the most passionate and moving were by Käthe Kollwitz. Her shocking portrayals of starvation, disease and filth, of death in the slums, of human tragedy behind the brick walls of the rental barracks were wrenching and terrible. The Kaiser refused to allow the Association of Berlin Artists to grant her their gold medal: ‘Please, gentlemen, a medal for a woman,’ he exclaimed, ‘that would really be going too far.’ It hadn’t helped that she had incited ‘revolutionary tendencies’ by producing engravings for Gerhart Hauptmann’s banned play, The Weavers.98
Although these artists would reach dizzying heights of fame during the Weimar Republic they were lonely pioneers in imperial Berlin. The official critic Broder Christiansen once sneered that the Naturalists were interested only in ‘the crass, the shrill, the caustic, the repulsive and the common … the miserable people of Berlin in Heinrich Zille’s paintings do not want to move,’ he said, ‘they are not there as a social indictment, but rather as a means of producing intense nervous stimulation. Their putrescence gives a stimulant to art, and in Zille’s paintings the latrine is seldom missing.’ Herwath Walden published a marvellous article simply listing the words used by Berlin critics against the new artists, expressions which might well have appeared in Hitler’s Degenerative Art catalogue, including ‘sensation seekers’, ‘motley coloured louts’, ‘Niggers in frock coats’, ‘Hottentots in dress shirts’, ‘rabid simpletons’, ‘shitty and laughable clods’, ‘bluffers’, and ‘a horde of colour spraying howling apes’.99
In those days of pettiness, repression, misunderstanding and hatred it was difficult for the industrial poor to see that the glittering Wilhelmine system was drifting towards collapse, and that it would be struck a mortal blow in the mindless butchery of the First World War. But between 1871 and 1914 the squalid life in the factories and the rental barracks carried on as before, and the artists who tried to address these issues were kept well away from the official culture, and the ever increasing wealth and prosperity of the swaggering imperial city.
Fame surrounds her, blazing, glorious,
shines to dazzle all men’s eyes:
and her chosen name, Victorious,
Goddess of Man’s enterprise.
(Faust, Part II, Act 1)
IMPERIAL BENIN, THE BRASH, parvenu capital of the German Reich, exploded on to the world stage in 1871. In its brief forty-seven years the imperial city would change from a small provincial town into a garish giant, and for most Berliners its sheer size and wealth was enough to prove that their city had finally arrived. Berlin was no longer a mere Residenz; it was the Reich capital, complete with parliament and bureaucrats, banks and enterprises and burgeoning industries. The opportunities seemed limitless and the optimism was intoxicating as the city became the showcase of the new energetic German state. The capital might have been chauvinistic, militaristic and undemocratic but few well-to-do Berliners noticed, and for many the late nineteenth century would be remembered as Berlin’s golden age. As one of Gerhart Hauptmann’s characters put it: ‘Berlin is splendid! … Berlin is the most wonderful city in the world … Berlin is life.’1
On 16 June 1871 Berliners woke to find their city in festive mood. Acres of bunting and flags smothered the grey buildings up and down Unter den Linden, and the Brandenburg Gate was heavy with greenery. Academy artists from Gustav Richter to Carl Becker, Otto Heyden, Georg Bleibtreu and Adolph von Menzel had worked since May to decorate the route between the Halle Gate and the Lustgarten to be used by the Prussian troops for their triumphal march. Great painted awnings hung across the road for five whole streets, and the facade of the Academy itself was hung with portraits of the victorious commanders-in-chief of the army.2 By mid morning tens of thousands of people had flocked to the city centre, pushing for a vantage point and jostling the little groups of schoolchildren already rehearsing their poems and patriotic songs like Freiligrath’s Hurrah! Hurrah! Germania! along the well-marked parade route. The sense of expectation was palpable, for today marked Berlin’s coming of age; the Prussian town was to be officially recognized as an imperial city. Prussia had defeated France, Germany was unified, and Berliners were to rule over it all.
Suddenly a group of figures appeared in the distance, and the crowd began to cheer. The first in line was not Kaiser William I but their real hero of the day, Prince Otto von Bismarck. He was followed by Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke and General Albrecht von Roon, the representatives of Prussian military might. Only then did the old Kaiser come into view, progressing slowly down the road followed by his sons. Behind them were the non-commissioned officers holding aloft the eighty-one captured French flags and eagles, which were laid at the feet of the new monument to Frederick William III, the man who had been so humiliated by Napoleon Bonaparte half a century earlier. Then came 42,000 men in full battle dress, some crowned with laurel wreaths, looking for all the world as if they were at a procession in ancient Rome. The parade lasted a full five hours, and for Berlin it marked the dawning of a new age, a time of peace and prosperity, of flamboyance and energy, of greatness and power, industrial growth and modernity.
Berlin was in the process of re-inventing itself yet again, this time transforming itself into a powerful world capital. Even the liberal-minded Fontane, the greatest and most critical of Berlin’s nineteenth-century writers, was overwhelmed by a sense of pride and patriotism. The mood was lighthearted and later, as the Landwehr battalions returned home, the writer Sebastian Hensel watched as the men walked up Unter den Linden arm-in-arm with their wives and children.3
But such relaxed displays of civilian life would soon disappear under the worst aspects of Prussian military culture. The last Kaiser would give Prussian officers virtually unlimited powers to behave as they wished in ‘his’ city; indeed the Kaiser saw himself rather like a warrior chief who alone stood above the General Staff, the Ministry of War and the Military Cabinet. Wilhelm von Hanke, chief of the Military Cabinet between 1888 and 1901, maintained that the army ‘should remain a separate body, into which no critical eyes should be permitted to gaze’.4 The officers under their control would become ever more abusive, bolstering the foreign stereotype that the city was the very heart of narrow-minded Prusso-German nationalism. The writer Jankowski spoke for the world when he said that Berlin ‘fed itself by war and became fat through war’, and Churchill would later refer to this Prussia as the embodiment of German evil. The military success which made the 1871 triumph possible was brought about by one of Berlin’s most influential and controversial sons, the man who had led the parade, Otto von Bismarck.5
Shakespeare said of Julius Caesar,
he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
It was a fitting description of Bismarck. Germany might never have been unified and Berlin might never have become Germany’s capital without this crafty political genius at Prussia’s helm, guiding it to power through his own particular brand of Realpolitik. Bismarck was able to create and maintain a system riddled with contradictions and preserve a semi-feudal style of government within an otherwise modern state. When he left his careful system of checks and balances unravelled and paved the way for the rampant aggressive nationalism of William II. But Bismarck was not a warmonger, as is often thought, and he did not engage in conflict for its own sake. He was a masterful technician of power, and used it first to create a nation state and then to protect it. And at the heart of his system was the capital, Berlin.
Bismarck was born outside Berlin on his father’s estate in Schönhausen on 1 April 1815. He cultivated his Junker image and harboured a deep suspicion of Berlin, but it was his mother, the daughter of a well-known