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

openly shunned most of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century and rejected those Berliners who identified with them. Balzac, who had the added stigma of being Karl Marx’s favourite author, was viciously attacked, and works like La Comédie humaine were criticized for their ‘dangerous classifications’ of human society. But the critics could not stop his work, or that of the brothers Goncourt or Emile Zola in France, Tolstoy in Russia, or Ibsen in Norway, from reaching Berlin altogether. By the 1880s a number of young writers from Johannes Schlaf and Hermann Conradi to Karl Henckell and Gerhard Hauptmann had moved to the city, had formed literary clubs like Durch on the Spittelmarkt, and had started to write in the new style. The first ‘Berlin Naturalists’, the Hart brothers, produced their 1884 Kritische Waffengange after reading Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart. In the Kritischen Jahrbuch, written five years later, they wrote: ‘Until 1880 there was no youth, no literary youth. Now it is here, and with them as in nature, movement, foment, storm.’⁸³ Karl Bleibtreu followed with his Revolution der Literatur, followed by Arno Holz, who in Das Buch der Zeit was the first to write about the lives of the Berlin masses. The Webercolonie am Müggelsee (part of the small outlying district of Berlin beside the pretty lake Müggelsee) in Friedrichshagen became a meeting point of the new Friedrichshagener Kreis, where Heinrich and Julius Hart, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille met with and discussed the works of Gerhart Hauptmann, Frank Wedekind, August Strindberg and dozens of others. The Naturalists and their sympathizers came to shun classicism and instead looked, as Eugen Wolff put it, at ‘the alcoholism or the prostitution, beggars and suicides, degeneration and bestiality, marriage breakdown and child labour, illnesses of poverty and slavery to machines’.⁸⁴ Erwin Bauer claimed that the ‘Berlin Modern’ reflected the passions of the French Revolution – freedom, equality and brotherhood.⁸⁵ These ideas helped to create a new theatre which burst on the Berlin scene in 1887.

      When the electrifying Théâtre Libre visited Berlin that year a group of artists were so moved that they decided to defy the Kaiser’s censors and start their own company. In April 1889 the Hart brothers met with Maximilian Harden and the editor Theodor Wolff behind the steamy windows of the Kempinski on the Leipziger Strasse; after hours of discussion they held up their glasses and toasted the foundation of the Verein Freie Bühne. As it was to be an ‘association’ the police could have little control over its programme. The new director Otto Brahm said of the project, ‘we are creating a free stage for modern life. Art shall stand at the centre of our endeavours; the new art which shows reality and the future.’⁸⁶ It came as no surprise that the first posters at the Lessing Theatre were soon advertising the Berlin première of Ibsen’s Ghosts. This extraordinary play, which revolved around the taboo theme of inherited syphilis, shocked the prudish Berlin audience, but the theatre was allowed to remain open. The opening night of the second production, Gerhart Hauptmann’s succès de scandale, Sonnenaufgang (Sunrise), turned out to be one of the most memorable evenings in the history of the Berlin theatre.

      Even before the curtain went up the audience was restless, and by the time the play had started the jeering made it virtually impossible for the players to get through the first act. The tension continued to mount and finally, during the graphic birth scene, the theatre erupted into a fist-fighting free-for-all; people leapt over seats towards the stage trying to punch the actors, and an enraged doctor threw a pair of forceps at the main character. This time, the play was banned, and William II permanently cancelled his subscription to the ‘Kaiser’s Loge’ in the Deutsches Theater.⁸⁷

