In Europe (8 page)

The remarkable thing was that these same contradictions were a part of Wilhelm himself. His manner was nostalgic, but at the same time his interests enthusiastically embraced all things new. When he heard about the incredible speed at which the American Barnum & Bailey's circus, which was touring Germany at the time, could load and unload its circus trains, he immediately sent a few officers to take a look. The Germany Army then actually adopted several of the circus’ techniques. Many such modernisations were spurred on by Wilhelm's enthusiasm. During his reign, Berlin, alongside New York, became the world's major centre for
the chemical industry and electrical engineering. The mega-concern Siemens, for example, owed its success primarily to the enormous sums spent by the German imperial army on the development of telegraph, telephone, radio and other modern communications systems. With more than half a million employees, the Prussian rail network was the largest and best-organised enterprise in Europe. Contemporaries described the hustle and bustle of the Potsdamer Platz as ‘deafening’: in 1896, the square was crossed each day by 6,000 freight cars, 1,500 private coaches, 7,000 hansom cabs, 2,000 omnibuses and 4,000 trams.

Under Wilhelm, therefore, Germany was more than a relic of a mystical, nonexistent past. It was, as the British urban historian Peter Hall correctly describes it, the world's first modern military-industrial state. It was a meeting place of extremes, a disconcerting clash between old dreams and the modern age.

Much of that Berlin has since been obliterated, but Wilhelm's cathedral, the Dom (1905), survives. Here the kaiser's voice can still be heard. In his younger years he believed that he was God's instrument on earth, and that any criticism of his policies was an act of blasphemy. Churches were named after the Hohenzollerns, and for good reason.

This Dom is a combination of St Peter's, St Paul's and Notre Dame. It is a brash attempt to catch up on the entire Renaissance and the eighteenth century in one fell swoop. All gold and marble, no expense or hardship was too great, yet the building still reminds one vaguely of a fake cathedral in the Arizona desert. Wilhelm had an enormous box built for himself, the size of a classroom, with a red marble staircase broad enough for a horse. To the left and right of the imperial box, apostles and Electors look down on us as one; in God's eyes, all men are equal, and the emperor is more equal than all.

As I pass by the imperial crypt, I notice that there is a celebration in progress: Elector Johan Cicero (1455–99) has been dead for precisely 500 years, and atop his spick-and-span sarcophagus – the crypt's
mise en scène
resembles nothing so much as a garage – is a fresh wreath with a lovely black ribbon. At the solemn consecration ceremony, Wilhelm promised the church leaders that he would make Berlin a second Vatican. So much has happened in this church since then – the benediction for the armies
of 1914, the weekly prayers for Hitler, Göring's wedding – that it is a miracle the building itself did not go completely – despite the heavy damage it incurred during the Second World War – by the sword.

Then, of course, there was that other Berlin, the Berlin of the gigantic housing projects, the massive blocks of flats built around one, two or sometimes even three courtyards, hundreds of dank little apartments, beehives that stank all day of nappies and sauerkraut. Like London and Paris, Berlin experienced a population explosion: from one million inhabitants in 1870 to almost four million in 1914. In the end, almost every square metre had been built upon. The regulations handed down by the city administration were limited almost entirely to the minimum size of the courtyards: 5.34 metres square, the minimum turning circle of a horse-drawn fire engine. The term ‘housing blocks’ says it all: red and ochre piles of shoeboxes that overran the city, inhabited not by individual families, but by ‘the masses’.

Hobrecht's vision of the integrated city had come to naught: the 1912 edition of the
Bärenführer
advised ‘adventuresome’ visitors to take a ride on the Ringbahn, to catch a glimpse of ‘that other Berlin’, where ‘hoi polloi’ lived. In my research, I came across a written complaint filed by residents of the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood concerning the lack of toilets. The reply from the Prussian civil servant stated that ‘an average bowel movement takes three to four minutes, including the time needed to arrange one's clothing’ and that ‘even if the bowel movement were to take ten minutes, the twelve hours in a day leave sufficient time for seventy-two persons to make use of the toilet.’

Berlin had a reputation as one of the cleanest, most efficient and best-maintained cities in Europe, but the city also had something chilly about it. The Polish writer Jósef Kraszewski saw streets full of soldiers walking along ‘like machines’, with measured tread, but what was more: ‘their demeanour was mimicked by the corner merchant, the coachman, the doorman, even the beggar.’ It was a city, he wrote, that was orderly, obedient and disciplined, ‘as in an ongoing state of siege’.

