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

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СКАЧАТЬ small provincial city nobody had cared how its women dressed, but all of a sudden it was important. Europeans began to be curious about this strange place in the Mark Brandenburg and for the first time the city became a stop on the nineteenth-century version of the grand tour for the non-military who were interested in learning about the art of war.⁶⁶ By 1900 a million visitors a year were arriving via the new water and rail networks which encircled the city, and the small dank inns of old gave way to the newest additions to the Berlin skyline, the grand hotels.

      In the late nineteenth century the size and style of hotels were considered a measure of the city’s greatness, and Berliners were eager to compete with their rivals. They had started very late – the first hotel large enough to call itself ‘grand’, the elegant Kaiserhof, was only completed in 1875. When the Kaiser saw it he said he had seen ‘nothing like it’ and Bismarck admired the elegant sandstone building so much he insisted that it be used as the venue for the Berlin Conference of 1878, at which the European powers attempted to halt Russian expansionism in the Balkans.⁶⁷ Other hoteliers tried to imitate its success, and soon the Grand Hotel de Rome, the King of Portugal, the Central Hotel, the Hotel d’Angleterre and the elegant Bristol were vying for business in the area around Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. By 1914 Berlin had twelve grand hotels with a capacity of 3,355 rooms, and they soon became important settings of novels and later films; Vicki Baum, who wrote People in the Hotel, would work as a maid at the Excelsior, and Greta Garbo would murmur ‘I want to be alone’ into one of its great pillars.⁶⁸ But all paled in comparison with the ‘best address in Berlin’, the famous Adlon at Number 1 Under den Linden.

      The Adlon has now been rebuilt, but for those who stayed there before the war the mere mention of the name still evokes wistful sighs. Debutantes and foreign dignitaries danced the night away in its ballrooms while heads of state and grand industrialists stayed in its lavish apartments. The hotel came into existence through the bad luck of Count Redern, who lost his pretty Schinkel palace while gambling one night with the king of England. The property went up for sale and Lorenz Adlon bought it, ripped down the palace (the equivalent of demolishing a Wren building in London) and, with the Kaiser’s blessing, built the hotel. Like Wertheim’s the hotel epitomized the new city: it was huge, opulent, and filled from top to bottom with frescoes, carpets, elaborate glassware and silver gilt; lights replaced service bells and its 140 bathrooms were awash with onyx and marble. The ‘Wonder of Great Berlin’ became another proud landmark and the Berlin design periodical Innendekoration was not being ironical when in January 1908 it called the Adlon a symbolic building which ‘outshone all others not only in Berlin or in Germany’, but even in ‘New York, Paris and London’. The Adlon was ‘great and important’, it stated, ‘because it loudly proclaimed to the world that Germany is rich!’⁶⁹

      Berliners had endured long periods of starvation and deprivation in their chequered past, which might explain why prosperity and success were so closely associated with food. The proprietors of the grand hotels joined in the race to build great restaurants and dining halls, cashing in on the fact that the bourgeoisie still equated gluttony with success. The images of the Berlin businessman bursting out of his waistcoat while cramming in yet another sausage, so brutally portrayed by Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, were not far from the truth. An American visitor quipped that Berlin ladies could not get through an entire performance of Hamlet without having a Schinkenbrot – a smoked ham sandwich – between acts, and it was considered quite normal in well-to-do families to have at least one seven-course meal a day.⁷⁰

