Marx was captivated by the new ideas sweeping 1830s Berlin and wrote to his father that he was attaching himself ‘ever more closely to the current philosophy’. His father sneered that he had merely replaced ‘degeneration in a learned dressing-gown and uncombed hair with degeneration with a beer glass’, but Marx was serious and had already started to struggle with Hegel’s troubled legacy.13 Marx agreed with Hegel that society was moving towards a Utopia but for him human beings had to make their own history, albeit under conditions which they had not chosen. To do this they had to act politically. Marx turned Hegel on his head, transforming Hegel’s passive view into a call for action. The epitaph on his gravestone in Highgate cemetery reads: ‘Philosophers have only explained the world in different ways, what matters is that it should be changed.’
In Berlin Marx drank in the theories of the Young Hegelians: religion became the ‘opium of the masses’; political action was necessary to create the perfect society; and it was possible to achieve an ideal world if one followed rational scientific principles. Nevertheless at this point in his development the young student showed more interest in the coffee houses, the theatres and the salons of Berlin than in the working-class districts to the north and it was only later, in Paris, that he first noticed the ‘nobility’ in the ‘toil-worn bodies’ of the workers and discovered his own ‘agent of history’ – the proletariat. Only then would the Hegelian ideas absorbed in Berlin fit into a vast system which explained how society was dominated by a class struggle between capitalists and workers and how, when the workers were made aware of their class consciousness, they would inaugurate a revolution and bring about a Communist society in which there would be plenty for all, classes would disappear, ideology would vanish, the state would wither away, and all human beings would live together in peace and self-fulfilment. It was a seductive idea and, although Marx left Berlin in 1841 as a virtually unknown academic, all of ‘Red Berlin’ would have his name on their lips by the time of his death in 1883. The city was growing, the Industrial Revolution was bringing inexorable change, and the urban working class was becoming a force in its own right. The new industrial areas north of the Oranienburg Gate would soon be fertile ground for the revolutionary ideas spread by Marx and his disciples.
The radicals, the neo-Hegelians, and indeed Marx himself came to maturity during a particularly grim phase in nineteenth-century industrialization. Berlin was no exception. Long hours, terrible working conditions, exploitation and brutality were the rule in the early factories and even before Marx’s arrival many were beginning to understand that however prosperous industrial Berlin appeared to be to the casual visitor it was a savage and terrible place for many of its inhabitants. Contemporary posters show the city haunted by a hideous black devil hovering above the buildings, waiting to devour those foolish enough to venture through the gates.14 Mothers in the villages of the Mark Brandenburg warned their children of the evil and depravity of the ‘Demon Berlin’, and conservatives grumbled about the hazards of having such a hotbed of radicalism in their midst. But the vast majority of the new working class who made up the overgrown industrial slums had not wanted to live in Berlin at all; they were immigrants who flooded into the city after their traditional way of life had collapsed in the east.
Berliners have created a great many myths about themselves, and one of the most enduring is the image of the ‘typical Berliner’. Every tour guide, local historian and Kneipe (bar) philosopher will expound at length about the collective wit, disrespect for authority, suspicion of leaders and tradition of tolerance which epitomizes a true Berliner. He will invariably point to medieval examples of Berliner Unwille or to Goethe’s musings about the audacious local temperament, or recall Queen Victoria’s daughter’s description of Berliners as ‘bristly, thorny … with their sharp tongues, their cutting sarcasms about everybody and everything’ as proof of this heritage. But like so many modern myths, it is largely a nineteenth-century creation. It is true that Berlin has always been a magnet for immigrants, and everyone from the Wends and the French Huguenots to the Jewish merchants and Dutch and Bohemian craftsmen left their mark on the city, but nothing could compare with the wave of people which swept into Berlin from Saxony and the east Elbian lands throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1900 more than 60 per cent of Berliners were either immigrants or the children of immigrants and this percentage skyrocketed in the years between 1900 and 1914, when the population doubled again.15 Visitors commented that Berlin looked more like a New York or a Chicago than any equivalent European city, and it developed a culture to match. A quick look through a modern telephone directory still reveals a plethora of common Bohemian, Moravian and Polish names, but these destitute strangers were brought together not by a common language or religion, but by poverty and fear, by the factory floor and the rental barrack. It was from these reluctant migrants, and not their earlier counterparts, that the caricature of the coarse, tough, witty, irreverent Berliner was born.
The reasons for the mass migration to the city were complex but ultimately lay in the fact that the land in the east could not sustain a large rural population. If one journeys overland from Berlin through the Mark Brandenburg into Poland and what were then the provinces of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and West and East Prussia one passes a seemingly endless patchwork of sandy fields broken by a few straggly pine forests and small villages. It was here that the Junkers, descendants of the settlers who had accompanied the old Teutonic conquerors to the area, lived on their estates, and fiercely defended their feudal privileges. Some were as poor as the French hobereaux who had to stay in bed while their only pair of trousers was being mended, but the larger landowners had become wealthier throughout the nineteenth century as rational methods of production, Liebig’s mineral fertilizers, and modern equipment triumphed over the sandy soil.16 They would suffer later when cheap imports of Russian and American grain undercut their products, but they prospered for much of the nineteenth century and were particularly important to the recovery of Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars. The ‘agrarian revolution’ which took place after the victory was bolstered by the reforms introduced between 1807 and 1821, but although they improved production and strengthened the Junkers’ power they had unforeseen consequences. Serfs were able to ‘buy’ their freedom from the lord by returning half the land they had once worked, but they were then left with tiny plots of poor soil from which it was impossible to make a living. Few could afford to buy seeds, farming equipment or supplies, and as the lord’s woodlands, grazing areas and common fields were now out of bounds few could survive for long. A desperately poor rural substratum emerged, with ex-serfs drifting around the countryside collecting wood, poaching, begging or stealing.17 The new, large-scale agriculture was achieved at the expense of peasant ownership, and between 1811 and 1890 the number of large estates increased by two-thirds in the east Elbian region. For their part the estate owners became increasingly powerful and continued to exert an extraordinary influence on the Prussian (and later the German) government. At the same time improved efficiency saw a vast increase in the population – Prussia’s grew by 26 per cent between 1840 and 1860 alone – but as fewer people were needed to work the land unemployment rose. Many were drawn to the new industrial cities.18 By the end of the century thousands of immigrants had moved in from West and East Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania and Mecklenburg.
To make matters worse, the crisis in agricultural labour coincided with the introduction of free trade in the North German Confederation and with the corresponding breakdown of the medieval guild system. Before 1810 only a privileged few had been entitled to become master-craftsmen, but the free trade laws did away with the strict code which required all silversmiths, jewellers, furniture makers, stone masons and a host of others to join one of the exclusive guilds. In 1820 there had been thirty masters and journeymen per 1,000 Prussians, but this had already doubled by 1850. Independent artisans were forced to work from home or to hire themselves out for menial repair work on battered furniture or church