Berlin

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BERLIN

prussian capital
industry and growth
class and culture
bibliography

Berlin, with its unprepossessing location on the north German plain, rose to prominence first as a garrison town and then as the capital of a major military power, Prussia.

prussian capital

By the time Frederick I (Frederick the Great, r. 1740–1786) died in 1786, not only Berlin's size but also its intellectual and cultural vitality made it a nascent rival to Vienna, the major city of central Europe. Frederick was a great devotee of the French Enlightenment, but his main contribution to intellectual life in his capital was the relaxation of censorship. After 1780, the city emerged as a center of publishing and of interaction across class and gender lines in literary salons, the most notable of which were hosted by Jewish women, Henriette Herz (1764–1847) and Rahel Levin (later Rahel Levin-Varnhagen; 1771–1833). The salons nurtured the writers who cultivated the new literary sensibility that came to be known as Romanticism. Although revolutionary ideas from France were much discussed in the salons, the distant rumblings left Berlin largely untouched until the army of Napoleon I (r. 1804–1814/15) defeated Prussia's army and occupied Berlin from 1806 to 1808. The anti-French feelings that had already emerged in Romantic theories of nationalism took their most pointed form in the 1808 lectures of the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and a cult of bodily fitness promoted by the schoolteacher Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852). After the French defeats of 1813–1814, however, political repression and censorship quieted nationalists and other reformers.

The Prussian reforms that followed the 1806 defeat gave Berlin an elected city council—with a limited franchise and limited powers—as well as a university, intended by its founder Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) as the embodiment of humanistic education. It quickly emerged as a major center of theology and philosophy (most notably with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [1770–1831]) and later became one of Europe's leading centers of scientific research, even attracting Albert Einstein (1879–1955) to its faculty in 1914. Humboldt's efforts to stake a claim for art in the capital also helped promote the work of the royal architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841), whose state theater and museum were the most prominent of the buildings that reshaped the vicinity of the royal palace in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

After rumbles of dissent and occasional violence from 1830 on, the political explosion in

March 1848 resembled that of many other cities. News from Paris and Vienna provoked a demonstration to demand reforms from Frederick William IV (r. 1840–1861). Attempts to disperse the 10,000 demonstrators on 18 March turned bloody, prompting the king to pull his troops out of the city. He bowed to the demands of the demonstrators both substantively and symbolically, paying his respects to the 200 dead and naming a new government. A newly elected Prussian national assembly convened in Berlin in May. The freedom of the press established in March also permitted a national workers' congress to meet there in August. Continuing demonstrations and riots strengthened the hand of the king's conservative advisors, however, leading to the forcible adjournment of the national assembly in November, followed by arrests and a reimposition of censorship.

industry and growth

Berlin was a rare national capital that also became a major center of large-scale, cutting-edge industry. The city's eighteenth-century economy had been shaped by two royal policies: the growth of the army, and the religious toleration that made the city a home to persecuted Protestant and Jewish refugees with artisanal and entrepreneurial skills. Berlin's population and industry continued to grow rapidly in the early nineteenth century, but the more fundamental transformation came at mid-century, as Germany's new joint-stock banks clustered in Berlin and helped to finance the large factories that accompanied the arrival of the railroads (the locomotive manufacturer Borsig being Berlin's first industrial behemoth) and telegraphy (to which the Berlin firm Siemens made major contributions). In 1859, two decades after he had been a student there, Karl Marx (1818–1883) wrote, "If you saw Berlin ten years ago, you would not recognize it now. From a stiff place of parade it has been transformed into the bustling center of German machine-building." Berlin became a major producer of both machinery and electrical goods. The large factories first clustered at the northern gates and later scattered to many suburbs, while the Luisenstadt district in the southeast attracted hundreds of small courtyard workshops, especially in the clothing industry. The army's contribution to this industrial revolution is difficult to measure, but just as the demand for uniforms helped make eighteenth-century Berlin a major center of textile manufacturing, it is notable that the Prussian army took an early interest in the military uses of the telegraph and railroad, refining their use to devastating effect in the wars of 1866 and 1870.

These victorious wars made Berlin the capital of a unified Germany. The federal nature of the new state meant that its presence in Berlin remained much smaller than that of the growing Prussian bureaucracy. Wilhelmstrasse, with its row of ministries in converted palaces, became synonymous with government and especially with the diplomacy of Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), who presided over both the chancellery and foreign ministry and served as host of the Congress of Berlin in 1878. A few blocks away, the Reichstag building was completed in 1894 to house the imperial parliament created in 1871. The national government was just one catalyst for the creation of a far more dominant metropolis than decentralized Germany had ever had, as Berlin drew political, economic, and cultural elites from the provinces and also became a target for anti-urban passions.

