The political disadvantage connected with having the Reichstag in Berlin does not end with the external [security] danger that this poses to the delegates and governmental officials;. . . even more, this has an unfortunate influence on the composition of the Reichstag. . . . The delegates move here and become comfortable here. . . . We have too many Berliners in the Reichstag, which is only-natural, since they don’t have to travel to meetings.
In the latter part of his reign Bismarck stayed away from the capital as much as possible, preferring to run the nation from the sanctuary of his country estates, Varzin and Friedrichsruh, which had been awarded him for his successful wars of national unification.
Ambivalence about Berlin as imperial capital was further reflected in the haphazard and tentative manner in which the Reich government established its physical presence in the city. Bismarck’s bete noire, the Reichstag, did not get a new building of its own until 1894. Until then it had to conduct its business in an abandoned porcelain factory. The structure was so decrepit that its glass ceiling occasionally broke away and fell into the assembly room, slicing up the chairs. Had this ever happened when parliament was in session, observed one member, “a delegate could easily have lost his head, or some other part of his body.” Such conditions led to the complaint that “the representatives of the nation are unhoused guests in the new Reich capital.” But it was not only the Reichstag that got short shrift. Bismarck’s government provided virtually no financial support to the city for logistical and infrastructure improvements. Most of the Reich ministries and administrative agencies initially rented space in private houses or moved into converted palaces on and around the Wilhelmstrasse, where the older Prussian offices were also located. A new building, modeled on the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, was constructed at Wilhelmstrasse Nr. 74 for the Imperial Chancellery. Bismarck, however, did not like the building’s style, so he moved his personal residence and office into a neighboring palace at Wilhelmstrasse Nr. 76, and then, in 1878, into a new Chancellery in the former Radziwill Palais at Wilhelmstrasse 77. Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry moved into the building originally designed for the Chancellery. The Foreign Office, increasingly cramped for space, worked out of several different buildings until a new home, modeled after another Florentine palazzo, was built for it on the Wil-helmplatz. Lacking time and preparation to grow gracefully into its new role, Berlin wore its capital vestments like an ill-fitting suit off the rack. For many years after unification, the governmental quarter had a temporary and improvised feel about it, as if the national government were not sure it wanted to be there at all.
Boomtown
The doubts that many Germans harbored about their new capital did nothing to dampen Berlin’s physical and economic expansion, which assumed truly frenzied proportions in the period following unification. The city resembled a giant mining camp or gambling casino, luring ambitious newcomers with the promise of instant gains. As many locals feared, rapid growth exacted its price in terms of civic grace and urban aesthetics. Berlin not only felt like a gambling camp, it began to look like one. Moreover, since the steamroller of growth tended to crush any historical impediments to “progress,” Berlin seemed increasingly bereft of any coherent identity or sense of continuity. It was settling into what one commentator famously labeled its “modern fate”—that of “always becoming and never managing to be.”
At the time of German unification, Berlin’s population stood at 865,000. In 1877 it passed the 1 million mark and, after a mere twenty-eight more years, reached 2 million. Berlin’s population growth came through large-scale immigration, not through a sudden burst of fecundity on the part of the natives. The newcomers hailed principally from Brandenburg, East Prussia, and Silesia. The Prussian capital had long been a city of immigrants, but now every other person seemed to have just climbed off the train and to radiate that mixture of disorientation and determination typical of recent arrivals. Their prevalence prompted the bon mot “every true Berliner is a Silesian.” The rawness, but also the vitality, of Bismarckian Berlin owed much to the influence of its newest residents.
Significantly, a considerable number of the newcomers were Jews from the Prussian provinces or from eastern Europe. In 1860 Berlin had only 18,900 Jews, but by 1880 the figure had risen to 53,900. The so-called Ostjuden from eastern Europe were seeking a safe haven from racial persecution in their own countries; for them Berlin was a promised land of religious and economic freedom. The Jews from rural Prussia saw the new capital as a place where they could take maximum advantage of talents honed as a result of past discrimination in the provinces. Having been barred from owning land, practicing many of the traditional crafts, or serving in the bureaucracy and military, the Jews had become experts in commerce, finance, journalism, the arts, and the law, precisely the fields that were most in demand in the modern metropolis. Settling into their new home, the Jews quickly put their stamp on the city, melding their own distinctive style with native traditions of irreverence and caustic wit. Their rise became associated with Berlin’s own rise as a major European metropolis. This integration generated much talk of a “Berlin-Jewish symbiosis.” Although never merely an illusion, as some commentators would later insist, this partnership was fragile from the outset, and its very seductiveness would tragically prevent all too many Jews from recognizing that fatal moment, some six decades later, when it had broken down altogether. It should be recalled, moreover, that while Berlin’s Jews were prominently identified with the city’s emergence as a center of cultural and economic modernism, most of the city’s modernists were not Jews and most of its Jews were not modernists.
The most pressing problem facing the new arrivals in Berlin was finding a place to live. For years Berlin had experienced housing shortages, but in the dawning imperial era the problem became acute. To accommodate the rising demand for housing, dozens of private Baugesellschaften (building societies) began throwing up new structures throughout the city. They covered over vacant lots, urban gardens, and children’s playgrounds. To render a large wetland near the Spree buildable, a construction company brought in boatloads of sand and spread it over the bog. Here rose the Hansaviertel, named after the sea-trading league to which Berlin had once belonged. Residents of the district could still experience the sensation of being at sea whenever heavy rains caused the Spree to flood and engulf the surrounding territory.
Much of the new construction took place in suburbs ringing the city, and competition for development sites quickly turned the environs of Berlin into a vast sandbox for real estate speculators. Anticipating the need for expansion, various building societies bought up some of the old Junker estates outside Berlin and subdivided them for private houses and apartment complexes. The former aristocratic holdings of Lichterfelde and Wilmersdorf were urbanized in this way. The potato farmers of Schöneberg became millionaires overnight by selling their fields to the speculators.
State and city officials made some effort to control the growth. There was a plan in place dating from the 1860s that called for grids of apartment blocks intersected by wide streets. The regulations, however, said little about how the units should be constructed, save for limits on height. This deficiency, combined with an entrepreneurial zeal to maximize profits on private plots, resulted in a proliferation of so-called Mietskasernen (rental barracks)—sprawling apartment complexes that blighted the poorer suburbs to the north and east of the old city. The “barracks” nickname was apt, for the structures resembled military quarters in their monotonous utilitarianism and disregard for basic human comforts. Typically five stories high, they filled entire blocks in a dense honeycomb of apartments built around inner courtyards just large enough (5.3 meters square) for a fire engine to turn around in. The innermost dwellings, accessible by long passageways from the street, received virtually no sunlight. Flat renters competed for space in the courtyards with small factories and craft shops, ensuring that the pounding of hammers and buzz of saws mixed with the wails of children and chatter of housewives all day long. Everyone who lived and worked in these urban caverns shared communal kitchens and earthen privies. Needless to say, such places were perfect incubators of diseases like cholera, typhus, and smallpox, which periodically swept the city.