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

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СКАЧАТЬ church, which the well-to-do of Berlin paid for out of their own pockets, and the design became ever more colourful as William insisted on more plaques, more carvings and more colourful gold, blue and pink mosaics. The church was consecrated on Sedan Day in 1895 in a wave of rampant nationalism and civic pride, and it was only after the war that the surviving ruin became the striking and impressive symbol of West Berlin. Gerhard Masur called it ‘one of the few buildings to have been improved by the fall of bombs and the ravages of fire’.⁸³

      Dozens of other ostentatious buildings went up under William II. Berlin was not yet a unified city (this would happen in 1920) and the autonomous districts built town halls to reflect their fierce local pride.⁸⁴ Charlottenburg, which claimed to be the most prosperous town in the empire, built a huge sandstone town hall to project its importance; not to be outdone the central Berliners built the ‘Red Rathaus’ in 1879. With its clinker-brick construction, ninety-seven-metre mock Renaissance tower and thirty-six red terracotta panels depicting Berlin’s history it remains a landmark in the city.⁸⁵ Commercial buildings also became ever larger and more ornate; banks and offices were mock Renaissance or neo-Gothic palaces; the Viktoria-Insurance on Linden-strasse had a monumental facade 130 metres long, while the Imperial Naval Headquarters, with its 800 offices, was an expression of William’s new military ambitions; Hitler was so impressed by it that he turned it into his Wehrmacht headquarters. William had little interest in preserving old buildings which got in his way; Rathenau recounted how the Gendarmenmarkt was to be elongated, cutting into the Leipziger Strasse and on to the site of the old Academy of Arts to create a ‘new and colossal Via Triumphalis’, while left and right on Unter den Linden Kaisermonumente were to be erected which would end in the facade of a huge new opera house, and the front of the Josty Eck was to become a monumental cascade in the form of the Trevi Fountain.⁸⁶ The pretty Opera House on Unter den Linden was to be replaced by a huge neo-Gothic affair and William ignored the public outcry which found expression in the popular street song, There Was Once an Opera House. Only the outbreak of the First World War halted the demolition. The historicist imperial style which had been inaugurated by Hitzig’s huge mock Renaissance Berlin Bourse of 1863 had been copied in museums, galleries, theatres, universities, bank buildings and private villas, in Hitzig’s central bank building on the Jägerstrasse and in the mock Renaissance Technical University. At the high point of this historicizing style, Renaissance, Gothic, baroque and classical features were all muddled together so that by the end of the Wilhelmine period heavy gaudy buildings dominated the Berlin skyline, and large sections of the medieval or Frederickan city had vanished for ever.

      William had great hopes for his capital but, in his attempts to create a great cultural centre in the heart of Europe, he often stifled the very artists and trends which might really have put his city on the map. He called everything from Impressionism to Naturalism ‘art from the gutter’, and while Schiele, Freud and Klimt were busy exposing the internal decay of Vienna the backward-looking military values imposed from above drove many great German writers and artists away: Schopenhauer hated Berlin, calling it a ‘psychologically and morally cursed nest’ and he moved to Frankfurt; Wagner stayed in Bavaria; Jakob Burckhardt refused a professorship there: he considered 1846 Berlin to be ‘repulsive, ugly, vile, mean to the point of malevolence, and with all this fortunately ridiculous’; Nietzsche despised the crass bourgeois aspect of the city; Brahms left after a short stay.⁸⁷ In the end only one great writer stayed in imperial Berlin to become its most perceptive critic. It was Theodor Fontane who looked past the glittering surface and exposed the conflicts and the turmoil which haunted the shadows of the new imperial city.