Today, in early 1999, all that has changed. West and East Berlin are now doing their cautious best to become reacquainted, like a couple following a long separation. In clothing and lifestyle the citizens of Berlin are heading inch by inch towards rapprochement, but chaos still reigns in
the shared household. Drivers from West Berlin keep colliding with the trams of the East, a phenomenon they forgot about long ago. The sewers of East Berlin regularly produce huge potholes in the streets; amid the victorious class struggle, the communist authorities of the last half-century forgot that the city's subterranean pipes and tunnels needed some occasional maintenance. Sometimes a water main will burst, and huge geysers will blow in the midst of traffic.

Just outside the door of the Dom stands a weathered chunk of concrete. Once it was a monument to commemorate anti-fascist resistance by the city's young communists: ‘United always in friendship with the Soviet Union.’ Now it has been put up on four wooden chocks, ready to be hoisted away. This, too, has passed.

Meanwhile, on the Kurfürstendamm, just around the corner from my lodgings, the matchbox game provides a glimmer of hope. Around noon each day the partners in the little gambling operation report for work. It is always a telling moment. The team consists of five men. There is one ‘pitcher’, a skinny man who skilfully conceals a little ball under one of three matchboxes, and four ‘players’. The men wear leather coats of clearly Eastern European origin; all but one, that is, a grey-haired fellow in a long camel-hair overcoat, clearly a man of substance. The pitcher rolls out his rug, squats down and starts performing his prestidigitation with the matchboxes. The players begin drawing in the guileless. One of them ‘wins’, ups the ante and does a stiff little dance of joy. The ‘man of substance’ nods approvingly, and places the occasional bet as well. The most fascinating element is the laughter: every three minutes, the black-leather group begins laughing wildly and pounding each other on the back in affected joy and comradeship. Berlin, as Oswald Spengler once wrote, is Europe's ‘whore of Babylon’. This is where it's all happening, the guileless think, this is the place for me to be.

The Berlin phone book is still rife with Polish, Czech and Russian names. Around 1900, more than sixty per cent of the city's population consisted of immigrants or the children of immigrants. To many visitors, Berlin seemed to have something American about it, something reminiscent of Chicago. The bare squares and noisy houses reminded the artist/author Karl Scheffler of ‘American or Australian towns that spring
up deep in the wilderness’. He gave his 1910 depiction of the city the significant title
Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal
, and felt that ‘no trace of the born gentleman is to be found in the modern citizen of Berlin’. The dense colonial hordes, he said, had ‘come pouring into the city from the Eastern plains, lured by the promise of Americanism’.

This is, of course, pure nonsense: it was not the promise of urban culture that attracted these penniless farmers; it was desperation, by and large, that drove them from their villages. But the sense of momentum and alienation did elicit a certain reaction within the city, a kind of pessimism of progress, a nostalgia for the traditional German community – whatever that may have been. Around 1910, large groups of young people marched out of town into the countryside each weekend under the rubric ‘
Los von Berlin
’. The leader of these
Wandervögel
had his followers greet him with a raised arm and a shout of ‘
Heil!
’ Käthe Kollwitz complained in her diary that her younger son, Peter, was such a great fan that he wore the regulation ‘natural’ clothing and imitated the movement's leaders right down to the smallest gesture.

Of what were the people of Berlin afraid? Not of war, in any case. War in their eyes was almost a ritual, a courageous and glorious thing. Were they afraid of socialism, and the rise of the lower class? A bit. Of losing their hard-won, middle-class prosperity? Probably. Of their own decline, of the new, of the unknown? Certainly. And what about the ‘Jewish syndicate’? Not everyone feared that, but some parts of the population assuredly did.

The roots of that anti-Semitism ran deep, even back into the Middle Ages. On 28 October, 1873, after a boom that lasted several years, the Berlin stock market collapsed. That crash was followed by a chain of bankruptcies – large factories, railway companies, brokerage firms – and within the space of a few days many citizens lost everything they possessed. The economy recovered quite quickly, but the psychological effect of the crash echoed on for a generation or more. In the first decade of the twentieth century, many of Berlin's fearful petits bourgeois felt envy and hatred when they saw wealthy Jews driving around the city. At the universities, a pseudo-scientific theory was developed to provide a basis for this mood of ‘conspiracy’, ‘decay’ and ‘betrayal’; it spoke of parasitic Jews and
Germanic ‘
Lichtmenschen
’, of the depraved city and the pure German soil. Bismarck's banker, Gerson von Bleichröder, the first Jew to be admitted to the German nobility, was barely tolerated by the better families; at a
Hofball
no one would dance with his wife, until an officer was explicitly ordered to do so.

