One of the ironies of Berlin’s identification with Weimar is that the capital’s financial posture within the German nation and Prussian state was less favorable than it had been in the imperial era. Under republican law, Berlin, like other municipalities, was no longer able to collect a surcharge on national income taxes, which had once been a major source of revenue. This hit the capital hardest because it had to provide extensive services for the various governmental bureaucracies located there. Mayor Böss complained that Berlin could not adequately fulfill its duties as a capital because it was kept on too short a fiscal leash by national and state leaders. His complaints, however, fell on deaf ears. Konrad Adenauer, mayor of Cologne, spoke for many of his colleagues when he observed: “Berlin has an enormous income through corporate taxes because, God knows, everything is concentrated there.” As we shall see, when Adenauer served as West Germany’s first chancellor between 1949 and 1963, he fully retained his aversion toward the metropolis on the Spree.
Weimar Culture
Mayor Böss was forever in search of new revenues for Berlin because, in addition to sponsoring ambitious housing and social welfare projects, he wished to make the municipal government a major player in the city’s cultural life alongside agencies of the Prussian state, which had traditionally dominated the scene. He poured money into a new municipal opera house in the Bismarckstrasse, which competed with the Prussian-backed houses on Unter den Linden and the Platz der Republik, and he funded a new city art museum to supplement the state institutions on the Museum Island. Hoping to convince Max Liebermann to donate one of his paintings to the city collection, he arranged for the artist to be named an honorary citizen of Berlin. During the course of personally delivering this honor to the artist’s studio, Böss removed a small oil from the wall and put it in his briefcase—a playful hint, he thought, of the quid pro quo expected from the painter. Liebermann, however, failed to get the joke: he sent the city a bill for 800 marks for the painting.
Böss was justified in focusing so much attention on cultural issues because culture, broadly defined, was the primary arena in which Weimar Berlin was making its name in the world. Although other German cities retained important cultural traditions and attractions, none of them could remotely match the Republican capital’s clout on the world stage. Fully aware of this fact, Berliners often disparaged the cultural offerings of other cities, especially those of its old rival, Munich. Writing in 1922, an observer from Berlin argued that Munich, previously “overestimated” as an art center, was now “nothing but a provincial town without an intellectual core.” A 1924 article in the Berlin periodical
During the Stresemann era Berlin owed its up-to-date cosmopolitan image partly to its continuing absorption of American influences, which, at least in mass culture, set the standard for modernity. Commenting on this trend, Ilya Ehrenburg called Berlin “an apostle of Americanism.” Of course, to those Germans who believed that “America” stood for all that was wrong with the modern world, Berlin’s ongoing Americanization simply confirmed its status as a trashy and vulgar sink of iniquity. It was on his return from a trip to America that Munich’s Cardinal Faulhaber called Berlin the embodiment of “babylonian mongrelism.”
