Kitabı oku: «Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin», sayfa 23

When the electrifying Théâtre Libre visited Berlin that year a group of artists were so moved that they decided to defy the Kaiser’s censors and start their own company. In April 1889 the Hart brothers met with Maximilian Harden and the editor Theodor Wolff behind the steamy windows of the Kempinski on the Leipziger Strasse; after hours of discussion they held up their glasses and toasted the foundation of the Verein Freie Bühne. As it was to be an ‘association’ the police could have little control over its programme. The new director Otto Brahm said of the project, ‘we are creating a free stage for modern life. Art shall stand at the centre of our endeavours; the new art which shows reality and the future.’⁸⁶ It came as no surprise that the first posters at the Lessing Theatre were soon advertising the Berlin première of Ibsen’s Ghosts. This extraordinary play, which revolved around the taboo theme of inherited syphilis, shocked the prudish Berlin audience, but the theatre was allowed to remain open. The opening night of the second production, Gerhart Hauptmann’s succès de scandale, Sonnenaufgang (Sunrise), turned out to be one of the most memorable evenings in the history of the Berlin theatre.

Even before the curtain went up the audience was restless, and by the time the play had started the jeering made it virtually impossible for the players to get through the first act. The tension continued to mount and finally, during the graphic birth scene, the theatre erupted into a fist-fighting free-for-all; people leapt over seats towards the stage trying to punch the actors, and an enraged doctor threw a pair of forceps at the main character. This time, the play was banned, and William II permanently cancelled his subscription to the ‘Kaiser’s Loge’ in the Deutsches Theater.⁸⁷

Gerhart Hauptmann continued his battle against the Berlin censors, producing play after play criticizing the existing system and exposing the misery and desperation of the Berlin underclass. Hanneles Himmelfahrt is a grim story of the fragility of existence in the slums in which Hannele’s mother dies and she is viciously beaten by her alcoholic father. The girl is taken to a poor house, where she has a series of visions before dying of her injuries. Die Ratten (The Rats) showed the hopelessness of life in a Berlin rental barrack. A young couple, the Johns, are herded together with human beings who are so degraded that they have ‘become’ rats, picking over refuse, nibbling, sniffing and scraping at everything. They drive one man to murder and the heroine to suicide but in the end the loathsome creatures are seen as victims of a society which denies them any self-respect. Hauptmann’s most famous work, Die Weber, played with a similar theme of mass psychology, this time showing people mesmerized and controlled by the eerie monotonous sound of the spindles which dominate the stage. This fierce attack on existing social order was banned on the grounds that ‘it was an open appeal to rioting’, but the liberal press defended it; Fritz Stahl praised it in the Deutsche Warte as ‘the greatest work of German Naturalism to date’, while Julius Hart wrote that it was ‘certainly not the revolutionary speech of a party politician, but was simply the voice of humanity reflecting tremendous suffering, love and hate’. The theatre company was taken to court and won only because the court decided that the high ticket prices ‘precluded the attendance of an appreciable number of workers at the performances’. Even so, Hauptmann was rejected by polite society; Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst called his Hanneles Himmelfahrt ‘A monstrous wretched piece of work … social-democratic-realistic, at the same time full of sickly, sentimental mysticism, nerve-racking, in general abominable. Afterwards we went to Borchard’s, to get ourselves back into a human frame of mind with champagne and caviar.’⁸⁸ Hatred of Hauptmann extended to Berlin University; as late as November 1922 a party organized for his sixtieth birthday was boycotted by the Berlin Student Society because he was not considered to be ‘a German of strong character’.

It was ironic that the Social Democrats did not come to the aid of these struggling artists, but they were already exhibiting the confusion and muddleheadedness which would plague them in later years. Unfortunately for them Marx had never clarified whether or not the dictatorship of the proletariat should produce a wholly new kind of art, or if bourgeois art could still be appreciated after the revolution. He gave no hint as to whether the proletariat should reject or affirm the culture of the past, nor whether critical art produced under the capitalist system was acceptable. Engels had attempted to deal with these questions after Marx’s death but had failed, and the local Berlin leaders like Bebel and Liebknecht considered the task of getting into power far more important than wasting time on painting and theatre. In the end it was agreed that ‘new art’ should be positive, optimistic, inspiring and uplifting. It should fill the worker with love for his fellow revolutionaries and point the way to the glorious future, an attitude which would be taken to its logical conclusion in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the meantime there was no place for depressing, realistic portrayals of life in the slums. The Social Democrats refused to support Hauptmann because, as Eduard Bernstein put it, the works ‘portrayed human suffering without advancing any remedies for it’. Marxism was supposed to have a magic formula to cure all social ills, and one ‘couldn’t have workers leaving the theatre in despair’.⁸⁹

