Berlin

Wilhelmian Berlin’s economy was fluid enough to allow working-class types with a strong entrepreneurial spirit to improve their lot in life, perhaps by opening a tavern or running a moving service. The newspapers often ran inspirational stories of upward mobility, offering these success stories as proof that Berlin was the ideal spot for a little man with big ambitions—one need not decamp to America! But there was also plenty of opportunity to move in the other direction and to end up, say, frequenting the municipal shelter at Jannowitzbrücke. Worse, one’s name might be added to the growing number of suicide cases reported each week in the newspapers.

Of course, the vast majority of Berlin’s workers neither moved up to the bourgeoisie nor leaped into the Spree; rather, they did their best to improve their situation little by little, often by joining the Social Democratic Party and/or a trade union, the two prime sources of organizational clout for industrial workers in imperial Germany.

We have seen that the Socialists were making significant gains in Berlin during Bismarck’s time despite the existence of the Anti-Socialist Law. With its repeal in 1890, the party and the affiliated union movement grew even faster. By the turn of the century it became commonplace to speak of the German capital as “Red Berlin.” While this development filled local proletarians with pride, it understandably horrified conservative elements among the middle and upper classes, and it added a new dimension to Berlin’s problematical reputation in the rest of the Reich. The sprawling capital, it seemed, was a breeding ground not just of moral and cultural corruption but also of political subversion. The “Whore on the Spree” wore a red garter!

In 1890 the SPD built a new headquarters at 69 Lindenstrasse. The massive building, whose 500,000-mark cost was covered by members’ dues and local donations, was seen by the Berlin workers as their answer to a recent statement by Kaiser Wilhelm that Social Democracy was a passing phenomenon. The kaiser obviously had his head in the sand. In 1890 the Socialist party counted 100,000 members nationwide, about 10,000 in Berlin. Six years later, the Berlin membership had jumped to 41,700, making it the largest municipal branch in the country. As of 1884, two of Berlin’s six Reichstag seats (those serving the proletarian areas in the north and east) were firmly in Socialist hands, and after 1893 three other electoral districts voted consistently for the SPD. In the 1887 Reichstag elections 40.2 percent of Berlin’s voters opted for the Socialists; by 1903 the figure was up to 48.5 percent, and in 1912, the high-water mark of Socialist success, 75.3 percent. August Bebel’s boast that “Berlin belongs to us,” which had been somewhat premature in 1878, now had a good measure of validity, at least with respect to the city’s representation in the Reichstag.

The SPD had more difficulty cracking Berlin’s city assembly and the Prussian Landtag (state parliament), where Prussia’s three-class voting system made electoral clout directly proportional to the amount of taxes a citizen paid. In 1909, for example, each class elected forty-eight delegates to the city assembly, but the first class, whose members paid a minimum annual tax of 42,000 marks, contained only 1,800 voters; the second, paying a minimum of 178 marks, embraced 32,000 voters; and the last class, consisting of all the remaining eligible voters (males over twenty-four), numbered 336,000. Elections for the city assembly and Prussian parliament, moreover, were not direct; voters chose “electoral representatives” who then cast the final votes in a public ballot. As an added hurdle to the Socialists, the city assembly required that one-half of its membership be composed of home owners, which ruled out most workers. Frustration over this rigged system induced many proletarians to abstain from voting in municipal elections; in 1903 some 48 percent of the third-class voters did not go to the polls; in 1907 the figure was 58.5 percent. Yet even here the Socialists managed to gain a foothold; in 1890 they won eleven seats in the assembly and in 1900 doubled that figure to twenty-two (out of 144). They made their first inroads into the Prussian parliament in 1908, when the SPD sent seven representatives (out of 443) to that body, six of them from Berlin.

The SPD’s electoral successes in the national capital were due in part to the party’s ability to transcend class boundaries. Although socialism remained overwhelmingly a working-class movement, it also attracted bourgeois intellectuals and professionals who dreamed of a truly democratic and socially unified Germany, and who envisaged Berlin as the catalyst for that transformation. Most of the men whom the party sent to the various political bodies came from this group rather than from the working-class rank and file.