“Metropolis Berlin evokes a kaleidoscopic panorama of impressions, opinions, and utopian hopes that constituted Berlin from the end of Imperial Germany to the rise of National Socialism. Iain Boyd Whyte and the late David Frisby invite the reader to be a flâneur in a truly great city, to marvel at the vitality of its urban spaces, and to listen to the cacophony of its voices and sounds. This extraordinary anthology of hundreds of documents tells the story of metropolitan Berlin by letting its inhabitants, visitors, and critics speak. A must have for every personal bookshelf and library.”―Volker M. Welter, Professor for Architectural History, University of California at Santa Barbara

"Metropolis Berlinis not merely a magnificent compendium of sources, but is also an exciting work of scholarship in its own right. It presents this global city, in all its architectural, urbanistic, and discursive richness and complexity, like no other volume before it."―Frederic J. Schwartz, author of Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany.

Iain Boyd Whyte is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh and author of Manmade Future (Routledge, 2007). David Frisby was Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and author of Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge, 2001).

Metropolis Berlin

1880–1940

By Iain Boyd Whyte, David Frisby

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27037-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, xiii,
Preface, xv,
General Introduction, 1,
PART ONE. BOOMING METROPOLIS,
1. The Metropolitan Panorama, 9,
2. Building and Regulating the Metropolis, 49,
3. Production, Commerce, and Consumption, 77,
4. Public transport and Infrastructure, 107,
5. The Proletarian City, 134,
6. Public Realm and Popular Culture, 172,
7. The Bourgeois City, 206,
8. The Green Outdoors, 245,
PART TWO. WORLD WAR I AND THE CITY,
9. City in Crisis, 273,
10. Critical Responses, 291,
PART THREE. WELTSTADT–WORLD CITY,
11. Planning the World City, 315,
12. Berlin montage, 367,
13. Work, 411,
14. Commodities and Display, 437,
15. Housing, 463,
16. Mass and Leisure, 508,
17. Technology and Mobility, 551,
18. From Berlin to Germania, 582,
Acknowledgments, 611,
Photo Credits, 619,
Index, 621,

CHAPTER 1

THE METROPOLITAN PANORAMA

In 1887, Jules Laforgue somewhat hesitantly announced the possible emergence of the flâneur in Berlin as a result of the expansion of the city and its growing beauty. Yet flânerie was perhaps already more common than he thought. The novelist Theodor Fontane declared in 1889: "I like to engage in flânerie in the streets of Berlin, mostly without a goal or purpose as is required for real flânerie [Flanieren]." On occasion, however, that strolling takes on more of a purpose, when he declares, "I am also gripped by a desire to study and permit myself to go and inspect all the possible old and new things that lie scattered around the city." And among these things are "panoramas and zoos, parks and statues, front gardens and fountains." On the flat Berlin landscape, few possibilities for natural panoramic views offered themselves. Visitors had to make do, for instance, with ascending the tower of the city hall. Nowadays, it is the cupola of the Reichstag that is the most popular, and in the recent past it was the television tower on the Alexanderplatz. In Fontane's day, and for some decades later, one of the best-known sites for viewing the city was to be found on the Friedrichstrasse. The Kaisergalerie, a substantial arcade opened in 1875, housed a panopticon that presented such novelties as the Prussian defeat of the French army at Metz during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 or the more exotic display around 1900 of "35 Togo negroes, 23 girls, 5 men and 2 children." And within the arcade's pan-opticon three large diorama images of Berlin in various periods were on display in 1888.

