The German Genius

Siegesallee and himself produced drawings for the figures, which should, he insisted, resemble his contemporary friends and supporters of royalty. Which is why the Elector Friedrich I, founder of the Hohenzollern dynasty, came to look like Philipp zu Eulenberg, the Kaiser’s closest friend. Many thought the whole project embarrassing and nicknamed the street “Die Puppenallee”—the avenue of the dolls. The Kaiser’s reputation also suffered: this was a man, Berliners quipped, “who could not attend a funeral without wanting to be the corpse.” 18
    Kaiser Wilhelm II saw it as his duty—and his right—to be involved in all aspects of Berlin’s artistic and intellectual life. 19 He saw himself as particularly suited to this because he felt he had a gift for drawing and for writing plays. He designed ships and produced a play of his own, titled Sardanapal , in which the central character is a king who sets fire to himself rather than be captured by the enemy. Visiting dignitaries would be forced to sit through performances of his play; among the dignitaries was his uncle, King Edward VII of England, who fell fast asleep until the raucous fire scene, when he suddenly awoke—and called for the fire department to be summoned. In artistic and cultural matters Wilhelm was a backward-looking archconservative, and his constant meddling eventually provoked a backlash. 20
    In the theater, matters came to a head in 1889. “[That year] was the year of the German theatrical revolution, just as 1789 was the year of the revolution of humanity,” wrote Otto Brahm, founder of Berlin’s Freie Bühne (Free Stage) movement, somewhat overstating his case to make his point. The Free Stage was a private club and not subject to censorship as public theaters were. For that reason Brahm felt able to produce Ibsen’s Ghosts , otherwise banned because it dealt with syphilis. Emboldened, he next tried Gerhart Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang ( Before Dawn ), an exploration of everyday life among the working classes. Hauptmann (1862–1946), born in Silesia (now part of Poland), would win the Nobel Prize in 1912. He was one of the founders of Realism, again one of those terms that evoke little reaction nowadays, though it was very different in the Kaiser’s Germany. 21 At the performances of Before Dawn , brawls were reported in the auditorium between the advocates and opponents of such modernism. 22
    Brahm was so encouraged by these reactions that he bought a public theater, the Deutsches Theater, and began mounting ever more political plays. The climax came in 1894 with a production of Hauptmann’s Die Weber ( The Weavers ), a ferocious indictment of the social conditions condemning Silesian textile workers to extreme poverty in the 1840s. 23 The play was banned by the police on the grounds that “it was likely to stir up the lower orders.” Judges overturned the ban after conceding that “the lower orders” could scarcely attend a play where the admission charge was well beyond their means. The Weavers ( De Waber in the Silesian dialect) proved a great success. 24
    The Kaiser hated what Hauptmann represented. At the end of an evening, he thought, people should leave a performance “not discouraged at the recollection of mournful scenes of bitter disappointment, but purified, elevated, and with renewed strength to fight for the ideals which every man strives to realise.” On the grounds that his plays contravened these self-evident rules, Wilhelm had Hauptmann arrested in 1892 “for subversion.” The courts, to their credit, could find little reason to keep the writer in jail, so the Kaiser tried other methods of intimidation and vetoed Hauptmann’s award of the Schiller Prize for dramatic excellence, giving it instead to one of his favorite hacks. 25
    Much the same happened with Max Reinhardt, a Jew from Austria who had arrived in Berlin at the turn of the century intending to be an actor. Reinhardt (1873–1943), born Max Goldmann, arrived when modern theater was taking off in all directions—Wagner, Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg. For him, Berlin was “Vienna multiplied by more than ten,” as he wrote to a friend. Reinhardt never succeeded as an actor, but he turned out to be a brilliant director after he founded his own cabaret called Sound and Smoke . This brought commissions from the legitimate stage, in particular the Deutsches Theater, which he took over from Brahm in 1905 and where he changed the offerings from grim