Kitabı oku: «Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin», sayfa 20

V The Rise of Red Berlin

God help the poor.

(Faust, Part I)

ON A DAMP AFTERNOON in October 1836 a black and yellow postal coach pulled into Berlin and a young student stepped out on to the pavement. He had just written a short verse to his beloved in Bonn: ‘The two skies. On the journey to Berlin in a carriage. The mountains pass, the forests recede. Gone from sight they leave no trace behind.’¹ It was not a promising start. After finding rooms in Lessing’s old house in the Mittelstrasse (with ‘cultured people’) the gaunt man, his face adorned by a rather unsuccessful moustache and wispy beard, set off to register at the university. Had he remained in the Rhineland the world might have been spared a great deal of turmoil and bloodshed, but his experiences in Berlin would redirect his career and change him from a drunken, duelling provincial student into the creator of scientific socialism and the driving force behind the international Communist movement. Berliners can be forgiven for ignoring the arrival of Karl Heinrich Marx, forced to Berlin by a father tired of his loutish behaviour in Bonn, but they would hear of him soon enough.² And Marx was only one of the litany of Communist saints who would be drawn to this burgeoning industrial city; Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel, Karl Liebknecht, Karl Radek, Rosa Luxemburg and even Lenin, who visited twelve times and who later slid through Germany on his way to lead the Russian Revolution, would be drawn to the new centre of the European working-class movement. Between Marx’s arrival and the end of the First World War the sprawling industrial city became known as ‘Red Berlin’, a powerful symbol lionized by the left and feared, even loathed, by just about everybody else.

When Marx first arrived in Berlin he found a city charged with pre-revolutionary tension. He threw himself into the radical circles at the university, joined the Doktorklub, a group of earnest young men who met over coffee and the eighty newspapers of the reading room of the Café Stehely, and was inspired by the latest works by the Young Germans like Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Karl Gutzkow and Theodor Mondt.³ But above all it was in Berlin that the young Marx came into contact with the works of Berlin’s most prominent philosopher: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.⁴

‘Only one man understands me,’ Hegel muttered towards the end of his life, ‘and even he does not.’⁵ The complaint was widespread; Hegel’s cryptic style, coupled with the fact that many of his works were published from lecture notes, added to the difficulty in deciphering his already obscure and abstract writing. Schopenhauer would call Hegel’s work ‘pure nonsense’ created by ‘stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses’, which had resulted in the ‘most bare faced general mystification that has ever taken place … and will remain as a monument to German stupidity’.⁶ It did not help that Hegel had attempted nothing less than the placement of all human knowledge into a coherent philosophy of history. Despite the savage criticism his work was, in Engels’s words, a ‘triumphal procession which lasted for decades’ and was later used to legitimate two of the most influential – and mutually exclusive – developments in history: the rise of chauvinistic Prussian nationalism, and the creation of scientific socialism. Hegel would be given the dubious honour of being invoked both by William II and by Marx.

Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770 and struggled for many years as a poor and unknown lecturer, confiding in his friend Schlegel that he had often gone hungry. His house at Jena was stormed by Napoleon’s soldiers and he barely managed to survive while in Nuremberg and Heidelberg, but by the time he reached Berlin in 1818 he had become the well-known author of Logic and the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and his birthday was jointly celebrated with that of the other icon of the fledgling German nation – Goethe.

Hegel was above all a product of his age. Golo Mann has said of him: ‘What Napoleon was to the political history of the period Hegel was to its intellectual history.’⁷ One sees in his work the desperate search for answers to the political turmoil which had ripped apart the Europe of his youth. For Hegel, the most important aspect of existence was the notion that everything – every idea and every situation – must always change, be torn down, and give rise to its opposite. If there is peace there will be war and, although this will result in violence and pain and bloodshed, eventually the warring parties will come to some reconciliation which will form a ‘higher stage’, a greater whole. The new status quo would not last either – it too would spawn its opposite, and the same process would be repeated again and again. This was the dialectic which swung through history like a giant pendulum, affecting everything from art to philosophy, from fashion to politics. For Hegel the great dualisms of history – the divisions between public and private or between the individual and society – would one day be reconciled through this relentless process. Only then would man achieve complete knowledge and fulfil the world spirit – Geist.⁸

Hegel died in 1831, and his followers immediately split into two antagonistic groups known as the Old Hegelians and the Young Hegelians. The first were ultra-conservative and would eventually use his defence of the all-powerful state – the Machtstaat – to legitimate Bismarck’s unification of Germany in 1871 and to justify chauvinistic nationalism and militarism well into the twentieth century. Because of this Hegel has been called everything from the father of nationalism to the harbinger of totalitarianism, but although he defended the Machtstaat, it is ahistorical to suggest that he either foresaw or would have approved of the policies later carried out in his name. He would have been appalled to see his face staring out gloomily from the pages of Nazi propaganda.⁹