Attempts to create alternative ‘inspiring’ Social Democratic works were a disaster. In June 1890 Bruno Wille founded a workers’ theatre, the Freie Volksbühne at the Böhmischen Bräuhaus (Bohemian Brewery) in Friedrichschain, and in order to make it affordable to the masses kept admission down to 50 pence and sold tickets by lottery amongst 2,000 trade union and Social Democratic members. The venture was a spectacular failure, not least because the plays, with their carefully worded Marxist solutions to social problems, were mind-numbingly dull. Social Democratic leaders promoted all manner of escapist kitsch which was surprisingly close to the official culture of imperial Berlin, reinforcing the very ‘Philistine petty bourgeois art’ which they professed to hate while finding nothing of value in the Naturalists or the modern theatre. Wilhelm Liebknecht was typical: ‘I have no time to go to the theatre, and did not visit the Freie Bühne productions,’ he said, but having read their plays he found them a ‘disappointment’. ‘I will not name names,’ he sniped, ‘but the breath of Socialism or, in my opinion, the Socialist movement, is not to be found on the stage of the jüngsten Deutschland’.⁹⁰ Frau Piscator had a different view: ‘The proletarians did not care for the proletarian theatre,’ she wrote. ‘It died without mourning in April of 1921.’ The only genuine working-class culture which was acceptable both to the avant-garde and to the party was vaudeville, and it was here that the image of the working-class slum dweller was developed, refined and projected on to the whole of the city. The ‘true Berliner’ as we know him today was largely created and introduced through the cabaret of the nineteenth century.

The first Berlin cabaret acts were born in local Kneipen, of which there were thousands in working-class Berlin; in the 1880s there was one for every 135 Berliners.⁹¹ These small smoke-filled rooms, with their wooden planks for a stage – the Brettl – surrounded by tables and chairs, would serve beer and schnapps along with bread and sausage or thick soup, and local entertainers would get up at the front to tell their jokes and rustic stories drawn from Berlin life. The first purpose-built cabaret, the Überbrettl or Buntes Theatre, was opened in January 1901 by Ernst von Wolzogen, who hoped to copy the tradition of the Montmartre and bring political satire and music to a small audience. It was a sensation and by the autumn no less than forty-three such Uberbrettl had opened, including the legendary Schall und Rauch. Middle-class theatre owners had also seen the potential of the local Kneipe performers and had put on revues of their own: the Tonhallen Theatre, founded in 1870, the Bellevue in 1872, the Neues American Reichs Theatre in 1877, and the Reichshallen Theatre in 1877, had all switched from conventional programmes to vaudeville within a few years, scouting for local talent in the Kneipen and teaching the amateurs how to perform on stage. Even the Wintergarten, with its 2,300-square-metre glass-covered hall, converted to vaudeville in 1887 and became the most prestigious stage of its kind in Europe. A cabaret journal of 1902 noted that ‘Julius Baron, the former director of the Wintergarten, was probably the first person to build a large and wide bridge between vaudeville artistry and bourgeois society’, taking the coarse language from the street and gentrifying it for the middle classes.

The most cutting satires were often censored through the Lex Heinze, but the best cabaret acts disguised their critiques under layers of double-entendre understood only by local audiences. A range of ‘Berlin characters’ emerged, from lower-class cab drivers, hawkers and apprentice shoemakers to the Eckensteher, or men who stood on street corners and hired themselves out as labourers. Whereas the old Berliner had been funny but rather slow and phlegmatic, the image of the new Berliner was of a cunning, street-wise character who could keep up with the hectic tempo of the big city. He or she was poorly educated but witty, self-assured, irreverent, crass, vulgar and spoke Berlinerisch in a more aggressive fashion than his or her predecessor. The new Berliner was subversive of authority, directly critical of the court and indirectly critical of the Kaiser, ridiculing official Berlin culture, the cult of subservience to the Prussian army and anything that smacked of bourgeois or upper-class life. He joked about attempts by Wilhelmine state officials to encourage loyalty, patriotism and morality through the Church and he was sympathetic to other oppressed groups, from prostitutes and prisoners to those under the colonial yoke and Poles and Catholics targeted in Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. He was resilient, amoral and permissive; in short he was all the things that were anathema to the official culture. The Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1874 reported that ‘The Berliner is always quick at repartee, always able to find a sharp, suggestive, witty formulation for every event and occurrence’, and newcomers learned to ape these characteristics or for ever be treated as outsiders. By the twentieth century, this image of the Berliner had been accepted as historical fact by both locals and foreigners alike. A nineteenth-century myth had become reality.

