Berlin

The commitment to unity was relatively easy to make in late summer 1914 because almost everyone thought the war would end quickly. Among the general public, word had it that the war would be over by Christmas, the victory a nice holiday gift. Some of the German troops departing for the front in early August even promised to be home “before the leaves fell.” The General Staff, conceding that there might be some delay here and there, prepared for a war that could last as long as six months.

During the first month of fighting it seemed as if the Germans’ confidence was not misplaced. True, the invaders encountered resistance from tiny Belgium, forcing them, among other measures, to call up huge Krupp cannons to smash the fortresses around Liège. But Belgian opposition slowed the German advance only by a few days. After taking Brussels the Germans turned south into northern France and were within twenty-five miles of Paris by September 5. The Germans also successfully repressed a French attack into occupied Alsace-Lorraine. Exploiting the breathtaking stupidity of the French commanders, who had ordered their troops to charge without surprise or concealment, the defenders slaughtered over 40,000 Frenchmen in just three days.

On the Eastern Front the Russian steamroller had gotten rolling faster than Germany had expected, and the kaiser worried that Berlin might fall to the Cossacks. Russian generalship, however, proved even more inept than the French, and the czar’s soldiers, though numerous, were so poorly equipped that many had to wait for a colleague to fall in order to obtain a rifle. At the end of August, German forces under Paul von Hindenburg and his chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, who had been hurriedly called east after helping win the victory at Liège, lured a large Russian army into a trap at the Masurian Lakes in East Prussia and annihilated it. Upon learning the news of this great victory, which the Germans named “Tannenberg” in honor of a clash between Teutonic Knights and Slavs in 1410, Berliners breathed a huge sigh of relief; there would apparently be no Cossacks in their city after all.

Indeed, in the wake of all these impressive victories the German capital gave itself over to a mood of festive celebration unmixed with the tension evident on the eve of the war. On August 7, after twenty policemen rode through town bringing news (somewhat prematurely) of the fall of Liège, church bells rang out across Berlin, and cheering crowds paraded up and down Unter den Linden. Among them was a nine-year-old boy named Felix Gilbert, who was later to emigrate to America and become one of its most distinguished historians. In his memoirs Gilbert recalled marching to the Royal Palace and yelling for a member of the royal house to make an appearance. Like other little boys he also celebrated the German victories by playing war games in the streets. Noticing some boys playing such games outside her home, the painter Käthe Kollwitz was amazed to hear one of them plead for mercy from his “captors” by announcing, “I am a father many times over and the only son of my wife.”

On August 11, a General Staff officer drove into town to announce “Victory in Alsace,” prompting another informal parade, this one led by a Berliner carrying a bust of Kaiser Wile wearing a laurel wreath. The crowd celebrating the Alsatian victory surrounded a column of Prussian troops marching through the Brandenburg Gate and showered them with roses, which the soldiers affixed, in very un-Prussian fashion, to their uniforms and rifles. The celebration extended to the city’s working classes, some of whom draped the national colors out their windows. Käthe Kollwitz’s family, solid Social Democrats, displayed the imperial flag at their flat in Prenzlauer Berg for the first time in their lives. To a conservative minister living in the proletarian district of Moabit, this phenomenon was “an amazing thing for those who know the conditions. Usually there is not a single flag on, say, the Kaiser’s birthday. . . . The Social Democratic worker is proud that he can show his patriotism.”

Successive announcements of more victories in Belgium, France, and East Prussia gave Berliners the impression that the war was virtually over. When captured French war material was paraded down Unter den Linden on Sedan Day, September 2, the journalist Theodor Wolff reported that he had never seen Berlin more “excited,” more bursting with happy crowds. An old general, recalling the way in which some Berliners had exploited the victory celebration of 1871, admonished home owners “not to rent their windows for the [coming] victory parade at too high a price.”