The first Berlin cabaret acts were born in local Kneipen, of which there were thousands in working-class Berlin; in the 1880s there was one for every 135 Berliners.91 These small smoke-filled rooms, with their wooden planks for a stage – the Brettl – surrounded by tables and chairs, would serve beer and schnapps along with bread and sausage or thick soup, and local entertainers would get up at the front to tell their jokes and rustic stories drawn from Berlin life. The first purpose-built cabaret, the Überbrettl or Buntes Theatre, was opened in January 1901 by Ernst von Wolzogen, who hoped to copy the tradition of the Montmartre and bring political satire and music to a small audience. It was a sensation and by the autumn no less than forty-three such Uberbrettl had opened, including the legendary Schall und Rauch. Middle-class theatre owners had also seen the potential of the local Kneipe performers and had put on revues of their own: the Tonhallen Theatre, founded in 1870, the Bellevue in 1872, the Neues American Reichs Theatre in 1877, and the Reichshallen Theatre in 1877, had all switched from conventional programmes to vaudeville within a few years, scouting for local talent in the Kneipen and teaching the amateurs how to perform on stage. Even the Wintergarten, with its 2,300-square-metre glass-covered hall, converted to vaudeville in 1887 and became the most prestigious stage of its kind in Europe. A cabaret journal of 1902 noted that ‘Julius Baron, the former director of the Wintergarten, was probably the first person to build a large and wide bridge between vaudeville artistry and bourgeois society’, taking the coarse language from the street and gentrifying it for the middle classes.
The most cutting satires were often censored through the Lex Heinze, but the best cabaret acts disguised their critiques under layers of double-entendre understood only by local audiences. A range of ‘Berlin characters’ emerged, from lower-class cab drivers, hawkers and apprentice shoemakers to the Eckensteher, or men who stood on street corners and hired themselves out as labourers. Whereas the old Berliner had been funny but rather slow and phlegmatic, the image of the new Berliner was of a cunning, street-wise character who could keep up with the hectic tempo of the big city. He or she was poorly educated but witty, self-assured, irreverent, crass, vulgar and spoke Berlinerisch in a more aggressive fashion than his or her predecessor. The new Berliner was subversive of authority, directly critical of the court and indirectly critical of the Kaiser, ridiculing official Berlin culture, the cult of subservience to the Prussian army and anything that smacked of bourgeois or upper-class life. He joked about attempts by Wilhelmine state officials to encourage loyalty, patriotism and morality through the Church and he was sympathetic to other oppressed groups, from prostitutes and prisoners to those under the colonial yoke and Poles and Catholics targeted in Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. He was resilient, amoral and permissive; in short he was all the things that were anathema to the official culture. The Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1874 reported that ‘The Berliner is always quick at repartee, always able to find a sharp, suggestive, witty formulation for every event and occurrence’, and newcomers learned to ape these characteristics or for ever be treated as outsiders. By the twentieth century, this image of the Berliner had been accepted as historical fact by both locals and foreigners alike. A nineteenth-century myth had become reality.
