1913
Page 8
In the future, this problem would become more acute. France would be required to rely more and more on its less physically robust conscripts, and those from its colonies. These were facts not lost on German military planners, or their acolytes. ‘A people who do not want to be soldiers and whose women refuse to have children, is a people benumbed in their vitality’, wrote one German a decade previously, ‘fated to be dominated by a younger and fresher race’.40 Weakened militarily, Bertillon asked, would France ultimately become like Poland, carved up by Europe’s other powers?
But this was not all. High levels of British emigration had historically strengthened the ties between the British motherland and its far-flung overseas possessions, particularly the settlement colonies of Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. Emigration from France to its empire, however, had traditionally been low, partly the consequence of slow population growth overall. This, Bertillon thought, tended to enfeeble the impulse of colonial expansion, and weaken the bonds of empire. Even in Algeria, the jewel of the French Empire, much of the non-Arab population was not of French origin. Within Europe, meanwhile, the decline in the number of French speakers compared to those who spoke German (now more than double), would mean that the language of Voltaire would lose its universality, and with it France would lose her cultural influence.
To read Bertillon’s analysis was to read about a France sleepwalking to her political, economic and cultural doom. How much would French achievements be worth without the men ready to fight for them? If the scales came to be weighed between France and Germany, as men such as Poincaré believed possible – perhaps likely – what would tip the balance France’s way? Faith, perhaps? National unity? The patriotism of the young?
In 1913 two Catholic intellectuals, Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, published Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (The Young of Today), writing under the pseudonym ‘Agathon’. They vigorously rejected the idea that demography was destiny. Instead, they described a generation of 1890, their generation, those born twenty years after French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. This generation, they claimed, was different from that of their parents, accused of pessimism and dilettantism. The younger generation, in contrast, was inspired by the ideal of action and sacrifice, by the culture of sport and by the adventure of travel, a rediscovery of Catholic faith in place of the libertinage of the precedent generation, that which had flourished around the turn of the century. Their intellectual heroes were Maurice Barrès and Henri Bergson – the philosopher of ‘l’élan vital’. Their exponents were Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy, the Catholic Dreyfusard and nationalist. Disciples of Jaurès, once numerous in the ‘cosmopolitan’ Sorbonne, were now outnumbered by nationalists.
This generation, Massis and de Tarde explained, would rather undertake a colonial campaign than sit comfortably at home. They provided the examples of Klipfell, a recent graduate of the École normale supérieure, who joined the army so as to serve in Morocco, and that of Ernest Pischari, the grandson of Ernest Renan, the great theorist of French nationalism, who wished to serve in the African bush. ‘For such young men’, Massis and de Tarde wrote, ‘exalted by their patriotic faith and by the cult of war-like virtues, all they need is the opportunity in order to become heroes’.41 This, they argued, would be the generation to save France.
BERLIN
Powerhouse
‘Paris has had its day’, wrote Theodore Dreiser, approaching the end of his European tour, ‘and will no doubt have others’. ‘London is happy with an endless conservative day’, he continued.1 But Berlin’s brightest days lay before it. ‘The blood is there, and the hope, and the moody, lustful Wagnerian temperament’, wrote Dreiser, suitably enough in the year of Wagner’s centenary.
Visitors to Berlin, over a million of them in 1913, found a city full of nervous, unchannelled energy; a city that wrapped itself in the mantle of the German Reich but which was, inside, still the provincial capital of Prussia; a city which was reckoned the most modern in Europe, an industrial powerhouse and a capital of science; a city on parade. Their reactions were mixed. Some saw a metropolis more suggestive of the future than any other, more urban and more modern, the very expression of the global economic force which the German Empire had become. But other visitors found a parvenu, blaring its new-found prosperity but with no finer sensibilities, an ugly and uncouth city. Many found both.
