Metodología Scrum

The Kaiser (Wilhelm II) abdicated on 9^th November 1918, two days before the official armistice. Conservatives or Mittelstand and nationalists felt the loss of the nation’s father figure as the end of certainty, made worse since the Kaiser was also head of the Evangelische Kirche (Protestant Church of Germany). Equally, others rejoiced at his departure as Germany as the symbol of unquestioned authority had gone they could imagine an ideal German future fit for a new century. The abdication was announced by Phillip Sheidermann: “even without the Kaiser’s consent” as a general strike was called and thousands of workers marched down Unter den Linden with revolutionary zeal.²

The fraught father-son relationship featured in expressionist work, regularly found a meaningful ‘end’ in the son’s newborn-freedom with the severance from the father, either by the father’s death or abandonment of his role. Beyond the father figure, any traditional authority had become suspect. Bookbinder noted that the Council of Intellectuals, a body comprising mostly of expressionist writers and artists, “demanded the abolition of all academic institutions [and] the nationalization of all theatres”.³ The absence of the traditional patriarchal figure in Germany created the illusion of an ‘orphaned’ state, which the Right took advantage of as they sanctioned the ‘Fatherland’ itself as an authority, whereas the Left promoted Internationalism and brotherhood between all men, albeit under the guidance of ‘un-German’ male role models such as Lenin or Marx.⁴

The predominant mood immediately post-war was one of grief. This atmosphere seemed to pervade all aspects and strata of German society as a direct response to defeat in the war and its repercussions. The militarism and modernity that had been proudly associated with the new century had left a nasty ‘after-taste’. Any utopian ideas about how machines would lead to a perfect future were left in serious doubt. As well as distrust towards new technology, national pride had been shattered and many Germans continued focusing their hatred on wartime ‘enemies’, blaming political leaders or looking for internal scapegoats. Over a million Germans had been killed, and the ‘acceptance’ of blame, the massive financial

reparations and the redrawing of the European map in favour of Germany’s war enemies resulted in the growth of collective resentment. A new form of virulent nationalism emerged that persistently blamed those European nations and ‘races’ that had supposedly profited from the war. Within this group, later to spawn the National Socialists, the lines were clear and familiar: everything German was good and everything non-German was bad.

The outcome of the war provoked fury not only on the Right but also on the Left, which questioned the legitimacy of the war itself. The progressive discontent that had grown within the ranks of the Wehrmacht worsened upon the soldiers’ return. Many of them who marched into Berlin were shell-shocked and/or wounded and all were hungry and tired. They found the capital crippled by poverty, disease and neglect.

Food rations had been cut again, coal was non-existent and the influenza epidemic or Blitzkatarrh was sweeping through the city and claiming 300 people – mostly young women – a day. The centre looked shabby and desolate, broken windows remained smashed, people fainted on the pavement while dead horses were ripped apart and slabs of meat carried off to frozen homes…and crime began to soar in the frenzied struggle for food.⁵

Richie highlighted the impact of influenza on the malnourished city’s populace, indeed, loss and death became what the author called an “obsession” and “violence [became]

mundane”.⁶ Reminders of the brutality of war were highly visible as amputees and other horrifically disfigured men begged in the streets or played chess outside bars, yet, it seemed that as Berliners grew used to ‘normal’ violence their appetite for more sensational aspects of death and mayhem grew insatiable; popular fiction in books and films often featured crazed killers, sadism and sexual violence.⁷

Entire families, made homeless by destitution, a situation often exacerbated by the

‘disappearance’ of the man or men of their households. The problem of impoverishment was made more serious by the influx of returning German soldiers looking for employment within the city. In the late Summer of 1920 there was a ‘homeless revolt’ against the shelter on Fröbelstrasse, as each person who had sought cover for the night was required to sign a document which stipulated that if no alternative accommodation had been found by the would-be tenant within five days the signatory would be liable, as law decreed, to be jailed for “up to six weeks in prison” then transferred to a workhouse.⁸ A wave of dissatisfaction with the status quo within Germany caused many to search for new political ideas on how to

re-build the fledgling nation, including the new Soviet model based on Marxist theory and Bolshevist practice.⁹

