progress … the result of the reunion of the German races in one common Fatherland’. But his insecurity and defensiveness shone through in his words: ‘The more we are able to wrest for ourselves a prominent position in all parts of the world the more should our nation in every class and industry remember that the working of Divine Providence is here manifested. If our Lord God had not entrusted to us great tasks He would not have conferred upon us great capacities.’ With this in mind William set about making Berlin the symbolic focus of the nation. A romantic version of Berlin’s importance in history was reinforced through everything from museums of local history to the creation of gigantic war memorials, Winged Victory statues and images of Berlin’s goddess Berolina, all smothered in ancient symbols such as eagles, oak leaves and laurel wreaths.73 Museums, schools, public buildings and patriotic paintings were commissioned to enhance this national iconography.
The sense of rivalry with Vienna and Paris never waned in Berlin.74 Bismarck had been particularly keen to emulate Napoleonic Paris – itself modelled on imperial Rome – which he saw as the ideal imperial capital. Bismarck was impressed by Napoleon’s monuments of war, and the column made of melted down cannon from Austerlitz in the Place Vendôme, which chronicled his exploits, found an echo in Berlin’s own victory column.75 The presence of Pope Pius VI at the ceremony at which Napoleon crowned himself emperor and the attempt to install the pope in Notre Dame found an echo in the desire to create a ‘Vatican of the North’ in Berlin. Bismarck admired Napoleon’s creation of wide streets like the Rue de Rivoli and was so impressed by the Champs-Élysées that he created the Kurfürstendamm in its image to connect the city centre with the elegant suburb of Grunewald.76 Napoleon had wanted to make Paris into the centre of European culture and had not only plundered the great art treasures of Europe for the Musée Napoléon but had also stolen entire archives from occupied countries in order to create a single great European reference archive; if Berlin could not achieve this it could at least build schools and museums and libraries. Paris was the unrivalled administrative and political centre of France and whereas Louis XIV had moved the French capital to Versailles Napoleon had moved it back, shunning, as Bismarck had done, the particularist interests of petty princes. Bismarck introduced many elements of imperial Paris to the new German capital. But if Paris was Bismarck’s ideal, the young William II looked increasingly to another rival – London.
The Kaiser became increasingly obsessed with the desire to outdo the new industrial and military giant of Europe, a country in which he had spent some of the happiest days of his youth.77 England had colonies, great wealth, grand buildings, a powerful navy, and much more besides, and William entertained the childlike belief that anything which England could do, Germany could do better. If London had grand hotels then Berlin needed them. If London had museums and department stores Berlin could have twice as many. The Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, founded in 1909, was to be an ‘Oxford in Dahlem’. The Lichterfelde Botanical Gardens, with its arboretum, pools and collections of native and foreign vegetation, was to rival Kew Gardens, as was the Great Tropical House, built in 1906, with its iron and glass cantilever construction. When William decided that Prussia needed a new Royal Library the architect Ernst von Ihne had one brief: it had to be bigger and better than the reading room of the British Library. Only the shell remained after the war, the huge battered clock frozen at 6.30 when it was bombed, but when standing it was the largest reading room in the world. It had cost Berliners 25 million marks. Having been built for show it was quite impractical; not only did the enormous dome magnify the slightest whisper but it was so difficult to heat that scholars had to dress in winter coats in order to work; the historian Droysen could always be seen with an enormous green and black blanket wrapped around his feet. But the Kaiser was delighted with the result.
The competition between London and Berlin went further. London had Houses of Parliament and a magnificent new Foreign Office so Berlin would have to have a Reichstag, something ‘huge, heavy and Imperial’. It was not that William wanted to do anything for politicians, whom he hated so much that after leaving a German Colonial exhibition he declared that he would like to have all parliamentarian heads shrunken and put on sticks like the ones he had just seen. He called the parliament buildings the Reichsaffenhaus or ‘empire ape house’, and he even objected to the ‘revolutionary’ slogan ‘To the German People’ which was to be emblazoned across the front.78 This was only added in the dark days of 1916. Nevertheless 183 architects competed for the Reichstag contract and in 1882 it was awarded to the heavy-handed Paul Wallot. The mock Renaissance building with its arches and its oversized dome would later play a key role in Berlin history, burning as the Nazis seized power, acting as a backdrop to the vicious hand-to-hand combat between Germans and Russians in May 1945, standing beside the Wall as an important symbol of West Berlin, and finally crowned the centre of the reunified capital by a glass dome designed by the English architect Sir Norman Foster. But when it was new it was simply another hollow showpiece for the upstart imperial city.
The gesture to political life was also to be extended to the religious life of the nation. Berlin had its hotels and political and industrial palaces and now William wanted a grand cathedral for his capital city. He was not modest; this was to be nothing less than the focal point of the ‘greatest Protestant dynasty in Europe’. Above all, the church was to encourage unquestioning loyalty to the Hohenzollern dynasty.
By the time William II came to power the Protestant Church had an established history of supporting secular authority, a tradition which had started with Martin Luther himself. Despite his sublime plea for intellectual liberty Luther had been politically conservative, teaching that an individual must pray to God but must obey his prince. The links between Church and ruler increased in Protestant areas well into the seventeenth century; in Berlin the Hohenzollerns appointed faithful Calvinist preachers as civil servants and educators, who consistently managed to combine their devotion to God with service to the state.79 In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars theologians, including the Berlin professor Schleiermacher, author of Über die Religion, pushed for the creation of a Church which would formally merge all Lutheran and Calvinist (Reformed) elements of Prussia and northern Germany and in 1817, on the tercentenary of the Reformation, Frederick William IV created a ‘national Church’. It would become a pillar of Prussian state power.
By the late nineteenth century conservatives were increasingly frightened by the spectre of revolution; as Ranke put it, ‘the whole order of things … is threatened by anarchic powers’. One way to counter the dangerous ideas disseminated by Social Democrats and revolutionaries was to ‘Christianize’ Prussia and to entice people back to a Church which conformed to state policy. In order to achieve this Bismarck actually began to interfere in Church appointments, barring Young Hegelians and others suspected of holding radical political views from the clergy. His political views also affected the state’s relationship with German Catholics. Bismarck was not anti-Catholic per se but wanted to curb the power of the Catholic Centre Party and admitted that religion was a convenient excuse by which to accomplish this: ‘it is not a matter of a struggle between faith and unbelief. What we have here is the age-old struggle for power, as old as the human race itself …’80
The struggle had started in 1864 when Pope Pius IX had published the encyclical Quanta Cura claiming Church supremacy over all civil authority. Bismarck had seen this as a challenge to his own political authority and had unleashed the Kulturkampf against them. Catholics were labelled a ‘fifth column’ who dared to put Rome above Berlin; as a result they suffered discrimination, priests were no longer permitted to work in the state service, the Prussian government imposed official requirements for the ordination of Catholic priests and Catholic schools were harassed.81 The Kulturkampf proved counterproductive, serving only to unite Catholics against Bismarck and eliciting much sympathy from non-Catholics throughout Germany. It was abandoned in 1875. Nevertheless the idea that no religion should act against the interest of the state but should rather inspire patriotism and loyalty persisted under William II.
The young Kaiser believed that he was God’s instrument on earth and that to criticize his policies was to go against God’s will. He expected complete loyalty from the Protestant Church but was in return willing to make Berlin the ‘Vatican of the North’. He believed it a ‘disgrace’ that London had St Paul’s, Paris Notre Dame and Rome the Vatican