Despite the encroachment of popular cabaret into middle-class society, Prussian officials continued to exert strict controls over the ‘higher forms’ of art, and suspicion of revolutionary art extended beyond Naturalist theatre to the new forms of painting and sculpture. Those who refused to follow the official guidelines were rejected by the Academy, and Franz Servaes warned that young artists who came to Berlin must expect to be called ‘talentless’, must become ‘as hard as steel – or go under’, and must ‘learn to mix his colours with his lifeblood’.⁹² In 1892 the Association of Berlin Artists dared to invite Edvard Munch to exhibit in the city but the conservative reaction was swift and decisive. Munch was labelled ‘vulgar and disgusting’, his work ‘lacked form’, he was ‘talentless’, he was ‘brutal and fiendish’, even ‘ruthless’. The exhibition doors were locked after two days. The insults continued. For the 1889 Academy exhibition Walter Leistikow submitted a very beautiful painting, Grunewaldsee, which owed a clear debt to the French Impressionists. The work showed the placid lake in evening light, the surrounding trees silhouetted against a darkening sky, and a small path snaking along the shore. He had high hopes for the painting but it was refused by the Academy. Richard Israel thought it of such high quality that he purchased it and donated it to the National Gallery, where it came to the attention of the Kaiser. Shortly after the Academy refusal the gallery director Hugo von Tschudi tried to persuade the Kaiser to invest in some French Impressionist paintings, and he hoped that by showing him a great work in the same style by the ‘Painter of the Mark Brandenburg’ he would approve the expenditure. The opposite happened. Instead of admiring Leistikow’s work William announced that the picture was terrible, and did not look like nature at all. He was certain of this not only because he personally ‘knew the Grunewald’ but because ‘apart from anything else he was a hunts-man’.⁹³ Tschudi was forced to resign, and it became clear that the Academy would remain closed to Leistikow. In 1898 he and eleven other artists, including Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, broke away in protest and founded the Berlin Sezession. Max Liebermann became its first president.

The first Berliner Sezession exhibition was held in a small building in the garden of the Theater des Westens in the Kantstrasse; the freshly prepared walls were so damp that the paintings had to be taken down every evening and rehung the next day to prevent damage. Most officially approved artists refused to have anything to do with the gallery; Menzel ‘spat with contempt’ when asked if he would exhibit there.⁹⁴ Nevertheless, the gallery became an underground success and moved to larger premises. A 1905 guidebook informed tourists that the Sezession had moved to Kurfürstendamm 208: ‘Regular summer exhibitions from May to September. Small but powerful … Officers go in civilian clothes!’ (the Kaiser had threatened to punish officers seen entering the gallery).⁹⁵ Despite official condemnation the gallery exposed Berliners to some of the greatest works of the late nineteenth century. The young art dealer Paul Cassirer was instrumental in bringing paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir, Lautrec, Rodin, Whistler, Israëls, Beardsley and Maillol to Berlin, and it was he who introduced the as yet unknown Cézanne to Germany. During a trip to Copenhagen Leistikow had seen works by Van Gogh and brought them to the gallery. According to Corinth the paintings ‘baffled Berliners … there was much ironic laughter and shrugging of shoulders’ but the Sezession continued to exhibit Van Gogh’s works long before they were generally appreciated as masterpieces.⁹⁶ The gallery also showed an increasing number of German artists and soon works by Beckmann, Grossmann, Purrmann and Walser were shown along with those by Hans Baluschek, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Heinrich Zille and Frank Skarbina.