      Fontane was born near Berlin and spent his youth travelling throughout the Mark Brandenburg with his debt-ridden father, an experience which later inspired his famous 1862–82 Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Travels in the Mark Brandenburg) and the 1889 Fünf Schlösse (Five Castles). His family was too poor to pay for a formal education and he was sent to a trade school in Berlin to learn pharmacy. Nevertheless he was able to journey to London and eventually returned to Berlin to write poetry. He joined the literary club Tunnel über der Spree whose programme, written by Arno Holz, began ‘Zola, Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, A world lies in their words’ and ended with the cry: ‘Our world is not Romantic, Our world is only modern!’ The journalists, artists and writers there encouraged the young Fontane; each member was given a nickname (Theodor Storm was ‘Tannhäuser’ and Emanuel Geibel was ‘Bertrand de Born’); Fontane was accepted, and nicknamed ‘Lafontaine’. After a short stint on a newspaper in London Fontane joined the conservative Kreuzzeitung and began to write about Berlin in earnest.⁸⁸ His articles, letters, and above all his social novels bring the imperial city to life. To read him is to begin to understand the pretensions of the new rich, the decline of the educated middle class, the struggles of the workers, the arrogance amongst the officers, the separateness of the aristocracy, and the universal problems of family pride, honour, passion, marriage and adultery, life and death in the brash imperial city. Above all he deals with the social pressures which in the strict hierarchy of the new Berlin conspire to destroy true love. The Berlin novels were written as a series and were meant to cut through and expose all strata of life, but they were written with such humour, gentle irony and compassion that they rose above being mere criticism. The novels share similar themes: Irrungen, Wirrungen (Error and Confusion) describes the impossibility of marriage between a working-class girl and an officer, while Stine focuses on a forbidden love between a nobleman and a middle-class girl which ends in death. Die Poggenpuhls is about the widow of a Prussian Junker and her impoverished children who are saved in part by the paintings of one daughter which are bought by a wealthy Jewish banker; Frau Jenny Treibel is a scathing criticism of a new rich family’s snobbery. Effi Briest, the German Anna Karenina, is the story of a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage, who is banished and dies alone after a handful of old love letters are discovered by her husband. Fontane was naturally sympathetic to the old bureaucrats and university professors, judges and lawyers, doctors and journalists who were now part of a fragmented group with no organized political voice and who were slowly being pushed aside by the materialistic and militaristic values of Berlin. These feelings come through in his last novel, Der Stechlin, in which he describes an endearing nobleman Dubslav von Stechlin and his encounters with virtually all layers of Berlin society. Dubslav and Count Barby are portrayed as honourable anachronisms of a vanishing world, and Fontane praises Dubslav’s modesty and integrity while heaping contempt on the insufferable upstart Herr Gundermann, who has recently been granted a ‘von’ by the Kaiser. Fontane’s works remain a unique and invaluable exposé of life and of the rapid changes in imperial Berlin, but for all his perceptive wit, his insight and his criticism he was largely ignored during his lifetime. He in turn saw Berliners in a jaded light, commenting in a letter to Georg Friedländer in 1884 that ‘The Berliner remains a selfish, narrow-minded provincial’ and that although the town continues to grow it is ‘ruled by imitation, the lowest common denominator, respectable mediocrity’.⁸⁹

      The Wilhelmine period produced a number of extraordinary artists and writers and architects, from Fontane to Messel, and saw the birth of everything from Expressionism to modern industrial architecture in Berlin. Indeed while many visitors were disappointed by its ostentatious yet uncertain style they were impressed by its great department stores, train stations, hotels and industrial buildings. It was not the Reichstag or the Dom, but rather the Borsig works and the extraordinary 1909 turbine factory built by Behrens for AEG which made Berlin seem so energetic, so modern, so like Chicago. Berlin succeeded in impressing not because of, but despite its Wilhelmine pretensions. New cabaret and revues were intent on projecting Berlin as a Weltstadt. Performers like Claire Waldoff sang of Berlin’s ‘big city’ character in songs like the Lindenlied, which compared Berlin’s main street with the great boulevards of Paris and Vienna; revues at the Metropol included glitzy productions extolling the virtues of Berlin, including hits like Paul Lincke’s 1908 Donnerwetter – tadellos!, his 1909 Halloh! Die grosse Revue! and Rudolf Nelson’s 1912 Chauffeur – in’s Metropol!! and the cheekily titled Das muss man seh’n! (You Gotta See It!). The new reviews extolled the virtues of the big city, glorying in its consumerism and cosmopolitan nature and advertising new forms СКАЧАТЬ