Berlin

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:

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.