Berlin

Berlin’s railroad stations set the tone for the city. “Pitiful hovels” was the only appropriate description for these structures, lamented Isidor Kastan, a physician who became editor of the Berliner Tageblatt in 1872. The Potsdamer Bahnhof, a typical example of the genre, had dark and dingy second-class waiting rooms, while those of first class “assaulted the senses” with mahogany chairs and sofas covered in bright red plush. Travelers were made to feel either like tramps or patrons of a provincial whorehouse.

“One is amazed,” wrote the Frenchman Victor Tissot after a visit to Berlin in the early 1870s, “that the center of the new German Reich, the ‘city of intelligence,’ has much less the character of a capital than Dresden, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, or Munich. Everything here carries the stamp of this new German monarchy that was cut by saber out of the coat of its neighbor and that behaves like the popinjay of lore who bedecked himself with the plumage of a peacock.” There was no point to look here for things of spiritual majesty or antiquity, Tissot averred, since to Berlin’s Prussian builders “cannons had always meant more than cathedrals.” Upon completing his visit, the Frenchman was sure that “Berlin, despite its pretensions, will never be a capital like Vienna, Paris, or London.”

Henry Vizetelly, an Englishman who provided a comprehensive, if jaundiced, portrait of Germany’s new capital in the Bismarckian era, also scoffed at Berlin’s attempts at grandeur. In his two-volume Berlin under the New Empire (1879), he wrote:

Berlin, viewed in comparison with London or Paris, has nothing imposing about it. Its long broad streets commonly lack both life and character. No surging crowds throng the footways, no extended files of vehicles intercept the cross traffic, bewilder one by their multiplicity, or deafen one with their heavy rumbling noise. And until quite recently the best Berlin shops would bear no kind of comparison with the far handsomer establishments in the English and French capitals.

In the 1870s—as would be the case again in the 1990s—Berlin was covered with construction sites. Again to quote Vizetelly:

In the Prussian capital, scaffoldings and buildings in course of construction constantly arrest the eye. In the outskirts of Berlin new quarters are still being laid out, new streets planned, new houses rising up everywhere. Until quite recently even in the heart of the city so many new structures were in the course of erection that one was led to imagine the capital of the new Empire had been handed over to some Prussian Haussmann to expend a handsome share of the French milliards on its extension and improvement.

Berlin did not install a modern sewer system until the late 1870s. In his memoirs, August Bebel, the Socialist leader, described what Berliners had faced before this reform:

Waste-water from the houses collected in the gutters running alongside the curbs and emitted a truly fearsome smell. There were no public toilets in the streets or squares. Visitors, especially women, often became desperate when nature called. In the public buildings the sanitary facilities were unbelievably primitive. One evening I went with my wife to the Royal Theater. I was revolted when, between acts, I visited the room designated for the relief of men’s bodily needs. In the middle of the room stood a giant tub, and along the sides were chamber pots which each user had to empty himself into the communal pot. It was all very cozy and democratic. As a metropolis, Berlin did not emerge from a state of barbarism into civilization until after 1870.

All European cities smelled badly in the late nineteenth century, but, as Bebel’s accounts suggests, Berlin seems to have been in a class of its own—only later would Berliner Luft (Berlin air) become a source of pride, rather than of revulsion. “The rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended the nostril arises on all sides and persistently tracks one’s steps,” complained Vizetelly. The famed British urban sanitation reformer Edwin Chadwick told Berliners that theirs was “among the foulest smelling capitals in Europe.” Claiming that visitors arriving in other cities from Berlin could always be identified by the stink of their clothing, Chadwick urged local and national leaders to attack the problems of stench and unsanitary conditions with the same energy that they applied to “external foes.”

Although Berlin’s notorious gutters were the prime cause of this malodorousness, they were not the only culprit. The fish, meat, and cheese stalls clustered around the Gendarmenmarkt added their pungent part. Sebastian Hensel, director of the Kaiserhof, recalled: