Berlin

Wartime Berlin’s free-for-all atmosphere often appalled front soldiers who visited the city on furlough or to convalesce from wounds. In addition to price-gouging and black marketeering, the sight of apparently carefree young people strolling the streets at night disgusted the troopers. Their complaints reached the kaiser, who telegraphed from his headquarters on July 16, 1916: “I am indignant that the youth of my Residence is displaying so little sense of decorum in this serious time, when we at the front are showing our metal to the enemy. The young people had better understand that we will not tolerate such behavior. Berlin must manifest in its outward demeanor that it is morally up these difficult times.”

Another indignant observer of the wartime Berlin scene was Private First Class Adolf Hitler, who spent a weekend in the capital in October 1916 while recovering from a leg wound at a nearby hospital. This was his first visit to the city, and he found the place a depressing hive of slackers and peace agitators. In the fall of 1917 he returned to the capital on an eighteen-day leave and this time gained a more favorable impression, since he was able to visit the great museums. “The city is tremendous,” he wrote in a postcard. “Truly a Weltstadt.” In a letter of 1920, Hitler opined that the “mistakes and dark sides” of Berlin were not fundamental to it but stemmed from a local culture dominated by Jews. Although as “Führer” he would dedicate himself to “saving” the German capital from this influence, he never fully lost his sense that Berlin was alien to the true German spirit.

Immer feste druff! (Keep Hittin’ ‘Em)

The First World War was a war of ideas and images as well as of bullets and bombs. The longer it went on, the more necessary it seemed to enlist the muses in the maintenance of morale at home and on the battlefield. As Germany’s cultural capital, Berlin took the lead in mobilizing the nation’s artistic, intellectual, and scientific resources for the war effort. Much of what the city produced during this period was virulently chauvinistic and xenophobic, as it was in the other wartime capitals. But the war also brought about some pathbreaking (if not always salutary) departures in art and science, in which Berlin likewise played the leading role.

Berlin fired its first barrage in the cultural war as German troops streamed across Belgium. Professor Adolf von Harnack, head of the Royal Library and a leader of the capital’s huge academic community, insisted that Germany had been forced to go to war because its culture, the true bulwark of Western Civilization, was in danger of being blotted out by barbarians from the East backed by unscrupulous predators from the West. Referring to Russia, he spoke of

the civilization of the tribe, with its patriarchal organization, the civilization of the horde that is gathered and kept together by despots [which] could not endure the light of the eighteenth century, still less that of the nineteenth century, and now in the twentieth century breaks loose and threatens us. This Asiatic mass, like the desert with its sands, wants to gather up our fields of grain.

A little later Harnack joined ninety-two other prominent German cultural figures, many from Berlin, in signing a manifesto designed to repudiate Allied charges of German atrocities. The so-called “Manifesto of the Ninety-three” encapsulated Germany’s, and Berlin’s, long-standing indignation over Western European caricatures of the Reich as a semicivilized pariah nation. Germany, said the manifesto, was the true home of European Christian culture. In claiming to be the defenders of Western Civilization, the signers hoped to win some understanding and respect from their counterparts in London and Paris. Instead, as any neutral observer could have predicted, their document had the opposite effect, strengthening the distrust that they had set out to break down.