Berlin

This admonition, of course, proved unnecessary. The massive German drive to take Paris faltered at the Battle of the Marne in September 1914. What was supposed to be a quick victory in the West—the General Staff had allotted only thirty-nine days for the entire campaign against France—degenerated into four years of bitter trench warfare. The Spirit of 1914 had been from the outset part wishful thinking, but as the war dragged on the ideal turned into a necessary mythos, trotted out to help maintain morale in the face of growing despair and internal discord. And just as Berlin had led the nation in cheering the early victories, so it assumed the lead in questioning the war once the conflict had begun to exact its terrible toll on the home front and battlefields alike.

You’ll Be Eating Shit for Dessert!

In Berlin, indications that the war might have less than a salutary effect on the economic climate came even before the campaign in the West ran aground. The mobilization of young male workers for the military forced many factories and businesses to shut down or curtail operations. Because the transportation network was turned over to the army for troop movement, firms were suddenly cut off from sources of supply and distant markets. Companies that focused on export suffered the most. Siemens, for example, lost foreign orders for 5.8 million lightbulbs. Eventually, the task of keeping the insatiable war machine up and running compensated for the loss of foreign markets, but the initial contraction, estimated at 24 percent, produced a sudden upsurge in unemployment. The capital’s jobless rate among male trade unionists shot up from 6 to 19 percent in the first two weeks of the war.

Hoping to prevent a breakdown in the civil truce, the government hastily increased unemployment benefits. Berlin added welfare measures of its own, including rent support for war families and a number of new soup kitchens. Because these measures were paid for through borrowing rather than tax increases, they constituted the first steps toward the horrible inflation that would plague the nation in the early Weimar years.

By the end of September there were no more demonstrations or raucous gatherings in the streets of Berlin. Now the largest crowds assembled outside the soup kitchens or in front of the War Academy, where lists of dead, wounded, and missing soldiers were posted. The first such lists went up in Berlin on August 9; new postings appeared approximately every three days for the rest of the war. The newspapers carried similar columns, bordered in black and bearing iron crosses next to the confirmed fatalities.

Käthe Kollwitz was among the Berliners who had reason to grieve in the early months of the war, for she learned on October 30, 1914, that her beloved son Peter had been killed on the Western Front. She admitted to a friend, “There is in our lives a wound which will never heal. Nor should it.” For the rest of the war, she kept Peter’s room exactly as he had left it. She also embarked on a work of art to commemorate him and the other young volunteers who had died at the front. But it took her until 1931 to complete a memorial with which she was satisfied. It consisted of granite statues of her husband Karl and herself on their knees at their son’s grave in Belgium. In 1937 Kollwitz produced another memorial sculpture, a small pietà of a mother mourning her dead child. Sixty years later a larger copy of this work would become part of post-reunification Germany’s tortuous effort to memorialize the victims of war and tyranny during a bloody century.

In Germany as elsewhere a high percentage of the early war casualties were middle-class. This was because young bourgeois men were the most active volunteers and as junior officers were most likely to lead charges “over the top.” The Kaiser Wile Gymnasium, Berlin’s most prestigious high school, lost over a dozen of its recent graduates in the first weeks of war.