join his hero, Karl Marx.

      Lassalle became a devoted member of Marx’s sycophantic entourage, and the Düsseldorf police soon noticed that his ‘energy and powers of persuasion’, his ‘wildly leftist ideas’ and his ‘not inconsiderable СКАЧАТЬ