Despite such innovations the industrial workers, both men and women, endured filthy manual labour, low wages, minimal security, overcrowded housing, miserable food and dangerous, cramped and disease-ridden working conditions. As early as 1828 General von Horn had complained that the children from the industrial districts were so ‘stunted in physical and mental development’ that they would be unable to fill the ranks of the army, concerns which led to the first piece of protective labour legislation, which stated that children should work no more than ten hours a day. But abuses still took place, and many a child spent his early life with no education and no freedom, surrounded by the filth and noise of machinery.57 The adult working day increased from twelve or fourteen hours a day in the 1840s to as much as seventeen hours a day in the 1870s and if the breadwinner became ill the dependants could quickly plunge below subsistence level.58 The clothing industry was particularly repugnant. Women were forced to work in sweat shops for starvation wages in utterly degrading conditions; one presser, Ottilie Baader, described her life as endless grey drudgery in which years passed without her noticing that she had ‘once been young’.59 Cheap labour kept German textiles competitive and there were nearly 500 wholesale garment dealers in Berlin in 1895 which exported goods all over the world, but the price was high. The women sewing and pressing in the Berlin sweat shops lived to an average age of twenty-six.60
Industrial workers made up between 55 and 60 per cent of Berlin’s population by 1900, as compared with 43 per cent in London or 38 per cent in Paris.61 And yet, few affluent Berliners knew or cared what was happening at the edge of their city. The closest most came to the slums was a glimpse from the new Ringbahn, where for a few pennies the well-to-do could look down on the dangerous but mysterious districts without having to go out on to the streets.62 The Bärenführer or ‘bear guide’ for Berlin recommended trips above the ‘other’ Berlin on the Nordringbahn so that the adventurous visitor could catch a glimpse of the ‘pulse’ of the ‘north’, which stretched out behind the Weidendamm Bridge where the Menschenmasse – the masses – lived. One could explore the ‘dark areas’, and as long as one was ‘tactful’ even a stranger could ‘study and experience the night life without undue fear’. Nevertheless the guide advised that it ‘would be better to leave the ladies in the hotel’, and carry valid papers ‘in case of a police Razzia’ (raid).63 For most middle-class Berliners the poor were a nuisance; as Franz Held put it:
Sick beggars with hunger in their eyes
Stretch out an arm for a penny piece
The satisfied public push past:
‘And the police tolerate this!’64
As Georg Hermann put it, the different areas of Berlin were ‘worlds apart’.
But a few were looking at the vast brick barracks and the teeming mass of people below and seeing the force of the future. After a visit to the slums Engels wrote that the city, ‘the breeding places of disease … the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night’, would not disappear until the conditions which produced it disappeared also. ‘As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist’, he continued, ‘it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question, or any other social question affecting the fate of the workers.’ The Communists believed that this teeming mass would soon realize its tremendous power, and would act.
Before the Wall collapsed central East Berlin was a dreary shrine to a falsified version of the history of the working-class movement in Germany. On May Day plastic cutouts of proletarian leaders were paraded down Unter den Linden in front of a forcibly gathered crowd to illustrate their place in the rise of the working class. Marx and Engels, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and finally Erich Honecker himself were put high on the list of Communist heroes, and Berlin was duly portrayed as the focal point of the smooth transition from one leader to another; from effete Social Democrats to vigorous Communists; from corrupt capitalism to the workers’ state, from one stage of history to the next. Erich Honecker’s reedy voice would float down to the bored Young Pioneers who were forced to stand around holding flowers and placards and singing the Internationale, which by the 1980s had lost any of its original meaning.
The actual history of the working-class movement in Germany was much more complex and less harmonious than the glib version peddled by Honecker and his government. East Germans could have been arrested for saying so, but it was by no means inevitable that Marx and Engels were destined to become the spiritual leaders of the Berlin working-class movement. Berlin was best known first as a liberal city; the Social Democratic Party had adopted Marxism almost by accident. Marx had been largely ignored in Berlin until after his death; his Communist Manifesto only became popular after it was re-imported by his followers, and even Das Kapital was better known abroad than at home. The political development of workers began not with the proletariat or factory workers, who were excluded from political life, nor did it start with radical intellectuals such as the Young Hegelians. The earliest champions of the workers were not Marxists at all, but well-to-do liberals who lived in the elegant centre of town, the very people who had first helped and encouraged Marx and whom he later grew to despise.
The liberals were naive, but well meaning. Bettina, the wife of the Romantic poet Achim von Arnim and author of Goethe’s Exchange of Letters with a Child, was so shocked by the hopeless misery of the workers during the cholera epidemic of 1831 that she wrote This Book Belongs to the King, one of the first works of social criticism written about Berlin.65 But the work was ignored by Frederick William, and it was not until the 1850s that charitable associations began to care for the destitute; a handful of fortunate Berliners received alms from the city but the 3 thalers and 2 silvergroschen per month was barely enough for food. Private citizens sometimes organized charity kitchens: Lina Morgenstern’s People’s Kitchen served out 2.2 million portions in 1871 alone and there were dozens like her, while liberal Bildungsvereine or cultural associations were set up to foster the ‘improvement of the moral and economic condition of the working class’.66 The irony of these groups was that the object of their concern, the ‘uncouth workers’, were themselves kept at arm’s length by high fees and membership requirements.67
The problem of the liberal approach to workers was characterized by the kind-hearted and well-meaning Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch. He was not interested in philosophy or in revolution – on the contrary he believed in providing practical help to the workers of the city. He sought a free market economy, freedom of movement and freedom of occupation, and the destruction of old guild restrictions. Politically he supported the view