Representations and images of the city were to be found not merely in the enclosed panoramas but also in the proliferation of textual images in an expanding world of the press. The "word city" of the feuilletons in newspapers and journals opened up a multiplicity of readings of the city, from panoramic perspectives to more modest attempts to capture the exemplary fragments and sensations of urban life in Berlin. The topographies and the physiognomies of the diverse cultures in the city, and hence the varied readings of the city, were all present in a proliferating newspaper culture of the late nineteenth century onward. In particular, the feuilleton section of the newspapers carried explorations of the physiognomies of the city, whether located in the central city streets such as the Friedrichstrasse or Alexanderplatz or in the suburbs, both bourgeois and industrial. The city as spectacle was served by the advertising in its major newspapers, especially the most popular ones. Urban spectators were also drawn to Berlin's advertising pillars (Litfaßsäulen). As Peter Fritzsche explains, "Two meters taller than anyone in the crowd, topped with a green crown of wrought iron, plastered with the striking colors of art nouveau posters, Litfaßsäulen caught the glances of city people again and again." But much more than their role as advertising medium, the Litfaßsäulen permitted smaller, handwritten notices of everyday dramas to be appended to them, so that "tacked onto 'the last romantic herald,' the paper scraps about ordinary people ... brought human interest to the city street."

At the other end of the spectrum, in newspapers and journals, another reading of the city commenced not from its fragmentary elements but rather from attempts to conceive of the city as a whole, as a more or less coherent conception of the emergent world city. And here the urban reader was often confronted with comparisons with other major cities in order to draw out what was distinctive about the Berlin metropolis. Comparisons could be made in terms of urban growth and expansion, urban topography, built environment, aesthetic form, forms and speed of circulation, and so forth. But more often than not, such comparisons became transposed into urban imaginaries that drew out largely negative features of the new metropolis within which were embedded the dystopian dimensions of a threatening urban modernity.

By 1910 Berlin was easily the largest city in Germany, with a population in excess of 2 million. Surprisingly, the second-largest city, Hamburg, with almost a million inhabitants, was not often compared with Berlin, despite its own cultural development and the architectural innovations introduced by Fritz Schumacher. Within the German Empire there was, however, the third most populous city: Munich, capital of the "democratic south," alternative cultural and artistic capital, symbol of "the other Germany." Although in the process of transformation into a modern city, Munich was not yet a site of large-scale industry. Rather, around 90 percent of all commercial enterprise in 1907 comprised self-employed or small-scale (up to five employees) enterprises. The city was, however, an expanding major cultural and artistic center, which nurtured strong views on the parvenu capital in the north. In a not untypical view from Munich, penned by Marcel Montandon in 1903, for example, Berlin was described as a place where "everything is intensive life, unlimited ambition, energy, a desire to shift mountains, uncontrolled lust to conquest. In Berlin, modern life stands at its height, automatic, splendid, and flashing like a fully loaded cannon. In addition, it contains something fever like, capricious and American."

Yet other elements of a Berlin imaginary were present in the comparisons between Berlin and other metropolitan centers. Mark Twain, who stayed in Berlin in 1892, identified Berlin as "Chicago on the Spree." For Twain, Berlin was a new city even compared with Chicago, a city full of broad, straight streets set in the topography of a flat surface. Over a decade later, Werner Sombart drew a comparison with Vienna as a city of culture in contrast to Berlin as "a suburb of New York," itself "a huge cultural cemetery." Berlin, in this imaginary, manifests the quintessence of "Americanism"—a theme from the mid-nineteenth century onward. In contrast, Alfred Kerr draws a contrast of Berlin with London, then the largest world capital city. Unusually, it is not Berlin that is the dynamic city of rapid traffic movements but London, nor is it Berlin that is the large-scale site of dwelling and consumption.

The view of Berlin from the tower of the city hall reveals another Berlin, which is not that of the imaginary constructions of the city but that of an expanding industrial sector. The notion of the Berlin metropolis derives not from its built environment in the center of the city but rather, according to Walther Rathenau, from its being "the factory city that no one in the west knows and that is perhaps the greatest in the world." Far from the city hall, the workers' panoramic view of the city was gained when traveling to and from work in the ring railway that links the outer industrial and working-class districts. As one anonymous commentator declared, "Whoever wants to get to know Berlin as an industrial and a worker's city must get up early. As the last night owls are being driven home to the west, the new day begins in the northern, eastern, and southern districts of the city."