Hegel’s other disciples, the Young Hegelians, saw his work as proof of precisely the opposite view. For them Hegel’s dialectic proved that what is ‘rational’ today is ‘irrational’ tomorrow, and that everything from religion to culture to politics must be destroyed to make way for something new, something better. Using Hegel as their guide they began to denounce their own society.¹⁰

Hegel had been a religious man all his life but his followers set about proving him wrong. Using his own methodology they tried to show that religion was a human construct whose time had passed. In 1835, four years after Hegel’s death, David Friedrich Strauss wrote his Life of Jesus, in which he used the dialectic to ‘prove’ that the New Testament was a myth. In his Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker Bruno Bauer denied that Jesus was the son of God, and in The Essence of Christianity Ludwig Feuerbach tried to show that it was not God who had created man, but rather man who had created God, and that the deity was nothing more than a projection of human needs and desires. It was Feuerbach who coined the now famous expression ‘You are what you eat’ – by which he meant that man is not fashioned in the image of God but is nothing more than biological matter.¹¹ Arnold Ruge became the leading Young Hegelian of the 1848 era and, using Hegel’s ‘terror of reason’, attacked everything from politics to the Romantics. He called for an end to ephemeral liberal theorizing and proclaimed that democracy would not simply ‘happen’ but must be fought for using principles of science and reason. He also chided Germans for being as passive about politics as they were ‘about the weather’. In 1838 Arnold Ruge and Theodor Ernst Echtermeyer founded the Hallesche Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst, which became a rallying point for radical intellectuals; it was banned by the Prussian government in 1841 and Ruge was forced to flee to Paris, but not before he and others – above all Bruno Bauer – had influenced the young Marx.¹²

Marx was captivated by the new ideas sweeping 1830s Berlin and wrote to his father that he was attaching himself ‘ever more closely to the current philosophy’. His father sneered that he had merely replaced ‘degeneration in a learned dressing-gown and uncombed hair with degeneration with a beer glass’, but Marx was serious and had already started to struggle with Hegel’s troubled legacy.¹³ Marx agreed with Hegel that society was moving towards a Utopia but for him human beings had to make their own history, albeit under conditions which they had not chosen. To do this they had to act politically. Marx turned Hegel on his head, transforming Hegel’s passive view into a call for action. The epitaph on his gravestone in Highgate cemetery reads: ‘Philosophers have only explained the world in different ways, what matters is that it should be changed.’

In Berlin Marx drank in the theories of the Young Hegelians: religion became the ‘opium of the masses’; political action was necessary to create the perfect society; and it was possible to achieve an ideal world if one followed rational scientific principles. Nevertheless at this point in his development the young student showed more interest in the coffee houses, the theatres and the salons of Berlin than in the working-class districts to the north and it was only later, in Paris, that he first noticed the ‘nobility’ in the ‘toil-worn bodies’ of the workers and discovered his own ‘agent of history’ – the proletariat. Only then would the Hegelian ideas absorbed in Berlin fit into a vast system which explained how society was dominated by a class struggle between capitalists and workers and how, when the workers were made aware of their class consciousness, they would inaugurate a revolution and bring about a Communist society in which there would be plenty for all, classes would disappear, ideology would vanish, the state would wither away, and all human beings would live together in peace and self-fulfilment. It was a seductive idea and, although Marx left Berlin in 1841 as a virtually unknown academic, all of ‘Red Berlin’ would have his name on their lips by the time of his death in 1883. The city was growing, the Industrial Revolution was bringing inexorable change, and the urban working class was becoming a force in its own right. The new industrial areas north of the Oranienburg Gate would soon be fertile ground for the revolutionary ideas spread by Marx and his disciples.

The radicals, the neo-Hegelians, and indeed Marx himself came to maturity during a particularly grim phase in nineteenth-century industrialization. Berlin was no exception. Long hours, terrible working conditions, exploitation and brutality were the rule in the early factories and even before Marx’s arrival many were beginning to understand that however prosperous industrial Berlin appeared to be to the casual visitor it was a savage and terrible place for many of its inhabitants. Contemporary posters show the city haunted by a hideous black devil hovering above the buildings, waiting to devour those foolish enough to venture through the gates.¹⁴ Mothers in the villages of the Mark Brandenburg warned their children of the evil and depravity of the ‘Demon Berlin’, and conservatives grumbled about the hazards of having such a hotbed of radicalism in their midst. But the vast majority of the new working class who made up the overgrown industrial slums had not wanted to live in Berlin at all; they were immigrants who flooded into the city after their traditional way of life had collapsed in the east.

