Berlin

Kaiser Wilhelm was very proud of the scientists, engineers, and inventors who were helping to make Berlin a seedbed of technological progress. His conservative tastes in art and architecture notwithstanding, he considered himself a man of the future, and he fully understood that scientific knowledge was a key element in national power. “The new century will be ruled by science, including technology, and not by philosophy as was its predecessor,” he declared. The monarch cultivated personal contacts with Wilhelm Rontgen, discoverer of the X ray, and with Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the airship pioneer. (Upon Rontgen’s discovery of the X ray, Wilhelm telegraphed him: “I praise God for granting our German fatherland this new triumph of science.”) At the turn of the century, he prodded Berlin University to open its doors to the graduates of the recently created Realgymnasien, which emphasized natural sciences at the expense of ancient Greek. In 1910, on the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universitat, he announced the creation of a new research complex for the natural sciences, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, which was situated on royal lands in the western suburb of Dahlem. The Society was to be Berlin’s answer to France’s Pasteur Institute and America’s Rockefeller institutes, a place where the country’s top scientists, funded by private industry and the government, could conduct the basic research necessary to keep Germany on the cutting edge of science and technology.

Bigger, Faster, Newer

In 1892 a group of prominent Berliners proposed to advertise their city’s arrival as a world metropolis by staging an international exposition on the model of the recent fairs held in Paris, London, Vienna, and Philadelphia. However, Kaiser Wilhelm, to whom the matter was referred, rejected the plan on the grounds that Berlin was not yet grand enough—not yet transformed enough by his

hand—to host a World’s Fair. “The glory of Paris robs the Berliners of their sleep. Berlin is a great city, a world city (perhaps?), consequently, it has to have a [world’s fair]. It is easy to understand why this argument is.. . attractive to the restaurants, the theaters and vaudevilles of Berlin. They would profit from it.” But, the kaiser went on,

Berlin is not Paris. Paris is the great whorehouse of the world; therein lies its attraction independent of any exhibition. There is nothing in Berlin that can captivate the foreigner, except a few museums, castles, and soldiers. After six days, the red book [the Baedeker guide] in hand, he has seen everything, and he departs relieved, feeling that he has done his duty. The Berliner does not see these things clearly, and would be very upset were he told about them. However, this is the real obstacle to the exhibition.