Berlin

It has been argued that the repeated efforts by Berlin’s rulers to keep the city in check moved the locals to develop their peculiar brand of impudent and subversive wit, the famous Berliner Schnauze. No history of Berlin would be complete without reference to this humor, and I have recorded a few choice examples in my narrative. I have also tried, however, to be faithful to Berlin’s subversive spirit by engaging in some irreverence of my own with regard to various hoary pieties and comforting myths that have grown up around the city in recent years. A town that has often been critical of its own shortcomings can, one trusts, abide some constructive criticism from the outside.

Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral) and Lustgarten, 1900

1

BERLIN UNDER BISMARCK

The city wall of Berlin is falling victim to the metropolitan spirit.

  —Robert Springer,

 Berlin Wird Weltstadt (1868)

WHEN GERMANY BECAME UNIFIED in 1871 following the defeat of France by a Prussian-led coalition of German states, Berlin was transformed from a provincial royal seat into the capital of one of the most powerful nations in Europe. Like the new German nation itself, however, the capital at that point was a work in progress, a far cry from the vibrant cosmopolitan metropolis it would eventually become. As Lord Frederick Hamilton, a young diplomat in Britain’s Berlin Embassy, snootily observed: “The Berlin of the ‘seventies’ was still in a state of transition. The well-built, prim, dull, and somewhat provincial Residenz was endeavoring with feverish energy to transform itself into a world city, a Weltstadt.” Even some Berliners were doubtful that their rough-edged city had leaped into the ranks of the great European capitals. “Oh Berlin, how far you are from being a true capital,” opined the novelist Theodor Fontane. “You have become a capital overnight through political fortuitousness, not through your own devices.”

In the course of trying to reinvent itself for its new role, Berlin changed so rapidly that it became difficult to define the essence of the place. Within twenty years, old timers were complaining that they couldn’t recognize their town. Yet it was during the great flux following German unification that the leitmotivs that would dominate Berlin’s history for the next hundred and thirty years were firmly laid down. Berlin’s frantic attempt to catch up with its older and more polished European rivals; its provocation of resentment and envy on the part of Germans from other parts of the country, especially the south and west; its tension-filled relationship with the rulers who governed Prussia and the Reich; its complicated mixture of novelty-worship and nostalgia for a lost, quieter era—all these trends were evident in the nineteen-year period during which Count Otto von Bismarck ran the newly unified German Reich from Europe’s newest capital.

Berlin en Fête

Germany celebrated its emergence as a unified nation with the largest military parade ever seen in Berlin, a city which over the years had witnessed more than its share of martial displays. On June 16, 1871, a brilliantly clear Sunday, 40,000 soldiers paraded from the Tempelhof Field via the Halle and Brandenburg Gates to the Royal Palace on Unter den Linden. All wore iron crosses on their tunics and many had victory wreaths slung over their shoulders. A contingent of noncommissioned officers bore eighty-one captured French battle flags, some of them in tatters. “The troops looked superb,” enthused Baroness von Spitzemberg, the wife of Württemberg’s representative in Berlin, “so manly, suntanned, bearded, their traditional Prussian stiffness loosened by the atmosphere of the parade; they were a lovely sight for a patriotic heart.”

At the head of the long column rode eighty-seven-year-old Field Marshal Friedrich von Wrangel, a hero of past Prussian victories who had been resurrected from retirement to lead the parade. He was followed by General Albrecht von Roon and Helmuth von Moltke, the latter carrying the field marshal’s baton he had just been awarded for his recent victories over France. According to one witness, the grim-faced field marshal looked as though he were planning a new campaign rather than accepting tribute for a war just won. Next to Moltke rode the true genius behind the wars of German unification, Bismarck, who in reward for his services had been made a prince, a title he claimed to disdain. Behind Bismarck and the generals came Germany’s new kaiser, William I, his erect posture belying his seventy-four years. “The wonderful old man must have larger-than-life strength to endure the external rigors and inner turmoil so calmly,” exulted an awed observer.