Berliners have created a great many myths about themselves, and one of the most enduring is the image of the ‘typical Berliner’. Every tour guide, local historian and Kneipe (bar) philosopher will expound at length about the collective wit, disrespect for authority, suspicion of leaders and tradition of tolerance which epitomizes a true Berliner. He will invariably point to medieval examples of Berliner Unwille or to Goethe’s musings about the audacious local temperament, or recall Queen Victoria’s daughter’s description of Berliners as ‘bristly, thorny … with their sharp tongues, their cutting sarcasms about everybody and everything’ as proof of this heritage. But like so many modern myths, it is largely a nineteenth-century creation. It is true that Berlin has always been a magnet for immigrants, and everyone from the Wends and the French Huguenots to the Jewish merchants and Dutch and Bohemian craftsmen left their mark on the city, but nothing could compare with the wave of people which swept into Berlin from Saxony and the east Elbian lands throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1900 more than 60 per cent of Berliners were either immigrants or the children of immigrants and this percentage skyrocketed in the years between 1900 and 1914, when the population doubled again.¹⁵ Visitors commented that Berlin looked more like a New York or a Chicago than any equivalent European city, and it developed a culture to match. A quick look through a modern telephone directory still reveals a plethora of common Bohemian, Moravian and Polish names, but these destitute strangers were brought together not by a common language or religion, but by poverty and fear, by the factory floor and the rental barrack. It was from these reluctant migrants, and not their earlier counterparts, that the caricature of the coarse, tough, witty, irreverent Berliner was born.

The reasons for the mass migration to the city were complex but ultimately lay in the fact that the land in the east could not sustain a large rural population. If one journeys overland from Berlin through the Mark Brandenburg into Poland and what were then the provinces of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and West and East Prussia one passes a seemingly endless patchwork of sandy fields broken by a few straggly pine forests and small villages. It was here that the Junkers, descendants of the settlers who had accompanied the old Teutonic conquerors to the area, lived on their estates, and fiercely defended their feudal privileges. Some were as poor as the French hobereaux who had to stay in bed while their only pair of trousers was being mended, but the larger landowners had become wealthier throughout the nineteenth century as rational methods of production, Liebig’s mineral fertilizers, and modern equipment triumphed over the sandy soil.¹⁶ They would suffer later when cheap imports of Russian and American grain undercut their products, but they prospered for much of the nineteenth century and were particularly important to the recovery of Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars. The ‘agrarian revolution’ which took place after the victory was bolstered by the reforms introduced between 1807 and 1821, but although they improved production and strengthened the Junkers’ power they had unforeseen consequences. Serfs were able to ‘buy’ their freedom from the lord by returning half the land they had once worked, but they were then left with tiny plots of poor soil from which it was impossible to make a living. Few could afford to buy seeds, farming equipment or supplies, and as the lord’s woodlands, grazing areas and common fields were now out of bounds few could survive for long. A desperately poor rural substratum emerged, with ex-serfs drifting around the countryside collecting wood, poaching, begging or stealing.¹⁷ The new, large-scale agriculture was achieved at the expense of peasant ownership, and between 1811 and 1890 the number of large estates increased by two-thirds in the east Elbian region. For their part the estate owners became increasingly powerful and continued to exert an extraordinary influence on the Prussian (and later the German) government. At the same time improved efficiency saw a vast increase in the population – Prussia’s grew by 26 per cent between 1840 and 1860 alone – but as fewer people were needed to work the land unemployment rose. Many were drawn to the new industrial cities.¹⁸ By the end of the century thousands of immigrants had moved in from West and East Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania and Mecklenburg.