At the same time, Berlin's artistic and cultural climate was being shaped more and more by liberal middle-class families with a broad education, a world in which Jews played a central role. The same went for the socialist movement. Furthermore, around 1910 – in Berlin, as well as in other major European cities such as Warsaw, Krakow and Vienna – one could barely speak any longer of ‘the’ Jews. The group had become too diverse for that. You had orthodox believers and communists, atheists and racists, Zionists of all shapes and sizes, liberals and social democrats. Most of them no longer understood Yiddish, the immigrants spoke dozens of languages and dialects, and the Jews of Berlin considered themselves Germans, that above all. The great majority had become completely secularised. Of all the famous German Jews of the day, not one still had ties with the Jewish faith.

The success of that Jewish community can still be seen in the partially restored synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, once the largest Jewish house of worship in Germany, with more than three thousand seats and an illuminated dome that was more than fifty metres high and stood out sharply against Berlin's skyline. It was a triumphal building: significant is the placement of the dome, which was built close to the street, not above the Torah as usual, to make the building stand out as much as possible. The photographs of the official opening show that everyone who was anyone in the Berlin of that day was in attendance.

Services and concerts went on in the grand synagogue without interruption, even after the Nazi takeover in 1933. The list still hangs there: on 9 February, 1935 the concert performance of
Joy in Winter
; on 11 November, 1935 a congregational meeting on the subject of emigration; on 20 November, 1935 a benefit concert for the Jewish Winter Aid programme, featuring Ferdinand Hiller's ‘The Destruction of Jerusalem’; on 15 February, 1936 a meeting ‘To Strengthen the Cohesion of the Congregation’; on 13 March, 1938 a memorial service for the victims of the Great War; on 24 April, 1938 a performance of Händel's oratorio
Saul
.
During the Kristallnacht in November 1938, the synagogue itself was saved by a brave policeman from the sixteenth precinct who, pistol in hand, chased the
Sturmabteilung
out of the already burning building. The final performance was held on 31 March, 1940: a closing concert for the Jewish Winter Aid programme.

I come across a photograph taken in 1933. The girls’ section of the Auerbachische Orphanage, a couple of little girls playing in a children's kitchen, proudly pushing their doll around in a pram, their eyes gleaming.

‘Peace, solidarity and cooperation are only conceivable among peoples and nations who know who they are,’ Václav Havel, then president of Czechoslovakia, wrote a lifetime later. And here he touched upon a deep human truth. ‘If I don't know who I am, who I want to be, what I want to achieve, where I begin and where I end, then my relations with the people around me and the world at large will inevitably be tense, suspicious and burdened by an inferiority complex that may go hidden behind puffed-up bravura.’

That applies to individuals, but also to the relations between nations, and it applies even more so to those situations in which the weaknesses of nations and of individuals more or less coincide.

On the south-eastern side of Berlin, behind the incineration plant and the cable factories, lies Köpenick. This suburb made world news in 1906 when the unemployed cobbler Wilhelm Voigt put on an old captain's uniform, ordered a group of soldiers to follow him, occupied the town hall ‘on His Majesty's orders’ and had them hand over the municipal cash box, containing 4,000 marks.

Later, I saw a photograph of this captain from Köpenick: an extraordinary hapless character with a cap three sizes too big for him. Köpenick tells the story of a society where the officer's cap was all-powerful, no matter who wore it. In ‘his’ city, the kaiser gave officers free rein. He insisted that his army remain free of all outside coercion. Wilhelm had increased the number of officers sevenfold, but the aristocracy remained in power. The military, in other words, did not become civilised: the civilians became militarised. The captain from Köpenick, it turned out later, had never served in the army, and had arranged the whole ruse more or less on instinct. Everyone fell for it. After centuries of humiliation, of
French and Austrian troops sacking and looting their way through a divided Germany, the military class had become Germany's most important mass symbol. The army represented the German nation,‘the marching forest’ as Elias Canetti called it, the ‘closed ranks’. All outsiders were no longer German.