Borsig was still deeply committed to the ideas of 1848 and saw his factory as a step in the advancement of civilization. He dreamt of the day when capital, the workers, and the natural sciences would ‘all be as one under the guiding hand of great industrial enterprise’. His famous villa, with its gardens, birds and tropical plants, was built near the factory to ‘bring beauty and harmony’ into the emerging industrial society. His ideology came through in all he did, and never more clearly than in the festivals held to mark factory anniversaries. The first great jubilee was held on 20 September 1846 to mark the completion of the 100th locomotive. The flower-bedecked engine was described as the darling of Berlin; little children looked at it in awe, beautiful ladies in enormous hats gossiped about it, and even the king and queen were shown admiring it. Such spectacles were repeated often, but the most extravagant was held on 21 August 1858 after the completion of the 1,000th engine.
The festival was a tribute to August Borsig and the events were clearly meant to emphasize the importance of his historical and cultural mission as well as to commemorate the ‘peaceful revolution’ which the factories had brought to Prussia.49 The local Moabit newspaper announced that the Borsigs planned to celebrate ‘in the grand style of a Renaissance prince’, and that is very much what they did; all Moabit was invited to the villa and 30,000 people ate, drank and danced at the factory. In the evening Albert, August’s son, staged an extraordinary play in the Viktoria Theatre written by the editor of Kladderadatsch. With hindsight it is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to sit through this bombastic extravaganza, but the employees of the day loved it. It took the form of a quasi-Greek drama which recounted the adventures of the busybody, Hans Dampf, amongst the gods. The terrible rivalry which had raged between the deities since time immemorial was vividly described: Vulcan, Mercury, Minerva and Venus ran around the stage in their Olympian finery brandishing weapons and fighting amongst themselves. The young man approached them and declared that, as he could harness steam, he was more powerful than they; he represented ‘the highpoint of industrial civilization’ and heralded ‘the dawning of a new Golden Age’. Only the great new force, steam, could bring the warring gods and the opposing elements into a new and happy co-existence. At the end of his demonstration Venus turned to Vulcan crying, ‘Yes! Yes! Steam now rules the world/And you and I are his loyal servants!’
The play had a clear political agenda. Albert Borsig, like his father, wished to see the creation of a strong united Germany. In one of the final scenes Minerva, ‘the Goddess of machinery and the art of war’, appeared with all the elements needed for a ‘strong Germany’: water, wind, coal, iron, fire, Father Rhine, the four winds, along with gnomes, dwarves and a cyclops carrying various Borsig products from cables to cannon. ‘Great industry’, they sang in chorus, could ‘make Germany into one true nation using tools of both war and peace’. At the end an image of the 1,000th locomotive, Borussia, was brought in. ‘This great Borussia’ possessed ‘revolutionary properties’, it ‘welded Germany together’ and brought ‘work, a sense of purpose, and happiness to the German nation’ by ‘giving people a future and distributing material and spiritual wealth’. Borsig’s trains were driving Germany towards unification.50
Some did not see these developments in such rosy terms: one contemporary wrote of the ‘debasement of man’ brought by Borsig’s new heavy industry while another called his factory a ‘terrible torture chamber … filthy, noisy and inhuman’. Some saw steam as the ‘Demon Dampf’, a great enemy which was ruining the traditional way of life and which should be stopped at all costs. But these voices were few and far between and for many liberal Berliners industry was the way of the future. August Borsig’s factory became the largest in the district of Moabit – ‘la terre Moab’, as he called it – and he turned the area around the Chausseestrasse and the Oranienburg Gate into the first great modern industrial centre of Berlin.
Borsig’s success was shared by others: in 1800 there had been 130 small firms in the area; by 1849 there were 2,000. Egells iron was joined by Schwartz-kopff torpedoes, Pflug founded his train carriage factory in 1838, Wöhlert his machine works in 1843 and his iron foundry in 1844. The new industries needed workers and the district grew twenty-five times in less than fifty years, with the population rising from 6,534 residents in 1858 to 159,791 by 1900. Locals were fascinated by the new industrial landscape, which they called ‘The Fireland’, and ‘Herculean Berlin’; a essayist wrote that Chausseestrasse was a ‘wonder of the world with ’every chimney spewing out great showers of sparks and thick billows of smoke, as if it were the fire city of Vulcan’.
A list of firms founded in Berlin during this period reads like a contemporary Who’s Who of German industry. Schering, Borsig, AEG, Siemens, Osram, AGFA, and dozens of others took advantage of the boom and expanded to proportions hitherto unknown in Germany. The Schering concern started in 1852 as a local pharmacy called the ‘Green Apothecary’, but soon began to produce the new wonder drugs chloroform and cocaine. Schering later made a fortune by pioneering the use of synthetic drugs to avoid importing raw materials.51 Berlin also became a huge centre for another kind of drug – alcohol – and the brewing and distilling industries flourished. The Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation or AGFA started with aniline production but soon became a German leader in photographic materials, optical instruments and precision tools. Following AGFA’s lead the city became a centre for precision instruments such as microscopes, nautical equipment and medical supplies. Loewe turned his small machine tool factory into an enormous concern for arms and ammunition which competed with Krupps in the Ruhr region.
At the same time Berlin became the capital of the German clothing industry. The Konfektion or ‘putting together’ had been started in the eighteenth century by Huguenots, who had produced uniforms for the Prussian army, but in the nineteenth century clothiers took modern technology from England and set up factories; entrepreneurs like Valentin Manheimer from Magdeburg and David Levin made the Hausvogteiplatz the centre of the ‘rag trade’. Berlin was heralded as the ‘German fashion capital’ although it was ridiculed throughout Europe for slavishly copying Parisian designs.
New industries produced a plethora of goods, from rubber bicycle tyres to decorative brassware. Berliners showed great inventiveness: one hit on the idea of using puréed peas instead of meat to make long-lasting ‘sausages’ for the Prussian army; another invented margarine, ‘workers’ butter’, from pressed palm oil; a third developed the insulated Thermos flask. The city grew at an amazing rate with hundreds of new firms being set up every year. Berliners became renowned for their technical prowess: one joke described two Bavarians sitting in a bar, one madly shaking and banging at a salt cellar. A Prussian sitting nearby brashly reached over and poked the holes of the container with a fork. ‘Damned Prussians,’ the Bavarian swore to his friend, ‘but you just can’t beat them!’ The two greatest firms founded by Berlin’s most famous entrepreneurs exhibited all the know-how of their Prussian contemporaries. Their names were Werner Siemens and Emil Rathenau.
Berliners became better informed through the inexorable growth in the newspaper industry. The titles which had been founded in the 1840s now reached mass circulation and Berlin was widely referred