Kaiser Wilhelrn I enters the Pariser Platz during the victory celebration in Berlin on June 16, 1871
Vantage points from which to watch the proceedings in comfort were in great demand. Merchants with houses or shops along the route rented out viewing space for breathtaking sums. One enterprising store owner on Unter den Linden installed ten “comfortable chairs” in his window “with an unobstructed view of the Pariser Platz.” Thousands brought camp-stools to the street or perched atop trees, lampposts, and monuments. “No roof was too high, no stool too low that was not occupied by people,” wrote the Vossische Zeitung. “There was not even any empty space atop the dizzying heights of the Brandenburg Gate. . . . The men and women up there sought to outdo each other with daring poses, all of them showing a contempt for death that was truly astounding.”
This moment, with all its bombast and swagger, can be seen as deeply symbolic of Bismarckian Germany and its raw new capital. Apart from its dominant military motif, the triumphal celebration resembled nothing so much as a house-warming party thrown by a newly rich sausage baron upon taking possession of his neo-Renaissance mansion. In subsequent decades the prevailing mood in Berlin would not remain uniformly celebratory, but the city’s self-conscious determination to display its prowess and to show the world that it had arrived as a great capital remained constant.
The Unloved Capital
Tumultuous as the unification festivities were, they masked disappointment in some quarters that Berlin had become the capital of the new Reich. Given Prussia’s crucial role in German unification, Berlin’s elevation was no doubt inevitable, but it hardly came without opposition. Wilhelm I would have preferred nearby Potsdam, seat of the Royal Guards and favored residence of Prussia’s greatest king, Frederick the Great. Wilhelm had fled Berlin in 1848 to escape the local radicals (see Introduction), and he continued to see the place as potentially unruly and rebellious. Wilhelm’s son, Grown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, known for his liberal inclinations, favored Frankfurt, site of the 1848 parliament that sought unsuccessfully to unify Germany from below. Bismarck quickly quashed objections within the ruling family to Berlin’s becoming the German capital by promising that the city’s elevation to that status would help ensure Prussian domination of national life.
Yet this Prussian angle was precisely why many Germans in other parts of the country were deeply unhappy with the selection. They resented Prussian power and saw Berlin as a bullying behemoth determined to overwhelm the rights and prerogatives retained by the individual states in the new imperial constitution. That document represented a tortuous compromise between Prussian-based centralism and the particularistic ambitions of semisovereign entities like Saxony and Bavaria. The fact that the national capital was simultaneously the Prussian capital threatened to tip the balance in favor of the centralizers. Many of the smaller states would have preferred Frankfurt, Leipzig, or even little Erfurt. Non-Prussian Germans also objected to Berlin’s eastern orientation, decrying it as the “capital of East Elbia,” a colonial frontier city on the edges of the Slavic wilderness. The residents of ancient western German cities like Cologne, Aachen, and Trier, which had known the fruits of Roman civilization, fretted about being under the thumb of a city that had been nothing but a bump on the Brandenburg Steppes when these older towns were building cathedrals and hosting lively medieval cultures. Anti-Berlin sentiment was equally strong in the south, especially in Bavaria, whose largely Catholic citizenry saw the Prussian metropolis as a dangerous repository of alien Protestantism.
Concerns about Berlin’s new status surfaced even in the imperial capital itself. Municipal officials, whose powers had long been limited by the Prussian government—mayors, judges, and police chiefs all had to approved by the king—would now be subject to yet another higher authority. Berlin’s assumption of the capital function made it seem dangerously powerful to non-Berliners, but in reality the municipal government had little authority of its own. The powers of the city assembly, magistrate, and mayor’s office were all closely circumscribed by the imperial administration and the authorities of the state of Brandenburg, headquartered in Potsdam. It would be years before local officials even gained control over their own streets and utilities. A determination on the part of Prussian and Reich officials to keep the city politically weak underlay repeated refusals throughout the imperial era to allow Berlin to merge the various suburbs around the historic core into one administrative entity.
Prussian patriots, meanwhile, were concerned that traditional values and customs would be swept aside as the new capital was invaded by alien elements from other parts of Germany and Europe. They worried that their town would become unrecognizable as a result of the demographic and economic changes accompanying Berlin’s assumption of imperial-capital status. This view was poignantly illustrated in a popular novel of the day, Ludovica Hesekiel’s Yon Brandenburg zu Bismarck (1873), which lamented the passing of a humble and harmonious “Old Berlin” in the rush to imperial greatness. Having seen her neighborhood around the Wilhelmstrasse totally transformed by national unity, the protagonist, an aging Prussian grande dame, protests: “[My heart] is sick. Let me go home now; the new German sun that is rising into the sky would only blind this old Prussian lady.” To Theodor Fontane, who loved Old Prussia, if not necessarily Old Berlin, the capital was becoming just another place in which to get ahead fast. “What does it mean to live in Berlin except to make a career?” he asked in 1884. “The large city has no time for thinking, and, what is worse, it has no time for happiness. What it creates a hundred times over is the ‘Hunt for Happiness,’ which actually is the same as unhappiness.” Fontane’s perspective reflected the widely held view in Germany that true creativity was incompatible with the hectic pace of life in a large city like Berlin, where everyone seemed too rushed to think seriously about deep matters of the soul. Contemplating the spread of vice and modernist values in the new capital, the conservative cultural critic Gonstantin Frantz insisted that Berlin had forfeited its claim “to be the metropolis of the German spirit.”
The great Bismarck himself, though largely responsible for Berlin’s becoming the German capital, shared some of these prejudices against the city on the Spree. Having grown up as a Junker (the aristocratic, East Elbian landowning class) on an estate in rural Prussia, Bismarck saw Berlin as an ugly concrete jungle full of pallid people and nasty urban smells. “I have always longed to get away from large cities and the stink of civilization,” he declared. “I would much rather live in the country,” he told the Reichstag members, “than among you, charming though you are.” On another occasion he protested that Berlin had “grown too big for me industrially and politically”—a reference to the city’s growing manufacturing base and sizable industrial proletariat. He was hardly less wary of Berlin’s high society, which he found frivolous and pretentious, and he grew positively contemptuous of its ambitious bourgeois liberals, whose influence he believed was corrupting the Reichstag, making it more difficult for him to control. Speaking before the parliament in 1881, he was quite frank regarding this issue: