In Europe (7 page)

Doorn and Berlin lay a universe apart, yet turn-of-the-century Berlin was nonetheless a reflection of that attitude towards life expressed in the packed salons at Doorn.

According to
Berlin für Kenner
, a German Baedeker published in 1900, Berlin was ‘the most glorious city in the world … the seat of the German kaiser and the king of Prussia’, with a ‘garrison of 23,000 men’, ‘as numerous as the railway ties between Frankfurt and Berlin’, while the population had a combined balance of ‘362 million in savings in the bank’.

At the same time, Berlin was and is a city that lurches back and forth as it moves through time, like a runaway train compartment on the Ringbahn. Midway through the twentieth century, in the 1950s, an elderly citizen of Berlin could have told you about the sleepy nineteenth century provincial city of his childhood, the imperial Berlin of his youth, the starving Berlin of 1915, the wild and roaring Berlin of the mid-1920s, the Nazi Berlin of his children, the ravaged Berlin of 1945 and the reconstructed, divided Berlin of his grandchildren. All one and the same city, all within the space of one lifetime.

Within that period, there was half a century, from 1871 to 1918, during which Berlin bore the title of ‘imperial capital’. Standing on the banks of the Oder, fifty kilometres outside Berlin, one found oneself at the geographic centre of the German Empire, 600 kilometres from Aken and
800 kilometres from Königsberg, the present-day Kaliningrad. Today that spot is marked by a Polish border post.

Berlin was the parvenu of Europe, but the city – with the frenetic energy of all newcomers – did everything it could to make up for its lagging behind London, Paris and Rome. Even today some of the neigh-bourhoods resemble a febrile European dream: a Jugendstil villa here, something a bit Venetian there, beside it a bit of Paris or Munich, with styles and shapes filched from all over the continent. The myth of Berlin was fabricated as well: supposedly, the city had started out as a Germanic settlement, with the bear as its symbol and eponym. In actual fact, however, for the first 600 years of its existence Berlin was a purely Slavic village. Its name has nothing to do with bears, but with the Slavic word
brl
, meaning ‘swamp’. The actual connotation is something along the lines of ‘Swampy Place’, in Old Polish. Yet that, of course, is hardly the stuff of which a Great German historical tradition can be made.

I had come to Berlin aboard the TGV and the ICE, travelling at 300kph past the villages of northern France, past cows with dungy backsides, a woman hanging the laundry, a pensive hare in a bare field.

Next came the broad, stern German lowlands. We were cruising at 200 kph now. The passengers in the first-class compartment spoke only to their mobiles: ‘Yeah, put my name on that EP.’ ‘Take a look at whether that Fassinger order is already on the net.’

After Wuppertal, a group of skinheads settled in on the platform between compartments. They sat there smoking and drinking beer, occasionally breaking into raucous laughter and loud belching. Beans, goulash soup and potatoes with sausage were being served in the club car. The first-class passengers ate in silence. The skinheads and the restaurant personnel were the only ones who spoke. ‘Shit!’ the boys kept yelling at each other, ‘Shit! Shit!’ It was a grey day, an unremitting greyish-green, all the way from Paris to Berlin.

Now, from my room, I look out on a courtyard full of brown leaves, a part of the earth where no one ever walks, sits or plays, occupied only by a large tree grasping for light. Darkness is falling. There is snow in the air. The windows across the way are dark, except for one warm, yellow rectangle, behind which someone is writing at a table.

These are lovely, private surroundings, excellent for getting some work done on my dispatches or doing a little background reading. For days I have been immersed in the diary of Käthe Kollwitz: sculptress and cartoonist for the satirical weekly
Simplicissimus
; wife of the social democrat general practitioner Karl Kollwitz; mother of two sons, Hans and Peter. A vivacious woman who was gradually tethered to earth by life at respectable Weissenburger Strasse 25. Here, to quote a few of her entries, is how she saw Berlin at the time:

Their youngest is one month old … One of the older children is mentally retarded. Soost's wife is thirty-five, and she's already borne nine children, three of whom died. But all of them, she says, were as sturdy as this little boy at birth, they only weakened and died because she couldn't breastfeed them; she had no milk because she had to perform hard labour and couldn't care for herself.

The name of the hotel where I am staying is the Imperator. It's actually more like a boarding house, an enormous apartment building built around two courtyards, with high-ceilinged hallways and rooms en suite. In imperial times it housed the families of citizens of substance, but since the 1920s it has served as a boarding house. Miraculously enough, the building survived the war. Here is Berlin at its best: cozy, the walls covered in art, the sheets and napkins snowy white, the crispiest
Brötchen
in town. The entrance to all this solid living, a lovely oak staircase, always smells of beeswax. The hall is covered in golden curlicues, forms in stucco and plaster. The balcony is held on high by two nymphs. The portico to the neighbour's house, with its profusion of marble, borders on the royal. Above the landing are two blank coats of arms. The façade is punctuated
by half-pillars. The copper nameplates beside the massive front door blare the message; this is a house for dentists, doctors, insurance agents and a respectable widow, who takes in boarders.

