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

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СКАЧАТЬ abortions of a polytechnical beer – imagination.’⁵⁵ Christian Morgenstern wrote a sketch on this theme for Schall und Rauch in which the millionaire Kalkschmidt tells a horrified old professor that he wishes to build his restaurant not so much in the ‘Old Bavarian’ style as the ‘Venetian church’ style, complete with ‘great pictures and all gilded with painted ceiling and real Carrara and old wood carvings and columns and stained glass windows’; when the professor objects Kalkschmidt chides: ‘You do not know the modern Berlin, Herr Professor.’⁵⁶ Adolf Behne complained that one could no longer see anything of the walls as they were covered in ‘Caryatides, columns, cartouches, busts’.⁵⁷ Some projects were even more ostentatious: in 1894 a family from Pankow Wollank had their oriental palace built in the shape of an Indian mosque which floated on a raft in a nearby lake. It vanished in flames a few years later. And naturally William II had to outdo his subjects. Cecilienhof, the site of the 1945 Potsdam Conference, was an extraordinary copy of an Elizabethan manor house and contained a room built in the shape of a ship’s cabin suspended on leather straps so that he could be rocked to sleep as if at sea. He ordered that it should be completed in a mad frenzy when Germany was already well on its way to losing the First World War. No matter what the cost, appearance was everything. For Spender even the most sordid tenements never lost ‘some claim to represent the Prussian spirit, by virtue of their display of eagles, helmets, shields and prodigious buttocks of armoured babies’.⁵⁸

      Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend is a novel about the new money coursing through nineteenth-century Europe. The Veneerings were typical of the new rich:

      All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new … from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms to the grand pianoforte with the new action … all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings – the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky.⁵⁹

      The Veneerings might well have lived in imperial Berlin. The interiors of the new villas were even more outlandish than their facades and were crammed with pillars, statues and staircases. Ceilings dripped with plaster cherubs and fruit-laden vines, grand bourgeois rooms groaned under the weight of dark, heavy stuffed furniture, ornate mirrors, thick carpets, full-length curtains and palm trees; fountains spurted champagne and ornamental gardens and conservatories were replanted every few months. Billions of marks circulated in Berlin and the beneficiaries spent it on luxury; as Siegfried Kracauer, Berlin review editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, put it, everything in Berlin ‘was glittering and absolutely new’. Even for those somewhat less well off life was getting better. Over two-thirds of Berliners rented apartments rather than owning their own homes, which allowed for easy mobility. Rooms in flats no longer ran into one another; they were now divided so that nurseries and bedrooms were separated from the public spaces, making life more private both for residents and servants. Urban life had become easier for all; kerosene and then gas lamps replaced candles; linoleum floors were easier to keep clean and solid fuel briquettes and safety matches made homes easier to heat. A service sector quickly developed to cater to the whims and desires of the well-to-do.⁶⁰

      Since unification Berliners had become keenly aware of their status in comparison to other European capitals. They had defeated France and Austria on the battlefield and now they were determined to outdo Paris and Vienna as centres of pomp and luxury. The new department stores which were built at the end of the century quickly became symbols of great local, if not national pride. Tietz, Ka De We and Wertheim’s became synonymous with the new urban Berlin, providing customers with thousands of new and wonderful goods from around the globe.⁶¹

      Hermann Tietz was typical of the new optimistic, energetic and daring Berliner. In order to build his store he had to rip down a house which was featured in Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, and although the destruction of a place immortalized by a great national writer would have been unthinkable a decade before there was little room for sentimentality in the new Berlin. Tietz delighted in introducing products to the city; the humble tomato was first sold on his food floor, although it took a while before suspicious Berliners took to the fleshy, watery ‘fruit’. Rice, once a luxury item, became commonplace. But Tietz was not alone; the first major development in the New West was the Kaufhaus des Westens or Ka De We, which would later become a famous anti-Communist landmark in West Berlin. The unusually restrained and refined building was innovative in that it combined the sale of goods with a central ticket office for all travel and entertainment, a beauty salon, a café and other services previously found only in separate outlets.⁶²

      In 1909 the beautiful Sarotti shop on the prestigious Leipziger Strasse opened its doors after costly refurbishment. A year later it was gone. The building was demolished to make room for the most sumptuous of all Berlin stores, Wertheim’s, which was built at a staggering cost of 12 million marks.⁶³ All the new stores were large versions of the bourgeois villas, resplendent with grand entrance halls, huge chandeliers, staircases, mosaics and mirrors, but Messel’s extraordinarily modern design for Wertheim was the most sumptuous of all. A hundred thousand lights illuminated the staircases, the fountains, the palm trees, and the soft rose-coloured tiles which had been supplied by a factory owned by the Kaiser. Glass replaced solid walls, giving the building a light, airy feel, and people came just to see the new atrium which was lit from above. Berliners loved this new place, called the ‘greatest department store in the world’, and they flocked to buy, to see and to be seen.

      But the new department stores alone could not make a Weltstadt (world city). Harden noted that ‘one finds nothing elsewhere to compare with the department store of A. Wertheim … those who first come to Berlin must believe that they have stepped onto the earth of the richest city in Europe. Only those who remain longer … see that the rich facade has merely dazzled and the spectacle begins to appear shoddy and shallow.’⁶⁴ Imperial Berlin glittered, but it lacked substance and depth, a fact reflected in everything from architecture to fashion.

      In the past, few Berliners had been exposed to western fashion trends, but they were determined to make up for lost time. Men who had avoided beards in the 1840s because of their ‘liberal’ connotations began to sport ‘emperor’s sideboards’, made popular by Franz Joseph and Kaiser William. Wives and daughters wanted to be well dressed for their dinners and balls and promenades on Unter den Linden, and new styles were not merely copied, but embellished by Berlin manufacturers so that they would be ‘better than in Paris’. Gone were the demure empire-line dresses and ringlets of the Biedermeier era, which had made women look more ‘mother than mistress’; now opulence was everything. Hats had to be wider, skirts fuller, shoes higher and fabric more colourful than elsewhere, and gowns became ever more expensive and outlandish. Even the fashion magazine Die Mode lamented that ‘the tendency of fashion at the moment is to go to extremes’. Hats began to reach extraordinary dimensions, extending far beyond each shoulder; theatres had long since requested that ladies leave them in lockers but they became so enormous that according to the Berliner Tageblatt tram passengers would take bets to see if fashionable ladies could get through the doors.

      For foreigners these desperate attempts to outshine the fashion capitals of Europe were pathetic; when Jules Laforgue left France for the Berlin court he ‘hoped to dispel the image of the terrible taste of the Germans’, but his visit had the opposite effect. For all their money, he said, Berlin women simply did not have a sense of style: ‘one piece goes so badly with others that it is often grotesque to see’. The overall impression was frightful, as ‘the Berlinerin never has her hair done properly, never wears proper shoes, her walk is without grace, the movements too natural and voice loud and monotone.’⁶⁵ For the writer Przervwa-Tetmajer even the words ‘ugly, shitty and horrific’ were too mild to describe the women he encountered in Berlin.

      By now, of course, comments made about Berliners by Frenchmen, Russians, Austrians, Englishmen and Italians СКАЧАТЬ