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

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СКАЧАТЬ Kaiser became increasingly obsessed with the desire to outdo the new industrial and military giant of Europe, a country in which he had spent some of the happiest days of his youth.⁷⁷ England had colonies, great wealth, grand buildings, a powerful navy, and much more besides, and William entertained the childlike belief that anything which England could do, Germany could do better. If London had grand hotels then Berlin needed them. If London had museums and department stores Berlin could have twice as many. The Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, founded in 1909, was to be an ‘Oxford in Dahlem’. The Lichterfelde Botanical Gardens, with its arboretum, pools and collections of native and foreign vegetation, was to rival Kew Gardens, as was the Great Tropical House, built in 1906, with its iron and glass cantilever construction. When William decided that Prussia needed a new Royal Library the architect Ernst von Ihne had one brief: it had to be bigger and better than the reading room of the British Library. Only the shell remained after the war, the huge battered clock frozen at 6.30 when it was bombed, but when standing it was the largest reading room in the world. It had cost Berliners 25 million marks. Having been built for show it was quite impractical; not only did the enormous dome magnify the slightest whisper but it was so difficult to heat that scholars had to dress in winter coats in order to work; the historian Droysen could always be seen with an enormous green and black blanket wrapped around his feet. But the Kaiser was delighted with the result.

      The competition between London and Berlin went further. London had Houses of Parliament and a magnificent new Foreign Office so Berlin would have to have a Reichstag, something ‘huge, heavy and Imperial’. It was not that William wanted to do anything for politicians, whom he hated so much that after leaving a German Colonial exhibition he declared that he would like to have all parliamentarian heads shrunken and put on sticks like the ones he had just seen. He called the parliament buildings the Reichsaffenhaus or ‘empire ape house’, and he even objected to the ‘revolutionary’ slogan ‘To the German People’ which was to be emblazoned across the front.⁷⁸ This was only added in the dark days of 1916. Nevertheless 183 architects competed for the Reichstag contract and in 1882 it was awarded to the heavy-handed Paul Wallot. The mock Renaissance building with its arches and its oversized dome would later play a key role in Berlin history, burning as the Nazis seized power, acting as a backdrop to the vicious hand-to-hand combat between Germans and Russians in May 1945, standing beside the Wall as an important symbol of West Berlin, and finally crowned the centre of the reunified capital by a glass dome designed by the English architect Sir Norman Foster. But when it was new it was simply another hollow showpiece for the upstart imperial city.

      The gesture to political life was also to be extended to the religious life of the nation. Berlin had its hotels and political and industrial palaces and now William wanted a grand cathedral for his capital city. He was not modest; this was to be nothing less than the focal point of the ‘greatest Protestant dynasty in Europe’. Above all, the church was to encourage unquestioning loyalty to the Hohenzollern dynasty.

      By the time William II came to power the Protestant Church had an established history of supporting secular authority, a tradition which had started with Martin Luther himself. Despite his sublime plea for intellectual liberty Luther had been politically conservative, teaching that an individual must pray to God but must obey his prince. The links between Church and ruler increased in Protestant areas well into the seventeenth century; in Berlin the Hohenzollerns appointed faithful Calvinist preachers as civil servants and educators, who consistently managed to combine their devotion to God with service to the state.⁷⁹ In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars theologians, including the Berlin professor Schleiermacher, author of Über die Religion, pushed for the creation of a Church which would formally merge all Lutheran and Calvinist (Reformed) elements of Prussia and northern Germany and in 1817, on the tercentenary of the Reformation, Frederick William IV created a ‘national Church’. It would become a pillar of Prussian state power.

      By the late nineteenth century conservatives were increasingly frightened by the spectre of revolution; as Ranke put it, ‘the whole order of things … is threatened by anarchic powers’. One way to counter the dangerous ideas disseminated by Social Democrats and revolutionaries was to ‘Christianize’ Prussia and to entice people back to a Church which conformed to state policy. In order to achieve this Bismarck actually began to interfere in Church appointments, barring Young Hegelians and others suspected of holding radical political views from the clergy. His political views also affected the state’s relationship with German Catholics. Bismarck was not anti-Catholic per se but wanted to curb the power of the Catholic Centre Party and admitted that religion was a convenient excuse by which to accomplish this: ‘it is not a matter of a struggle between faith and unbelief. What we have here is the age-old struggle for power, as old as the human race itself …’⁸⁰

      The struggle had started in 1864 when Pope Pius IX had published the encyclical Quanta Cura claiming Church supremacy over all civil authority. Bismarck had seen this as a challenge to his own political authority and had unleashed the Kulturkampf against them. Catholics were labelled a ‘fifth column’ who dared to put Rome above Berlin; as a result they suffered discrimination, priests were no longer permitted to work in the state service, the Prussian government imposed official requirements for the ordination of Catholic priests and Catholic schools were harassed.⁸¹ The Kulturkampf proved counterproductive, serving only to unite Catholics against Bismarck and eliciting much sympathy from non-Catholics throughout Germany. It was abandoned in 1875. Nevertheless the idea that no religion should act against the interest of the state but should rather inspire patriotism and loyalty persisted under William II.

      The young Kaiser believed that he was God’s instrument on earth and that to criticize his policies was to go against God’s will. He expected complete loyalty from the Protestant Church but was in return willing to make Berlin the ‘Vatican of the North’. He believed it a ‘disgrace’ that London had St Paul’s, Paris Notre Dame and Rome the Vatican while Berlin had nothing but a handful of small medieval and eighteenth-century churches. Germany was unified; four-fifths of the population was Protestant, and now it needed a powerful symbol at its centre. In 1884 William commissioned the Berlin cathedral. The old church, once redesigned by Schinkel, was ripped down and a massive baroque-style building erected in its place to tower above the palace, the Reichstag and the Armoury.⁸²

      The Dom was opened in 1905 in a wave of nationalistic celebration, and sermons delivered from its pulpit gave William II complete support in his dangerous foreign and domestic policy. In 1914 the sermons rang in the ears of young Berliners off to war, and twenty years later it served as the focus of Hitler’s Nazi state Church and as the site of Nazi ceremonies, including Göring’s outlandish wedding. After being bombed and gutted during the war it was partially restored by Erich Honecker both to reward those East German Protestants who supported his corrupt regime and to project the ‘pride and legitimacy’ of the DDR. It remains one of Berlin’s most controversial buildings.

      In May 1993 a ceremony took place in the centre of reunified Berlin to mark the end of fifty years of dereliction, but the day was not a happy one. Although some in the congregation were clearly moved by the ceremony many Berliners complained that the project had been too expensive and that the money should have gone to more pressing projects such as countering right-wing radicalism or helping refugees from Bosnia. The event could not have been more different from the proud, arrogant spectacle staged there in 1905 which so aptly demonstrated the links between the Protestant Church and Wilhelmine Germany.

      The Dom was not the only church built at the time. The empress shared William’s passion for heavy neo-Gothic architecture, which she combined with an obsession for building churches: forty-two went up in a mere ten years. Dozens of these brick or sandstone edifices still stand in the old working-class districts, where they were intended to inspire the secular proletariat. Before William churches in Berlin had usually been named after saints or other biblical figures, but in the new Berlin the houses of God were named after the Hohenzollerns themselves. One of Berlin’s most famous landmarks was the church at the northern end of the Kurfürstendamm, the Kaiser Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Memorial Church), built to honour СКАЧАТЬ