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

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘correctly’ into a Western liberal representative democracy like England or the United States. The thesis was absurd; Germany was not unique – Russia also refused to follow the so-called ‘correct path – and the notion that history follows such ‘courses’ is simplistic. Even so, Bismarck stymied the creation of a stable parliamentary system and retained some of the most oppressive aspects of Prussian rule. It was this inflexibility which would ultimately lead to its complete collapse.²⁸

      After 1871 Berlin’s political power increased dramatically. It now housed the federal government, including its executive – the Kaiser and the Chancellor, who personally controlled all aspects of German foreign and military policy as Article XI of the constitution declared that ‘presidency of the union belongs to the King of Prussia who shall, in this capacity, be termed German Emperor’. Berlin was the main benefactor of the German Constitution of 1871, which turned it into the centre of the federal union of twenty-five allied states. Although each had a representative assembly of its own, they also now sent delegates to the Bundesrat or Federal Council and to the Reichstag or National Parliament, made up of representatives elected by male suffrage and secret ballot. The Bundesrat and the Reichstag controlled most aspects of German commerce, transportation, communication, patents, tolls and matters relating to the economy. The individual states were left to govern their own police forces, education and health, but any important measures had to pass through the Berlin Bundesrat which was dominated by the Prussian state government. This was a backward, undemocratic parliamentary system which represented the landowners, aristocrats and Junkers through an electoral system which based status on the amount of taxes paid by the candidate.²⁹ And yet as the largest state, with seventeen out of fifty-eight votes in the Bundesrat, Prussia could control most important decisions in the federal government. Berlin’s own political structure reflected this conservatism; the mayor-elect of Berlin had to be confirmed by the Kaiser and despite its large urban proletariat the three-tier voting system ensured a politically ‘reliable’ mayor, as reflected in the continuing electoral success of Adolph Wermuth, bürgerlich mayor of Berlin until 1920.³⁰ Politically, there was no question that Bismarck’s Berlin was the powerhouse of the Reich. Berliners were impressed by their status and many put aside their reservations to bask in the glow of the power and authority of the post-unification city. Above all, they began to make money.

      Within months of the grand victory parade the city had become wildly prosperous, its fortunes boosted by the 5 billion francs indemnity pouring in from France. Felix Philippi wrote, ‘Everyone, everyone flew into the flame … the market had bullish orgies; millions, coined right out of the ground, were won; national prosperity rose to apparently unimagined heights. A shower of gold rained down on the drunken city.’³¹ Industry boomed, the population skyrocketed, and a frenzy of luxury and materialism marked the glorious age of the Gründerzeit or ‘time of foundations’, a term which alluded not only to the Empire, but also to the sheer number of new companies created at the time.

      The years following the creation of the empire were undisturbed by war. Bismarck had achieved all he wanted through the military; now he tried to avoid conflict through a carefully balanced foreign policy dictated by Realpolitik. He survived the stock market crash of 1873, which saw the destruction of economic liberalism, and he enhanced his comprehensive system of social security reforms. But a shadow was soon to pass over the prosperous new capital. Years before, the revolutionary citizens had hated the ‘Cartridge Prince’ who had tried to crush the 1848 revolution, but by the 1880s their old Kaiser William I had become a revered and beloved figure. Revolutionary talk had moved to the slums and the back streets, and the well-to-do had become enthusiastic supporters of the new order which had brought them such wealth.

      In 1887 rumours began to fly through the cafés and offices that the Kaiser was ill; loyal subjects gathered beneath the palace windows waiting for news, and bulletins were put up every few hours. After a short illness the Kaiser died at the age of ninety-one, sixteen years after the birth of the empire.

      For decades, the crown prince Frederick William had waited in the wings for a chance to rule, nurturing his liberal values and holding an alternative court on Unter den Linden with his wife Vicky. Young Etonians had cheerfully pushed the royal carriage from the train station to Windsor the day the prince married Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, and the young man was popular in England. The gentleman prince had been the great moderate hope of the future; his preference for British liberalism and hatred of Bismarck made him the only man who might successfully have challenged the all-encompassing power of the Junkers, and many hoped that he would introduce a constitutional monarchy modelled on the English system. But fate intervened. The pair had waited thirty years for the throne, but when Frederick finally succeeded he was a dying man. The throat cancer which now ravaged his body had made him speechless and he could only breathe through a little silver tube pushed into his windpipe. His illness had become a great source of tension between England and Germany; German doctors had pronounced his tumour malignant early on and would probably have saved him had they operated immediately, but Vicky had relied on the incorrect diagnosis of her Scottish doctor, sentencing her husband to an early grave and fostering anti-English sentiments in Berlin.³² This tragic and largely forgotten figure ruled from the palace in Berlin for a mere ninety-nine days, and his premature death paved the way for the accession of his thirty-year-old son, Kaiser William II. That year – 1888 – was later known as the ‘year of the three Kaisers’.³³ It was also the beginning of the end for imperial Berlin.

      It was a tragedy for Germany that William came to power, and although there is no doubt that he was bright and quick witted, he was also vain, arrogant and rash.³⁴ Some of this might have been due to his difficult youth; his mother nearly died in childbirth and by the time anyone attended to the infant his wrenched and twisted arm was beyond repair. As he grew the poor boy was forced to endure painful shock treatments, take disgusting quack medicines and have frequent baths in the blood of freshly slaughtered animals to try to bring the withered arm back to life. The prince forced himself to ride despite constantly falling off his horse because of his lack of balance, and he learned how to hide his arm under ever more grandiose uniforms or by resting it on the hilt of his sword.³⁵ The need to overcome his physical weakness combined with the belief that he had been chosen to rule by God made him arrogant and something of a bully. His friend Eulenburg noted his sheer blood lust during his hunts in the Romintern Forest and his delight in watching ‘the panting desperate brutes as they hurl themselves perpetually against the farthest hedges’. It was not uncommon for William to kill 1,000 animals in a week, and when he was forty-three he put up a monument to commemorate the bagging of his 50,000th beast.³⁶ He was rude to important guests at court whom he often teased in an offensive, even sadistic manner; he sometimes forced visitors to do gymnastics on the deck of his yacht, the ‘perpetual floating casino’, and would push them when they were bending over or kneeling down. He became known as the ‘showman of Europe’, the ‘crowned megalomaniac’, the man who ‘wanted every day to be his birthday’. Max Weber called him the ‘Imperial Clown’; Bismarck complained that he was like a balloon pushed around by sudden gusts of wind, and even the once indulgent Queen Victoria called him a ‘hot-headed, conceited, and wrong-headed young man, devoid of all feeling’.³⁷

      When his father died the young prince moved fast to wipe out all traces of his memory and take control of his city. Robert von Dohme remembered how, on the very day of Frederick’s death, William cordoned off the palace and imprisoned his mother in her rooms for allegedly sending vital documents to England. He rifled through state papers, erasing the memory of his hated parents and destroying anything which might threaten his authority. Then he filled the palace with his sycophantic friends. His lust to increase Germany’s imperial might and to compete above all with England meant that the military was given a free hand in the city, and civilians had to get used to being jostled by arrogant officers in the streets. William had always disliked Berlin and he was happy to fill it with his own kind. Berliners found themselves increasingly identified in the rest of the world with the most arrogant, militaristic, expansionist tendencies of the Prussian army. Liberals were silenced, and the ‘Red Radicals’ were forced underground.

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