Berlin

The Iron Chancellor was not amused. Increasingly, he blamed “the democratic claque that rules Berlin” for the failures of his domestic policy. The parliament, he fumed, had become hopelessly “Bedinized” by its locally based delegates, who had the infuriating habit of attending every session and outmaneuvering their conservative cousins from the provinces. Bismarck now regretted that he had helped to make Berlin the national capital in the first place. In his frustration, he even began toying with the notion of moving the Reichstag to a “healthier” place. After all, as he told his personal physician, Berlin was not Germany. “It would be as great a mistake to confound the Berliners with the Germans as it would be to confound the Parisians with the French—in both countries they represent a quite different people.” If the Reichstag were moved away from the Spree metropolis, he reasoned, its delegates would “not have to fear the scandal-mongering press of Berlin.”

In a way, it was fitting that Bismarck had become deeply disenchanted with Berlin. By the last decade of the nineteenth century the city had changed significantly, while the Iron Chancellor was reverting to the hidebound views of his youth as a Prussian squire. The reserved and somewhat sleepy Prussian capital that Bismarck had known as a young man, and indeed for much of his career, was beginning to assert itself as an international mover and shaker in commerce, natural science, technology, the arts, and military affairs. At the very moment the Iron Chancellor was cursing the city whose newly prominent stature he had done so much to engineer, the Spree metropolis was getting ready to embark on an even more ambitious course under a new leader, who, though sharing many of Bismarck’s reservations about Berlin, was determined to make it into a world capital in every sense of the word.

Reichstag, 1896

2

WORLD CITY?

Berlin must not only present itself as the largest city in Germany, but must give witness of its energy and progressive spirit in all dimensions of its restless productivity.

—Catalog, Berlin

Industrial Exhibition, 1896

WHAT IS POSSIBLE in other world-cities must also be possible in Berlin.” So claimed Martin Kirschner, Berlin’s governing mayor, at the turn of the century. The statement suggested pride and insecurity simultaneously—insistence that Berlin had already joined the ranks of world-cities, anxiety that it might yet fall short of greatness in some important way. For the German metropolis, the twenty-six-year period between Kaiser Wilhelm IIs ascension to the throne in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought tremendous change and plenty of cause to boast about urban progress and technological innovation. As the distinguished urbanologist Sir Peter Hall has written, Berlin in the late nineteenth century “could fairly claim the title of high-tech industrial center of the world: the Silicon Valley of its day.” But the dizzying changes also brought reasons to reflect on the quality of the city’s development and ample justification for concern about how it was handling its demanding role as the capital of a highly volatile young nation.

Parvenopolis

The speed at which Berlin was transformed in the Wilhelmian era pointed up its most salient features: a breathtaking mutability and a “lack of historical consciousness regarding itself.” These qualities had been evident in the Prussian capital since the Gründerzett and even before, but the rate of change became even more spectacular in the two and a half decades preceding World War I. During this period Berlin became the most “modern” of European capitals—so up-to-date, in fact, that the most apt comparison seemed to be with that overnight metropolis on the other side of the Atlantic, Chicago. Although Mark Twain famously called Berlin “the German Chicago,” he proposed that “Chicago would seem venerable beside it.” The French travel writer Charles Huard also considered Berlin “newer even than Chicago, the only city in the world with which one can compare it in terms of the incredible rapidity of its growth.” The Berlin industrialist Walther Rathenau, who had a sharp eye for the foibles of his native city, joked about an American inventor from Chicago who when visiting Germany went straight to the capital without stopping at Cologne because he “didn’t care for old things” and believed that Berlin was “on the verge of surpassing Philadelphia.” It was this preoccupation with making it big fast that led Rathenau to label his hometown “the Parvenu of Great Cities and the Great City of Parvenus.”