Much is made of the extreme opposition of the country’s Right and Left factions, although both were united against Weimar’s more moderate constitutional government led by their top-hatted President, Friedrich Ebert, and coups were a constant threat. His working-class roots annoyed the Right and his ‘appeasement’ of the establishment infuriated the Left. In Berlin, there was a ‘tradition’ that no one could trust a leader who did not wear a well-decorated military uniform. The National Socialists and Communists and several other bands of men of the same ilk were similarly idealistic, opinionated and frustrated with the regime. Bands of these politically motivated extremists marched around the streets of Berlin, mostly in private armies. The capital had already acquired a reputation as an unruly place, full of radicals and subversives, but in view of national defeat and in light of Russia’s 1917 Communist Revolution, Berlin’s chaos rose to new dimensions, both at its political core and on the street. The new republican government felt it necessary to convene in the relatively more peaceful town of Weimar within the province of Thüringen (Thuringia).

In an attempt to quell the surge of uprisings against the new government, it “semi-officially”

sanctioned ‘soldiers’ into the streets of Berlin.¹⁰ This Freikorps was an ‘army’ modelled on the young, physically ‘perfect’ officers who had led what Richie termed as “suicide attacks”

in the war.¹¹ German soldiers are discussed at length in Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, and he considered them the embodiment of everything constructed as wholly male, traits that were traditionally considered good and defined as an opposite force of everything bad – hence feminine. Thereby, in Berlin, the ‘body’ of the soldier was launched as the shape and sound of masculinity in extremis.

The noise of constant marching and chanting of these ‘soldiers’ in the streets was incessant, so too the gun and mortar fire as one military-style faction opened up on another; it was to the background of this ‘encouraging’ noise that many men felt under obligation to join the throng to counter the ‘opposition’ or to prove their masculinity. There was also an atmosphere of total confusion: Richie wrote that “Crowds of young men rode around in lorries terrorizing people and demanding that they ‘join the revolution’ but as they all wore

bright red few could tell if they were Social Democrats, Spartacus members or something else entirely.”¹²

The hyperinflation crisis that started during the war due to Imperial fiscal policy was made worse by post-war reparations and exacerbated by strikes in 1923.¹³ Money was printed in a futile attempt to ease the situation but only made matters worse and inflation spiralled.

Suicides increased as life savings were made worthless, people spent any money they had immediately knowing it would be useless the following morning and bartered their valuables for food. A black market economy quickly developed and crime and prostitution soared.

Fundamentally, it ended the idea of the traditional German work ethic and saving for the future. Middle-class women and their families no longer saved money for their dowries rendering it unnecessary to preserve ‘virtue’ for their wedding nights. Coupled with this, due to fatalities during the war there was also a ‘surplus’ of single women against numbers of men, all of who had to find a way to support themselves and often dependents financially.

Female ‘emancipation’ was somewhat inevitable as pre-war male ‘protection’ ceased to be an option.

Berliners had to watch as foreigners lived the high-life and bought prime property, as Richie explained:

Berliners experienced an inversion of values and a new moral relativism far more acute than that seen after the 1873 crash and by the mid 1920s many of the social ties which had bound the Berlin upper and middle class together had completely broken down….The higher the prices rose the greater the abandon, the madder the nightclubs, the faster the dancesteps, the louder the jazz bands, the more plentiful the cocaine. But this was not the joyful dancing of the so-called ‘Golden Twenties’; it was an insane dance of forgetting, a dance of despair.¹⁴

Prostitution grew beyond its ‘normal’ bounds as every desire was catered for, including sex with children or pregnant women, as one’s body often became one’s sole asset and currency in the crisis.

In October 1923 the young music student Kurt Weill wrote a letter to his teacher Ferruccio Busoni reporting that the price of an average concert hall ticket was the “fantasy price” of

“up to a billion marks”. He also observed that even in this desperation “One glance into the audiences of the concert halls makes one realize that Berlin will not give up its music”. He went on to say that each audience dressed themselves akin to the composer they were about

to hear, “But what all their faces do have in common is a touching look of blissfulness, that despite of all that’s been happening they’re still able to sit in an illuminated concert hall and are allowed to listen to music.”¹⁵ Soon after, with the introduction of the Rentenmark, the suspension of reparations payments, a new budget and currency restrictions the economy appeared to stabilise; the addition of the Dawes` Plan followed and the inflation crisis eased.¹⁶

