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

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СКАЧАТЬ end the loathsome creatures are seen as victims of a society which denies them any self-respect. Hauptmann’s most famous work, Die Weber, played with a similar theme of mass psychology, this time showing people mesmerized and controlled by the eerie monotonous sound of the spindles which dominate the stage. This fierce attack on existing social order was banned on the grounds that ‘it was an open appeal to rioting’, but the liberal press defended it; Fritz Stahl praised it in the Deutsche Warte as ‘the greatest work of German Naturalism to date’, while Julius Hart wrote that it was ‘certainly not the revolutionary speech of a party politician, but was simply the voice of humanity reflecting tremendous suffering, love and hate’. The theatre company was taken to court and won only because the court decided that the high ticket prices ‘precluded the attendance of an appreciable number of workers at the performances’. Even so, Hauptmann was rejected by polite society; Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst called his Hanneles Himmelfahrt ‘A monstrous wretched piece of work … social-democratic-realistic, at the same time full of sickly, sentimental mysticism, nerve-racking, in general abominable. Afterwards we went to Borchard’s, to get ourselves back into a human frame of mind with champagne and caviar.’⁸⁸ Hatred of Hauptmann extended to Berlin University; as late as November 1922 a party organized for his sixtieth birthday was boycotted by the Berlin Student Society because he was not considered to be ‘a German of strong character’.

      It was ironic that the Social Democrats did not come to the aid of these struggling artists, but they were already exhibiting the confusion and muddleheadedness which would plague them in later years. Unfortunately for them Marx had never clarified whether or not the dictatorship of the proletariat should produce a wholly new kind of art, or if bourgeois art could still be appreciated after the revolution. He gave no hint as to whether the proletariat should reject or affirm the culture of the past, nor whether critical art produced under the capitalist system was acceptable. Engels had attempted to deal with these questions after Marx’s death but had failed, and the local Berlin leaders like Bebel and Liebknecht considered the task of getting into power far more important than wasting time on painting and theatre. In the end it was agreed that ‘new art’ should be positive, optimistic, inspiring and uplifting. It should fill the worker with love for his fellow revolutionaries and point the way to the glorious future, an attitude which would be taken to its logical conclusion in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the meantime there was no place for depressing, realistic portrayals of life in the slums. The Social Democrats refused to support Hauptmann because, as Eduard Bernstein put it, the works ‘portrayed human suffering without advancing any remedies for it’. Marxism was supposed to have a magic formula to cure all social ills, and one ‘couldn’t have workers leaving the theatre in despair’.⁸⁹

      Attempts to create alternative ‘inspiring’ Social Democratic works were a disaster. In June 1890 Bruno Wille founded a workers’ theatre, the Freie Volksbühne at the Böhmischen Bräuhaus (Bohemian Brewery) in Friedrichschain, and in order to make it affordable to the masses kept admission down to 50 pence and sold tickets by lottery amongst 2,000 trade union and Social Democratic members. The venture was a spectacular failure, not least because the plays, with their carefully worded Marxist solutions to social problems, were mind-numbingly dull. Social Democratic leaders promoted all manner of escapist kitsch which was surprisingly close to the official culture of imperial Berlin, reinforcing the very ‘Philistine petty bourgeois art’ which they professed to hate while finding nothing of value in the Naturalists or the modern theatre. Wilhelm Liebknecht was typical: ‘I have no time to go to the theatre, and did not visit the Freie Bühne productions,’ he said, but having read their plays he found them a ‘disappointment’. ‘I will not name names,’ he sniped, ‘but the breath of Socialism or, in my opinion, the Socialist movement, is not to be found on the stage of the jüngsten Deutschland’.⁹⁰ Frau Piscator had a different view: ‘The proletarians did not care for the proletarian theatre,’ she wrote. ‘It died without mourning in April of 1921.’ The only genuine working-class culture which was acceptable both to the avant-garde and to the party was vaudeville, and it was here that the image of the working-class slum dweller was developed, refined and projected on to the whole of the city. The ‘true Berliner’ as we know him today was largely created and introduced through the cabaret of the nineteenth century.

