Berlin

The biggest “pariah” of all the Berlin plutocrats was Henry Bethel Strousberg, a Jewish merchant’s son from East Prussia who made a fortune by financing railroad construction in Germany and eastern Europe. From there he branched out into manufacturing, mining, and retailing. Although Berlin’s aristocrats snubbed him socially, they were happy enough to invest in his enterprises. At the height of his fortunes Strousberg was reputed to be the richest man in Germany. His mansion on the Wilhelmstrasse put Bleichröder’s palazzo to shame: adorned with Corinthian columns, it featured an elaborate winter garden replete with an artificial lake. Strousberg also owned over a dozen rural estates to which he traveled by private train or in a four-horse carriage with liveried footmen. To make sure that the Berlin-ers kept up with his exploits, he bought a local newspaper that published regular accounts of his comings and goings.

Strousberg and Bleichröder were hardly the only boomtown entrepreneurs to display their wealth in architectural splendor—or in what they took to be architectural splendor. August Julius Albert von Borsig, heir to his father’s industrial fortune, built an imposing neo-renaissance villa on the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and the newly created Vosstrasse. His neighbor was Prince Pless, whose fortune was derived from coal mines and agriculture. Pless was disturbed that his own new home, built in the style of an eighteenth-century French chateau, stood next door to the upstart Borsig’s pretentious pile. He therefore put in a stable on the edge of his property, so that “the scent of an older way of life would out-stink the air of the new.”

As Berlin’s center became congested, more and more of its plutocrats built them-14 selves gaudy palaces in the “New West” of Schöneberg and Charlottenberg. They especially favored the Kurfürstendamm, a broad new avenue, which its promoters, including Bismarck, hoped would surpass the Champs-Elysées in grandeur. The Kurfürstendamm thoroughly transformed western Berlin. Running from the southwestern edge of the Tiergarten to the Grunewald (Berlin’s answer to Paris’s Bois de Boulogne), it attracted new housing blocks to an area previously occupied by small farms and garden colonies. The heroine of Fontane’s novel Irrungen Wirrungen, set in the early 1870s, could still walk these fields for miles, but that bucolic world was gone within a decade.

Siegessäule, 1930

Old Berlin, resolutely spartan and dowdy, had never offered much in the way of luxury shops, restaurants, or hotels. After unification, there was a frantic effort to remedy this deficiency—indeed, to make Germany’s new capital the equal of Paris or London in the quality of its urban amenities. Unter den Linden, central Berlin’s most famous street, went from being a predominantly residential address for nobles and rich burghers to a commercial thoroughfare lined with fancy shops, restaurants, banks, and hotels. Competing for the attention of passersby, the new stores outdid each other in ornamental facades. The Kaiser-Gallerie, a glass-covered mall modeled after Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuelle, opened to great fanfare in 1873. It boasted more than fifty shops, cafés, restaurants, and entertainment facilities. Equally imposing were the new hotels, which were urgently needed, since Berlin was now attracting roughly 30,000 visitors a day, compared to 5,000 before unification. The fanciest of the new hostelries was the Kaiserhof, which featured over three hundred guest suites, numerous conference rooms, and a Viennese-style restaurant, the café Bauer. Although the Kaiserhof got off to a rocky start, burning down just days after its completion, it was totally rebuilt within three months of the fire.

Up and coming cities, of course, require more than shops and hotels to stake a credible claim to grandeur: they need impressive monuments and public buildings. Berlin’s signature monument of the Gründerzeit (foundation era) was the Siegessäule (Victory Column), a breathtakingly gaudy shaft dedicated to the military triumphs that had brought Germany its unity. Erected at the western end of Unter den Linden (it was later moved by the Nazis to its present location at the Grosser Stern in the Tiergarten), the fluted column was surrounded with captured French cannon and topped by a golden Victory Goddess. According to the Danish diplomat Georg Brandes, the pillar looked as if it had been commissioned by the King of Siam rather than by a European monarch. The proportions of the crowning Victory Goddess, he noted, were so “unhappy” that Berliners began calling her the “only lady in town without a lover.”

Despite all the efforts to make the new German capital a grand and imposing metropolis, Gründerzeit Berlin hardly presented itself as the last word in urban sophistication. As one of Bismarck’s ministers, Rudolph Delbrück, bluntly declared: “Berlin is frightfully small-townish.”