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

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СКАЧАТЬ family, their attacks against religion, their internationalism and their ever more vehement opposition to German patriotism brought them into further disrepute with the respectable elements of society. It did not help that venerable leaders like Bebel declared that he wanted to ‘remain the deadly enemy of this bourgeois society and this political order in order to undermine it in its conditions of existence and, if I can, to eliminate it entirely’.⁸⁰ Each side began to fear and loathe the other, a division which was summed up by the chief of police in 1889:

      The antagonism between the classes has sharpened and a gulf separates the workers from the rest of society. The expectation of victory among the socialists has grown. The German socialist party holds first rank in Europe because of its superior organization. It has outstanding leaders, especially Bebel and Liebknecht, and it is united. Clandestine papers continue to appear in spite of all confiscatory measures. The trade-union movement increases steadily, and the party can look forward to considerable gains in the next elections to the Reichstag.⁸¹

      But the ‘heroic years’ also allowed the Social Democratic Party to develop a private world which was so self-sufficient that it began to lose touch with the normal aims and function of the state – an isolation which prevented them from making the politically crucial transition from a labour movement to a broad-based democratic party. Had the political elite been aware of and receptive to the problems of the workers they might have acted on their behalf; had they later offered the SPD full participation in the government the pseudo-Marxism of the party programme might soon have been dispensed with and the radicals might well have been integrated into society. But the nation lacked an effective parliamentary system and the workers were made to feel that they had no place in the new Germany. Those who had tried to work within the framework of the state had found that their state rejected and despised them. Even the American ambassador James Gerard was moved to say that the Berlin workers ‘probably work longer and get less out of life than any working men in the world’. But the arrogant William II continued the backward-looking policies of his predecessors, proclaiming whenever he got the chance that he regarded ‘every Social Democrat as an enemy of the Empire and Fatherland … such a gang of traitors are a breed of men who do not deserve the name of Germans … and their party must be rooted out to the very last stump’.

      In the end neither Bismarck nor the Kaiser nor anyone else could have stifled the rise of the working class or the increasing power of the left for long. By 1890 ‘Red Berlin’ was already a fact of life. The SPD was Germany’s largest party, netting over 1.5 million votes. Its nerve centre was the most powerful working-class city on the continent, and its importance began to affect all other aspects of life in the city.

      For decades Berlin had remained a cultural backwater, falling well behind other German court cities – let alone the centres of Paris or London. When Balzac visited Berlin in 1843 he was disgusted by its provincialism: ‘Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert,’ he wrote, ‘and you have an idea of Berlin. It will one day be the capital of Germany, but it will always remain the capital of boredom.’ Things became worse under William II, who actively tried to stop artistic impulses from decadent centres like Paris from reaching his city. But despite his control of bodies such as the Academy of Fine Arts even he could not completely stifle influences from abroad. Brave Berlin authors like Julius Meier-Graefe, patrons like the ‘Red Count’ Harry Count Kessler, museum directors like Hugo von Tschudi, art dealers like Paul Cassirer and the editors of journals such as Pan or Kunst und Kunstler defied him and promoted contemporary artists from Manet and Degas to Strindberg and Ibsen. This in turn encouraged a new generation of artists in Berlin, artists who rejected the stale official art of the court and who wanted to address the issues of their day. As the playwright Samuel Lublinski put it: ‘The future is the truth. Our puffing locomotives, our restless hammering machines, our technical prowess and our science – it is there we find the truth, the only subject that should concern a modern poet.’⁸²

      Given the spirit of the times many aspiring young authors took great risks with their careers. Conservative critics openly shunned most of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century and rejected those Berliners who identified with them. Balzac, who had the added stigma of being Karl Marx’s favourite author, was viciously attacked, and works like La Comédie humaine were criticized for their ‘dangerous classifications’ of human society. But the critics could not stop his work, or that of the brothers Goncourt or Emile Zola in France, Tolstoy in Russia, or Ibsen in Norway, from reaching Berlin altogether. By the 1880s a number of young writers from Johannes Schlaf and Hermann Conradi to Karl Henckell and Gerhard Hauptmann had moved to the city, had formed literary clubs like Durch on the Spittelmarkt, and had started to write in the new style. The first ‘Berlin Naturalists’, the Hart brothers, produced their 1884 Kritische Waffengange after reading Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart. In the Kritischen Jahrbuch, written five years later, they wrote: ‘Until 1880 there was no youth, no literary youth. Now it is here, and with them as in nature, movement, foment, storm.’⁸³ Karl Bleibtreu followed with his Revolution der Literatur, followed by Arno Holz, who in Das Buch der Zeit was the first to write about the lives of the Berlin masses. The Webercolonie am Müggelsee (part of the small outlying district of Berlin beside the pretty lake Müggelsee) in Friedrichshagen became a meeting point of the new Friedrichshagener Kreis, where Heinrich and Julius Hart, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille met with and discussed the works of Gerhart Hauptmann, Frank Wedekind, August Strindberg and dozens of others. The Naturalists and their sympathizers came to shun classicism and instead looked, as Eugen Wolff put it, at ‘the alcoholism or the prostitution, beggars and suicides, degeneration and bestiality, marriage breakdown and child labour, illnesses of poverty and slavery to machines’.⁸⁴ Erwin Bauer claimed that the ‘Berlin Modern’ reflected the passions of the French Revolution – freedom, equality and brotherhood.⁸⁵ These ideas helped to create a new theatre which burst on the Berlin scene in 1887.

      When the electrifying Théâtre Libre visited Berlin that year a group of artists were so moved that they decided to defy the Kaiser’s censors and start their own company. In April 1889 the Hart brothers met with Maximilian Harden and the editor Theodor Wolff behind the steamy windows of the Kempinski on the Leipziger Strasse; after hours of discussion they held up their glasses and toasted the foundation of the Verein Freie Bühne. As it was to be an ‘association’ the police could have little control over its programme. The new director Otto Brahm said of the project, ‘we are creating a free stage for modern life. Art shall stand at the centre of our endeavours; the new art which shows reality and the future.’⁸⁶ It came as no surprise that the first posters at the Lessing Theatre were soon advertising the Berlin première of Ibsen’s Ghosts. This extraordinary play, which revolved around the taboo theme of inherited syphilis, shocked the prudish Berlin audience, but the theatre was allowed to remain open. The opening night of the second production, Gerhart Hauptmann’s succès de scandale, Sonnenaufgang (Sunrise), turned out to be one of the most memorable evenings in the history of the Berlin theatre.

      Even before the curtain went up the audience was restless, and by the time the play had started the jeering made it virtually impossible for the players to get through the first act. The tension continued to mount and finally, during the graphic birth scene, the theatre erupted into a fist-fighting free-for-all; people leapt over seats towards the stage trying to punch the actors, and an enraged doctor threw a pair of forceps at the main character. This time, the play was banned, and William II permanently cancelled his subscription to the ‘Kaiser’s Loge’ in the Deutsches Theater.⁸⁷

      Gerhart Hauptmann continued his battle against the Berlin censors, producing play after play criticizing the existing system and exposing the misery and desperation of the Berlin underclass. Hanneles Himmelfahrt is a grim story of the fragility of existence in the slums in which Hannele’s mother dies and she is viciously beaten by her alcoholic father. The girl is taken to a poor house, where she has a series of visions before dying of her injuries. Die Ratten (The Rats) showed the hopelessness of life in a Berlin rental barrack. A young couple, the Johns, are herded together with human beings who are so degraded that they have ‘become’ СКАЧАТЬ