      The hallmark, however, was quantity, rather than quality. Dishes were based on the rustic peasant food of their forefathers – Conrad Alberti described the heavy smell of frying, alcohol and sauerkraut mixed with tobacco smoke which hovered in the thick air of the local Kneipe where, ‘as it was Thursday’, the main dish was Eisbein.⁷¹ A French visitor once complained that in a ‘delicatessen’ one could only get coarse sausage and in a ‘bakery’ one could only get black bread. Preserved foods from pickled cucumbers to sauerkraut remained Berlin staples long after Frederick the Great had ceased to force his subjects to buy huge quantities of salt; local fish included carp, canal trout, eel and pickled herring, while other specialities included Bouletten or small hamburgers, pork cutlets and, above all, beer. Meals were a serious ritual; Arno Holz joked in Phantasus that his family remembered the day he was born because they could recall ‘the roast with plums they had for lunch, and I had arrived by coffee time’. The restaurants were as outlandish as the hotels; the Rheingold at the Adlon greeted its 4,000 customers with a facade which looked more like the nave of a medieval cathedral than a place in which to eat, while Borchardt, Dessel, Kranzler and Kempinski on the Leipziger Strasse (known as the Café Egomania because of the posturing of its customers) became city landmarks.

      Berlin had done well, but it was still desperately trying to catch up with its rivals in Europe. With their new money and their new look Berliners could not understand why outsiders remained so critical or why they were so slow to acknowledge Berlin’s greatness. The Kaiser was keenly aware of his city’s subservient position in Europe. In 1896 he wrote that ‘Berlin is a great city, a world city (perhaps?)’. It was no Paris, for

      Paris is the whorehouse of the world; therein lies its attraction … There is nothing in Berlin that can captivate the foreigner, except a few museums, castles and soldiers. After six days, the red book in hand, he has seen everything, and he departs relieved with the sense that he has done his duty. The Berliner does not see these things clearly, and he would be very upset, were he told about them.⁷²

      But despite his harsh words William was desperate for the city to reflect the power of his Germany. He wanted visitors to marvel at the ingenuity and wealth of his people, at the ‘powerful, surprising and almost incomprehensibly rapid progress … the result of the reunion of the German races in one common Fatherland’. But his insecurity and defensiveness shone through in his words: ‘The more we are able to wrest for ourselves a prominent position in all parts of the world the more should our nation in every class and industry remember that the working of Divine Providence is here manifested. If our Lord God had not entrusted to us great tasks He would not have conferred upon us great capacities.’ With this in mind William set about making Berlin the symbolic focus of the nation. A romantic version of Berlin’s importance in history was reinforced through everything from museums of local history to the creation of gigantic war memorials, Winged Victory statues and images of Berlin’s goddess Berolina, all smothered in ancient symbols such as eagles, oak leaves and laurel wreaths.⁷³ Museums, schools, public buildings and patriotic paintings were commissioned to enhance this national iconography.

      The sense of rivalry with Vienna and Paris never waned in Berlin.⁷⁴ Bismarck had been particularly keen to emulate Napoleonic Paris – itself modelled on imperial Rome – which he saw as the ideal imperial capital. Bismarck was impressed by Napoleon’s monuments of war, and the column made of melted down cannon from Austerlitz in the Place Vendôme, which chronicled his exploits, found an echo in Berlin’s own victory column.⁷⁵ The presence of Pope Pius VI at the ceremony at which Napoleon crowned himself emperor and the attempt to install the pope in Notre Dame found an echo in the desire to create a ‘Vatican of the North’ in Berlin. Bismarck admired Napoleon’s creation of wide streets like the Rue de Rivoli and was so impressed by the Champs-Élysées that he created the Kurfürstendamm in its image to connect the city centre with the elegant suburb of Grunewald.⁷⁶ Napoleon had wanted to make Paris into the centre of European culture and had not only plundered the great art treasures of Europe for the Musée Napoléon but had also stolen entire archives from occupied countries in order to create a single great European reference archive; if Berlin could not achieve this it could at least build schools and museums and libraries. Paris was the unrivalled administrative and political centre of France and whereas Louis XIV had moved the French capital to Versailles Napoleon had moved it back, shunning, as Bismarck had done, the particularist interests of petty princes. Bismarck introduced many elements of imperial Paris to the new German capital. But if Paris was Bismarck’s ideal, the young William II looked increasingly to another rival – СКАЧАТЬ