Berlin

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.