Berlin

Berliners’ popular amusements also struck outsiders as raw and uncouth. Beer-drinking, of course, was prominent among these, the foamy liquid being almost a national religion. It was consumed in innumerable Bierstuben and (during warmer months) in raucous outdoor beer gardens. These institutions were studies in informality: men and women of all social classes pressed together on rough benches, quaffing mug after mug of beer and smacking their lips over giant hunks of meat. When not drinking in their beer gardens, Berliners might be found amusing themselves at one of the city’s many variety reviews, known locally as Tingel-Tangel. These featured small troupes of performers who danced, put on skits, and sang satirical verses lampooning such targets as greedy landlords, the Jesuits, and the French. Visiting a Tingel-Tangel in the Schützenstrasse, Vizetelly witnessed a woman named Alma singing a long song full of animal noises, enthusiastically echoed by the audience, “until one was well able to imagine the kind of existence which Noah and his family must have passed while shut up in the Ark.”

Berlin was also known for its “dissolute dancing-places,” such as the Orpheum, which boasted erotic frescoes depicting “nudities in postures difficult to describe, but on which Germans gaze through their spectacles without the slightest appearance of being shocked.” The women who frequented the Orpheum were mostly prostitutes, strapping Silesians trying very hard to look Parisian. “If these Circles were only as beautiful and seductive as vice is commonly reputed to be,” observed Vizetelly, “Berlin youth would run far greater risks of being led astray here.” Prostitutes also congregated in large numbers on the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse. To Laforgue, this scene was more depressing than stimulating:

What a grotesque and heart-breaking spectacle this fast corner provides! On the steps, five or six old crones hunched over the boxes in their laps groan: ‘Matches, Matches.’ Bums stop you with the same offer, calling out, ‘Herr Baron, Herr Doktor, Herr Professor.’ And then a man slumped on his crutches selling these same matches. And most astonishing of all is a torso enshrined in a crate on wheels moving about with the help of its hands; it wears a long blond beard and glasses and also sells matches. . . . And the demi-mondaine (for Berlin tact has reduced Dumas’ word to this level) pounds the pavement incessantly. In the winter it’s frightful. Fortunately the lantern of the hot sausage vendor shines in the distance. The ladies help themselves and eat, leaning over the gutter so as not to soil themselves.

From the standpoint of visitors from the great European capitals, then, and even in the eyes of some critically minded locals, Berlin in the first decade or so after German unification was at once rustic and risque, a strange mixture of backwoods rowdiness and frank sexual openness. It was not yet the bustling hive of up-tempo urban life that it would become at the turn of the century. Pedestrians did not yet have to fear being run over by an auto or bus upon crossing the Potsdamer Platz. On the other hand, the Spree city was already getting that reputation for raunchiness and “decadence” that would persist despite the best efforts of prudish rulers to shape the capital in their own image.

Bust

Berlin’s postunification boom had been somewhat shaky from the beginning. Many of the new joint stock companies were little more than hollow fronts whose major function was to bilk unsophisticated investors. The building explosion had been predicated on the illusion that the capital would quickly expand to 9 million souls; parts of the city were thus considerably overbuilt, making it increasingly difficult for landlords to maintain high rents. Railway development in eastern Europe-—the basis of Strousberg’s empire—was costing far more than it yielded, though this unpleasant fact was covered up for a time by government officials on Strousberg’s payroll. Berlin’s economy, moreover, was dependent on the health of an international marketplace stretching from Vienna to New York; financial tremors on the Danube or Hudson could wreak havoc on the banks of the Spree.