Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

when the thousands who could not pay the high rents were forced on to the street. Eyewitnesses described families sitting dejectedly amongst their possessions or pushing them along in small hand or dog carts; streets in Luisenstadt, at the Halle Gate or by the Lustizer Platz were piled so high with furniture and belongings that it was impossible for pedestrians to get by. During the particularly bad Easter move of 1872 there were so many people on the street that the city officials were forced to build a temporary shelter in Moabit; between 1900 and 1905 the shelter on Fröbelstrasse took in 2,000 people every night. But for most the only option was to move under a bridge or into a deserted building site, a stable, an empty train carriage or a warehouse. A group of families at the Stralau Gate hauled an old river barge on to land and lived under it, a novelty which soon became a local landmark.

      The authorities had little sympathy for the destitute families and were often remarkably brutal when breaking up their settlements. After the Easter move of 1871 dozens of people had settled around the Blumenstrasse and the Kottbus Gate, and as the fire brigade had not managed to shift them by July the police were sent in to move them on. In one street battle alone 159 people lay bleeding on the roads, having been cut down by sabres.⁴¹ The following year during another insurrection the police ripped down the white flag with the red Brandenburg eagle which a carpenter had nailed to a flagpole as a rallying mark. The carpenter took out his red handkerchief, and nailed it in its place. It became the first red flag raised in Berlin since 1848. The public prosecutor was so disturbed by this that he forced the socialists, who had not been directly involved in the fighting, to pay the revenue lost to the landlords.⁴²

      The police tended to overreact to anything reminiscent of 1848, when Berliners had torn up paving stones to slow down cavalry and infantry, carried projectiles to upper floors and thrown them at passing troops, and tried to strangle soldiers who entered their homes. But for the new working class these street battles became part of the local culture which bound the poor together against the Berlin police, and which marked the beginning of a radical split between the Berlin ‘underclass’ and the city authorities. As Ringelnatz put it: ‘Die Dichter und die Maler, Und auch die Kriminaler, Die kennen ihr Berlin’ (the poets and the painters, and also the criminals, they all know their Berlin).⁴³

      In his efforts to create the perfectly planned city James Hobrecht had unwittingly created a maze of slums, back corridors, hidden rooms and hiding places which made the new districts difficult to control. As the population soared the crime rate rose with it and a huge underclass of thieves, criminals, prostitutes, blackmailers and confidence men began to flourish in the dark areas stretching out behind Alexanderplatz to the north, the north-east, and on the outskirts of southern Berlin. Homelessness and begging were made illegal in 1843, and the Poor Law or ‘Eberfeld System’ forced people who were caught committing petty crimes to work on civic projects, but these measures had little effect on illegal activity. The slums of Berlin began to resemble Chicago in the 1920s or even Moscow in the 1990s, with extortion, black marketeering and dubious business deals becoming the norm. The city began to acquire the reputation as a ‘fount of perversion, criminality and evil’. Döblin called Berlin a ‘peculiar debauched city of sin, joined by trains, swarming with agitated worker-animals … whose lungs filled with the poisonous vapours from the factories emit the death rattle … It was rotten here from the beginning.’⁴⁴

      The Berlin authorities were slow to tackle the root cause of the problem, which was poverty and overcrowding, but they remained obsessed with political control and with reversing the decline of moral standards in the city. The Lex Heinze of 1900 was one attempt to improve morality in Berlin. It listed items to be banned, including ‘obscene literature, pictures or representations’ and ‘objects suited for obscene use’ which they found offensive.⁴⁵ Berlin’s chief of police, Horst Windheim, set up the much-derided Sittenpolizei or ‘Morality Police’ unit, which took to following suspicious characters on the streets or swooping down on rubber-goods suppliers, barber shops and pharmacies to confiscate any obscene photographs or objects which could be used for contraception or other ‘degenerate purposes’.⁴⁶

