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      William II dreamed of filling every street in his city with grand statues and monuments to rival those of the ancient world. For him these were an important way of projecting historical legitimacy, of demonstrating the power and the might of the German capital and its new place in the world. He did not understand that since the early nineteenth century great and profound works of art had no longer been asked to fit within a given tradition, but were increasingly judged by their ability to break from it. Thanks largely to Romantic notions of the creative spirit, artists were now supposed to be original, to be emancipated, to be ‘free’. William disregarded this trend; for him art was to reflect the historical greatness of the Prussian state, and of the new capital city of Berlin.¹¹¹ The huge nationalistic monuments he sponsored were meant to remind troublesome Berliners of the glorious victories of the past, and would become the focus for parades and ceremonies of all kinds.

      When the angels in Wim Wenders’s classic Berlin film Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) met to look over the lonely city they chose one of its most impressive vantage points, the top of the Siegessäule (Victory Column) which towers high above the Brandenburg Gate. The massive structure was built to commemorate Bismarck’s victorious campaigns against Denmark, Austria and France, and symbolized the pomp and splendour of the imperial capital. The red Swedish granite structure was decorated with captured cannon barrels and enhanced by mosaics depicting a glorified version of the victories of the Prussian army throughout the ages, and it was topped by a rather beefy golden Goddess of Victory. It was meant to commemorate the unification of Germany but, in the spirit of true Prussian chauvinism, failed to depict the contribution of any other state. But this was only one of dozens of huge monuments put up by the Kaiser.

      William could not tolerate boring single figures in the ‘old style’, and the works he commissioned were always of heroes (usually Prussian) standing amongst cannons, draping flags, angels, fearsome animals and anything else that could be squeezed in. His favourite sculptor was Reinhold Begas, who designed everything from the Schiller Memorial to the Bismarck Monument on the Kaiserplatz and, the most overblown of all, the national monument for Kaiser William I. In this ‘William the Victorious’ peeked out from a plethora of angels, horses and enormous lions, earning it the name ‘William in the Lion’s Den’. The Kaiser generously awarded his favourites with honours and medals of all kinds; in 1905 he even awarded Count Gortz, the designer of the ghastly Coligny Memorial in front of the Schloss the Order of the Black Eagle. The Kaiser was not particularly tactful and his commission of a new ‘Roland’ was one of his less sensitive projects. In medieval Hanseatic cities a Roland statue had been a symbol not only of free trade but also of the political independence of citizens. The free city of Bremen still has a Roland statue in the town square, complete with the spikes on its knees which were once used to measure standardized lengths of cloth. But soon after the Hohenzollerns took over Berlin in 1440 they destroyed all symbols of local autonomy and threw the Roland into the river. The original has never been found but as a goodwill gesture William commissioned an 11-metre-high red granite structure to take its place. History was now a device for the instilling of national pride. The history it represented bore little resemblance to actual events but had become meaningless kitsch. This exaggerated form of historicization was personified in the most outlandish monument of the era, the Siegesallee or ‘Victory Avenue’.

      William was convinced that Berlin had risen to greatness because of his own ancestors, and the monument was designed to commemorate their influence throughout the ages. The lane was 700 metres long and stretched through the Tiergarten from the Königsplatz to Kemperplatz, along the axis of the Siegessäule and the site of the new Roland fountain. It was flanked by thirty-two busy Carrara marble statues of Hohenzollern figures, from the twelfth-century Albert the Bear to Kaiser William I. Berliners soon named it the ‘Puppenallee’ or Doll’s Lane, and laughed to discover that the statue of the fourteenth-century Margrave Heinrich dem Kinde looked exactly like the satirical caricaturist Heinrich Zille. Oskar Bie, who published the Neue deutsche Rundschau, said in 1902 that ‘there are only five or six [of the figures] that could affect a modern person’, while Rathenau criticized the ‘feudalism’ of the project. The marble statues of the Siegesallee were dismantled by the Allies in 1947 and some have recently been discovered buried like corpses in the mud of the pumping station at the Landwehr Canal.

