Berlin.
A capital city.
An epicentre.
A playground.
Although the decade of the 1920s in Germany
was known as the Weimar Republic,
the city of Berlin became its hub.
Formerly home to militaristic Prussians,
it turned into a multicultural melting pot of modern society.
Work in rural areas was scarce,
forcing people into the city.
And they joined an earlier influx of Jews
from the eastern provinces of Germany
and from Slavic Europe.
But as well as this ethnic mix,
there was a sexual mix too.
Men, women, girls, boys, straight, gay.
Everyone was present in Berlin during the 1920s.
And the city is the focus of so much
in the Philharmonia Orchestra's new series,
Weimar Berlin: Bittersweet Metropolis.
"All the vital energies
of its locals begin and end here.
In the same way that the heart is both a point of departure
and the destination of the blood
as it flows through the body's veins and arteries.
It's the heart of a world whose life
is belt drive and clockwork,
piston ribbon and siren scream.
It is the heart of the world which spins on its axis
a thousand times faster than the alternation
of day and night would have us believe."
It's quite important to understand,
Berlin was a bit more like
a new world city in the old world.
In the mid-19th century, Berlin was a sleepy little town
with, I think, 100,000 inhabitants.
And then it became the royal and then the imperial residence after 1871.
And it wanted to completely transform itself,
and it became this rather colossal residential representative city
in which everything is a bit too large to this day, you know?
You've got these ridiculously wide streets
and everything is just too big.
Berlin never had one stamp of identity set on it.
Berlin was always looking for its identity,
and that was the ideal place for people coming
not only from Germany, but also
Auden, Isherwood from Britain and other places
to indulge and engage in this vast experimentation in a city
that has grown to almost four million,
most of them, of course, recent immigrants,
speaking many languages.
Those were days when cities were simply transformed
when what had been an orderly provincial life
suddenly became a really throbbing metropolis,
and that's what we see in Berlin.
During the Weimar years, people flocked to the cities
but there was considerable ambivalence
around this tremendous urban growth.
And Weimar cinema really reflects this tension,
depicting the city simultaneously
as an exciting pleasure ground of all kinds of possibilities
and a cesspool of decadence and danger.
Tales of the city really abound in Weimar cinema,
there was even a whole genre called the street film
in which naive middle-class men
are lured by the bright lights
and the array of sexual temptations on offer.
Another wonderful example of the way in which
both glamour and vice come together in a Weimar film
is Fritz Lang's urban thriller, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler,
made in 1922, which consciously sets itself up
as an almost documentary portrait of contemporary society.
It shows Berlin as the center of organized crime,
shadowy backstreets where you can be
robbed, assaulted, murdered, abducted at any moment.
But the city is also packed
with glamorous depraved nightclubs,
a lot of them secret or illegal,
catering to every possible taste with drugs and gambling
and all kinds of erotic spectacle.
And spectacle of another kind
also dominated the cities of Weimar Germany.
It was the display of urban technological advance.
But it wasn't always alluring,
given the population's memories
of recent deadly technology on the battlefields.
I think the history of human engagement
with technology at this time is really
one of the most fascinating aspects of this whole story.
Veterans from the First World War came back
with a story of technology as an anonymous killer.
They were not possibly able
to stand up against machine guns,
against tanks, against planes,
against long range artillery.
So they had come to see technology as a very lethal affair.
But also of course now people themselves
were more technologised, because the amputees coming back
from the war had mechanical limbs,
so they became partial robots themselves,
what we call cyborgs today.
You see this aspect of the relationship
between man and machine most strongly in Metropolis by Fritz Lang,
where a robot is turned into the semblance of a living woman
to lead astray the masses essentially.
It's a world in this film that's not a million years away
from the world we seem to be living in today
where an ever smaller number of extremely rich people
is having one eternal party,
whereas the people underneath are slaving away
and they're slaving away in Metropolis
to run a gigantic machine,
the heart machine that pumps through the city.
