Bismarck was not accustomed to losing a battle, and if the troublesome workers could not be intimidated, perhaps they could be bought. His change of heart was inspired by a number of factors, including a new-found faith in the Prussian tradition of state paternalism embodied by Frederick the Great, who had at one time referred to himself as the ‘King of the Beggars’, and by Napoleon III, whom he believed had at one time ‘secured the loyalty and allegiance of the peasantry by means of his social legislation’. Above all Bismarck was influenced by his friend Disraeli, whom he had met during the Berlin Congress of 1878. In his novel Sybil Disraeli had described the two groups ‘between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy … The Rich and the Poor’, and he, like Bismarck, had been shocked to think that there were people in Berlin or London who were living ‘lower than the Portuguese or the Poles, the serfs of Russia or the Lazzaroni of Naples’. Bismarck was so taken by the British Prime Minister that he put his portrait beside the only others on his desk – ‘My monarch, my wife, and my friend’ – and when his policy of repression failed it was Disraeli who inspired him to push through his social reforms.
The first state insurance measure was announced by the Kaiser in 1881. Health insurance was introduced in 1883 and over 14 million were covered by 1913; accident insurance was introduced in 1884, accompanied by the most sophisticated and thorough code of factory legislation in Europe. At the same time a number of projects were completed in Berlin: hospitals were set up in the densely populated areas of Friedrichshain, Wedding and Kreuzberg, a new sewer system was built, a central slaughter house and market were completed in 1881 and hundreds of schools were put up. But although the changes were far-reaching it was too little, and far too late. The workers were happy to take advantage of the new measures but they were certainly not going to forget the recent repression, or the dreams of fundamental political change which had been nurtured by it.
It says something of the immense ignorance of Berlin’s ruling class that they vehemently opposed Bismarck’s modest proposals. The nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke proclaimed that the workers were ‘poor and should remain so’; the highest values of culture and politics were never intended for the masses because ‘the millions must plough and hammer and plane in order that the several thousand may carry on scientific research, paint and govern’. For him ‘the masses must for ever remain the masses’, and the ‘poor man should know that his lament: why am I not rich? is no more reasonable even by a hair’s breadth than the lament, why am I not the German crown-prince?’79 There were thousands like him in imperial Berlin, and they made compromise with the moderate left virtually impossible.
Faced with this intransigence the Social Democrats became ever more radical. Their growing hatred of the government, their unorthodox views on the family, their attacks against religion, their internationalism and their ever more vehement opposition to German patriotism brought them into further disrepute with the respectable elements of society. It did not help that venerable leaders like Bebel declared that he wanted to ‘remain the deadly enemy of this bourgeois society and this political order in order to undermine it in its conditions of existence and, if I can, to eliminate it entirely’.80 Each side began to fear and loathe the other, a division which was summed up by the chief of police in 1889:
The antagonism between the classes has sharpened and a gulf separates the workers from the rest of society. The expectation of victory among the socialists has grown. The German socialist party holds first rank in Europe because of its superior organization. It has outstanding leaders, especially Bebel and Liebknecht, and it is united. Clandestine papers continue to appear in spite of all confiscatory measures. The trade-union movement increases steadily, and the party can look forward to considerable gains in the next elections to the Reichstag.81
But the ‘heroic years’ also allowed the Social Democratic Party to develop a private world which was so self-sufficient that it began to lose touch with the normal aims and function of the state – an isolation which prevented them from making the politically crucial transition from a labour movement to a broad-based democratic party. Had the political elite been aware of and receptive to the problems of the workers they might have acted on their behalf; had they later offered the SPD full participation in the government the pseudo-Marxism of the party programme might soon have been dispensed with and the radicals might well have been integrated into society. But the nation lacked an effective parliamentary system and the workers were made to feel that they had no place in the new Germany. Those who had tried to work within the framework of the state had found that their state rejected and despised them. Even the American ambassador James Gerard was moved to say that the Berlin workers ‘probably work longer and get less out of life than any working men in the world’. But the arrogant William II continued the backward-looking policies of his predecessors, proclaiming whenever he got the chance that he regarded ‘every Social Democrat as an enemy of the Empire and Fatherland … such a gang of traitors are a breed of men who do not deserve the name of Germans … and their party must be rooted out to the very last stump’.
In the end neither Bismarck nor the Kaiser nor anyone else could have stifled the rise of the working class or the increasing power of the left for long. By 1890 ‘Red Berlin’ was already a fact of life. The SPD was Germany’s largest party, netting over 1.5 million votes. Its nerve centre was the most powerful working-class city on the continent, and its importance began to affect all other aspects of life in the city.
For decades Berlin had remained a cultural backwater, falling well behind other German court cities – let alone the centres of Paris or London. When Balzac visited Berlin in 1843 he was disgusted by its provincialism: ‘Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert,’ he wrote, ‘and you have an idea of Berlin. It will one day be the capital of Germany, but it will always remain the capital of boredom.’ Things became worse under William II, who actively tried to stop artistic impulses from decadent centres like Paris from reaching his city. But despite his control of bodies such as the Academy of Fine Arts even he could not completely stifle influences from abroad. Brave Berlin authors like Julius Meier-Graefe, patrons like the ‘Red Count’ Harry Count Kessler, museum directors like Hugo von Tschudi, art dealers like Paul Cassirer and the editors of journals such as Pan or Kunst und Kunstler defied him and promoted contemporary artists from Manet and Degas to Strindberg and Ibsen. This in turn encouraged a new generation of artists in Berlin, artists who rejected the stale official art of the court and who wanted to address the issues of their day. As the playwright Samuel Lublinski put it: ‘The future is the truth. Our puffing locomotives, our restless hammering machines, our technical prowess and our science – it is there we find the truth, the only subject that should concern a modern poet.’82