In the past, few Berliners had been exposed to western fashion trends, but they were determined to make up for lost time. Men who had avoided beards in the 1840s because of their ‘liberal’ connotations began to sport ‘emperor’s sideboards’, made popular by Franz Joseph and Kaiser William. Wives and daughters wanted to be well dressed for their dinners and balls and promenades on Unter den Linden, and new styles were not merely copied, but embellished by Berlin manufacturers so that they would be ‘better than in Paris’. Gone were the demure empire-line dresses and ringlets of the Biedermeier era, which had made women look more ‘mother than mistress’; now opulence was everything. Hats had to be wider, skirts fuller, shoes higher and fabric more colourful than elsewhere, and gowns became ever more expensive and outlandish. Even the fashion magazine Die Mode lamented that ‘the tendency of fashion at the moment is to go to extremes’. Hats began to reach extraordinary dimensions, extending far beyond each shoulder; theatres had long since requested that ladies leave them in lockers but they became so enormous that according to the Berliner Tageblatt tram passengers would take bets to see if fashionable ladies could get through the doors.
For foreigners these desperate attempts to outshine the fashion capitals of Europe were pathetic; when Jules Laforgue left France for the Berlin court he ‘hoped to dispel the image of the terrible taste of the Germans’, but his visit had the opposite effect. For all their money, he said, Berlin women simply did not have a sense of style: ‘one piece goes so badly with others that it is often grotesque to see’. The overall impression was frightful, as ‘the Berlinerin never has her hair done properly, never wears proper shoes, her walk is without grace, the movements too natural and voice loud and monotone.’65 For the writer Przervwa-Tetmajer even the words ‘ugly, shitty and horrific’ were too mild to describe the women he encountered in Berlin.
By now, of course, comments made about Berliners by Frenchmen, Russians, Austrians, Englishmen and Italians were tainted with a mixture of surprise, jealousy and fear of this upstart capital in their midst. When Berlin was a small provincial city nobody had cared how its women dressed, but all of a sudden it was important. Europeans began to be curious about this strange place in the Mark Brandenburg and for the first time the city became a stop on the nineteenth-century version of the grand tour for the non-military who were interested in learning about the art of war.66 By 1900 a million visitors a year were arriving via the new water and rail networks which encircled the city, and the small dank inns of old gave way to the newest additions to the Berlin skyline, the grand hotels.
In the late nineteenth century the size and style of hotels were considered a measure of the city’s greatness, and Berliners were eager to compete with their rivals. They had started very late – the first hotel large enough to call itself ‘grand’, the elegant Kaiserhof, was only completed in 1875. When the Kaiser saw it he said he had seen ‘nothing like it’ and Bismarck admired the elegant sandstone building so much he insisted that it be used as the venue for the Berlin Conference of 1878, at which the European powers attempted to halt Russian expansionism in the Balkans.67 Other hoteliers tried to imitate its success, and soon the Grand Hotel de Rome, the King of Portugal, the Central Hotel, the Hotel d’Angleterre and the elegant Bristol were vying for business in the area around Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. By 1914 Berlin had twelve grand hotels with a capacity of 3,355 rooms, and they soon became important settings of novels and later films; Vicki Baum, who wrote People in the Hotel, would work as a maid at the Excelsior, and Greta Garbo would murmur ‘I want to be alone’ into one of its great pillars.68 But all paled in comparison with the ‘best address in Berlin’, the famous Adlon at Number 1 Under den Linden.
The Adlon has now been rebuilt, but for those who stayed there before the war the mere mention of the name still evokes wistful sighs. Debutantes and foreign dignitaries danced the night away in its ballrooms while heads of state and grand industrialists stayed in its lavish apartments. The hotel came into existence through the bad luck of Count Redern, who lost his pretty Schinkel palace while gambling one night with the king of England. The property went up for sale and Lorenz Adlon bought it, ripped down the palace (the equivalent of demolishing a Wren building in London) and, with the Kaiser’s blessing, built the hotel. Like Wertheim’s the hotel epitomized the new city: it was huge, opulent, and filled from top to bottom with frescoes, carpets, elaborate glassware and silver gilt; lights replaced service bells and its 140 bathrooms were awash with onyx and marble. The ‘Wonder of Great Berlin’ became another proud landmark and the Berlin design periodical Innendekoration was not being ironical when in January 1908 it called the Adlon a symbolic building which ‘outshone all others not only in Berlin or in Germany’, but even in ‘New York, Paris and London’. The Adlon was ‘great and important’, it stated, ‘because it loudly proclaimed to the world that Germany is rich!’69
Berliners had endured long periods of starvation and deprivation in their chequered past, which might explain why prosperity and success were so closely associated with food. The proprietors of the grand hotels joined in the race to build great restaurants and dining halls, cashing in on the fact that the bourgeoisie still equated gluttony with success. The images of the Berlin businessman bursting out of his waistcoat while cramming in yet another sausage, so brutally portrayed by Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, were not far from the truth. An American visitor quipped that Berlin ladies could not get through an entire performance of Hamlet without having a Schinkenbrot – a smoked ham sandwich – between acts, and it was considered quite normal in well-to-do families to have at least one seven-course meal a day.70
The hallmark, however, was quantity, rather than quality. Dishes were based on the rustic peasant food of their forefathers – Conrad Alberti described the heavy smell of frying, alcohol and sauerkraut mixed with tobacco smoke which hovered in the thick air of the local Kneipe where, ‘as it was Thursday’, the main dish was Eisbein.71 A French visitor once complained that in a ‘delicatessen’ one could only get coarse sausage and in a ‘bakery’ one could only get black bread. Preserved foods from pickled cucumbers to sauerkraut remained Berlin staples long after Frederick the Great had ceased to force his subjects to buy huge quantities of salt; local fish included carp, canal trout, eel and pickled herring, while other specialities included Bouletten or small hamburgers, pork cutlets and, above all, beer. Meals were a serious ritual; Arno Holz joked in Phantasus that his family remembered the day he was born because they could recall ‘the roast with plums they had for lunch, and I had arrived by coffee time’. The restaurants were as outlandish as the hotels; the Rheingold at the Adlon greeted its 4,000 customers with a facade which looked more like the nave of a medieval cathedral than a place in which to eat, while Borchardt, Dessel, Kranzler and Kempinski on the Leipziger Strasse (known as the Café Egomania because of the posturing of its customers) became city landmarks.
Berlin had done well, but it was still desperately trying to catch up with its rivals in Europe. With their new money and their new look Berliners could not understand why outsiders remained so critical or why they were so slow to acknowledge Berlin’s greatness. The Kaiser was keenly aware of his city’s subservient position in Europe. In 1896 he wrote that ‘Berlin is a great city, a world city (perhaps?)’. It was no Paris, for
Paris is the whorehouse of the world; therein lies its attraction … There is nothing in Berlin that can captivate the foreigner, except a few museums, castles and soldiers. After six days, the red book in hand, he has seen everything, and he departs relieved with the sense that he has done his duty. The Berliner does not see these things clearly, and he would be very upset, were he told about them.72
But despite his harsh words William was desperate for the city to reflect the power of his Germany. He wanted visitors to marvel at