After midcentury, Berlin grew outward rapidly. Although its eighteenth-century customs wall remained in place until 1868, in 1841 and 1861 the city annexed large chunks of territory beyond it, growing from 1,330 to a still-compact 5,923 hectares. The city's population of 150,000 in 1786 was some seven times as large as a century before, but nearly a quarter of the residents were garrison soldiers and their dependents. By 1877 another sevenfold increase brought the total over a million, with a second million added by 1905. By then, growth had long since spilled over into the suburbs: bourgeois Charlottenburg grew from 20,000 residents in 1871 to 306,000 in 1910, proletarian Rixdorf (later called Neukölln) from 8,000 to 237,000. When Berlin annexed its suburbs in 1920, it doubled its population to about four million. The heart of the Prussian capital had been the royal palace and the stately boulevard Unter den Linden, with commerce centered on adjacent Friedrichstrasse. Around 1900 the city's commercial center pushed southwest into grand new buildings on Leipziger Strasse and Potsdamer Platz, and a rival center was emerging along the fashionable new boulevard Kurfürstendamm, west of the Tiergarten park. Six major rail terminals ringed the city by 1882, when a new east-west rail line, built by the state railway, opened the city center to rail commuters. The first privately built subway line was completed in 1902, but most workers still commuted on foot or by streetcar.

Berlin had been a Protestant city since the Reformation, and most migrants were Protestant as well, although ever fewer attended church. Late in the century, many Roman Catholics came from eastern and western Prussian provinces, including many Poles. By the early 1900s, 11 percent of Berliners were Catholic. Jews never exceeded 5 percent of the population, but they attracted attention—much of it unwanted—as Jews and Gentiles alike came to acknowledge a prominent Jewish role in the city's economy and culture. Some assimilated German Jews advanced to modest prosperity, a few to great wealth. Most had little to do with the poor, Yiddish-speaking new arrivals from the east who clustered in Berlin's most notorious slum, the so-called shed quarter near Alexanderplatz, which was mostly leveled after 1906 in Berlin's only major slum clearance project before World War II.

Berlin faced the typical public health problems of a burgeoning city, and responded fairly well to them, although it was widely regarded as a laggard by the impressive standards of German municipal government. The Prussian state's infringement on what were elsewhere regarded as municipal prerogatives sometimes imposed vital reforms, but it also

hampered the formation of a civic-minded local elite. Past the middle of the century, Berliners were entirely at the mercy of wells, cesspools, open gutters, and the meager flow of the filthy Spree River. The Prussian government licensed the city's first waterworks in 1852, and a sewer system was built in the 1870s. In 1872, the English sanitary reformer Sir Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890) urged approval of the latter by telling Berliners that visitors arriving elsewhere from their city could be recognized by the foul odor of their clothes. In the following decades, cholera vanished and typhoid became much less common, but tuberculosis persisted as a killer.

Well into the twentieth century, critics blamed the city's miserable housing conditions on the 1862 city extension plan drawn up by the engineer James Hobrecht (1825–1902), although it is difficult to imagine how a better plan could have overcome the problems of poverty and overcrowding in most neighborhoods. Hobrecht's plan was little more than a sketch of broad streets and deep blocks covering the vast area that would be developed in the following decades. Apart from a few old sections, Berlin became a city of wide streets, as Hobrecht intended, but also of warrens of courtyard dwellings, something he did not foresee. Most streets were lined with enormous five-story apartment buildings with ornate facades concealing tiny flats, luxurious apartments, or, typically, both, with the larger flats facing the street. In western and southwestern suburbs such as Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, and Wilmersdorf, upscale apartments predominated, and beyond them, villa districts such as Grunewald and Wannsee stretched as far as the old royal town of Potsdam in an expanse of suburbs unmatched on the Continent. In most other directions, working-class tenements were interspersed with factories. Berlin's speculative real estate market produced these solidly constructed and spacious buildings at an astonishing rate, but they acquired a dreadful reputation. Most rooms faced gloomy courtyards and most flats were badly overcrowded; a typical building had a hundred or more residents. They were short on toilets and baths, and the upper classes feared them as breeders not only of disease but also of loose morals and subversive ideas. Certainly they did not fulfill a middle-class ideal of privacy, as working-class families typically could afford their own flats only by taking in single male lodgers. Reformers decried the tenements but effected little change.