Berlin expanded in the autumn of 1920, incorporating many outer suburbs into central or Old Berlin. This made the German capital the third largest city in Europe with a population of 3,858,000.¹⁷ The expansion further aided the geographically duplicitous nature of the city along with integrated transport links under the Berliner-Verkehrs-Betriebe (BVG) in the form of streetcars, over-and underground trains and buses. In 1923 commercial flights began to operate out of Tempelhof airport and a few years later Lufthansa was created and soon operated to fifteen destinations. Transport and speed became a focus for collective pride and every record of speed or distance was joyously celebrated. There were thousands of cars in the city by 1928, adding to the appearance of dynamism; special maps of the newly expanded city and other car paraphernalia and motor-wear were not only bought by motorists but became fashionable. Schlör remarked that the “rapid succession of inventions immerses the city in an ever brighter light generating the sensation of living ‘fast’”.¹⁸

The underlining theme in Andreas Huyssen’s book After the Great Divide was the link between women and mass culture. The 1920s was the era that marked both the biggest shift of employment between the sexes and rise in consumerism for industrially made products and culture. The new technologies and industries brought about further changes in employment demographics and fiscal representation between genders. Women, many of whom had stepped in men’s jobs during the war became less inclined to stay at home before marriage; the female workforce became more employable than the male for their flexibility, communicative skills and willingness to take lower wages or part-time hours. Machines had taken over many of the heavy jobs in the factories that had previously employed hundreds of men, while light industry work, that had replaced many crafts of yesteryear, could be done by either sex but offered relatively low wages. The large new department stores that sold

‘everything’ and the many other service industries such as hotels and restaurants offered more women employment opportunities and the administration and secretarial posts

presented still more. Women working in the entertainment industry reflected this new phenomenon as Large described: “the kicklines [were] just body parts in mechanised unison, the show business equivalent of busy hands over a factory conveyor belt.”

As in previous decades German Jews continued to experience a double life: on one hand they were as fully assimilated citizens, often notable in banking and business circles as well as in the arts, sciences and medicine but on the other, a ‘race’ apart. In Germany, the Jewish population never rose above one percent, and though their visibility seemed greater in Berlin, Jews never accounted for more than five percent of the city’s inhabitants. Jews had been promised equal rights in 1812 and 1871, but these were only officially granted after the war. This development was not welcomed by all; Friedrich wrote “To a nation shattered by defeat and revolution, the emergence of Jews in public life seemed somehow a sinister development, quite apart from the old religious antagonisms.”²⁰

This feeling of something sinister at work often became attributed to various people or groups of people; the ‘devil’ was seen everywhere. For example, Friederich quoted “an observer” describing the Polish Jew, Karl Radek:

behind his mask of ‘youthful ardour’ there lay an expression that resembled partly a wolf and partly ‘a street urchin’ after a particularly successful prank. A truly impertinent, amusing, and frightening Mephistophelian face.²¹

Radek was an envoy of Lenin and certainly Communist, but when the Jewish cabinet minister Walter Rathanau was assassinated, the German Chancellor, Joseph Wirth made speech in the Reichstag, after which he pointed his finger, proclaiming, “There sits the enemy, where Mephisto dribbles his poison into the wounds of the people, there is no doubt the enemy sits on the right.”²² Just as Jews were blamed for the ills of Capitalism and Bolshevism, the devil was implicated as ringleader for both the Right and Left; the figures of the ‘clever Jew’ and the ‘cunning’ Devil became ever increasingly interchangeable.

Unlike assimilated Jews, the Ostjuden were a closed community, who had fled for decades to Berlin from many Eastern states (see chapter 1) but there was a new wave of immigrants after the war bringing the total number to approximately 80,000 in all Germany.²⁴ Before his assassination, Walter Rathenau, as many German Jews had, expressed his distaste for these foreigners “…they live half willingly in their invisible ghetto, not a living limb of the

people, but an alien organism in its body”.²³ Roth roported “All in all some 50,000 people have come to Germany from the East since the war. I have to say, it can seem as though there were millions, the impression of so much wretchedness is double, treble, tenfold”.²⁵ In Roth’s 1921 article ‘The Orient on Hirtenstrasse’, he described Berlin’s “strange and mournful ghetto world”.²⁶ Roth, characteristically tired of Weimar Berlin’s sensational activities, delved instead into uncelebrated aspects of Berlin life. The strange attire, resolute exoticism and remoteness of these people made them appear a race apart to Roth and others, even to German Jews.