Berlin

Hessel was surprised that stores like Wertheim, dedicated to mass consumption, did little to accommodate the universal need for kitsch. But there was a good reason for this: the department store was designed to combine convenience with luxury, drawing middle-brow patrons toward a more sophisticated taste. As Hermann Tietz, founder of another retail chain, put it: “The department store hopes to be model and guide for achieving an elevated lifestyle.”

Of course, to effect this transformation the stores had first to lure people from the streets into their luxurious web of wares. Thus the new emporia constructed elaborate display windows that rivaled stage sets in their capacity to evoke exotic worlds. The displays often featured mannequins so real looking that passersby were inclined to ask them the time of day. Some of the dummies were even animated, capable of acting out little domestic dramas like dunking a soiled shirt into a basin of soap. Berlin became so taken with this aspect of big-city life that it staged annual window-display contests and christened itself the “city of show windows.”

The display windows were models of refined taste compared to another novel means of attracting the attention of Emptor Berlinanus—giant billboards. Entire facades disappeared behind wooden hoardings painted in garish colors. Visiting the city in 1911, the writer Max Brod observed that “All of Berlin is one big placard by [the illustrator] Lucian Bernhard. Doesn’t the purple knight with the orange beard fall to his knees on every street corner? Don’t prolific hordes of thin greyhounds, lime-green monkeys, cigar-smoking goblins, and tender Gibson girls fill the streets?” Every store, noted another observer, had “its own display, its own illumination, its own mechanical noisemaker” screaming at passersby and turning the streets into “a bewildering mess.”

The hordes of people who shopped or worked in Berlin’s commercial district needed places to eat that were relatively quick and inexpensive. The department stores installed caféterias and (another innovation) vending machines so that customers would not have to leave the building to eat or spend too much time doing it. Quick and cheap meals were also available at Aschingers, which may be considered the world’s first fast-food chain. At any one of the forty Aschinger branches in the city a hungry patron could get an open-face sandwich for ten pfennigs, or for thirty pfennigs a dish of Loffelerbsen mit Speck, the recipe for which derived from Germany’s greatest chemist, Justus von Liebig. Free bread came with every order of beer, a deal that no true Berliner could pass up. Other attractions were spotlessly clean premises and buxom young waitresses dressed in Bavarian-style dirndls, whom Jules Huret found “fresh and appetizing like milkmaids as they stand behind the glass-covered counters.”

For those with a little more time and money to spend on a meal, Kempinski in Leipzigerstrasse was the perfect alternative, an “Everyman’s Paradise [providing] elegance for all.” Most dishes there cost only 75 pfennigs, but for 2 marks 75 pfennigs one could “dine in style with the little lady.” Even the kaiser sometimes ate there, which so pleased Kempinski that he placed a bust of His Majesty in the foyer. Later Kempinski opened a second restaurant on the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, where the Hotel Kempinski stands today.

“Man is what he eats,” said the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. He also is what he reads. At the turn of the century, Berliners read newspapers. They read them so voraciously that the German capital emerged as the newspaper city par excellence, with more papers than London. The media culture helped shape the citizenry, turning legions of freshly arrived country folk into wise-cracking urbanites almost overnight. It also changed the look and feel of the city, as newspaper kiosks sprang up at every major intersection and newspaper vendors prowled the streets shouting the day’s headlines.