class and culture

The tenements bred a vigorous working-class subculture in which courtyard peddlers and corner pubs played a role, as did the Social Democratic Party and the labor unions it sponsored. Berlin's factories proved fruitful ground for socialist and union organizing, and the city became known as a Red stronghold. Although the unequal Prussian franchise kept the municipal government in the hands of middle-class liberals, by 1912 the Social Democratic Party received 75 percent of Berlin's vote in the Reichstag election. Berlin's teeming streets and other public spaces became places of convivial sociability but also of frequent tension between the police and the restive majority. The early 1900s saw increasingly large and frequent street protests, some occasioned by strikes, others by Social Democratic marches and rallies for democratic reforms. Compromises and tensions marked the relationship between the crowds and the police, which had to adjust to recently established legal rights of assembly and to ever larger but usually orderly demonstrations. A rare outbreak of large-scale disorder, sparked by a strike, lasted for several days in 1910 in the district of Moabit, which, like neighboring Wedding, was an area of large factories and tenements with a more exclusively proletarian population than most other parts of the city. Along with strikes and demonstrations, crowds also assembled to cheer the emperor on festive occasions, and to show their support for him and the nation in the summer of 1914.

Berlin's loyalty to Prussian traditions, especially military ones, was often exaggerated, but foreign visitors were inclined to see Berliners as servile, a reputation cemented by a notorious incident in 1906 when a drifter acquired a used army captain's uniform and proceeded to commandeer a passing squad of soldiers, seize a suburban town hall, arrest the mayor, and abscond with the treasury, all without resistance. Countervailing images emphasized bourgeois strivers (often stereotyped as Jewish) and cheeky proletarians. Ordinary Berliners were renowned for their irreverent sense of humor, a spirit captured in the drawings and engravings of the popular artist Heinrich Zille (1858–1929). Visitors like Mark Twain (1835–1910) in 1892 remarked on the newness of "the German Chicago" and the dynamism as well as the rawness of its society.

Although the wealthier classes were largely united in their antipathy to Social Democracy, the cultured bourgeoisie sometimes chafed under the yoke of the court, nobility, and army. One bourgeois institution that quickly rose to international prominence was the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1882. There was more discord at the royal opera, where Emperor William II (r. 1888–1918) objected to the tastes of the composer Richard Strauss (1864–1949), its conductor from 1898 to 1918. That was only one example of a growing conflict between the official culture and the growing oppositional one. Prussian wealth, power, and cultural ambition enabled Berlin to amass great museum collections of European art and classical antiquities, including the Hellenistic altar from Pergamon and the treasures Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) unearthed at Troy, but the museum director Hugo von Tschudi (1851–1911) was forced out in 1909 because William II abhorred his acquisitions of modern art. The emperor's taste for grand neoclassical painting and sculpture was apparent in Berlin's museums and public squares, but during his reign, modern writers and artists flocked to Berlin from across central Europe, drawn by like-minded publishers and gallerists as well as the palpable excitement they felt in the demimonde of seamy Friedrichstrasse, the crowds and lights of Potsdamer Platz, and the glittering entertainment district emerging on Kurfürstendamm.

In the 1880s Berlin became the center of German literary naturalism, with a circle of writers attentive to the miseries of the urban working class. This new literature attracted most attention on the stage as Berlin became the center of the central European theatrical world, with new theaters playing the shocking works of foreign playwrights such as Henrik Johann Ibsen (1828–1906) as well as those of local writers, notably Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946). Some theaters also broke new ground in their attempts to reach a working-class audience. Much of the formal innovation and daring subject matter that made Berlin theater and cabaret world-famous in the 1920s was developed before 1914. Another example of Berlin's drawing power is the group of expressionist painters known as Die Brücke, all of whom moved from Dresden to Berlin around 1910. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) in particular became famous for his lurid paintings of Berlin street life. During the same years, the brief flowering of literary expressionism was also largely a Berlin phenomenon, and attention to the urban crowd by the Berliners Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and Max Weber (1864–1920) helped create the discipline of sociology. Evidence that the new urban dynamism was felt beyond intellectual circles can be found in the city's many mass-circulation newspapers spreading their tales of crime and vice through the streetcars and cafés.

See alsoCities and Towns; Demography; Germany.