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

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СКАЧАТЬ itself. The new state had been created not by the German people but by the army, by the Junkers, by Bismarck and by ‘blood and iron’. Instead of turning into a liberal democratic state Berlin had become the centre of an ever larger military machine. By the time the foolish young Kaiser had pushed his people to the brink of world war it was too late for them to regain control of their own destiny. On the surface the imperial period was stable and prosperous, but the seeds of its own destruction had been sown during the militaristic ceremony which marked its birth in the Hall of Mirrors in 1871.

      ‘In Berlin’, it was said, ‘the air stinks of powder.’ Whereas the sight of uniformed officers in Piccadilly or on the Champs-Élysées usually meant that some state occasion was underway, it was the norm in Berlin. The army had always shaped the life of the city, but despite the old parade-ground atmosphere the military had remained decidedly separate from civilian life under the Soldier King and Frederick the Great and William I. The officers had formed a tight-knit group of pious, frugal and unostentatious men devoted to the Protestant Church and to their monarch – they had not played polo, for example, because it had made the distinction between rich and poor too obvious. They had led quiet, even reflective lives; the old Count Helmuth von Moltke, whose family had been poor, had translated Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to meet the expenses of his appointment to the General Staff. Most had been forced to wait until their forties or even their fifties before they could afford to marry. Exclusive regiments like the Guards or the Cavalry lived by Frederick II’s dictum that ‘only nobles are noble enough to command’, and no amount of money, power, prestige, social or political influence could overcome the barrier of birth; indeed the old Kaiser had known all 3,000 of his aristocratic officers personally. This old way of life was transformed under William II.³⁸

      Within a few years of taking the throne William expanded the officer corps to 20,000 men; indeed the strength in officers and men increased by almost 100 per cent between 1880 and 1913.³⁹ There would have been a great deal to be said for widening the social base of recruits if it had led to a more moderate, meritocratic system, but it had the opposite effect. The power of the aristocrats was never really broken; in 62 per cent of the Prussian regiments more than 58 per cent of officers were nobles, while sixteen regiments had an exclusively aristocratic officer corps. Although middle-class recruits could now hold junior positions up to the rank of colonel, noble Prussian officers held most General Staff posts, numbering 625 officers by 1914; the Minister of War, von Heeringen, criticized plans to expand the Prussian army because it would lead to the inclusion of social groups which were ‘not really suitable for supplementing the officer corps’, exposing it to ‘democratic influences’. Jews were treated with barely concealed contempt; there was not a single Jewish regular officer in the entire Prussian army between 1878 and 1910.⁴⁰ Bourgeois officers fortunate enough to obtain a commission renounced their backgrounds and slavishly copied the manners, ideas and activities of their aristocratic fellows. The army encouraged this by developing a policy of indoctrination and coercion which taught them how to think and behave. National pride was the order of the day and, as the Polish writer Józef Kraszewski put it, the army ‘is a school which teaches without fail’.⁴¹ New recruits were told that the army was ‘the only fixed point in the whirlpool, the rock in the sea of revolution that threatens us on all sides, the talisman of loyalty, and the palladium of the prince’. Albrecht von Roon told his men: ‘The army is now our fatherland, for it is the only place which has not yet been infiltrated by impure and restless elements.’ Recruits were expected to swear an unswerving oath of loyalty, which by the early twentieth century had led to an abdication of personal responsibility far beyond anything in equivalent armies in western Europe. This would reach absurd heights during the Nazi period, when officers still refused to act against Hitler even though they knew he was leading the nation to ruin because they had sworn an oath. They had forgotten the lesson of Tauroggen.⁴²

      The new Wilhelmine officers were insufferable. The great historian Eckhard Kehr wrote that ‘the Prussian lieutenant, who up to this time had been on the average relatively modest’, had turned into ‘the unbearable prig of the Wilhelmine era’. The writer Wesenhof declared, ‘everyone knows that Berlin is an eastern city, which means it lacks taste … but the fact that the French, English or Italians are full of themselves is not nearly so irritating to the foreigner as the arrogant stance of a Prussian officer or bank director’. Most nineteenth-century visitors were amazed by the sheer number of rude uniformed men who pushed people around on the streets. The American ambassador James Gerard wrote that

      on one occasion I went to the races at Berlin with my brother-in-law and bought a box. While we were out looking at the horses between the races a Prussian officer and his wife seated themselves in our box. I called the attention of one of the ushers to this, but [he] said he did not dare ask a Prussian officer to leave, and it was only after sending for the head usher and showing him my Jockey Club badge and my pass as an Ambassador that I was able to secure possession of my own box.

      Even after minor disputes on the street he noted how officers would ‘instantly cut the civilian down’.⁴³ When the Kaiser went to the opera or the theatre his entourage of officers would not only take up most of the seats but would delight in disrupting the proceedings. Soldiers could send enormous packages through the post simply by writing ‘Militaría’ on the front. Officers still settled their disputes through duels, and failure to follow this code of honour meant dismissal from the army. Parades and manoeuvres were a daily occurrence throughout Berlin; Fritz von Unruh had his sleep interrupted ‘every morning by the trumpet in the infantry barracks across from me’, and recalled his irritation when endless parades forced traffic to grind to a halt.

      But however much they complained, Berliners were deeply affected by the military ethic. Everybody seemed to wear a uniform. State and municipal officials wore dark sober jackets; cab drivers wore red braided coats and top hats; even Friedrich Engels once wrote to his sister from Berlin: ‘here you see me in my uniform, my coat very romantic and artistic.’ Sybil Bedford compared Berlin unfavourably with London, complaining that ‘uniforms, no longer the livery of duty, were worn like feathers, to strut the owner and attract the eligible’, and as Schlettow in Carl Zuckmayer’s play put it, wearing mere civilian clothes in Berlin was like being ‘half a portion, with the mustard left out’.

      Berliners’ obedience to uniforms went to absurd lengths. In October 1906 a company of twenty soldiers commanded by a ‘captain’ arrived at Köpenick Station, marched to the town hall and occupied the building. The ‘captain’ was in fact Wilhelm Voigt, an unemployed shoemaker and petty criminal who had purchased a musty old uniform in a second-hand shop, ordered a company of soldiers in the street to follow him – which they had done without question – and cheekily commanded the mayor to hand over the town funds ‘by the Order of His Imperial Highness’. The mayor may have had his doubts about this strange little man but the power of the uniform was too much. He handed over 4,000 marks – an enormous sum at the time. The ‘captain’ took it, marched his company out, and promptly disappeared. He was caught a few days later but when they heard about his prank Berliners laughed uproariously and even the Kaiser was amused enough to release him from prison after only two years. The soldiers who had been duped had all charges against them dropped because they had ‘unquestioningly obeyed the command of an officer’. The ‘Captain of Köpenick’ became a Berlin celebrity: Die Welt am Montag published a long interview with him; he entertained audiences in an arcade on Unter den Linden and sold his story on the new wax sound discs, some of which were found in a junk store in 1966 and given to the Köpenick Museum.⁴⁴ Carl Zuckmayer wrote a play about him which was later made into a popular film. But however entertaining it was, the ‘Captain of Köpenick’ story exposed Berliners’ pathetic and widespread deference to authority on a scale unthinkable in any other European capital. By laughing at him Berliners were laughing at their own impotence.

      The spotlessly clean city was well managed and highly efficient; Christian Otto once commented that ‘in no other German city is the attention to the law greater than here’. But if the city was clean it was also oppressive, and most visitors found it cold and antiseptic. People were ‘arrogant’ СКАЧАТЬ