Berlin

Every year, it seemed, some faction was in the streets, carrying placards and shouting demands. In 1900 the tram workers went out for several days, throwing the city into chaos. The troops were called out, and Kaiser Wilhelm, who had balked at the prospect of a civil war when he took the throne, told the commanding general that he hoped “five hundred people [among the strikers] might be gunned down.” Two years later the German Metal Workers’ Association, Berlin’s largest union, walked off their jobs to protest the firing of a worker’s representative who had been fired for trying to restore the docked wages of a colleague. When the employers brought in strikebreakers, other unions staged sympathy strikes, which shut down the proletarian district of Wedding for fourteen days. The metal workers won that round, but they were less successful when they struck for higher wages in two waves of walkouts in 1905–6 and 1910–12; in every instance, the police came out in force to protect the scabs who broke the strikes.

Economic grievances were not the only cause for work-actions. Berlin’s workers tried to use the strike weapon to force the government to liberalize the Prussian electoral system that so patently discriminated against the lower classes. A token reform in 1910, which did nothing to alleviate the basic injustice, prompted a series of Sunday demonstrations in the capital, each larger than the one before. In February the Berlin police president banned the demonstrations on the grounds that the streets were “reserved for the exclusive use of traffic.” Wishing both to evade a clash with the police and to score a symbolic victory, on March 6 the SPD announced a “suffrage promenade” to Treptow Park, which drew the forces of law and order to that outlying district. Meanwhile, the real march occurred right in the middle of town and was over by the time the exhausted police arrived to break it up.

This was an impressive display of working-class discipline but also another indication of the SPD’s strategic caution. Some of the radicals thought that the strikes and demonstrations in 1910 meant that Berlin’s masses were about to rise up and overthrow the kaiser, but they mistook restlessness for revolution. It would take the misery of four years of war, capped by the humiliation of defeat, to turn the capital of German imperialism into the capital of the German revolution.

Kaiser Wilhelm II proclaims war from a balcony of the Royal Palace, August 1, 1914

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DISCORD IN THE CASTLE

Berlin, the Reich capital, must and will take the lead in terms of discipline and willingness for sacrifice.

—Anton Wermuth,

Lord Mayor of Berlin, 1914

ON AUGUST 1, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II announced to a cheering crowd of Berliners that Germany was mobilizing for war against Russia. Three days later the cast of enemies also included France and Great Britain, and young men began boarding trains to take them off to battle. After a peace of forty-three years, Berlin was again on a war footing, but this war would be much different from the ones that had turned the Prussian Residenzstadt into Europe’s newest national capital. World War I, largely the fruit of Germany’s desperate desire for world-power status, would destroy the German empire forever and wreck Berlin’s bid to match London as a great imperial city. Intended also to pull the nation together and to shore up authoritarian rule at home, the war would divide the country as never before, giving impetus to a revolution that ended five hundred years of Hohenzollern rule in Prussia. As the national capital, Berlin was the nerve center of the German war effort but also the place where social divisions and organizational inadequacies were most sharply revealed. The city would emerge much chastened from the long ordeal—less on the make than on the mend.

A Place in the Sun