Walter Leistikow (1865–1908) was able to paint in such a way that Berlin did not look like Berlin, but rather looked a bit like France: here his “Grunewaldsee”, 1902.
Image: AKG
Called up for summer vacation manoeuvres: The residents of the capital have always liked to go away – and at the same time tried to make Berlin look like Paris or the Caribbean. A literary search for clues about the art of finding home from afar
For as long as Berlin has existed, the city has wanted to be something other than what it is. Museum Island should be like ancient Athens, Kurfürstendamm should look more Parisian than Paris, Potsdamer Platz should look like Chicago. Perhaps this longing look to the outside also explains the Berliners’ love of travel: no one wants to leave as much as Berliners, as the great writers of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic found. In the summer of 1930, the essayist Siegfried Kracauer wrote that the travel behavior of Berliners had something almost military about it: “The asphalt is glowing and the time to travel is threateningly approaching. One does not travel here; you have to travel.” And Berliners set off in droves: at the start of the vacation, you can’t shake the “sensation,” writes Kracauer, “that traveling is less a private pleasure than a general mass gathering.” The masses were “simply taken out of their jobs and summoned to the summer retreat manoeuvres”.
A downright pathological need to travel
In the case of Kracauer, the Germans and especially the Berliners who are setting out on vacation are an army that invades alpine mountain valleys and southern beaches, where morning gains are then bitterly defended with trench-deep sandcastles and broadly laid out towels. Even before the First World War it was no different: In 1906, the Berlin illustrator Edmund Edel (1863–1934) wrote a sociology of the then newly established West Berlin, whose new bourgeoisie, who had just gained money, were still a little unsure how to live the fine, cultivated life of a bourgeois, spreads in Charlottenburg and in the Grunewald: “Berlin W. A few chapters from the surface” reads in places as if it were written today. Edel also notes that the new type of Berliner has a downright pathological need to travel.