Berlin полностью

Wonderful Friedrichstrasse Station, when one stands on the outside platform over the Spree, where one sees nothing of the ‘architecture’ but only the huge surface of the glass walls; and the contrast to the shabby confusion of the surrounding buildings is especially lovely when twilight shadows cause the rag-tag environs to merge into a single whole and the many tin windowpanes begin to reflect the setting sun, bringing the whole area to colorful, shimmering life, stretching afar over the dark, low, monstrous cleft out of which the broad-chested locomotives threateningly emerge. And then what an intensification when one enters the darkened hall, which is still suffused with hesitant daylight: the huge, gradually arching form indistinct in a murky haze, a sea of gray hues just tinged with color, from the brightness of rising steam to the heavy darkness of the roof-skin and the absolute black of the bellowing engines arriving from the East; but above them, glowing in the murky surface of the glazing like a sharp, red shimmering pinnacle, appears the gable of a building, set luridly ablaze by the evening sun.

Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, circa 1900

If Berlin was enamored with its trains and railway stations, the city also developed a romance with the automobile, which was to transform urban life in the twentieth century even more than the railroads had done in the nineteenth. With time the German capital would become one of the most car-crazy cities in Europe, despite its excellent public transportation system.

Berlin registered its first automobile in 1892 to a department store owner named Rudolf Herzog, who obtained the registration number 1A-1. Unfortunately for Her-zog, Kaiser Wilhelm insisted that his car, a Daimler he bought in 1898, should carry this distinctive registration. Because Herzog refused voluntarily to cede the number, Wilhelm took him to court to force a transfer. The court rejected the emperor’s suit on the ground that obtaining a particular automobile license did not belong to the traditional rights of the sovereign. While this may be taken as a setback for absolutism, the very fact that the case was raised at all showed once again that in modern Berlin the remnants of feudalism remained very much in evidence.

When the kaiser hit the streets of Berlin in his new Daimler, whose horn was tuned to the thunder-motif from Wagner’s Das Reingold, motor-driven conveyances were just beginning to make headway against traditional horse-drawn vehicles. Most Berliners laughed when the first motor-taxi was introduced in 1899, and six years later there were still 52,000 workhorses in the city. In the first decade of the new century, however, the internal combustion engine began a steady conquest of the streets. In 1905 a motor bus line was in operation on the Friedrichstrasse; hundreds of people gathered at its stops beating one another with umbrellas for a chance to jump aboard. The “luxury bus” service that began in 1909 carrying passengers from the café Victoria downtown to Luna Park on the Hallensee became a prime attraction for residents and visitors alike. Private cars took a little longer to make their presence felt because they were very expensive, with even the simplest models fetching 2,700 marks. Moreover, at first they were not allowed to go faster than fifteen kilometers per hour, which was the top speed for carriages. Yet by 1913 there were already enough cars on the road that policemen had to be stationed at the main intersections to control the traffic, and after the war Berlin would become the first city in Europe to have a traffic light.

While cars and motor buses were conquering Berlin’s streets, an even more spectacular harbinger of the new age, airships, made their first appearance in the skies overhead. When one of the earliest zeppelins, whose construction was financed by public subscription, landed on the outskirts of the capital in 1909, Berliners went wild. Merchants turned the event into a commercial occasion, filling their stores with zeppelin hats, ties, pocket watches, scarves, toys, and cigars. The police warned that people staring up at airships made perfect targets for roving pickpockets, but nothing could detract from the excitement of these amazing machines, which symbolized Germany’s technological brilliance.