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

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СКАЧАТЬ writer Boleslaw Prus exclaimed that ‘Berlin is beautiful – too beautiful … and as cold as ice.’ Jules Laforgue, the French writer, invited to the court to converse with the Empress Augusta, was scathing about the oppressive atmosphere in Berlin which he captured in his book Berlin, la cour et la ville.⁴⁵ He recalled how in his native France one immediately got a whiff of absinth and freedom from the train attendants and heard them call to one another, ‘Will I see you later this evening?’; but in Germany ‘the personnel are military, they don’t say a word but busy themselves with running the train, performing the same task yesterday as today’. He was amazed to see how when an officer walked past a group of soldiers the latter stood to attention, stamping their feet on the spot until he had passed, a scene repeated ‘every day all around Berlin’.⁴⁶ Carl Ludwig Schleich and his friends the writers Strindberg and Hartleben were nearly arrested for simply trying to measure the curvature of the earth at the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse, while Kraszewski commented that even with civilians one could see that ‘either he was, or he will be a soldier’: they adopted the manner of their military brethren, and treated visitors ‘as if you are meant to fetch their shoes’. He found the city ‘severe, ordered, serious, obedient and disciplined … as if in a permanent state of siege’. Not only did the soldiers move along the street with rigid measured steps like machines, but they were ‘copied by the street-seller, the coachman, the porter, even the beggar’. Rosa Luxemburg was even more critical. ‘Berlin made a ghastly impression on me,’ she wrote; ‘it is a cold, tasteless, massive barrack filled with those darling arrogant Prussians, every one looking as if he has swallowed the stick with which he had just been beaten.’ The new militarism was detested by many; after a brief visit in 1898 Wesenhof complained that there was ‘nothing left of the elevated idealism which led philosophy, poetry and even sometimes politics in Germany … Where is the old cradle of art, the co-parent of Gothic, the Fatherland of Dürer, Goethe and Heine? It is no longer in Berlin.’

      In the meantime Berlin’s propertied middle class was becoming rich beyond its wildest dreams. Members of the old liberal Bildungsbürgertum (or educated middle class) were marginalized and although they continued to live in the quiet elegant Tiergarten, read their pleasant journals and attend their lectures at the university, they could not win against Berlin’s new brassy culture.⁴⁷ Berlin was a city which epitomized the nineteenth-century literary paradigm of ‘new’ and ‘old’ money, but the new money was winning. By the turn of the century there were dozens of millionaires in the city, with forty-five families each possessing fortunes exceeding a staggering 3 million marks. Names like Siemens and Borsig, Ullstein, Gerson, Mosse and Wertheim became synonymous with the new wealth and in many ways it was these families who created the thriving heart of the new Berlin.⁴⁸ Even so they remained shut out of the political, military and social life of Berlin and Potsdam, which was still controlled by the 7,000 aristocrats in the city – less than 1 per cent of the population. In England a public school education, appointment to high political office or a life peerage could propel a nineteenth-century industrial family into the upper reaches of the establishment, but this was impossible in Berlin, where a distinct line existed between the aristocrats and everyone else. Instead of trying to create their own independent culture the new rich copied the upper classes, competing with one another for imperial recognition and attempting to get their sons into the officer corps and marry off their daughters to the younger sons of minor nobility. Many of the new rich laid claim to ‘family crests’ and bought up old and unprofitable Junker estates in the hope that the prestige of the ex-inhabitants would rub off on them. They took up riding and hunting, art collecting and charity work, and they fought for membership in the Union Club or the Kaiser’s Automobile Club. This ‘neo-feudalism’ was parodied in endless cartoons and articles but it was a fact of life in imperial Berlin.

