Berlin

While Wilhelmian Berlin could undoubtedly be considered (in the words of one contemporary) “the youngest European great city,” it remained questionable whether, even now, the German capital could in all respects be classed as a Weltstadt

, a distinction that many Berliners had been claiming for some time. Although boasting almost 2 million inhabitants in 1900, which made it the fourth largest city in Europe, Berlin lacked the worldwide political and economic power of imperial London, the international cultural resonance of Paris, the global commercial reach of New York, the symbolic heft of Rome or Athens. Between 1900 and 1913 London hosted 536 international conferences, Paris 371, and Berlin only 181. As an economic and cultural magnet for outsiders, Berlin continued to attract primarily other Germans and eastern Europeans. It was certainly not the international melting pot that New York City was at this time. Even within Germany, the capital’s influence was much stronger in the north and east than in the west and south, whose citizens still looked to their regional capitals for inspiration.

The physical results of Berlin’s rapid modernization were generally not pretty, and the psychological effects could be extremely unsettling. The majority of Berliners seem to have embraced the new age readily enough; indeed, they were very proud of their city’s status as “Chicago on the Spree.” However, a number of influential social commentators were appalled by Berlin’s chaotic “Americanization,” with its attendant disregard of aesthetic and spiritual values. In his bitter polemic, Berlin

—Ein Stadtschicksal

(1910), the critic Karl Scheffler called the German metropolis “the capital of German non-culture.” He argued that uncontrolled growth and concessions to speculative greed had generated a cluttered amorphousness, while desperate efforts to create an impressive imperial facade had yielded a “barbarian monumentality.” The essayist Arthur Eloesser, a native Berliner, lashed out at his city’s undiscriminating celebration of the new, its frantic effort to try to overcome the cultural head start of the older European capitals by resorting to “simulations, surrogates, and imitations.” He regretted that a Berlin native was likely to feel less at home in his own city than was a newly arrived immigrant, who did not have to “cast off any inhibiting memories or troublesome sentiments in order to jump into the flowing present and swim toward a shoreless future.” Even Karl Baedeker’s authoritative guide to the city (1903) felt compelled to point out that since “three-quarters of [Berlin’s] buildings are quite new, it suffers from a certain lack of historical interest.”

Like many contemporary social commentators and travel writers, Berlin’s novelists often focused on the negative aspects of rapid growth and hunger for world-class status. As Kätherine Roper has pointed out in her study of the novels of imperial Berlin, imaginative writers working at the turn of the century depicted a city wracked by a nervous sickness bordering on collective insanity. They equated Berlin’s cult of novelty and need to impress with a generalized collapse of moral integrity. Dilating on the implications of Berlin’s dubious distinction as “the parvenu among world cities,” a character in one such novel, Theophil Zolling’s Der Klatsch: Ein Roman aus der Gesellschaft

, laments:

All around us we see and hear the powerful drive of this huge city; here world peace is negotiated, and politics and history are made; here is the center for the intellectual and artistic flowering of our nation. . . . But our civilization has not yet become a noble culture, and our society remains petty, lowly, and mean. . . . Despite all our great men, we will remain barbarians as long as we allow the get-rich spirit, the social fawning, and the back-biting to reign among us.

Max Kretzer’s Meister Timpe (1888) focuses on the costs that Berlin’s rapid industrialization exacted upon its class of small craftsmen. The protagonist, a master wood-turner, sees his world collapse when a furniture manufacturer buys the property next to his shop to build a new factory. One of Timpe’s apprentices knows what is coming: “The large factories devour the craft-shops, and in the end nothing remains but workers and factory owners, two-legged machines and steam boilers.” Timpe’s fate, and that of the city he had known, is foreshadowed when his rapacious neighbor fells some beautiful trees to make space for factory chimneys. To Timpe, what was falling here was nothing less than “the old Berlin, the steady perspective of his childhood, the magical atmosphere of his youth.”