One of Adolph Menzel’s most cutting paintings, Beati Possidents (Happy Owners), looks at first like a Dutch bourgeois genre painting of the early seventeenth century. Upon inspection one sees that it was painted in 1888 and depicts a smug, self-satisfied bourgeois couple before the balcony of their new villa, surrounded by gardeners, artists and others busy transforming it into a ‘historic’ house. Menzel saw these vast megalomaniac villas as little more than ‘freshly painted forgeries’ as false as the painting itself.51 Everything in imperial Berlin was built for show. Huge new apartment houses and pseudo-palaces went up in areas like Charlottenburg and in the new ‘villa colonies’. The enormous structures looked impressive, but they were nothing but cheap brick smothered in plaster and stucco. Isherwood described these houses as ‘shabby monumental safes crammed with tarnished valuables’, and although the writer Prus was initially impressed by what he found he soon wrote: ‘I long to see something small and simple … Berlin houses are simply overloaded with ornaments – and behind the palaces you can see breweries and behind turrets there are factory chimneys. Even the churches in Berlin are swamped by these private houses.’ Maximilian Harden said they were built so that the new Berliners could ‘show off for the people across the road’. They had ‘monumental facades designed to look impressive even if the inhabitants actually live in tiny bedrooms at the top of the house’.52 George Hermann described a typical villa with its nur FÜE HERRSCNAFTEN (social elite only) and PLEASE WIPE YOUR FEET signs at the edge of the decorative garden complete with yellowing miniature fir trees and new busts of Dante, Luther and the Belvedere Apollo.53 Christian Friedrich Hebbel said that at first glance Berlin reminded one of Paris and Rome but that one must not look too closely as the squares were shoddy and the buildings ‘unsolid’.
There was no consistency in the architecture and there was no new ‘Berlin style’ to replace the Prussian style of the eighteenth century.54 The Berlin villa colonies were more like a Beverly Hills or Reno, Nevada, than a Knightsbridge, with a pastiche of styles copied from other cultures and periods. Rathenau described these areas as full of all manner of cheap and expensive ugliness which made one feel caught in a feverish dream: ‘Here is an Assyrian temple beside a patrician mansion from Nuremberg, a bit further on is a glimpse of Versailles, then memories of Broadway, of Italy, of Egypt – terrible abortions of a polytechnical beer – imagination.’55 Christian Morgenstern wrote a sketch on this theme for Schall und Rauch in which the millionaire Kalkschmidt tells a horrified old professor that he wishes to build his restaurant not so much in the ‘Old Bavarian’ style as the ‘Venetian church’ style, complete with ‘great pictures and all gilded with painted ceiling and real Carrara and old wood carvings and columns and stained glass windows’; when the professor objects Kalkschmidt chides: ‘You do not know the modern Berlin, Herr Professor.’56 Adolf Behne complained that one could no longer see anything of the walls as they were covered in ‘Caryatides, columns, cartouches, busts’.57 Some projects were even more ostentatious: in 1894 a family from Pankow Wollank had their oriental palace built in the shape of an Indian mosque which floated on a raft in a nearby lake. It vanished in flames a few years later. And naturally William II had to outdo his subjects. Cecilienhof, the site of the 1945 Potsdam Conference, was an extraordinary copy of an Elizabethan manor house and contained a room built in the shape of a ship’s cabin suspended on leather straps so that he could be rocked to sleep as if at sea. He ordered that it should be completed in a mad frenzy when Germany was already well on its way to losing the First World War. No matter what the cost, appearance was everything. For Spender even the most sordid tenements never lost ‘some claim to represent the Prussian spirit, by virtue of their display of eagles, helmets, shields and prodigious buttocks of armoured babies’.58
Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend is a novel about the new money coursing through nineteenth-century Europe. The Veneerings were typical of the new rich:
All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new … from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms to the grand pianoforte with the new action … all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings – the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky.59
The Veneerings might well have lived in imperial Berlin. The interiors of the new villas were even more outlandish than their facades and were crammed with pillars, statues and staircases. Ceilings dripped with plaster cherubs and fruit-laden vines, grand bourgeois rooms groaned under the weight of dark, heavy stuffed furniture, ornate mirrors, thick carpets, full-length curtains and palm trees; fountains spurted champagne and ornamental gardens and conservatories were replanted every few months. Billions of marks circulated in Berlin and the beneficiaries spent it on luxury; as Siegfried Kracauer, Berlin review editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, put it, everything in Berlin ‘was glittering and absolutely new’. Even for those somewhat less well off life was getting better. Over two-thirds of Berliners rented apartments rather than owning their own homes, which allowed for easy mobility. Rooms in flats no longer ran into one another; they were now divided so that nurseries and bedrooms were separated from the public spaces, making life more private both for residents and servants. Urban life had become easier for all; kerosene and then gas lamps replaced candles; linoleum floors were easier to keep clean and solid fuel briquettes and safety matches made homes easier to heat. A service sector quickly developed to cater to the whims and desires of the well-to-do.60
Since unification Berliners had become keenly aware of their status in comparison to other European capitals. They had defeated France and Austria on the battlefield and now they were determined to outdo Paris and Vienna as centres of pomp and luxury. The new department stores which were built at the end of the century quickly became symbols of great local, if not national pride. Tietz, Ka De We and Wertheim’s became synonymous with the new urban Berlin, providing customers with thousands of new and wonderful goods from around the globe.61
Hermann Tietz was typical of the new optimistic, energetic and daring Berliner. In order to build his store he had to rip down a house which was featured in Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, and although the destruction of a place immortalized by a great national writer would have been unthinkable a decade before there was little room for sentimentality in the new Berlin. Tietz delighted in introducing products to the city; the humble tomato was first sold on his food floor, although it took a while before suspicious Berliners took to the fleshy, watery ‘fruit’. Rice, once a luxury item, became commonplace. But Tietz was not alone; the first major development in the New West was the Kaufhaus des Westens or Ka De We, which would later become a famous anti-Communist landmark in West Berlin. The unusually restrained and refined building was innovative in that it combined the sale of goods with a central ticket office for all travel and entertainment, a beauty salon, a café and other services previously found only in separate outlets.62
In 1909 the beautiful Sarotti shop on the prestigious Leipziger Strasse opened its doors after costly refurbishment. A year later it was gone. The building was demolished to make room for the most sumptuous of all Berlin stores, Wertheim’s, which was built at a staggering cost of 12 million marks.63 All the new stores were large versions of the bourgeois villas, resplendent with grand entrance halls, huge chandeliers, staircases, mosaics and mirrors, but Messel’s extraordinarily modern design for Wertheim was the most sumptuous of all. A hundred thousand lights illuminated the staircases, the fountains, the palm trees, and the soft rose-coloured tiles which had been supplied by a factory owned by the Kaiser. Glass replaced solid walls, giving the building a light, airy feel, and people came just to see the new atrium which was lit from above. Berliners loved this