      Gerhart Hauptmann continued his battle against the Berlin censors, producing play after play criticizing the existing system and exposing the misery and desperation of the Berlin underclass. Hanneles Himmelfahrt is a grim story of the fragility of existence in the slums in which Hannele’s mother dies and she is viciously beaten by her alcoholic father. The girl is taken to a poor house, where she has a series of visions before dying of her injuries. Die Ratten (The Rats) showed the hopelessness of life in a Berlin rental barrack. A young couple, the Johns, are herded together with human beings who are so degraded that they have ‘become’ rats, picking over refuse, nibbling, sniffing and scraping at everything. They drive one man to murder and the heroine to suicide but in the end the loathsome creatures are seen as victims of a society which denies them any self-respect. Hauptmann’s most famous work, Die Weber, played with a similar theme of mass psychology, this time showing people mesmerized and controlled by the eerie monotonous sound of the spindles which dominate the stage. This fierce attack on existing social order was banned on the grounds that ‘it was an open appeal to rioting’, but the liberal press defended it; Fritz Stahl praised it in the Deutsche Warte as ‘the greatest work of German Naturalism to date’, while Julius Hart wrote that it was ‘certainly not the revolutionary speech of a party politician, but was simply the voice of humanity reflecting tremendous suffering, love and hate’. The theatre company was taken to court and won only because the court decided that the high ticket prices ‘precluded the attendance of an appreciable number of workers at the performances’. Even so, Hauptmann was rejected by polite society; Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst called his Hanneles Himmelfahrt ‘A monstrous wretched piece of work … social-democratic-realistic, at the same time full of sickly, sentimental mysticism, nerve-racking, in general abominable. Afterwards we went to Borchard’s, to get ourselves back into a human frame of mind with champagne and caviar.’⁸⁸ Hatred of Hauptmann extended to Berlin University; as late as November 1922 a party organized for his sixtieth birthday was boycotted by the Berlin Student Society because he was not considered to be ‘a German of strong character’.

      It was ironic that the Social Democrats did not come to the aid of these struggling artists, but they were already exhibiting the confusion and muddleheadedness which would plague them in later years. Unfortunately for them Marx had never clarified whether or not the dictatorship of the proletariat should produce a wholly new kind of art, or if bourgeois art could still be appreciated after the revolution. He gave no hint as to whether the proletariat should reject or affirm the culture of the past, nor whether critical art produced under the capitalist system was acceptable. Engels had attempted to deal with these questions after Marx’s death but had failed, and the local Berlin leaders like Bebel and Liebknecht considered the task of getting into power far more important than wasting time on painting and theatre. In the end it was agreed that ‘new art’ should be positive, optimistic, inspiring and uplifting. It should fill the worker with love for his fellow revolutionaries and point the way to the glorious future, an attitude which would be taken to its logical conclusion in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the meantime there was no place for depressing, realistic portrayals of life in the slums. The Social Democrats refused to support Hauptmann because, as Eduard Bernstein put it, the works ‘portrayed human suffering without advancing any remedies for it’. Marxism was supposed to have a magic formula to cure all social ills, and one ‘couldn’t have workers leaving the theatre in despair’.⁸⁹

      Attempts to create alternative ‘inspiring’ Social Democratic works were a disaster. In June 1890 Bruno Wille founded a workers’ theatre, the Freie Volksbühne at the Böhmischen Bräuhaus (Bohemian Brewery) in Friedrichschain, and in order to make it affordable to the masses kept admission down to 50 pence and sold tickets by lottery amongst 2,000 trade union and Social Democratic members. The venture was a spectacular failure, not least because the plays, with their carefully worded Marxist solutions to social problems, were mind-numbingly dull. Social Democratic leaders promoted all manner of escapist kitsch which was surprisingly close to the official culture of imperial Berlin, reinforcing the very ‘Philistine petty bourgeois art’ which they professed to hate while finding nothing of value in the Naturalists or the modern theatre. Wilhelm Liebknecht was typical: ‘I have no time to go to the theatre, and did not visit the Freie Bühne productions,’ he said, but having read their plays he found them a ‘disappointment’. ‘I will not name names,’ he sniped, ‘but the breath of Socialism or, in my opinion, the Socialist movement, is not to be found on the stage of the jüngsten Deutschland’.⁹⁰ Frau Piscator had a different view: ‘The proletarians did not care for the proletarian theatre,’ she wrote. ‘It died without mourning in April of 1921.’ The only genuine working-class culture which was acceptable both to the avant-garde and to the party was vaudeville, and it was here that the image of the