      The first Berlin cabaret acts were born in local Kneipen, of which there were thousands in working-class Berlin; in the 1880s there was one for every 135 Berliners.⁹¹ These small smoke-filled rooms, with their wooden planks for a stage – the Brettl – surrounded by tables and chairs, would serve beer and schnapps along with bread and sausage or thick soup, and local entertainers would get up at the front to tell their jokes and rustic stories drawn from Berlin life. The first purpose-built cabaret, the Überbrettl or Buntes Theatre, was opened in January 1901 by Ernst von Wolzogen, who hoped to copy the tradition of the Montmartre and bring political satire and music to a small audience. It was a sensation and by the autumn no less than forty-three such Uberbrettl had opened, including the legendary Schall und Rauch. Middle-class theatre owners had also seen the potential of the local Kneipe performers and had put on revues of their own: the Tonhallen Theatre, founded in 1870, the Bellevue in 1872, the Neues American Reichs Theatre in 1877, and the Reichshallen Theatre in 1877, had all switched from conventional programmes to vaudeville within a few years, scouting for local talent in the Kneipen and teaching the amateurs how to perform on stage. Even the Wintergarten, with its 2,300-square-metre glass-covered hall, converted to vaudeville in 1887 and became the most prestigious stage of its kind in Europe. A cabaret journal of 1902 noted that ‘Julius Baron, the former director of the Wintergarten, was probably the first person to build a large and wide bridge between vaudeville artistry and bourgeois society’, taking the coarse language from the street and gentrifying it for the middle classes.

      The most cutting satires were often censored through the Lex Heinze, but the best cabaret acts disguised their critiques under layers of double-entendre understood only by local audiences. A range of ‘Berlin characters’ emerged, from lower-class cab drivers, hawkers and apprentice shoemakers to the Eckensteher, or men who stood on street corners and hired themselves out as labourers. Whereas the old Berliner had been funny but rather slow and phlegmatic, the image of the new Berliner was of a cunning, street-wise character who could keep up with the hectic tempo of the big city. He or she was poorly educated but witty, self-assured, irreverent, crass, vulgar and spoke Berlinerisch in a more aggressive fashion than his or her predecessor. The new Berliner was subversive of authority, directly critical of the court and indirectly critical of the Kaiser, ridiculing official Berlin culture, the cult of subservience to the Prussian army and anything that smacked of bourgeois or upper-class life. He joked about attempts by Wilhelmine state officials to encourage loyalty, patriotism and morality through the Church and he was sympathetic to other oppressed groups, from prostitutes and prisoners to those under the colonial yoke and Poles and Catholics targeted in Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. He was resilient, amoral and permissive; in short he was all the things that were anathema to the official culture. The Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1874 reported that ‘The Berliner is always quick at repartee, always able to find a sharp, suggestive, witty formulation for every event and occurrence’, and newcomers learned to ape these characteristics or for ever be treated as outsiders. By the twentieth century, this image of the Berliner had been accepted as historical fact by both locals and foreigners alike. A nineteenth-century myth had become reality.

      Despite the encroachment of popular cabaret into middle-class society, Prussian officials continued to exert strict controls over the ‘higher forms’ of art, and suspicion of revolutionary art extended beyond Naturalist theatre to the new forms of painting and sculpture. Those who refused to follow the official guidelines were rejected by the Academy, and Franz Servaes warned that young artists who came to Berlin must expect to be called ‘talentless’, must become ‘as hard as steel – or go under’, and must ‘learn to mix his colours with his lifeblood’.⁹² In 1892 the Association of Berlin Artists dared to invite Edvard Munch to exhibit in the city but the conservative reaction was swift and decisive. Munch was labelled ‘vulgar and disgusting’, his work ‘lacked form’, he was ‘talentless’, he was ‘brutal and fiendish’, СКАЧАТЬ