Industrial Berlin itself was becoming an acceptable ‘subject’ for the first time, and paintings began to show the desolation and misery of life in the working-class city. Lesser Ury exhibited his first ‘street paintings’ in 1889. Skarbina’s Railway in the North of Berlin depicts a proletarian couple trudging through the dirty snow on a Ringbahn bridge high above a railyard, framed by dreary smokestacks and rusty ironwork and bathed in icy artificial light. Poor tattered women huddle under a cold yellow sky waiting for their husbands in Hans Baluschek’s Midday at Borsig, while in his Berlin Landscape a lonely female figure hurries furtively past a Berlin municipal railway and row of tenements, concealing a small red wreath meant for a socialist demonstration. Baluschek captured the new Berlin which ‘like a lucky speculator, lacked the breeding and culture to play the new role with decorum, without meanness’.

Heinrich Zille’s lithographs were inspired in part by the revelations of a Dr Ebelin who, after talking to Berlin slum children, discovered that ‘70 per cent have no idea of what a sunrise looks like, 76 per cent don’t know what dew is, 82 per cent have never seen a lark, half have never heard a frog’. Zille showed people crammed together in their high rental barracks accessed by tiny staircases or living in wretched wet cellars and over stinking stalls without air and sun. ‘There, one could kill a man’, he commented wryly, ‘just as easily as if one used an axe.’⁹⁷ His drawings for popular magazines were tragic, witty and ironic at the same time; one showed a boy yelling to his mother to throw down the flower pot because his dying consumptive sister wanted to sit ‘in the garden’. But of all the works shown the most passionate and moving were by Käthe Kollwitz. Her shocking portrayals of starvation, disease and filth, of death in the slums, of human tragedy behind the brick walls of the rental barracks were wrenching and terrible. The Kaiser refused to allow the Association of Berlin Artists to grant her their gold medal: ‘Please, gentlemen, a medal for a woman,’ he exclaimed, ‘that would really be going too far.’ It hadn’t helped that she had incited ‘revolutionary tendencies’ by producing engravings for Gerhart Hauptmann’s banned play, The Weavers.⁹⁸

Although these artists would reach dizzying heights of fame during the Weimar Republic they were lonely pioneers in imperial Berlin. The official critic Broder Christiansen once sneered that the Naturalists were interested only in ‘the crass, the shrill, the caustic, the repulsive and the common … the miserable people of Berlin in Heinrich Zille’s paintings do not want to move,’ he said, ‘they are not there as a social indictment, but rather as a means of producing intense nervous stimulation. Their putrescence gives a stimulant to art, and in Zille’s paintings the latrine is seldom missing.’ Herwath Walden published a marvellous article simply listing the words used by Berlin critics against the new artists, expressions which might well have appeared in Hitler’s Degenerative Art catalogue, including ‘sensation seekers’, ‘motley coloured louts’, ‘Niggers in frock coats’, ‘Hottentots in dress shirts’, ‘rabid simpletons’, ‘shitty and laughable clods’, ‘bluffers’, and ‘a horde of colour spraying howling apes’.⁹⁹

In those days of pettiness, repression, misunderstanding and hatred it was difficult for the industrial poor to see that the glittering Wilhelmine system was drifting towards collapse, and that it would be struck a mortal blow in the mindless butchery of the First World War. But between 1871 and 1914 the squalid life in the factories and the rental barracks carried on as before, and the artists who tried to address these issues were kept well away from the official culture, and the ever increasing wealth and prosperity of the swaggering imperial city.

VI Imperial Berlin

Fame surrounds her, blazing, glorious,

shines to dazzle all men’s eyes:

and her chosen name, Victorious,

Goddess of Man’s enterprise.

(Faust, Part II, Act 1)

IMPERIAL BENIN, THE BRASH, parvenu capital of the German Reich, exploded on to the world stage in 1871. In its brief forty-seven years the imperial city would change from a small provincial town into a garish giant, and for most Berliners its sheer size and wealth was enough to prove that their city had finally arrived. Berlin was no longer a mere Residenz; it was the Reich capital, complete with parliament and bureaucrats, banks and enterprises and burgeoning industries. The opportunities seemed limitless and the optimism was intoxicating as the city became the showcase of the new energetic German state. The capital might have been chauvinistic, militaristic and undemocratic but few well-to-do Berliners noticed, and for many the late nineteenth century would be remembered as Berlin’s golden age. As one of Gerhart Hauptmann’s characters put it: ‘Berlin is splendid! … Berlin is the most wonderful city in the world … Berlin is life.’¹

