The Industrial Revolution hit the traditional cottage industries just as hard. There were half a million small linen and wool looms and tens of thousands of spinners in Prussia alone in the early nineteenth century, but as the shining new factories began to spring up in Europe’s cities life for traditional workers became a struggle for survival. Hollow-eyed children were sent to work at the age of four; Huhn (chicken) on a menu could mean Hund (dog); and even the cannibalistic jokes running through Kayssler’s social commentary, akin to Swiftian satire about Irish children, were not considered far fetched by those who visited the region. Linguet’s observation that ‘you can be sure that [the city] where the most human beings are at the point of dying of hunger is the one where the most hands are employed in working the shuttle’ was an apt description for much of the east.20 It was clear that the cottage weavers were fighting a losing battle.
The spark which ignited the powder keg was started by famine. From 1843 Prussia experienced successive failures in both the grain and potato harvests, and food riots became increasingly common in Berlin after 1845. By this time around 70 per cent of a labourer’s income was spent on food – a dire situation when, according to the great liberal scientist Rudolf Virchow, workers’ real wages dropped by 45 per cent between 1844 and 1847.21 The latter was the year of the ‘Potato Revolution’, which saw violence on the streets of Berlin provoked by endless food shortages and an outbreak of typhus, a disease brought on by malnutrition.22 It was put down by the military. But the situation was worse in Silesia. There linen weavers could no longer compete with new mechanical production techniques employed in Britain and they were penniless and starving. Eighty thousand people contracted typhus and around 16,000 people died that winter. Thousands rose up in desperation against the local merchants and middlemen in a pitiful attempt to get food and to somehow reverse the course of the Industrial Revolution. The weavers blamed the wealthy middlemen, who were detested for flaunting their coaches and clothes and estates as the people went hungry. Three hundred weavers attacked their factories and homes in 1847, smashing property and burning the records of their debts. Not amused by the cartloads of ‘German Luddites’ bearing down on them with sticks and pitchforks, the merchants asked the Prussian military to intervene and the latter, nervous about the persistent whispers of revolution floating around Europe, crushed the revolt with brute force.23
In more settled times an incident like this would soon have been forgotten, but the story of the revolt became one of the first great rallying myths of the emerging working class; indeed it fuelled the Marxist belief that industrial capitalism must inevitably lead to the degradation and impoverishment – to the pauperization – of workers. Heinrich Heine wrote about it in his early poem of social protest The Silesian Weavers; it was taken up by Gerhart Hauptmann in his eerie, disturbing – and banned – play Die Weber (The Weavers) and by Käthe Kollwitz in her black lithographs of the same name; it cropped up in Franz Mehring’s essay Hauptmanns Weavers, in Friedrich Kayssler’s The Weavers’ Social Drama, and was later alluded to by many a left-wing Berlin writer of the nineteenth century. The frightened and starving cottage weavers would never know of their place in history, but they packed up their belongings and left for Berlin, adding to the mass of new arrivals there. Evidence of this exodus has long since disappeared under the weight of the more terrible things which have since happened in eastern Germany and Poland. Perhaps the closest equivalent one can find today are the chillingly quiet villages near Chernobyl in Ukraine which resemble the abandoned settlements that once littered the territory east of the Elbe. There the evidence of rapid departure is everywhere: small brightly painted wooden houses line the dusty roads, old bottles stand on kitchen window sills, benches where neighbours once chatted in the sun lie at the edges of overgrown gardens, and rusting wire still clings to empty chicken coops. In the 1980s the fear of radiation forced people to move; in the mid nineteenth century it was starvation, but the end result was the same: a destitute population compelled to emigrate in search of a better life.
In 1847 400,000 peasants, merchants and artisans left the eastern provinces; by 1870 it was over 800,000 per year and over 2 million Germans emigrated in the years between 1850 and 1870. Of the 133,700 who officially registered in Berlin in 1870 (many did not) over half were young men of working age. The city population surged to 1 million following demobilization after the war of 1871; twenty years later it doubled again, and it had reached 4 million by 1914. Most continued to come from the east; in 1911 alone 1,046,162 people came to Berlin from German lands along with 97,683 from Russia; this was in contrast to the mere 7,611 who came from western countries like Holland or 3,682 from Italy.24 Huge tent cities sprang up on the fringes of a Berlin bloated with desperate people hoping to get work – older men with families to feed and a few qualifications, or rural untrained youths with no idea about life in the city. Many had hoped to make enough money in Berlin to buy a passage to America but had been trapped by their poverty.
The mass migration caught officials by surprise, but the indifferent city councils pretended that nothing was happening and refused to make provision in the hope that the troublesome people at their gates would simply go away.25 In the end the Prussian government had to order the Berlin police to prepare plans for new housing developments, but it was not until 1858 that the young architect and civil engineer James Hobrecht was appointed to draw up plans for huge districts to house the newcomers. It took Hobrecht four years to produce the Generalbebauungsplan (general development plan), a quintessentially Prussian piece of work which was brilliant, meticulous, all-encompassing, and fundamentally flawed. The police president, who ran the city in much the same way as the préfet de la Seine ruled Paris, could have rejected the plans outright, but the combination of the relentless wave of people coupled with the demands of burgeoning industry for cheaply housed labourers encouraged him to make disastrous decisions which turned the ‘Athens on the Spree’ into the biggest working-class slum on the continent.26 As the peasants huddled in their tent cities, huge barracks were built within the city walls which would soon house them like virtual prisoners.
Nobody else in Europe noticed when Hobrecht was appointed in Berlin as all eyes were on Paris, and the architect Baron Haussmann. When Louis-Napoleon lived in exile in London between 1838 and 1840 he had been much impressed by the new developments around Regent Street which he passed when visiting his mistress in St John’s Wood.27 Back in Paris he appointed Haussmann to copy the London style and, guided by the motto ‘air, open prospects, perspective’, Haussmann created a city of such beauty and spaciousness that it has never been equalled.28 The Rue de Rivoli, the Champs-Élysées, the Place Vendôme, and the Place de la Concorde became the envy of Europe and were copied around the world just as Versailles had been before. The burgomaster Anspach attempted to Haussmannize the lower part of Brussels; in Mexico City in 1860 Emperor Maximilian opened the most bizarre imitation of the Champs-Élysées called the Paseo de la Reforme, which was designed to join the Aztec city to the palace of Chapultepec. Most Italian cities were given Haussmannesque main roads to connect the centres with the new railway stations, including the Via Nazionale in Rome and the Via Independenza in Bologna. The 1864 reconstruction of Florence was a slavish copy of Haussmann’s style; even the Vienna Ring was influenced by him.29
Not all of Haussmann’s contemporaries appreciated his work. Delvau spat that Paris ‘is no longer Athens but Babylon! No longer a city but a station!’ For him the city of Balzac had been destroyed; Paris was now little more than a ‘tasteless circus’. Sadly, Hobrecht was another of Haussmann’s critics, but for different reasons. For him Haussmann’s Paris was not well organized or efficient, and it could not possibly house enough people. There would be little room for glorious boulevards and spacious avenues in his grand plan.
For centuries architects from Alberti to Le Corbusier have tried to create ideal communities for human beings, and for just as long the disorderly and difficult creatures have refused to conform to their ideas. Frederick the Great was the first to make this mistake in Berlin when, as early as 1747, he passed a Housing Law which allowed property speculators to build ‘ideal three-storey apartments around Leipziger Platz. As Werner Hegemann fumed in his 1930 work Das steinerne Berlin (Berlin in Stone), these cramped buildings became the most despised houses in Berlin: ‘Frederick