The Wilhelmine period produced a number of extraordinary artists and writers and architects, from Fontane to Messel, and saw the birth of everything from Expressionism to modern industrial architecture in Berlin. Indeed while many visitors were disappointed by its ostentatious yet uncertain style they were impressed by its great department stores, train stations, hotels and industrial buildings. It was not the Reichstag or the Dom, but rather the Borsig works and the extraordinary 1909 turbine factory built by Behrens for AEG which made Berlin seem so energetic, so modern, so like Chicago. Berlin succeeded in impressing not because of, but despite its Wilhelmine pretensions. New cabaret and revues were intent on projecting Berlin as a Weltstadt. Performers like Claire Waldoff sang of Berlin’s ‘big city’ character in songs like the Lindenlied, which compared Berlin’s main street with the great boulevards of Paris and Vienna; revues at the Metropol included glitzy productions extolling the virtues of Berlin, including hits like Paul Lincke’s 1908 Donnerwetter – tadellos!, his 1909 Halloh! Die grosse Revue! and Rudolf Nelson’s 1912 Chauffeur – in’s Metropol!! and the cheekily titled Das muss man seh’n! (You Gotta See It!). The new reviews extolled the virtues of the big city, glorying in its consumerism and cosmopolitan nature and advertising new forms of entertainment which would later be associated exclusively with the Weimar period, from the six-day bicycle race to boxing and from the new facilities at Wannsee beach to the creation of the Luna Park. One song from the Metropol’s 1910 production of Hurra! Wir leben noch! dared to place Berlin ahead of other European capitals: ‘As soon as day has turned to night,’ it complained, ‘London has shut up tight.’90 If some complained that Berlin was crass or parvenu the revues argued that this was because the city was so new – a Metropolinchen. As a song in Das muss man seh’n! put it, Berlin was still trying to find its feet: ‘I have the foibles of my youth, I’m still a young metropolis.’
References to Berlin’s modernity made little impact on the ‘official culture’ controlled by William II. He continued to control the cabaret through rigorous censorship which banned political criticism and ‘obscenity’. In one example the Kaiser forbade officers to attend performances of Donnerwetter – tadellos! because the expression, translated as ‘Goddamn – perfect’, was one of his own favourites and was mercilessly ridiculed in the performance. His views on art in general were clearly demonstrated during a speech in 1901, when he decried all things modern: ‘Art should help to educate the people; if art does nothing more than paint misery more ugly than it is, it sins against the German people.’ Art in his city was meant to ‘proffer a hand to uplift, rather than to debase’. The art and architecture he commissioned should present Berlin’s greatness, not its weaknesses, and there was constant tension there between ‘acceptable’ art and the great trends sweeping the rest of Europe.91
Music remained a mainstay of Berlin cultural life and retained a high standard – in part because it was less prone to censorship than the theatre. Concerts had become popular among the bourgeoisie in the early nineteenth century and Berlin attracted the first musical celebrities, including Paganini and Liszt, nurtured choirs like the Singakademie and the Philharmonischer, where Bach and Handel had played. Berlin was a musical city which boasted schools like the Musikhochschule and the Sternsche Konservatory; orchestras included the Royal Orchestra for the Opera House and the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1826. The Academy of Music, founded in 1869, attracted Schumann, Wagner, Brahms and Dvorák, and the Berlin Philharmonic, founded in 1882, was conducted by Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Edvard Grieg. Berliners idolized musicians, and little porcelain busts and photographs of Wagner, Brahms and Saint-Saëns, the likes of which can still be found in the homes of central European music teachers, were sold at Berlin newsstands next to those of the violinists Eugène Ysäye, Sarasate, Wilhelmj, and the pianists d’Albert, Rubinstein, Liszt, Frau Schumann, Graf Zicy (who played only with his left hand), and the magnificent Hans von Bülow, who told his orchestra while rehearsing the overture Oberon that ‘it sounds as if he is calling a regiment of heavy cavalry when they are supposed to be elves!’ But however high the standard of performance, few composers could bear to live in the stifling militaristic city, and even Rubinstein admitted that ‘Berlin offended my spirit’. Paderewski was shocked at the conservative tastes, and although he called it one of the great musical centres of the world he muttered that ‘the traditions of Handel, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are kept with such severe seriousness and with such reverence that these composers have almost become false idols’. Felix Mendelssohn complained of Berlin’s contradictions, which in turn influenced musical life: ‘the huge pretensions, the tiny achievements; the exact criticisms, the miserable performers; the liberal ideas, the royal servants crowding the streets’.92 Bülow gave a farewell concert in Berlin in 1892 shortly after William’s speech damning everything from socialism to modern art: after long applause Bülow turned to the young Kaiser and said sarcastically: ‘Your Majesty has in the last days been gracious enough to inform us that the best way for grumblers to improve the miserable and woeful state of the Fatherland is to shake the German dust from his slippers and to leave as quickly as possible. I do this forthwith and take my leave of you.’ With these words he took his handkerchief from his sleeve, dusted the lacquered stand, and deserted the podium. He left Berlin for good, returning only once for a concert shortly before his death in February 1894.93 Few other respected figures dared challenge the Kaiser’s views so openly.
The same conservatism was evident in opera. Like concerts, opera had moved from being the preserve of the aristocracy and was now an essential part of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world. The new audiences called for romantic and patriotic subject matter and the houses obliged. Berlin had dozens of opera houses, including the Theater des Westens, which opened in 1896, the Komisches Oper of 1905, the Kroll Theater in the Tiergarten, the Charlottenburg Opera of 1912, which was replaced by West Berlin’s gloomy Deutsche Oper after the division of the city, and the old Royal Opera House. Caruso sang in Berlin every year between 1906 and 1913, and because Berliners had the curious custom of allowing stars to sing in their own language one might hear Erwin Booth in English, Rossi in Italian and the chorus in Russian all at the same time. But in Wilhelmine Berlin there was no doubt who was the master of opera – Richard Wagner.
Wagner took the inspirations of middle-class Berliners and transformed them into music. Political works such as the patriotic Kaiser March, written for the 1871 victory celebrations in Berlin, were rare; for the most part Wagner was an apolitical critic of his age despite the fact that the themes he chose would fit comfortably into the world view of increasingly chauvinistic nationalists. Wagner did not want to write ‘mere music’ but Gesamtkunstwerk – a complete work of art which over the course of the evening would transform the fragmented, alienated bourgeois audience into a collective whole. His work, with its crescendos and chromatic passages, was designed to bring the listener to ever greater levels of ecstasy so that by the end he would be submerged in a world of honour and glory and history which would make the materialistic society around him seem crass and vulgar by comparison.94 Wagner was immensely popular. When he came to Berlin for a performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Royal Opera House in 1876 he was mobbed by the crowds; at a performance of The Ring in the Viktoria Theatre five years later thousands of wild fans gathered in the streets to cheer him on, while well-to-do Berlin ladies competed with one another to entertain him and see to his every whim.
For his part William disliked all new tendencies in opera. When the Wagner memorial was unveiled in Berlin he asked, ‘Why do people really make such