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To rationalize the public transportation system in the sprawling megalopolis, Berlin consolidated its various streetcar, elevated-train, bus, and subway lines under one administrative roof: the Berlin Transportation Company, or BVG (Berliner-Verkehrs-Betriebe), in 1928. The new enterprise, Berliners liked to boast, was the largest municipal agency in the world, as well as Germany’s third largest corporation after the Reichsbahn (which had recently been privatized) and the I. G. Farben chemical trust. The chairman of the BVG’s board of directors, Ernst Reuter, was a leading Social Democratic politician and former Communist who had become an avid proponent of technological modernization. Reuter was also active in the development of Berlin’s electrical power system, which needed beefing up to accommodate all the new industries, rail lines, and housing projects. In 1927 the giant Rum-melsburg Power Station came on line, followed a year later by the Western Power Station (now the Reuter Station). Both plants were models of functional aesthetics, much photographed by admirers of cutting-edge industrial design.

Elevated train at Gitschiner Strasse, 1930

Cutting-edge was the image that Weimar-era boosters most often propounded for their city, just as their predecessors had done in the imperial era. Now, however, technological modernity was combined with pride in being politically and socially up-to-date. A program entitled “Berlin in the Light” (October 13–16, 1928) heralded the German capital as “Europe’s New City of Light,” whose nighttime streets, thanks to advanced lighting techniques, had been “transformed into an exciting showplace, an arena for a new nocturnal existence.” In the following year the city’s newly created Office for Tourism, Exhibitions and Fairs orchestrated a multimedia campaign promoting the message that Berlin was a “World City of Order and Beauty.” A promotional poster showing cars with illuminated headlights passing through the Brandenburg Gate carried the slogan: Jeder einmal in Berlin (Everyone must go once to Berlin). In 1927 Walter Ruttmann’s avant-garde film, Berlin: Sym-phonie einer Grossstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis), which projected a symphonic harmony of man and machine in the metropolis, reflected the progressive-republican hope that technological rationalization would translate into political and social advancement.

In 1925 President Ebert died with time left in his term, requiring a new presidential election to replace him. The candidate preferred by most conservatives was former Field Marshal Hindenburg, who, far from losing status because of his role in Germany’s defeat, was much admired as an emblem of the imperial era and its proud military class. Prorepublican centrists and liberals could opt for Wilhelm Marx, a colorless former chancellor from the Center Party, while the radical left had Ernst Thalmann, a rabble-rousing Communist. Hindenburg emerged victorious with 48.3 percent of the vote to Marx’s 45.3 percent and Thalmann’s 6.4 percent. In Berlin, however, Marx outpolled the Hero of Tannenberg by 52.6 percent to 37.0 percent, while Thalmann got 10.4 percent. Hindenburg exacted his revenge on Berlin by delaying for a year and a half his official visit to the governing mayor’s office in the “Red City Hall” (so named because of its red-brick facade, not its politics). Although he was obliged to conduct national business in Berlin, he got away as often as he could to his estate in the Prussian countryside, Neudeck, where he felt much more at home.

Mayor Böss took the lead in championing the Weimar order. When, during an official dinner honoring New York’s Mayor Jimmy Walker at the venerable Hotel Kaiserhof, hotel officials put out imperial flags rather than the republican colors, Böss refused to attend. Thereafter he kept official functions away from the hotel, which remained on the black list until the ascension of Hitler, who once again made it a center of state occasions.