Russians, who made up over a third of tourists to the city, might breathe a little more freely here than they could at home, and perhaps see in Berlin an intimation of what a rapidly industrialising, semi-democratic state could achieve.2 Austrians, the second most frequent visitors, looked nervously at Berlin as a rival capital of the German-speaking world. Americans, the third most numerous group, tended to find the city modern at least, reminding them of home. But they would not stay long. ‘They’ll only stay three days here’, noted the owner of the Hotel Adlon melancholically, ‘then they will scatter to the spa towns … it’s Paris which will get the bulk of their money’.3
Theodore Dreiser’s first glimpses of the city were from a horse-drawn carriage, jogging from the glass and iron splendour of the Friedrichstrasse railway station down the tree-lined Unter den Linden, Berlin’s ostentatious answer to the Champs-Elysées, with the Brandenburg Gate ahead:
Everything, literally everything, was American new – and newer – German new! And the cabbies were the largest, fattest, most broad-backed, most thick-through and Deutschiest looking creatures I have ever beheld.
Charles Huard, a French artist, sketched the same view on a sheaf of paper, later incorporating it into a caustic book on Berlin which played to the popular French stereotypes of the Germans: haughty, disdainful, unattractive. Unter den Linden, he had been assured by an acquaintance from Berlin, was finer than the Corso in Rome, more aristocratic than the boulevards of Paris or Piccadilly in London. Instead, he found ‘a wide avenue, certainly, but planted with common trees, unwelcome chestnuts and shrivelled linden trees; unsightly carriages drawn by emaciated horses … My disillusion was complete’.4 On the terrace in front of the Kranzler patisserie Huard noted ‘a fat man trying greedily to lick his spoon’ and, on the pavement, ‘a succession of heavy, thick, robust people, with arrogant and forbidding faces’.
Arriving from the east, Sergey Prokofiev marvelled at the number of railway stations in the city, unsure of which one he should alight at: ‘Berlin something-or-other, that must be ours, no, must be further on, then Berlin-something-else, no, this still isn’t it; finally, Berlin Friedrichstrasse, and we had to scramble out quickly as the train waited there only for two minutes before continuing to yet another Berlin-something’.5 Prokofiev and his mother lunched on lobster and champagne at the Kempsinsky hotel to recover. The city, he found, was ‘Germanically impressive’, with broad, straight avenues through the Tiergarten, the central city park and former hunting grounds of the Hohenzollern kings. No beautiful women though, he noted, or at least none as attractive as Umnenkaya, the Russian girl from St Petersburg who occupied his thoughts.
Berlin für Kenner, a guidebook from 1912, advised the new arrival to the city, fresh off the train from Paris or St Petersburg or Vienna, to head straight into the crowds.6 Starting conveniently from Friedrichstrasse – the station where Dreiser, as well as Prokofiev and Prokofiev’s mother had disembarked – the guidebook suggested walking first south down Leipziger Strasse towards what was one of the city’s premier sights: the Wertheim department store, one of the city’s largest alongside A. Jandorf & Co., Tietz, and, newest of all, the Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) in the city’s west. ‘Naturally one goes inside’, the guidebook explained, ‘and then is immediately cast helplessly into the delirium of Berlin life’. Wertheim was indeed a city within a city, offering shopping, but also a library, art gallery, roof garden, photography studio, ticket agency and several restaurants. Such stores were a crucible of the Berliner identity, some observers noted, because these were places where aristocrats and the middle classes mixed,
where the city’s population was united in a new culture of conspicuous consumption.7 More prudish Germans, scandalised that a department store should feature alongside Berlin’s museums and art galleries amongst the city’s highlights, saw department stores rather as proof of Berlin’s worsening dissipation, an assault on traditional middle-class virtues of thrift and self-development through education, and perhaps a softening of that famously upright Prussian spine.
