Urban Decline from the Industrial Revolution

In the 19th century our towns and cities began more and more to lose their character as centres of civilization and became more and more centres of habitation.

In our great modern cities, the proletariat does not show much attachment to the place where it lives.

This is because their dwelling-place is nothing but an accidental abode.

This is in turn caused by the frequent change of residence which is forced upon them by social conditions.

There is no time for the growth of any attachment to the town in which they live. But another reason lies in the cultural barrenness and superficiality of our modern cities.

During the German Wars of Liberation, our German towns and cities were few and of very modest size.

The few cities were ‘great’ because they were mostly the residential cities of princes. As such, they had almost always a definite cultural value.

Those few towns which had more than 50,000 inhabitants were, in comparison with modern cities of the same size, rich in scientific and artistic treasures.

Back then, Munich had not more than 60,000 souls yet it was on the way to become one of the first German centres of art.

Nowadays almost every industrial town has a population at least as large as that, without having anything of real value to call its own.

They are agglomerations of tenement houses and congested dwelling barracks, and nothing else. It would be a miracle if anybody should grow sentimentally attached to such a meaningless place.

Even the great cities become more barren of real works of art the more they increase in population. They assume more and more a neutral atmosphere and present the same aspect, though on a larger scale, as the wretched little factory towns.

Everything that our modern age has contributed to the civilization of our great cities is absolutely deficient. All our towns are living on the glory and the treasures of the past.

If we take away from the Munich of to-day everything that was created under Ludwig 2nd we should be horror-stricken to see how meagre has been the output of important artistic creations since that time. One might say much the same of Berlin and most of our other great towns.

But the following is the essential thing to be noticed: Our great modern cities have no outstanding monuments that dominate the general aspect of the city and could be pointed to as the symbols of a whole epoch. Yet almost every ancient town had a monument erected to its glory.

It was not in private dwellings that the characteristic art of ancient cities was displayed but in the public monuments, which were not meant to have a transitory interest but an enduring one. And this was because they did not represent the wealth of some individual citizen but the greatness and importance of the community.

It was under this inspiration that those monuments arose which bound the individual inhabitants to their own town in a manner that is often almost incomprehensible to us to-day. What struck the eye of the individual citizen was not a number of mediocre private buildings, but imposing structures that belonged to the whole community. In contradistinction to these, private dwellings were of only very secondary importance indeed.

When we compare the size of those ancient public buildings with that of the private dwellings belonging to the same epoch then we can understand the great importance which was given to the principle that those works which reflected and affected the life of the community should take precedence of all others.

Among the broken arches and vast spaces that are covered with ruins from the ancient world the colossal riches that still arouse our wonder have not been left to us from the commercial palaces of these days but from the temples of the Gods and the public edifices that belonged to the State.

The community itself was the owner of those great edifices. Even in the pomp of Rome during the decadence it was not the villas and palaces of some citizens that filled the most prominent place but rather the temples and the baths, the stadia, the circuses, the aqueducts, the basilicas, etc., which belonged to the State and therefore to the people as a whole.

In medieval Germany also the same principle held sway, although the artistic outlook was quite different. In ancient times the theme that found its expression in the Acropolis or the Pantheon was now clothed in the forms of the Gothic Cathedral. In the medieval cities these monumental structures towered gigantically above the swarm of smaller buildings with their framework walls of wood and brick. And they remain the dominant feature of these cities even to our own day, although they are becoming more and more obscured by the apartment barracks.

They determine the character and appearance of the locality. Cathedrals, city-halls, corn exchanges, defence towers, are the outward expression of an idea which has its counterpart only in the ancient world.

The dimensions and quality of our public buildings to-day are in deplorable contrast to the edifices that represent private interests. If a similar fate should befall Berlin as befell Rome future generations might gaze upon the ruins of some Jewish department stores or joint-stock hotels and think that these were the characteristic expressions of the culture of our time. In Berlin itself, compare the shameful disproportion between the buildings which belong to the REICH and those which have been erected for the accommodation of trade and finance.

The credits that are voted for public buildings are in most cases inadequate and really ridiculous. They are not built as structures that were meant to last but mostly for the purpose of answering the need of the moment. No higher idea influenced those who commissioned such buildings.

At the time the Berlin Schloss was built it had a quite different significance from what the new library has for our time, seeing that one battleship alone represents an expenditure of about sixty million marks, whereas less than half that sum was allotted for the building of the Reichstag, which is the most imposing structure erected for the REICH and which should have been built to last for ages.

Yet, in deciding the question of internal decoration, the Upper House voted against the use of stone and ordered that the walls should be covered with stucco. For once, however, the parliamentarians made an appropriate decision on that occasion; for plaster heads would be out of place between stone walls.

All these symptoms which preceded the final collapse of the Second Empire must be attributed to the lack of a definite and uniformly accepted WELTANSCHAUUNG and the general uncertainty of outlook consequent on that lack. This uncertainty showed itself when the great questions of the time had to be considered one after another and a decisive policy adopted towards them.

This lack is also accountable for the habit of doing everything by halves, beginning with the educational system, the shilly-shally, the reluctance to undertake responsibilites and, finally, the cowardly tolerance of evils that were even admitted to be destructive.

Visionary humanitarianisms became the fashion. In weakly submitting to these aberrations and sparing the feelings of the individual, the future of millions of human beings was sacrificed.