It was in these years at the turn of the century, it has been argued, that "in contrast to Paris, the capital of aesthetic modernity in the nineteenth century, [Berlin] was perceived as a center of a technological, civilizing modernity." This made it all the more difficult to make claims for the aesthetic attractions of the expanding new metropolis that got beyond the equation of an industrial and technological modernity with ugliness. A view of the city as a whole (its Gesamtbild) that sought a more differentiated and nuanced image was perhaps more difficult to find. Rathenau's critique of contemporary Berlin in his ironically entitled essay "The Most Beautiful City in the World" (1899) castigated the lack of any organic whole in the layout of streets and houses in the metropolis. It implied a yearning for the ordered urban ensemble offered by Haussmann and a monumentality of structures that anticipated some of the submissions for the Greater Berlin competition of 1910. In contrast, the architect and critic August Endell's poetic monograph on modern Berlin, The Beauty of the Great City (1908), extracts beauty from the technology of the modern metropolis, from the ugliness of the city. It is the observer, he argues, who creates the aesthetic surface of the city from the formless streets and the sociospatial patterns of interactions in the urban crowd.

The urban individual's strategies for survival in the accelerating and often bewildering dynamics of circulation in the modern metropolis were more fully explored in the sociologist Georg Simmel's celebrated essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life," published in 1903. Born on the intersection of two of Berlin's main streets, Friedrichstrasse and Leipziger Strasse, Simmel taught at Berlin University for most of his working life, and the city had a profound impact on his intellectual endeavors. As he noted himself: "Perhaps I could have achieved something that was also valuable in another city; but this specific achievement, which I have in fact brought to fruition in these decades, is undoubtedly bound up with the Berlin milieu." In his engagement with the modern city in general, and Berlin in particular, there is no apparent aesthetic strategy to confront the unmerciful objectivity of precision, exactitude, and calculability, but rather an indifference, an intellectual distance, and the cultivation of a blasé attitude that can confront the dramatic increase in "nervous life" in the modern metropolis. The complex web of metropolitan interactions that we experience as a chaos of crisscrossing and entangled connections in fact emerge out of the precision and calculating tactics employed in each individual interaction. The image of the whole metropolis emerges out of the complex, intersecting hierarchies of networks of interactions, transactions (crucially, monetary transactions), and communications that possess different rhythms and spatial parameters. In consequence, the total image of the city could often be accessed only through an exploration of the fragmentary experiences of urban life.

1

Jules Laforgue

BERLIN

The Court and the City

Published as "Berlin: La cour et la ville" (1887); reprinted in Laforgue, Œuvres complètes, vol. 6 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930), pp. 126-33. Translated by Jane Yeomans.

Even if he's from Berlin, the German is no flâneur. Yet as the capital grows in size and beauty, and more and more distractions appear in the streets, such a personage is emerging, more or less. There's no one German word, though, and the chronicler has to write: der flâneur von profession.

Berlin's heraldic arms consist of a bear posing elegantly on its hind legs.

Berlin now has forty thousand houses, and had only half that number twenty years ago. Berlin has an underground railway, a sky like a spider's web, crisscrossed with telephone wires, fairly widespread electric lighting, and, for the past year, covered food halls to replace the foul-smelling markets in the middle of public places.

There are never any traffic jams in Berlin; cars never lurch forward too quickly. The omnibus is confined to the suburbs and is used only by workmen. The trams are like toys—low roofs and no upper decks. The tramway is well thought of; uniformed army officers travel on it daily. The driver always stands; instead of our pedal horn, he has a hand bell, which he abuses horribly. The trams have no regular tariff: you buy a ticket for the distance to be traveled, and they are monitored by guards. Tram stages are marked with poles—no numbers.

The walls aren't blackened with obscenities; you don't see "long live this" or "long live that."

No one reads in the street; you never see people with leather briefcases.

No interesting street names: it's always Augustastrasse, Wilhelmstrasse, Friedrichstrasse, Karl- and Charlottenstrasse, Dorotheenstrasse, Moltke-, Bismarck-Goethe-, Schillerstrasse—no picturesque names at all, except Unter den Linden.

The cafés don't have pavement terraces.

Street discipline: an apprentice balancing a pyramid of hatboxes is stopped by a policeman and forced to leave the pavement.