Continuing down Leipziger Strasse from Wertheim one arrived at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin’s Trafalgar Square and Place de l’Étoile rolled into one. Here, above all, one could sense the vibrancy of the city: ‘the picture of unbelievable movement of people, lights and cars that presents itself to the eyes – THAT is Berlin!’ This was the square that suggested itself to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and to Ludwig Meidner, painters of the city, as an expression of the modern metropolis. ‘A street’, Meidner wrote the following year in his instructions on how the modern city should be painted, ‘is composed not of tonal values, but is a bombardment of whizzing rows of windows, of rushing beams of light between vehicles of many kinds, of a thousand leaping spheres, tatters of people, advertisements, and droning, formless masses of colour’.8
This, then, was Berlin: colourful, large, impressive in a showy kind of way, above all, modern. Berlin was a city of vending machines and newspaper kiosks, telephones and trams. In 1895 the city had eight times as many telephones per head of population as London; by 1911, even after the prodigious growth of telephony all across the world, it still had twice as many as the capital of the British Empire.9 Berlin’s electric tram network was equal in length to the distance between Berlin, in the north-east of the German Empire, to Frankfurt-am-Main, in the south-west. Its most recent subway station – Alexanderplatz – had opened in 1913. At the very end of that year, the world’s most famous physicist, Albert Einstein, prepared to take up his new post at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften (the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science). After all, Berlin was a city of science – and it was not unfriendly to the Jews. The World Zionist Organisation had its headquarters here.
Less visible to the casual visitor to Berlin was what Walter Rathenau, the German Jewish son of the founder of the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), called the ‘Fabrikstadt’, the factory-city of Berlin, lining the city’s eastern canals and the ring railway, forming a huge arc around the centre from north-west to south-east, from the Siemens plant at Charlottenburg past AEG’s various factories. For it was here in Berlin that the German electrical engineering industry – makers of world-famous turbines and generators, telegraphs and telephones – had made its home, close to some of Europe’s finest technical universities, and to many of the industry’s major clients: the German military, the railways and the post office.10 While Paris might retain the crown of the cité lumière, Berlin gloried in the title of ‘Elektropolis’, city of electricity.
American Walt Kuhn, visiting Berlin to acquire European art works to show at an exhibition at the Armory in New York certainly found the city an energising jolt, if not perhaps the pleasantest of places. ‘Town and people not “Gemütlich”’, he wrote home to his wife.11 He compared the traffic to New York: ‘the police make a bluff of it, but you’ve got to jump or get bumped’.
The origins of Berlin as a garrison town, and Prussia as a militarised society, still persisted in a certain air of officiousness in the city, attempting to tame Berlin’s restlessness and contain it within the straitjacket of Prussian order. The Belgian ambassador remembered that, whereas one could lie down on the grass in the Bois de Boulogne or in a London park, one was met in the Tiergarten with the sign ‘Verboten’ – ‘forbidden’ – stuck in the perfectly tended lawn.12 Dreiser described the everyday presence of high officialdom:
The German policeman with his shining brass helmet and brass belt; the Berlin sentry in his long military gray overcoat, his musket over his shoulder, his high cap shading his eyes, his black-and-white striped sentry box behind him, stationed apparently at every really important corner and before every official palace; the German military and imperial automobiles speeding their independent ways, all traffic cleared before them, the small flag of officialdom or imperialism fluttering defiantly from the foot-rails as they flash at express speed past you.13
The spiky-helmeted officer was such an instantly recognisable symbol of Prussia that it was chosen as the cover of an English guidebook to Berlin, understood in a single glance across a crowded London bookshop.14
In Berlin, the suggestions of Prussia’s military origins and traditions were never far away, in the monuments to past military victories, in the endless parades, in the military brass bands in the city’s parks, or in the presence of soldiers in fantastic uniforms, the Kaiser chief amongst them, on Berlin’s grand central avenues and in its smart cafés. In 1906 traditional Prussian deference to the outward signs of military office had turned to farce when a humble cobbler Wilhelm Voigt, dressed in the second-hand uniform of an army officer, picked up some real German soldiers in the street, ordered them to follow him to Köpenick town hall, where he proceeded to claim 4,000 marks from the borough’s mayor – with nothing more than his self-assurance and his soldiers as his warrant – and then made off with the money, changing later into civilian clothes. So confident was he of the effect of his military uniform that he had commandeered a train on the way. Voigt was picked up, and eventually pardoned by the Kaiser in 1908. After all, Wilhelm felt, had not Voigt’s escapade shown that the spirit of hierarchy and authority was alive and well in Berlin? By 1913 the ‘Captain of Köpenick’ was part of Berlin lore.
