Berlin

I had the opportunity to smell the Gendarmenmarkt in all its glory during Wednesday and Saturday markets. There was a long row of green, slimy, moss-covered fishtanks, with fish floating belly-up in stagnant, reeking water . . . the cadavers were pushed around by women with long paddles in an effort to make them look alive. . . . At the butcher stands along Markgrafenstrasse bottle-flies hummed around moldering carcasses, pools of blood coagulated in the street, and starving dogs fought over bits of gristle and guts. Worse still were the cheese stalls in the passage between Jägerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse. At one o’clock 18 the vendors dumped their garbage into the street. Although a battery of old women spend hours mopping up herring tails, cabbage leaves, and cheese wrappings, they couldn’t expel the hideous stench.

With its location on the sandy steppes of Prussia, Berlin was also plagued with blowing grit. In dry weather, wrote Vizetelly, one encountered “clouds of sand which . . . rise into the air and envelope everything they encounter in their progress.” To prevent the sand from penetrating into houses, housewives kept their windows closed, stifling the occupants. Vizetelly reasoned that blowing grit was the main reason why so many Berliners wore spectacles, just as the men constantly smoked cigars in order to avoid breathing undiluted air.

Like Berlin’s physiognomy, the habits and physical features of its inhabitants struck visitors from western European capitals as hopelessly provincial, if not downright gross. Jules Laforgue, a young poet from Paris who was hired by the royal court to read French periodicals to Empress Augusta, was put off by the ugliness of the local shop girls, all of whom seemed to have huge feet and thick ankles. As for their clothes, said the Frenchman, the Berliners were a disaster. Ladies were “slovenliness itself,” with not the slightest idea of how to dress. Although the men took care with their suits, their model was the military uniform, so everything was “tight and stiff.” And their manners! The Berliners’ “passion for formality,” thought Laforgue, stemmed “from their having so widely been called barbarians and boors.” They wanted desperately to be polite like the British and French, but “by working so hard they have put their foot in it.” Thus one found in Berlin that the men greeted each other not by slightly nodding their heads but by bending their entire spines and clicking their heels, while women performed a mechanical curtsey. At the same time, Berliners could be shockingly rude. In shops men took off their hats but kept their cigars in their mouths; in restaurants they dumped food into their mouths with their knives and smoked while they ate, scattering ashes everywhere. They stuffed themselves even at theaters and concerts, then belched and farted contentedly. This ensured that the air inside the public places was as foul as that outside.

Another aspect of life in the new capital that caught the attention of visitors was the overwhelming presence of the military and the deferential attitude of the citizenry toward the soldiers. Noting that troops were constantly marching and dragging cannon through the streets, Vizetelly said that the city seemed like one big maneuver field, with “civilian life. . . a mere adjunct to the martial elements.” Walking the streets, Laforgue was shocked to see a merchant carrying a pile of hats step off the sidewalk to let a sergeant pass. Similarly, Georg Brandes was amazed at the extent to which soldiers in Berlin were “privileged beings next to whom civilians counted for nothing.” The goose-stepping guards in front of the Neue Wache struck him as “ridiculous and barbaric.” The British diplomat Charles Harding, on the other hand, found the strutting German officers comical in their vanity. He knew of a young Guards officer who wore his white buckskin breeches “so tight that he could not bend his legs,” and had “to be helped up the stairs by two stalwart soldiers from his regiment.”