      Identification with the existing system extended to the quest for orders, medals and distinctions, which reached a ridiculous level amongst the bourgeoisie at the height of the empire. They were not eligible for noble orders such as the Black Eagle or the Red Eagle of the Crown, but there was no shortage of lesser honours which could be handed out to them. Invitations to the Kaiser’s annual Ordenfest (Order Festival) were fought over by businessmen and professionals: there, an old palace servant might be seated near an officer who had obtained Pour le Mérite for distinction in battle, while an artist might be next to an arms manufacturer. Berliners were obsessed with questions of rank: when Madame Essipoff gave a concert at the palace she insisted upon being referred to as the ‘Palace Musician’, a title which was utterly meaningless but which she used until her death.⁴⁹ When the great nineteenth-century historian Ranke was ill the papers solemnly reported that ‘Dr Wirkliche Geheime Rat Professor Doktor von Ranke has had a restless night’. Wives expected to be addressed as ‘professor’ or ‘doctor’ like their husbands, and even people who had been friends for decades would use these cumbersome prefixes. Theodor Storm once commented that ‘even in educated circles in Berlin an individual is not judged by his personality but by his rank, orders and title’. But as Gerard pointed out, the silly emphasis on empty labels tended to ‘induce the plain people to be satisfied with a piece of ribbon instead of the right to vote, and to make them upholders of a system by which they are deprived of any opportunity to make a real advance in life’.⁵⁰

      Whatever their political restrictions the new rich Berliners had wonderful lives and their optimism and wealth quickly changed the appearance of the city. Sybil Bedford commented on the ‘big money, big enterprise, big buildings, big ideas’ which made Berlin a city of ‘Wagnerian flourishes’. A nineteenth-century Polish visitor who compared Vienna with Berlin said: ‘Vienna is a Grand Lord, ruined but proud, and in a noble lordly fashion disinterested in the future. Berlin is a nouveau riche, a boorish peasant who is determined to see that what he has acquired he will retain.’ Berlin began to be called the parvenu capital of Europe; loud, pushy and ostentatious. And nowhere was this more obvious than in the buildings which were erected after 1871.

      One of Adolph Menzel’s most cutting paintings, Beati Possidents (Happy Owners), looks at first like a Dutch bourgeois genre painting of the early seventeenth century. Upon inspection one sees that it was painted in 1888 and depicts a smug, self-satisfied bourgeois couple before the balcony of their new villa, surrounded by gardeners, artists and others busy transforming it into a ‘historic’ house. Menzel saw these vast megalomaniac villas as little more than ‘freshly painted forgeries’ as false as the painting itself.⁵¹ Everything in imperial Berlin was built for show. Huge new apartment houses and pseudo-palaces went up in areas like Charlottenburg and in the new ‘villa colonies’. The enormous structures looked impressive, but they were nothing but cheap brick smothered in plaster and stucco. Isherwood described these houses as ‘shabby monumental safes crammed with tarnished valuables’, and although the writer Prus was initially impressed by what he found he soon wrote: ‘I long to see something small and simple … Berlin houses are simply overloaded with ornaments – and behind the palaces you can see breweries and behind turrets there are factory chimneys. Even the churches in Berlin are swamped by these private houses.’ Maximilian Harden said they were built so that the new Berliners could ‘show off for the people across the road’. They had ‘monumental facades designed to look impressive even if the inhabitants actually live in tiny bedrooms at the top of the house’.⁵² George Hermann described a typical villa with its nur FÜE HERRSCNAFTEN (social elite only) and PLEASE WIPE YOUR FEET signs at the edge of the decorative garden complete with yellowing miniature fir trees and new busts of Dante, Luther and the Belvedere Apollo.⁵³ Christian Friedrich Hebbel said that at first glance Berlin reminded one of Paris and Rome but that one must not look too closely as the squares were shoddy and the buildings ‘unsolid’.

      There was no consistency in the architecture and there was no new ‘Berlin style’ to replace the Prussian style of the eighteenth century.⁵⁴ The Berlin villa colonies were more like a Beverly Hills or Reno, Nevada, than a Knightsbridge, with a pastiche of styles copied from other cultures and periods. Rathenau described these areas as full of all manner of cheap and expensive ugliness which made one feel caught in a feverish dream: ‘Here is an Assyrian temple beside a patrician mansion from Nuremberg, СКАЧАТЬ