“Metropolis Berlin evokes a kaleidoscopic panorama of impressions, opinions, and utopian hopes that constituted Berlin from the end of Imperial Germany to the rise of National Socialism. Iain Boyd Whyte and the late David Frisby invite the reader to be a flâneur in a truly great city, to marvel at the vitality of its urban spaces, and to listen to the cacophony of its voices and sounds. This extraordinary anthology of hundreds of documents tells the story of metropolitan Berlin by letting its inhabitants, visitors, and critics speak. A must have for every personal bookshelf and library.”—Volker M. Welter, Professor for Architectural History, University of California at Santa Barbara

"Metropolis Berlinis not merely a magnificent compendium of sources, but is also an exciting work of scholarship in its own right. It presents this global city, in all its architectural, urbanistic, and discursive richness and complexity, like no other volume before it."—Frederic J. Schwartz, author of Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany.

Iain Boyd Whyte is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh and author of Manmade Future (Routledge, 2007). David Frisby was Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and author of Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge, 2001).

Metropolis Berlin

1880–1940

By Iain Boyd Whyte, David Frisby

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27037-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, xiii,
Preface, xv,
General Introduction, 1,
PART ONE. BOOMING METROPOLIS,
1. The Metropolitan Panorama, 9,
2. Building and Regulating the Metropolis, 49,
3. Production, Commerce, and Consumption, 77,
4. Public transport and Infrastructure, 107,
5. The Proletarian City, 134,
6. Public Realm and Popular Culture, 172,
7. The Bourgeois City, 206,
8. The Green Outdoors, 245,
PART TWO. WORLD WAR I AND THE CITY,
9. City in Crisis, 273,
10. Critical Responses, 291,
PART THREE. WELTSTADT–WORLD CITY,
11. Planning the World City, 315,
12. Berlin montage, 367,
13. Work, 411,
14. Commodities and Display, 437,
15. Housing, 463,
16. Mass and Leisure, 508,
17. Technology and Mobility, 551,
18. From Berlin to Germania, 582,
Acknowledgments, 611,
Photo Credits, 619,
Index, 621,

CHAPTER 1

THE METROPOLITAN PANORAMA

In 1887, Jules Laforgue somewhat hesitantly announced the possible emergence of the flâneur in Berlin as a result of the expansion of the city and its growing beauty. Yet flânerie was perhaps already more common than he thought. The novelist Theodor Fontane declared in 1889: "I like to engage in flânerie in the streets of Berlin, mostly without a goal or purpose as is required for real flânerie [Flanieren]." On occasion, however, that strolling takes on more of a purpose, when he declares, "I am also gripped by a desire to study and permit myself to go and inspect all the possible old and new things that lie scattered around the city." And among these things are "panoramas and zoos, parks and statues, front gardens and fountains." On the flat Berlin landscape, few possibilities for natural panoramic views offered themselves. Visitors had to make do, for instance, with ascending the tower of the city hall. Nowadays, it is the cupola of the Reichstag that is the most popular, and in the recent past it was the television tower on the Alexanderplatz. In Fontane's day, and for some decades later, one of the best-known sites for viewing the city was to be found on the Friedrichstrasse. The Kaisergalerie, a substantial arcade opened in 1875, housed a panopticon that presented such novelties as the Prussian defeat of the French army at Metz during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 or the more exotic display around 1900 of "35 Togo negroes, 23 girls, 5 men and 2 children." And within the arcade's pan-opticon three large diorama images of Berlin in various periods were on display in 1888.

Representations and images of the city were to be found not merely in the enclosed panoramas but also in the proliferation of textual images in an expanding world of the press. The "word city" of the feuilletons in newspapers and journals opened up a multiplicity of readings of the city, from panoramic perspectives to more modest attempts to capture the exemplary fragments and sensations of urban life in Berlin. The topographies and the physiognomies of the diverse cultures in the city, and hence the varied readings of the city, were all present in a proliferating newspaper culture of the late nineteenth century onward. In particular, the feuilleton section of the newspapers carried explorations of the physiognomies of the city, whether located in the central city streets such as the Friedrichstrasse or Alexanderplatz or in the suburbs, both bourgeois and industrial. The city as spectacle was served by the advertising in its major newspapers, especially the most popular ones. Urban spectators were also drawn to Berlin's advertising pillars (Litfaßsäulen). As Peter Fritzsche explains, "Two meters taller than anyone in the crowd, topped with a green crown of wrought iron, plastered with the striking colors of art nouveau posters, Litfaßsäulen caught the glances of city people again and again." But much more than their role as advertising medium, the Litfaßsäulen permitted smaller, handwritten notices of everyday dramas to be appended to them, so that "tacked onto 'the last romantic herald,' the paper scraps about ordinary people ... brought human interest to the city street."

At the other end of the spectrum, in newspapers and journals, another reading of the city commenced not from its fragmentary elements but rather from attempts to conceive of the city as a whole, as a more or less coherent conception of the emergent world city. And here the urban reader was often confronted with comparisons with other major cities in order to draw out what was distinctive about the Berlin metropolis. Comparisons could be made in terms of urban growth and expansion, urban topography, built environment, aesthetic form, forms and speed of circulation, and so forth. But more often than not, such comparisons became transposed into urban imaginaries that drew out largely negative features of the new metropolis within which were embedded the dystopian dimensions of a threatening urban modernity.

By 1910 Berlin was easily the largest city in Germany, with a population in excess of 2 million. Surprisingly, the second-largest city, Hamburg, with almost a million inhabitants, was not often compared with Berlin, despite its own cultural development and the architectural innovations introduced by Fritz Schumacher. Within the German Empire there was, however, the third most populous city: Munich, capital of the "democratic south," alternative cultural and artistic capital, symbol of "the other Germany." Although in the process of transformation into a modern city, Munich was not yet a site of large-scale industry. Rather, around 90 percent of all commercial enterprise in 1907 comprised self-employed or small-scale (up to five employees) enterprises. The city was, however, an expanding major cultural and artistic center, which nurtured strong views on the parvenu capital in the north. In a not untypical view from Munich, penned by Marcel Montandon in 1903, for example, Berlin was described as a place where "everything is intensive life, unlimited ambition, energy, a desire to shift mountains, uncontrolled lust to conquest. In Berlin, modern life stands at its height, automatic, splendid, and flashing like a fully loaded cannon. In addition, it contains something fever like, capricious and American."

Yet other elements of a Berlin imaginary were present in the comparisons between Berlin and other metropolitan centers. Mark Twain, who stayed in Berlin in 1892, identified Berlin as "Chicago on the Spree." For Twain, Berlin was a new city even compared with Chicago, a city full of broad, straight streets set in the topography of a flat surface. Over a decade later, Werner Sombart drew a comparison with Vienna as a city of culture in contrast to Berlin as "a suburb of New York," itself "a huge cultural cemetery." Berlin, in this imaginary, manifests the quintessence of "Americanism"—a theme from the mid-nineteenth century onward. In contrast, Alfred Kerr draws a contrast of Berlin with London, then the largest world capital city. Unusually, it is not Berlin that is the dynamic city of rapid traffic movements but London, nor is it Berlin that is the large-scale site of dwelling and consumption.

The view of Berlin from the tower of the city hall reveals another Berlin, which is not that of the...