      When he opened the lane William made a speech in the Schloss to promote ‘International Respect for German Sculpture’. He began by proclaiming his Berlin art to be ‘of a quality rarely seen even during the Renaissance’, and compared Michelangelo unfavourably with his own Begas. He warned ‘his’ artists against going down the wrong path of ‘new art’, and finally declared that ‘art which transgresses the laws and barriers outlined by Me, ceases to be an art’.¹¹² William had wanted to make Berlin the greatest city in the world. He believed he had succeeded. He claimed to have ‘watched with sharp eyes’ all developments in art and stated that although he had seen many great cities Berlin had now become the ‘most beautiful’.¹¹³ Instead, he made it at best a laughing stock and at worst a hated symbol of pomp, arrogance and Prussian militarism.

      Bie was critical of the political control of art; while in the Florence of the Medicis the nobles and patrons had remained separate from the artists and craftsmen, he said, in the Kaiser’s Berlin the Siegesallee was a last vestige of the long-dead Louis XIV – Kultur and the Meyerheim Exhibition was little more than ‘dog and ape theatre-art’. For Bie the official art was fighting against the Secession movement, through which freedom ‘opens its small door’.¹¹⁴ Przervwa-Tetmajer said that the ‘appalling and crass Victory Boulevard with its padded officers on parade and its grim brutal seriousness is an excellent image of Prussia’. He continued: ‘This is the most ghastly city known to me and every time I am there I get the same impression.’ Even Princess Bluächer said, ‘Berlin seems so ostentatiously clean and parvenu, and its absolute lack of style verges on vulgarity.’ For his part Jules Laforgue complained that all he could see from the Princess Palace where he was living were ‘pillars and statues everywhere … I have five windows, and all I see are monuments surrounded by officers with monocles’. Kraszewski deplored the fashion for military statues: ‘it is impossible to have a civilian hero here,’ he wrote; ‘even the monuments and statues wear uniforms’ – and even Berolina, the armour-clad Goddess of Berlin, was ‘decidedly masculine, strong and obese with a serious expression’. Karl Baedeker refused to award even a single star to any of the Kaiser’s monuments, stating that Berlin could ‘not compete in antiquity or historical interest with other great European capitals’.¹¹⁵ His only positive comment was to say Berlin was a ‘model of cleanliness’ – faint praise indeed. Berlin was pompous not grand, theatrical not regal, showy not elegant, and bombastic not magnificent; its real treasures lay in its new industrial architecture and in the attempts to bring modern art to the city, not in the Kaiser’s grandiose attempts to outdo the Renaissance. It was a city which was trying too hard to impress and by so doing made itself an object of ridicule; as Fontane put it in 1898, ‘as far as Berlin is concerned, all chicness and elegance is gone’.

      The insults cut deep. Baedeker’s snub deeply offended William and made him even more determined to prove Berlin’s worth on the international scene. If he could not do it through culture, he could do it by force. His mood changed from friendly competitiveness to aggressive nationalism and many Berliners who felt isolated and resentful began to find comfort in this increasingly belligerent chauvinism. The Kaiser and his representatives had trained them well. In a questionnaire to mark the turn of the century, Berliners were asked who was the most important German of the century; most named Bismarck and then Kaiser William I. The greatest thinker was said to be Helmuth von Moltke, who beat Darwin and Schopenhauer. The greatest artist was Adolph von Menzel, the greatest sculptor Reinhold Begas. The most important event in world history had been the creation of the German Reich, thus the most important event for Berlin was being named capital of a united Germany.¹¹⁶ The answers were indicative of the tragic combination of provincialism and fervent nationalism which would sweep the city in the next decade and would push Berliners on to fight in the First World War. In a few short decades Berlin had grown from a backwater into the most powerful capital on the continent, but this brilliant flame was about to be extinguished in the bloody trenches of France and Flanders.