      One of their most obvious targets was rampant female, male and child prostitution which was fast becoming a feature of the industrial city. Unlike Hamburg, Paris and Vienna, brothels had been outlawed in Berlin by the mid nineteenth century so that contact between prostitute and client was made in cafés, pubs, dance halls and along the main shopping streets. A woman could register with the police and if she promised to keep away from cultural and government centres, train stations, museums, palaces and army barracks and any other ‘sensitive areas’ she might be permitted to work without being arrested, but of an estimated 50,000 prostitutes only 4,000 signed up.⁴⁷ In his book on prostitution, in which he reports that, as one woman told him, ‘only the stupid ones register!’ Abraham Flexner described the unique style of Berlin prostitution: the slow glance, the deliberate walk, the striking clothing, the longing stare into a café window. He described ridiculous scenes where innocent bourgeois women were hauled off to the station by the police for apparently looking at someone in an ‘alluring manner’, although according to Hans Ostwald it was easy to make mistakes:

      In the streets between the Zoo Railway and Wittenbergplatz and along the Kurfürstendamm there is a crowd of strollers at all times of day in which women predominate … here one doesn’t know; perhaps she is the daughter or wife of the man who walks beside her – for here the glittering colour of the demimonde is also the style of dress. And that plain woman over there is perhaps soliciting.⁴⁸

      As the inevitable consequence of rampant prostitution there was a spate of unwanted pregnancies. The numbers of illegitimate children rose in the mid nineteenth century. In 1750 around 4 per cent of births in Berlin were illegitimate; by 1816–20 the number had climbed to 18.3 per cent. It dropped to 14.5 per cent by 1866–70 but this was still extremely high compared to the Prussian average of 7 per cent.⁴⁹ Added to this was a so-called ‘abortion epidemic’ in the late nineteenth century.⁵⁰ Max Hirsch, the famous Berlin gynaecologist and proponent of the holistic study of women’s health, tried to reduce the pressure on women who had abortions by arguing that modern life, and in particular factory employment, with its foul air, dim lighting and loud noise, noxious fumes and glass or metal particles in the air, contributed to the high incidence of miscarriage. He also pointed out that given hard physical labour, poor living conditions and a high incidence of smallpox, influenza, cholera, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, syphilis – all hazards of the Berlin slums – women stood a high risk of not being able to carry to full term.⁵¹ But the police argued that the incidence of abortion was too high to be accounted for by Hirsch’s findings, and new health insurance records showed that 10 per cent of female recipients suffered from the side effects of illegally induced abortions. Some women broke limbs throwing themselves from trams while others had to be treated for shock or hypothermia after being fished out of the Landwehr Canal, but the vast majority were found out because they had to be treated for the after effects of quack remedies peddled by the charlatans and frauds who fed on the desperation of others. One of many dangerous common remedies for those who could not afford a good surgeon was to eat hundreds of phosphorous match heads, a practice which only stopped when the substance was banned in 1907.⁵² To add to this, many women died because of air bubbles in syringes, unsterilized instruments or internal injuries inflicted during backroom abortions; the mortality rate after complications was over 25 per cent and the Prussian Statistical Office estimated that over 2 per cent of Berlinerins died this way.⁵³ Women of all different ages and classes had abortions, but those most often caught were the factory workers, prostitutes, seamstresses and servants, for whom there was no protection even if they had been made pregnant by an employer and could not afford ‘reliable’ care. The crisis eventually became a political issue; in July 1871 even the conservative Kreuzzeitung expressed concern about the increasing number of ‘unknown graves’ being found throughout the city.

      The terrible conditions for many women from factory workers to domestic servants fuelled the fledgling women’s movement in Berlin. The concept of female emancipation first reached Berlin from France, where well-to-do women like Aurore Dupin, better known as George Sand, had called for women’s rights as early as 1830. The climate in Berlin was hostile. When in 1835 the Berliner Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow published his novel