Despite the encroachment of popular cabaret into middle-class society, Prussian officials continued to exert strict controls over the ‘higher forms’ of art, and suspicion of revolutionary art extended beyond Naturalist theatre to the new forms of painting and sculpture. Those who refused to follow the official guidelines were rejected by the Academy, and Franz Servaes warned that young artists who came to Berlin must expect to be called ‘talentless’, must become ‘as hard as steel – or go under’, and must ‘learn to mix his colours with his lifeblood’.92 In 1892 the Association of Berlin Artists dared to invite Edvard Munch to exhibit in the city but the conservative reaction was swift and decisive. Munch was labelled ‘vulgar and disgusting’, his work ‘lacked form’, he was ‘talentless’, he was ‘brutal and fiendish’, even ‘ruthless’. The exhibition doors were locked after two days. The insults continued. For the 1889 Academy exhibition Walter Leistikow submitted a very beautiful painting, Grunewaldsee, which owed a clear debt to the French Impressionists. The work showed the placid lake in evening light, the surrounding trees silhouetted against a darkening sky, and a small path snaking along the shore. He had high hopes for the painting but it was refused by the Academy. Richard Israel thought it of such high quality that he purchased it and donated it to the National Gallery, where it came to the attention of the Kaiser. Shortly after the Academy refusal the gallery director Hugo von Tschudi tried to persuade the Kaiser to invest in some French Impressionist paintings, and he hoped that by showing him a great work in the same style by the ‘Painter of the Mark Brandenburg’ he would approve the expenditure. The opposite happened. Instead of admiring Leistikow’s work William announced that the picture was terrible, and did not look like nature at all. He was certain of this not only because he personally ‘knew the Grunewald’ but because ‘apart from anything else he was a hunts-man’.93 Tschudi was forced to resign, and it became clear that the Academy would remain closed to Leistikow. In 1898 he and eleven other artists, including Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, broke away in protest and founded the Berlin Sezession. Max Liebermann became its first president.
The first Berliner Sezession exhibition was held in a small building in the garden of the Theater des Westens in the Kantstrasse; the freshly prepared walls were so damp that the paintings had to be taken down every evening and rehung the next day to prevent damage. Most officially approved artists refused to have anything to do with the gallery; Menzel ‘spat with contempt’ when asked if he would exhibit there.94 Nevertheless, the gallery became an underground success and moved to larger premises. A 1905 guidebook informed tourists that the Sezession had moved to Kurfürstendamm 208: ‘Regular summer exhibitions from May to September. Small but powerful … Officers go in civilian clothes!’ (the Kaiser had threatened to punish officers seen entering the gallery).95 Despite official condemnation the gallery exposed Berliners to some of the greatest works of the late nineteenth century. The young art dealer Paul Cassirer was instrumental in bringing paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir, Lautrec, Rodin, Whistler, Israëls, Beardsley and Maillol to Berlin, and it was he who introduced the as yet unknown Cézanne to Germany. During a trip to Copenhagen Leistikow had seen works by Van Gogh and brought them to the gallery. According to Corinth the paintings ‘baffled Berliners … there was much ironic laughter and shrugging of shoulders’ but the Sezession continued to exhibit Van Gogh’s works long before they were generally appreciated as masterpieces.96 The gallery also showed an increasing number of German artists and soon works by Beckmann, Grossmann, Purrmann and Walser were shown along with those by Hans Baluschek, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Heinrich Zille and Frank Skarbina.
Industrial Berlin itself was becoming an acceptable ‘subject’ for the first time, and paintings began to show the desolation and misery of life in the working-class city. Lesser Ury exhibited his first ‘street paintings’ in 1889. Skarbina’s Railway in the North of Berlin depicts a proletarian couple trudging through the dirty snow on a Ringbahn bridge high above a railyard, framed by dreary smokestacks and rusty ironwork and bathed in icy artificial light. Poor tattered women huddle under a cold yellow sky waiting for their husbands in Hans Baluschek’s Midday at Borsig, while in his Berlin Landscape a lonely female figure hurries furtively past a Berlin municipal railway and row of tenements, concealing a small red wreath meant for a socialist demonstration. Baluschek captured the new Berlin which ‘like a lucky speculator, lacked the breeding and culture to play the new role with decorum, without meanness’.
Heinrich Zille’s lithographs were inspired in part by the revelations of a Dr Ebelin who, after talking to Berlin slum children, discovered that ‘70 per cent have no idea of what a sunrise looks like, 76 per cent don’t know what dew is, 82 per cent have never seen a lark, half have never heard a frog’. Zille showed people crammed together in their high rental barracks accessed by tiny staircases or living in wretched wet cellars and over stinking stalls without air and sun. ‘There, one could kill a man’, he commented wryly, ‘just as easily as if one used an axe.’97 His drawings for popular magazines were tragic, witty and ironic at the same time; one showed a boy yelling to his mother to throw down