There were more subtle signs of society’s latent militarisation, too. The city’s apartment buildings, occupying large blocks of land, were referred to as Mietskasernen, literally ‘rented barracks’, a reference to the size of the apartments they contained as well as to their anonymous, uniform and quasi-military character. In Grunewald, the forested areas to the city’s west, one might easily come across groups of young men on a Wandervogel of an early morning, part of a scouting society under the patronage of Germany’s militaristic Crown Prince Wilhelm, the same man who published his paean of praise to the manly virtues of war in 1913. Even in the public gymnastics practised by the beach at Wannsee there was a fondness for the display of military precision and bodily preparation. No surprise then that the president of the German Imperial Board for the Olympic Games, charged with improving the country’s Olympic performance for the 1916 Berlin games – to be held in the new stadium inaugurated with great fanfare in June 1913 – was a military man, General Victor von Podbielski.15
The organisational virtues of the Prussian state were in evidence in Berlin’s streets, kept spotless by an army of cleaning trucks (though this made it dangerous for cyclists). The city had made great strides since the 1870s in the matter of public sanitation. By 1913 one English guidebook could comment: ‘Berlin drinking water is excellent, so clear and so refreshing it is a wonder the working-classes do not prefer it to beer, but unfortunately they do not’.16 Whereas Hamburg had experienced a cholera outbreak as recently as 1892, Berlin’s city authorities kept the city safe through the regular application of disinfectant.17
Whatever the role of officialdom in making Berlin function efficiently as a city, and whatever its military undertones, there was ample room for private distraction and frivolity too. Society could not be managed entirely from above, as some conservatives would have liked. There was the Luna Park at Halensee and the flirtatious atmosphere of the five o’clock tea dances in any one of the city’s leading hotels. Like the rest of Europe, Berlin was in the midst of a craze for the tango in 1913, though the Kaiser forbade military officers in uniform from dancing it. There was perhaps even a hint of counter-culture in the city’s vegetarian restaurants (which numbered 152 in 1902) and nudist societies – not to mention in its nightlife.18
For it was at night the city’s gloves came off, exchanging its
daylight officiousness for its night-time licentiousness. ‘The nightlife of Berlin’, remarked Berlin für Kenner in the exaggerated tones of a promoter, ‘cannot be compared to that of any other city, not even Paris, and it marks out Berlin as a Weltstadt’.19 In the centre of town, around Friedrichstrasse and from Unter den Linden until Mohrenstrasse, the guide promised visitors plenty of Nachtlokalen, the late closing bars frequented by smartly-dressed Berliners. ‘Why don’t you follow them in?’ it suggested, ‘one doesn’t need to drink champagne in the Moulin Rouge or the Palais de Danse, one can be quite happy with Mosel or Bordeaux’. (Dreiser’s experience was different: he found he could buy only champagne at the Palais de Danse at the cost of twenty marks a pop, about a third the cost of a good new suit.20) These places, not far from the city’s new hotels, the grand Adlon (located at number one, Unter den Linden) or the only slightly less grand Esplanade, were relatively tame. Here, noted the guide helpfully, ‘one can take one’s wife without fear’. Later, one could continue the evening at the Lindencasino or at Toni Grünefeld’s bar, open till four in the morning at least.
An alternative expedition, or ‘Bummeltour’ as the guide called it, would take the (male) visitor to the northern part of Berlin, more industrial, more grimy, more risqué. For this, it ‘would be better to leave the wife at the hotel’. Here the night could stretch until after dawn. At six in the morning one could continue drinking toasts to Berlin the glorious, Berlin the superlative, Berlin the drunk, at Café Stern or at the bars of the Elsässer Strasse, just opening, the Erlanger Krug, Café Goethe or Walhalla. Now would be the final hour for the city’s prostitutes, estimated at 20,000 plus perhaps an additional 2,000 male prostitutes.21 (Though homosexuality was illegal in Germany, Berlin was the homosexual capital of Europe – and therefore the world.) In some of these early morning bars it might be wise to hide one’s identity papers in case the police decided to conduct a razzia, a raid. But then, ‘Auch das ist Berliner leben!’ – ‘THAT too is Berlin life!’ – proclaimed the guide triumphantly, as if a trip to Berlin were not complete without a run in with the forces of law and order. So much for unquestioning deference to authority.