The social price, however, was extremely high. The new currency completely swept away whatever paper marks people still possessed, capping, for many Germans, a process of progressive impoverishment. To keep the new currency stable, moreover, the national, state, and municipal governments adopted strict austerity programs, including unprecedented reductions in public spending. In Berlin alone some 39,000 city employees, among them high-level civil servants, lost their jobs. Many never found employment again, ensuring that the jobless rate in the capital would remain dangerously high even during the period of relative prosperity between 1924 and 1929.
5
THE WORLD CITY OF ORDER AND BEAUTY
—Ilya Ehrenburg,
THE HORRORS OF THE EARLY Weimar era that Berlin’s artists so faithfully—and perhaps all too eagerly—recorded did not entirely fade away when the political and economic conditions stabilized in the mid-1920s. The capital’s streets were still crowded with underage prostitutes, crippled beggars, and vulgar plutocrats. Yet the city, relying extensively on American loans, now undertook significant modernization and building projects that had been deferred during the Great Inflation. In the process it added between 80,000 and 100,000 new residents a year, pushing the population over the 4 million mark in 1925. Berlin now harbored one-fifteenth of Germany’s total population, one-twelfth of its large factories, and one-tenth of its employees. Politically it evolved into a bastion of pro-Republican sentiment: “Weimar,” originally posed as a safe alternative to Berlin, became almost synonymous with the capital. The city’s cultural life became even more open to outside influences—again from America but also from the young Soviet Union, which offered visions of harmonious social progress to compete with America’s survival-of-the-fittest technocracy.
Unfortunately, many progressive-minded Berliners mistakenly assumed that the rest of the nation thought as they did. In reality, however, the industrial concentration, economic rationalization, cultural cosmopolitanism, and pro-Republican politics that shaped Weimar Berlin were not nearly so warmly embraced outside the capital as inside it. The German capital had long been attacked as too big and too foreign, and the attacks escalated over the Weimar period as the city became yet more “alien” in its values. A brochure published in Karlsruhe, for example, denounced the Spree metropolis as a frightening cross between “Chikago und Moskau,” a nasty mixture of “Amerikanismus und Bolshevismus.” Thus Berlin’s claim to stand for Germany seemed more problematical than ever, at least at home. Worried about this gulf between capital and nation, Kurt Tucholsky advised his fellow Berlin intellectuals to “radiate energy in the provinces instead of patting themselves on the back.” They should, he said, respond to the provincial outcry against the capital by speaking out “with the power of Berlin, which is light, to the provinces, where it is dark.” But what if the provinces preferred it in the dark? And what if the light from Berlin was rather like that cast by the moon: visible only under clear skies and ultimately dependent on an outside source?
The Era of Fulfillment
In August 1923 Gustav Stresemann, with three months still to serve as chancellor, also took up the office of foreign minister, which he held until his death in 1929. It is for his service as foreign minister that he is best remembered. Although he was intent upon restoring Germany’s status as a great power, he sought to do so not by saber rattling but by negotiation. By fulfilling Germany’s treaty obligations to the Western Powers (he remained hostile to Poland and opposed accepting Germany’s revised border with that nation) he hoped to win reductions in reparations and an end to the restrictions on German sovereignty. In 1924 he helped to broker the Dawes Plan, which provided for fixed reparations payments along with generous American loans; he was also the chief German negotiator behind the Locarno Pact (1925), which confirmed the inviolability of the Franco-German and Franco-Belgian borders and the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland; and in 1926 he orchestrated Germany’s entry into the League of Nations.
