* Germany was especially advanced in chemicals, now linked to medicine and agriculture. In 1897, a single German chemist, working at a dye-manufacturing company, Bayer, in Elberfeld, created two of the essential drugs of modern life: that August, Felix Hoffman, twenty-nine, synthesized an ancient pain-killing tonic, salicin, extracted from willow tree bark, to produce aspirin, the antipyretic, anti-inflammatory, analgesic drug that enriched Bayer and conquered the world. He also synthesized diamorphine to create a less addictive version of morphine, which he called heroin after heroisch – ‘heroic’ – for its euphoric effects. (Heroin was marketed as a cough mixture until after the First World War and was only banned in the USA in 1924.) In 1907, Paul Erlich, a German-Jewish associate of Koch, seeking what he called a ‘magic bullet’ that killed a bacterium but not other cells, discovered that synthetic compounds could cure first sleeping sickness and then syphilis; he teamed up with the chemical conglomerate Hoechst to mass-produce the first synthetic antibiotics. In 1908, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber created ammonium nitrate to replace natural nitrates such as guano for use as fertilizers. The chemical magnate Carl Bosch developed the Haber–Bosch process to manufacture a substance that helped intensify modern farming and enable it to feed billions. This truly was an intense agro-revolution that improved nutrition and, combined with better healthcare, cleaner water, vaccination, electricity, refrigeration and petrol engines, powered an exponential rise in population. It is believed food production increased eighteen-fold, mostly after 1900. In 1800 there were 900 million on earth; by 1900, there were 1.65 billion – and it went on rising: in 2022, there were 8 billion. The growth in cities, particularly those in the English-speaking world, was remarkable. In 1890, London and New York were the two clear million-peopled cities, though Chicago was close behind. By 1920, there were twenty million-plus mega-cities; fifty-one by 1940; and 226 by 1985.
It is estimated that the Haber–Bosch process helps generate a third of global food production, which in turn feeds around three billion people. Yet these same life-giving chemicals were also essential for killing. The fertilizers were used in manufacturing explosives; Haber developed chlorine used as a weapon in the First World War; Bosch went on to head the BASF chemicals group and in 1925 founded IG Farben, a new conglomerate that also merged with Mayer and which later manufactured Zyklon-B, the gas used to murder Jews during the Holocaust. Such are the multiple possibilities of science.
ACT NINETEEN
1.6 BILLION
Hohenzollerns, Krupps, Ottomans, Tennos and Songs
DARLING, HARPIST, TUTU AND CONCETTINA: WILLY AND HIS FRIENDS
It started with Friedrich Krupp, son of the great cannoneer, Wilhelm’s partner in the arming of his forces and the building of his ships, Meister of 50,000 workers at Essen. Krupp was married with children, but he spent much of his time enjoying a promiscuous gay life at Capri and in Berlin hotels. In Germany, as in every other European country, homosexuality was illegal and could be prosecuted under the Criminal Code’s inhumane paragraph 175. It was also taboo in this macho Pietist society, leaving gays vulnerable to both arrest and blackmail.
When the socialist press started to spread rumours, Wilhelm advised Krupp to avoid Capri, but then the Meister’s wife, Margarethe, received anonymous letters and photographs revealing Krupp’s orgies. She appealed to the kaiser and tried to seize the company. Instead the kaiser colluded in her confinement in a lunatic asylum, Krupp thanking him for ‘the kind and gentle way in which Your Majesty intervened on my behalf’. In November 1902, socialist journalists exposed ‘Krupp on Capri’, naming a young barber as his lover. A week later Krupp committed suicide. The kaiser, having been assured that Krupp was ‘asexual’ even if he had ‘an exceptionally soft’ nature, attended the funeral of this ‘truly German man’, attacked the socialists and then, recognizing the Krupp dynasty as a strategic asset, presided over the succession. Krupp had left two daughters: the fourteen-year-old Bertha was the sole heir. Wilhelm chose her husband, Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, a diplomat, who on their marriage in 1907 assumed the name Krupp and proved a skilful magnate, providing the guns for the First World War – nicknamed Big Berthas by the troops – and then embracing Hitler.
