But however much they complained, Berliners were deeply affected by the military ethic. Everybody seemed to wear a uniform. State and municipal officials wore dark sober jackets; cab drivers wore red braided coats and top hats; even Friedrich Engels once wrote to his sister from Berlin: ‘here you see me in my uniform, my coat very romantic and artistic.’ Sybil Bedford compared Berlin unfavourably with London, complaining that ‘uniforms, no longer the livery of duty, were worn like feathers, to strut the owner and attract the eligible’, and as Schlettow in Carl Zuckmayer’s play put it, wearing mere civilian clothes in Berlin was like being ‘half a portion, with the mustard left out’.
Berliners’ obedience to uniforms went to absurd lengths. In October 1906 a company of twenty soldiers commanded by a ‘captain’ arrived at Köpenick Station, marched to the town hall and occupied the building. The ‘captain’ was in fact Wilhelm Voigt, an unemployed shoemaker and petty criminal who had purchased a musty old uniform in a second-hand shop, ordered a company of soldiers in the street to follow him – which they had done without question – and cheekily commanded the mayor to hand over the town funds ‘by the Order of His Imperial Highness’. The mayor may have had his doubts about this strange little man but the power of the uniform was too much. He handed over 4,000 marks – an enormous sum at the time. The ‘captain’ took it, marched his company out, and promptly disappeared. He was caught a few days later but when they heard about his prank Berliners laughed uproariously and even the Kaiser was amused enough to release him from prison after only two years. The soldiers who had been duped had all charges against them dropped because they had ‘unquestioningly obeyed the command of an officer’. The ‘Captain of Köpenick’ became a Berlin celebrity: Die Welt am Montag published a long interview with him; he entertained audiences in an arcade on Unter den Linden and sold his story on the new wax sound discs, some of which were found in a junk store in 1966 and given to the Köpenick Museum.44 Carl Zuckmayer wrote a play about him which was later made into a popular film. But however entertaining it was, the ‘Captain of Köpenick’ story exposed Berliners’ pathetic and widespread deference to authority on a scale unthinkable in any other European capital. By laughing at him Berliners were laughing at their own impotence.
The spotlessly clean city was well managed and highly efficient; Christian Otto once commented that ‘in no other German city is the attention to the law greater than here’. But if the city was clean it was also oppressive, and most visitors found it cold and antiseptic. People were ‘arrogant’ or ‘haughty’. Penderewski found the bars and cafés crowded and noisy, but heartless and without ‘genuine laughter’, and in a letter to his wife the Polish writer Boleslaw Prus exclaimed that ‘Berlin is beautiful – too beautiful … and as cold as ice.’ Jules Laforgue, the French writer, invited to the court to converse with the Empress Augusta, was scathing about the oppressive atmosphere in Berlin which he captured in his book Berlin, la cour et la ville.45 He recalled how in his native France one immediately got a whiff of absinth and freedom from the train attendants and heard them call to one another, ‘Will I see you later this evening?’; but in Germany ‘the personnel are military, they don’t say a word but busy themselves with running the train, performing the same task yesterday as today’. He was amazed to see how when an officer walked past a group of soldiers the latter stood to attention, stamping their feet on the spot until he had passed, a scene repeated ‘every day all around Berlin’.46 Carl Ludwig Schleich and his friends the writers Strindberg and Hartleben were nearly arrested for simply trying to measure the curvature of the earth at the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse, while Kraszewski commented that even with civilians one could see that ‘either he was, or he will be a soldier’: they adopted the manner of their military brethren, and treated visitors ‘as if you are meant to fetch their shoes’. He found the city ‘severe, ordered, serious, obedient and disciplined … as if in a permanent state of siege’. Not only did the soldiers move along the street with rigid measured steps like machines, but they were ‘copied by the street-seller, the coachman, the porter, even the beggar’. Rosa Luxemburg was even more critical. ‘Berlin made a ghastly impression on me,’ she wrote; ‘it is a cold, tasteless, massive barrack filled with those darling arrogant Prussians, every one looking as if he has swallowed the stick with which he had just been beaten.’ The new militarism was detested by many; after a brief visit in 1898 Wesenhof complained that there was ‘nothing left of the elevated idealism which led philosophy, poetry and even sometimes politics in Germany … Where is the old cradle of art, the co-parent of Gothic, the Fatherland of Dürer, Goethe and Heine? It is no longer in Berlin.’
In the meantime Berlin’s propertied middle class was becoming rich beyond its wildest dreams. Members of the old liberal Bildungsbürgertum (or educated middle class) were marginalized and although they continued to live in the quiet elegant Tiergarten, read their pleasant journals and attend their lectures at the university, they could not win against Berlin’s new brassy culture.47 Berlin was a city which epitomized the nineteenth-century literary paradigm of ‘new’ and ‘old’ money, but the new money was winning. By the turn of the century there were dozens of millionaires in the city, with forty-five families each possessing fortunes exceeding a staggering 3 million marks. Names like Siemens and Borsig, Ullstein, Gerson, Mosse and Wertheim became synonymous with the new wealth and in many ways it was these families who created the thriving heart of the new Berlin.48 Even so they remained shut out of the political, military and social life of Berlin and Potsdam, which was still controlled by the 7,000 aristocrats in the city – less than 1 per cent of the population. In England a public school education, appointment to high political office or a life peerage could propel a nineteenth-century industrial family into the upper reaches of the establishment, but this was impossible in Berlin, where a distinct line existed between the aristocrats and everyone else. Instead of trying to create their own independent culture the new rich copied the upper classes, competing with one another for imperial recognition and attempting to get their sons into the officer corps and marry off their daughters to the younger sons of minor nobility. Many of the new rich laid claim to ‘family crests’ and bought up old and unprofitable Junker estates in the hope that the prestige of the ex-inhabitants would rub off on them. They took up riding and hunting, art collecting and charity work, and they fought for membership in the Union Club or the Kaiser’s Automobile Club. This ‘neo-feudalism’ was parodied in endless cartoons and articles but it was a fact of life in imperial Berlin.
Identification with the existing system extended to the quest for orders, medals and distinctions, which reached a ridiculous level amongst the bourgeoisie at the height of the empire. They were not eligible for noble orders such as the Black Eagle or the Red Eagle of the Crown, but there was no shortage of lesser honours which could be handed out to them. Invitations to the Kaiser’s annual Ordenfest (Order Festival) were fought over by businessmen and professionals: there, an old palace servant might be seated near an officer who had obtained Pour le Mérite for distinction in battle, while an artist might be next to an arms manufacturer. Berliners were obsessed with questions of rank: when Madame Essipoff gave a concert at the palace she insisted upon being referred to as the ‘Palace Musician’, a title which was utterly meaningless but which she used until her death.49 When the great nineteenth-century historian Ranke was ill the papers solemnly reported that ‘Dr Wirkliche Geheime Rat Professor Doktor von Ranke has had a restless night’. Wives expected to be addressed as ‘professor’ or ‘doctor’ like their husbands, and even people who had been friends for decades would use these cumbersome prefixes. Theodor Storm once commented that ‘even in educated circles in Berlin an individual is not judged by his personality but by his rank, orders and title’. But as Gerard pointed out, the silly emphasis on empty labels tended to ‘induce the plain people to be satisfied with a piece of ribbon instead of the right to vote, and to make them upholders of a system by which they are deprived of any opportunity to make a real advance in life’.50
Whatever their political restrictions the new rich Berliners had wonderful lives and their optimism and wealth quickly