On 16 June 1871 Berliners woke to find their city in festive mood. Acres of bunting and flags smothered the grey buildings up and down Unter den Linden, and the Brandenburg Gate was heavy with greenery. Academy artists from Gustav Richter to Carl Becker, Otto Heyden, Georg Bleibtreu and Adolph von Menzel had worked since May to decorate the route between the Halle Gate and the Lustgarten to be used by the Prussian troops for their triumphal march. Great painted awnings hung across the road for five whole streets, and the facade of the Academy itself was hung with portraits of the victorious commanders-in-chief of the army.² By mid morning tens of thousands of people had flocked to the city centre, pushing for a vantage point and jostling the little groups of schoolchildren already rehearsing their poems and patriotic songs like Freiligrath’s Hurrah! Hurrah! Germania! along the well-marked parade route. The sense of expectation was palpable, for today marked Berlin’s coming of age; the Prussian town was to be officially recognized as an imperial city. Prussia had defeated France, Germany was unified, and Berliners were to rule over it all.

Suddenly a group of figures appeared in the distance, and the crowd began to cheer. The first in line was not Kaiser William I but their real hero of the day, Prince Otto von Bismarck. He was followed by Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke and General Albrecht von Roon, the representatives of Prussian military might. Only then did the old Kaiser come into view, progressing slowly down the road followed by his sons. Behind them were the non-commissioned officers holding aloft the eighty-one captured French flags and eagles, which were laid at the feet of the new monument to Frederick William III, the man who had been so humiliated by Napoleon Bonaparte half a century earlier. Then came 42,000 men in full battle dress, some crowned with laurel wreaths, looking for all the world as if they were at a procession in ancient Rome. The parade lasted a full five hours, and for Berlin it marked the dawning of a new age, a time of peace and prosperity, of flamboyance and energy, of greatness and power, industrial growth and modernity.

Berlin was in the process of re-inventing itself yet again, this time transforming itself into a powerful world capital. Even the liberal-minded Fontane, the greatest and most critical of Berlin’s nineteenth-century writers, was overwhelmed by a sense of pride and patriotism. The mood was lighthearted and later, as the Landwehr battalions returned home, the writer Sebastian Hensel watched as the men walked up Unter den Linden arm-in-arm with their wives and children.³

But such relaxed displays of civilian life would soon disappear under the worst aspects of Prussian military culture. The last Kaiser would give Prussian officers virtually unlimited powers to behave as they wished in ‘his’ city; indeed the Kaiser saw himself rather like a warrior chief who alone stood above the General Staff, the Ministry of War and the Military Cabinet. Wilhelm von Hanke, chief of the Military Cabinet between 1888 and 1901, maintained that the army ‘should remain a separate body, into which no critical eyes should be permitted to gaze’.⁴ The officers under their control would become ever more abusive, bolstering the foreign stereotype that the city was the very heart of narrow-minded Prusso-German nationalism. The writer Jankowski spoke for the world when he said that Berlin ‘fed itself by war and became fat through war’, and Churchill would later refer to this Prussia as the embodiment of German evil. The military success which made the 1871 triumph possible was brought about by one of Berlin’s most influential and controversial sons, the man who had led the parade, Otto von Bismarck.⁵

Shakespeare said of Julius Caesar,

he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus; and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs, and peep about

To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

Men at some time are masters of their fates.

It was a fitting description of Bismarck. Germany might never have been unified and Berlin might never have become Germany’s capital without this crafty political genius at Prussia’s helm, guiding it to power through his own particular brand of Realpolitik. Bismarck was able to create and maintain a system riddled with contradictions and preserve a semi-feudal style of government within an otherwise modern state. When he left his careful system of checks and balances unravelled and paved the way for the rampant aggressive nationalism of William II. But Bismarck was not a warmonger, as is often thought, and he did not engage in conflict for its own sake. He was a masterful technician of power, and used it first to create a nation state and then to protect it. And at the heart of his system was the capital, Berlin.