This street is one great cultural derivation: Berlin's nouveau riche copied their emperor's style in the same way that their emperor copied his from the capitals of a more ancient Europe. They were built this way everywhere in the better neighbourhoods, the apartment buildings with a gateway for carriages – used, in actual fact, only by the coal merchant or milkman – the impressive vestibules and palatial stairways, the divided stateliness of a façade, the cut-rate grandeur.

In this campaign for glory, Kaiser Wilhelm himself set the tone. The whole city was permeated with his romanticised view of history. Wilhelm's hand could be seen everywhere: in the countless statues of winged deities, in the many museums, in the thirty-five neo-Gothic churches – one of the empress’ hobbies – in the thousands of oak leaves, laurel wreaths and other ‘national’ symbols, in the copper statue of the city's pudgy pseudo-goddess, Berolina, at Alexanderplatz, in the Siegfrieds with their imperial swords, in the Germanias with their triumphal chariots. London and Paris had long histories, but Berlin lacked continuity; these instant monuments served to fill the historical vacuum.

Wilhelm was deeply impressed by his arch rival England and copied whatever he could: Kew Gardens at Lichterfelde, Oxford at Dahlem, the famous Round Reading Room of the British Museum in his own Kaiserliche Bibliothek. But everything, of course, had to be bigger than its counterpart in England. At the Tiergarten, as an eternal tribute to his ancestors – but above all to himself – he had built the 700-metre-long Siegesallee, lined with marble statuary. That eternity, by the way, did not last long: the marble statues of the Electors (which Wilhelm felt looked ‘as though made by Michelangelo’) were tossed into the Landwehrkanal not long after the Second World War; today, a few of them have been dredged up and brought back to the Siegesallee and the Tiergarten.

Wilhelm had a specific objective in all this, of course. As Germany made its ascent it was not only faced with the same conflicts seen in Great Britain and France, but it was also one of Europe's youngest nations. When Wilhelm II took the throne in 1888, the country was less than twenty years old. Most of its inhabitants did not even consider themselves Germans;
they were Saxons, Prussians or Württembergers. Every town, every valley had its own dialect. Only the upper class spoke High German; when travelling, middle-class Germans had trouble understanding each other. The local courts at Munich, Dresden and Weimar still maintained their royal status, with jealously guarded ranks and privileges. Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony and Baden had their own armies, their own currencies and postage stamps, and even their own diplomatic services.

At the same time, young Germany had major ambitions in the field of international politics. Europe had been living in relative peace for decades, a situation often summarised by the phrase ‘inside Europe, balance rules; outside Europe, Britain rules’. The great Prussian chancellor Bismarck's sole objective was to make a united Germany's new-found power a part of that system, and at first he succeeded wonderfully well. With patience and wisdom he had allowed Europe to grow accustomed to the new configuration. He had circumvented the major risks: an alliance between Russia and France which would have locked Germany in from both sides, and the disruptive potential of the perpetual issue of the Balkans, to say nothing of the danger of Germany being dragged into a possible war between Russia and Austria. Bismarck's Germany was, as the diplomat and author Sebastian Haffner put it, a contented nation.

In 1890, Bismarck was bumped aside by the young Wilhelm, effectively putting an end to the politics of patience and caution. The kaiser and his new ministers represented a discontented, restless, misunderstood Germany. Just as the eighteenth century had been the century of the French, and the nineteenth the century of the British, in their eyes the twentieth century was to be German. And, in a certain sense, it was. Around the turn of the century they began assembling a gigantic fleet, as a retort to British naval power. They cultivated the old enmities with Russia and France, thereby driving those countries into each other's arms. They began an arms race. Their thinking and behaviour focused increasingly on an altered version of stability: outside Europe, balance rules; inside Europe, Germany rules.

Yet despite its appropriation of power, the new German nation lacked the natural status of older countries such as France and Great Britain. On the one hand, a modern civil society was developing, with prospering trade and industry; on the other, however, real power was still in the
hands of a few hundred aristocratic families and an associate caste of top officials and officers who danced to the kaiser's tunes. On the one hand, the Germans’ self-awareness was growing with each passing year; on the other, Germany continued to live in a state of uncertainty about its national character and even its national boundaries, beyond which there were Germans living as well. The German state, in short, was much smaller than the German nation.

Wilhelm II's task, therefore, was somehow to provide emotional cohesion for this disconnected land. As in every brand-new nation, the new subjects had to be given the feeling ‘this is something to which I want to belong, this is a great thing, this will lift us out of the mire of our existence’. That is why young nations build monuments, grand government buildings and sometimes even whole capitals. But Kaiser Wilhelm took things a step further. He adopted a quasinational style of government as well, a brand of theatre that fit his own person to a tee. The result, in the words of the German historian Michael Stürmer, was a ruling style consisting of ‘a great deal of propaganda, sweeping gestures and alluring prospects, a pinch of the very old and a pinch of the very new, and none of it real: pure bread and games.’

Wilhelm's theatricality lacked conviction in other ways too. Germany had long ceased to be the country of regimental colours, laurel wreaths and Electors chiselled in marble. Beneath the great display of tradition, it had, like Britain, become a modern and pluriform nation with countless intellectual, economic and cultural ties with the rest of the world. In Britain, many of the traditions still had a certain historical basis, and enjoyed broad popular support. The superficial forms created by Wilhelm, however, were empty and came far too late.