You never see a pastry maker in the street. Never a shoeblack. No street traders, no one shouting their wares, no market dealers, no clothes merchants, no chair upholsterers, no coopers or glaziers, and so on. The one exception is the grinder, who sharpens knives or scissors on a stone wheel. This man is sinister, though: rather than calling for clients, he hits his hammer on the grindstone, which makes a very disagreeable sound. The Parisian, transfixed, recalls the faucet seller's whistle.

The postman in his military uniform, bag of letters fixed to his belt buckle and dangling in front.

The street postboxes are delightful: big, wrought-iron, blue-painted—a pleasure to the eye. I think it was for the sake of the postal service that Prussia committed her greatest follies. Minister Stephan wanted to do things with style, and now towns with a population of only twenty thousand possess veritable palaces.

Delivery men stationed here and there, with red varnished caps bearing a number and the word Express. For just a couple of coins, they are happy to take something to the other end of town for you. And with what rectitude! A rectitude one would scarcely have thought possible outside a small town.

The beatitude of the policemen, smug in their work. When it rains, it's quickly on with the rubber raincoat; in winter, a fur collar goes around the overcoat. The policeman's helmet has a spike cushioned with a little metal ball.

The flower sellers—always lilies of the valley—have to stay in the street, up close to the pavement. These are usually rough characters—women of dubious character and gray-haired old hags. I'm thinking of the corner of Unter den Linden Avenue and Friedrichstrasse.

All the dogs are muzzled. Apart from the huge ferocious hounds like Bismarck's, which wealthy students parade, you rarely see anything but sad creatures pulling carts.

Parsimonious city council: very little watering, hoses like ours unheard of. The main streets are unbearably dusty in August—you yearn for a drop of water. Then the snow falls and freezes, sledges replace the carriages and go flying by, the horses jangling their bells in the silent carved-out groove of the street; with a sledge you can travel through the woods with ease. Then the great thaw comes and feet are clad in shapeless rubber galoshes.

A strange, scarcely credible character—the chimney sweep. Dressed from head to toe in a black-stockinged garment, like a funereal clown, he shuffles along on clogs, grasping a couple of tools and wearing a top hat! One thinks of a ghost, or of something escaped from the circus. And with his blackened eyelids, you never really know if he's looking at you.

Berliners are not quite used to their chimney sweeps yet: they just about manage to give them a smile. But their respect for the fire brigade is constant. The alarm bell beats out the rhythm of a heavy gallop; then everyone makes way, and the first vehicle comes into sight: eight firemen in their helmets, side flaps down, sit face-to-face; the driver is flanked by two policemen, with two more firemen on the running board, one ringing a bell, the other gripping a flaming pitch-soaked torch and dropping bits of fire into the road behind them.

Berlin's lack of water gives a truly unpleasant impression. You never see any water—the town is utterly dry. Here and there, just a couple of pumps. And how ugly they are! A pump handle and its neck, protruding from a shapeless wooden assembly.

On the dot of eleven at night (Unter den Linden is long since deserted), the cleaning carts begin to sweep up the dust on Friedrichstrasse—at that time the only street alive in Berlin. I say "alive"; I should rather say "high-living." What a pathetic and grotesque scene life on this street presents! Five or six wretched children squat on a doorstep, clutching matches to their knees and moaning, "Matches, matches." Youths and scoundrels accost you with the same plea, crying, "Herr Baron, Herr Baron, Herr Professor." Even an adult, sagging on his crutches, tries to sell you matches. But most shocking of all at this hour is a male torso, fitted into a box on wheels, and propelling himself around with his hands: he has a full, fair beard and spectacles, and he, too, is selling matches. During the day this world is completely out of sight; it's allowed into this lively part of Berlin only after ten at night. Something else allowed here at night—and which should be permitted during the day—the itinerant orange merchants. Their carts are stationed here at this hour, trusty dogs asleep on their rags, one eye open.

(Continues...)Excerpted from Metropolis Berlin by Iain Boyd Whyte, David Frisby. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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