Bismarck was born outside Berlin on his father’s estate in Schönhausen on 1 April 1815. He cultivated his Junker image and harboured a deep suspicion of Berlin, but it was his mother, the daughter of a well-known Prussian bureaucrat and one-time adviser to Frederick the Great, who adored the city and who introduced him to urban life. It was she who had him educated at the great Berlin school the Graue Kloster, and who taught him that there was more to life than tending his father’s run-down estates and drinking at the officers’ club. Although Bismarck would later deny his middle-class roots it was his mother who first opened his eyes to the fascinating world of politics.⁶

Bismarck’s early career contained few clues to his future success. His first port of call was Göttingen University, where he was stirred not by the words of his liberal colleagues, but by literature, particularly the fiery work of Sir Walter Scott. After Göttingen he studied in Berlin, sat the rigorous Prussian civil service exams, spent a year in the military and then suddenly took eight years off to help manage his father’s crumbling estate. Despite the much professed love of his Junker heritage the years at Schönhausen dragged slowly by and according to his brother he spent hours dreaming of great battles and future glory to come. When the 1848 revolution broke out he decided that it was time to act. He rounded up the peasants on his estate and prepared to march them to Berlin to save his beleaguered king. Although his mission ended in failure he decided from that moment on to become actively involved in affairs of state. He rejoined the civil service and managed to get himself appointed as ambassador to the Frankfurt Diet, where he nurtured a budding contempt for parliamentarians. His next posting in St Petersburg taught him the advantages of the tsar’s autocratic regime, which he admired, while his stint in Paris made him despise the effete French. But wherever he went his love for all things Prussian continued to shine through; he wrote to a friend in Berlin that ‘as soon as it was proved to me that something was in the interest of a healthy and well-considered Prussian policy, I would see our troops fire on French, Russians, English or Austrians with equal satisfaction’. His tough patriotism endeared him to his fellow Junkers – already threatened by the rise of the industrialists and the urban working class – and when a fight began to brew between the liberal parliamentarians and the king Bismarck was eager and ready to act on their behalf.⁷

The conflict which propelled Bismarck to power, and which ultimately crippled the might of the Prussian bourgeoisie, centred around the question of army reform. This confrontation emerged in 1860 when a new law was put before the Diet to implement reforms introduced by von Roon which included the provision for a three-year term of compulsory military service, for an annual intake of 63,000 recruits, and the weakening of the popular Landwehr, which had been created by the Scharnhorst-Boysen reforms during the Napoleonic Wars. The old liberal parliamentarians were against the reforms but both sides held firm until the king tried to break the deadlock by dissolving the Assembly and holding new elections. He actually did this twice, but to his chagrin the new Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, which included a number of liberal civil servants, became the largest political grouping.⁸ William was deeply troubled – what was the point of being king if he could not determine basic military policy? Finally he could stand it no longer, and when the second election result was announced he stormed to the palace and drafted a letter of abdication. The struggle between the Berliners and the Hohenzollerns appeared to be turning in the civilians’ favour when a conservative ultraroyalist candidate was proposed for the office of Prussian Prime Minister. His name was Otto von Bismarck, and this time the parliament had met its match.

The news of the possible abdication had terrified the Junkers, who knew that if William left he would be succeeded by his liberal-minded son Frederick William, who could not be relied upon to protect their feudal privileges. In a last-ditch effort to save William, the Minister of War, Albrecht von Roon, sent an urgent message to Bismarck. He was to return from Paris at once; ‘Delay is dangerous,’ he wrote. ‘Hurry!’ Bismarck arrived in the city on 20 September, and two days later, during a walk in the gardens at Babelsberg, persuaded the king to rip up his letter of abdication and promised to govern as Prime Minister without a majority and without parliamentary approval of the budget – in other words, illegally. The king grumbled that the Berliners would ‘cut off your head and later on mine on the Opernplatz beneath my windows. You’ll end up like Strafford and I like Charles I.’ But Bismarck knew Berliners better than that. He remembered the failed revolution of 1848, the lack of action, the fear of real revolution. Berliners were ‘all talk and no action’, and the parliamentarians were worst of all. They were mere ‘chatter-boxes who cannot really rule Prussia … they know as little about politics as we knew in our student days’. The conservative Kreuzzeitung newspaper predicted that he would ‘overcome domestic difficulties by a bold foreign policy’. They were right. When Bismarck stood before the budget committee a short time later he rammed home his triumphant message in his high-pitched voice: ‘Germany does not look to Prussia’s liberalism but to her strength … The great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and the resolutions of majorities – that was the mistake of 1848 – but by blood and iron!’⁹ The fateful pact at Babelsberg between Bismarck and the king marked the beginning of twenty-eight years of the Iron Chancellor’s rule, and true to his word he set about unifying Germany by force.¹⁰