The disappearance of the individual in the totality is the most advantageous characteristic of the city – hence the freedom, the independence of the individual who doesn’t need to pay attention to small-city, narrow-minded prejudices. A multifaceted, general social life – this is the impression that the frenetic hustle and bustle of the capital city makes upon the foreign visitor. In Berlin’s open, public community life, there is no trace of a certain narrow expression of partisanship, whether pietism or irreverence, whether servile Prussianism or radical Jacobinism. These elements are in and of themselves present, but only as small atoms in a large body. Certain elements are less than desirable, but life in general in a big city is pleasant, and doubly pleasant in Berlin, more than any other German city, because here the earnest and striving spirit makes it all the more exciting. The stinking gutters and the dust of the streets in summer are without a doubt an unpleasant extra, but those who always link Berlin to these things are forgetting that life doesn’t happen in the gutters and dust. The open community life is the pulse of this city. Out in the public streets everything surges and roars chaotically, the noble and the lowly, rich and poor: no one is limited by others. Only in the domestic arena do the differences of class become apparent. The high aristocracy, the cream, as they call themselves, have their residences in certain parts of Friedrichstadt. Their main part of town is Unter den Linden and on that part of the Wilhelmstrasse which is next to the Linden. You can see how small the influence of this class is in that it consists of one and a half streets, and even has to share these with others. Unter den Linden has pulled in the powerful middle class, and on the other end of the Wilhelmstrasse, where the Halle Gate is, you can already find some proletarian holes in the wall. The middle class, the shop owners and the industrialists, have expanded into Königstadt and further outwards past Luisenstadt. The proletariat consistently follows on the heels of this caste, and you can find them in the attics and cellars of the trading houses, as well as in the shacks next to the factories. Only a part of the proletariat and its bleak poverty makes itself visible within this society, outside the gates of the northwest section of the city. Misery is in its final, most terrifying form there. Everything that happens here is connected with the police and the courts, because the chains of poverty are bound to the barren moor of crime. These pariahs hear nothing of the effervescence and fire of the inner city. When they visit the inner city, their trail is marked by the blood of the forces of law and order and attacks on the property and lives of the city’s inhabitants.
[ . . . ]
print version
return to list
previous document