And indeed when they finally rise against their oppressors
it's a machine, a rogue robot in the form of a woman
who's supposed to destroy them.
And it wasn't just film that relied on the city,
and the city of Berlin in particular.
Urban spaces also became the chief focus
for artists of the time.
Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Christian Schad –
these movers and shakers in the visual arts
all turned their eyes on the city.
And it could be both a hellish dystopia
and a place of thrilling encounters.
And of course with a camera instead of a brush in hand,
photographers like August Sander
where able to record exactly what happened on these streets.
Taking detailed, but somewhat detached images
of everyone from mousetrap salesmen to bailiffs.
"I am a camera with its shutter open,
quite passive, recording, not thinking.
Recording the man shaving in the window opposite
and the woman in the kimono washing her hair.
Some day all this will have to be developed,
carefully printed, fixed."
Due to Germany's financial instabilities
in part caused by the reparations the country had to pay
after the First World War,
many flocked to the cities to find work.
Berlin became overcrowded,
the breeding ground for political experiments
as well as cultural ones.
And so it turned into a fascinating case study
for those living beyond Germany's borders.
British writer, Christopher Isherwood wrote that
"Here is the seething brew of history in the making."
And he knew that brew firsthand
because he lived in the apartment up there
recording like a camera both his life
and the lives of others.
Well, Christopher Isherwood first went to Berlin
in March 1929,
and he famously said in Christopher and His Kind,
his 1970s autobiography,
for Christopher, Berlin meant boys.
And there was certainly an element of going to Berlin
to stay with his friend, W. H. Auden
who'd been there since August the year before,
and that told him how easy it was to find boys,
compliant working class boys with whom one could have sex.
So that was part of it.
Auden had gone to Berlin principally to meet a man
called John Layard, who had formulated various theories
about the important thing in life was to be true to yourself
and obviously this had a great deal of appeal
for homosexual men at that period.
Berlin had this reputation as the place,
the sort of gay capital of Europe,
and in many ways it was.
In 1931, Wyndham Lewis, the painter and writer
who had visited Berlin in order to write
an admiring book on Hitler,
talked in appalled terms
about the many gay bars, transvestite bars, lesbian bars,
and he described Berlin as the Hauptstadt of vice,
the capital of vice.
Also Isherwood famously said, "I am a camera,"
and he was a very, very good reporter
and he was always looking for material for his books.
He'd published one book by the time he went to Berlin.
And his second one was in the process of being written,
that was The Memorial.
And he had a very good journalist's eye for details.
And of course going to Berlin,
it was such a melting pot, there was so much going on.
He saw the rise of Nazism and really
what Spender called the Weimar Dämmerung, the twilight of the Weimar Republic.
And really a society teetering on the brink of collapse
with mass unemployment
and street fighting between communists and Nazis
and all of this fed into Isherwood's work.
He wanted to write a vast, epic novel called The Lost,
which would be set during the period he was in Berlin
and be about the society in Berlin
and about the people he met.
This book never quite got written,
but bits of it did end up in his Berlin books.
So in Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin,
which are still I think the books for which he's best known,
his portrait of Berlin is still very much central
to the idea of Berlin in the 20s and 30s.
As well as delight, this decadent world
had a whiff of danger too.
Isherwood and Auden relished it,
but the clock was ticking.
Berlin was a Petri dish.
It could spawn beautiful boys
and glamorous chansonnières,
perceptive painters and observational authors.
But it could just as easily produce fascists
eager to stamp out all experimentation
in life, love and culture
as well as the Jewish community that made this city tick.
The Nazis were on the rise.
"I had an absurd pang of fear
that they were going to attack us –
a gang of terrifying soft muffled shapes –
clawing us from our seats,
dragging us hungrily down, in dead silence."
As the sound of jackboots replaced the sound of laughter,
Berlin's heyday was over.
Lights had blazed and so had personalities,
but they would soon be trodden down by the Third Reich.