To make matters worse, the crisis in agricultural labour coincided with the introduction of free trade in the North German Confederation and with the corresponding breakdown of the medieval guild system. Before 1810 only a privileged few had been entitled to become master-craftsmen, but the free trade laws did away with the strict code which required all silversmiths, jewellers, furniture makers, stone masons and a host of others to join one of the exclusive guilds. In 1820 there had been thirty masters and journeymen per 1,000 Prussians, but this had already doubled by 1850. Independent artisans were forced to work from home or to hire themselves out for menial repair work on battered furniture or church silver, and a newcomer could only hold his own against new mass-produced items by constantly increasing the length of his working day. Many simply gave up and went to the city.¹⁹

The Industrial Revolution hit the traditional cottage industries just as hard. There were half a million small linen and wool looms and tens of thousands of spinners in Prussia alone in the early nineteenth century, but as the shining new factories began to spring up in Europe’s cities life for traditional workers became a struggle for survival. Hollow-eyed children were sent to work at the age of four; Huhn (chicken) on a menu could mean Hund (dog); and even the cannibalistic jokes running through Kayssler’s social commentary, akin to Swiftian satire about Irish children, were not considered far fetched by those who visited the region. Linguet’s observation that ‘you can be sure that [the city] where the most human beings are at the point of dying of hunger is the one where the most hands are employed in working the shuttle’ was an apt description for much of the east.²⁰ It was clear that the cottage weavers were fighting a losing battle.

The spark which ignited the powder keg was started by famine. From 1843 Prussia experienced successive failures in both the grain and potato harvests, and food riots became increasingly common in Berlin after 1845. By this time around 70 per cent of a labourer’s income was spent on food – a dire situation when, according to the great liberal scientist Rudolf Virchow, workers’ real wages dropped by 45 per cent between 1844 and 1847.²¹ The latter was the year of the ‘Potato Revolution’, which saw violence on the streets of Berlin provoked by endless food shortages and an outbreak of typhus, a disease brought on by malnutrition.²² It was put down by the military. But the situation was worse in Silesia. There linen weavers could no longer compete with new mechanical production techniques employed in Britain and they were penniless and starving. Eighty thousand people contracted typhus and around 16,000 people died that winter. Thousands rose up in desperation against the local merchants and middlemen in a pitiful attempt to get food and to somehow reverse the course of the Industrial Revolution. The weavers blamed the wealthy middlemen, who were detested for flaunting their coaches and clothes and estates as the people went hungry. Three hundred weavers attacked their factories and homes in 1847, smashing property and burning the records of their debts. Not amused by the cartloads of ‘German Luddites’ bearing down on them with sticks and pitchforks, the merchants asked the Prussian military to intervene and the latter, nervous about the persistent whispers of revolution floating around Europe, crushed the revolt with brute force.²³

In more settled times an incident like this would soon have been forgotten, but the story of the revolt became one of the first great rallying myths of the emerging working class; indeed it fuelled the Marxist belief that industrial capitalism must inevitably lead to the degradation and impoverishment – to the pauperization – of workers. Heinrich Heine wrote about it in his early poem of social protest The Silesian Weavers; it was taken up by Gerhart Hauptmann in his eerie, disturbing – and banned – play Die Weber (The Weavers) and by Käthe Kollwitz in her black lithographs of the same name; it cropped up in Franz Mehring’s essay Hauptmanns Weavers, in Friedrich Kayssler’s The Weavers’ Social Drama, and was later alluded to by many a left-wing Berlin writer of the nineteenth century. The frightened and starving cottage weavers would never know of their place in history, but they packed up their belongings and left for Berlin, adding to the mass of new arrivals there. Evidence of this exodus has long since disappeared under the weight of the more terrible things which have since happened in eastern Germany and Poland. Perhaps the closest equivalent one can find today are the chillingly quiet villages near Chernobyl in Ukraine which resemble the abandoned settlements that once littered the territory east of the Elbe. There the evidence of rapid departure is everywhere: small brightly painted wooden houses line the dusty roads, old bottles stand on kitchen window sills, benches where neighbours once chatted in the sun lie at the edges of overgrown gardens, and rusting wire still clings to empty chicken coops. In the 1980s the fear of radiation forced people to move; in the mid nineteenth century it was starvation, but the end result was the same: a destitute population compelled to emigrate in search of a better life.

In 1847 400,000 peasants, merchants and artisans left the eastern provinces; by 1870 it was over 800,000 per year and over 2 million Germans emigrated in the years between 1850 and 1870. Of the 133,700 who officially registered in Berlin in 1870 (many did not) over half were young men of working age. The city population surged to 1 million following demobilization after the war of 1871; twenty years later it doubled again, and it had reached 4 million by 1914. Most continued to come from the east; in 1911 alone 1,046,162 people came to Berlin from German lands along with 97,683 from Russia; this was in contrast to the mere 7,611 who came from western countries like Holland or 3,682 from Italy.²⁴ Huge tent cities sprang up on the fringes of a Berlin bloated with desperate people hoping to get work – older men with families to feed and a few qualifications, or rural untrained youths with no idea about life in the city. Many had hoped to make enough money in Berlin to buy a passage to America but had been trapped by their poverty.