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Among the plethora of new papers founded in the Wilhelmian era, the most important was the Berliner Morgenpost inaugurated in 1898 by the Ullstein press. Aiming at a mass readership, the Morgenpost made daily life in the teeming metropolis its main focus. As the paper’s first editor declared: “Above all, the Morgenpost strives to be a genuinely Berlin paper and as such hopes to be at home in every household in the city... . The Morgenpost wants to depict Berlin, Berlin as it feels and thinks, as it works and dreams, as it suffers and loves, Berlin the way it really is.” To convey this sense of “true Berlin” the paper often employed the distinctive local dialect, turning “g’s” into “j’s” and “das” into “det,” and invented a folksy Ur-Berliner called Rentier Mudicke, who passed on irreverent witticisms in a weekly column. Drawings by Heinrich Zille, the gifted chronicler of Berlin’s back streets and tenements, added to the verisimilitude. So too did graphic accounts of murder, rape, suicide, and corruption. As a practical service to its readers, the paper printed streetcar schedules and maps, listed sporting events and cabaret performances, even ran articles on where to find the best meat, butter, and eggs. These and other innovations made the Morgenpost an instant success; it boasted 100,000 subscribers after only eight months of operation, and by the turn of the century it was Berlin’s largest daily, with almost 200,000 subscribers.

Another new mass circulation paper, BZ am Mittag, which first appeared in 1904, relied on street sales rather than home distribution to reach a wide readership. This strategy made good sense because on workdays, when the paper was sold, central Berlin swarmed with pedestrians. On October 1, 1900, some 87,266 people were recorded crossing Potsdamer Platz in the course of a single hour; by 1908 the hourly traffic in the square had risen to 174,000, making it the busiest crossroads in Europe. Aggressive newsboys made sure that no one walked the streets without getting a pitch for the BZ.

To grab readers’ attention, the BZ focused on the more spectacular and colorful dimensions of big-city life. In 1906, for example, it retailed the exploits of a murder suspect named Rudolf Hennig, who had escaped the police by dashing across the rooftops of Prenzlauer Berg, the gritty proletarian district north of the city center. For a full week, the paper kept the story alive with Hennig sightings and mock interviews with the fugitive. Inspired by the BZ reports, Hennig imitators donned the green cap and clogs he was reported to favor and began strutting the streets, taunting the cops. A thirteen-year-old boy was shot to death playing the game “Catch Hennig.” When the real Hennig was finally run to ground, the paper quickly dropped the story, for it turned out that the notorious criminal was a meek-looking milquetoast totally lacking in gangster charisma.

The Hennig case was still on Berliners’ minds when the local papers hit upon an even more piquant tale of life in their city, one that hilariously pointed up the persistent motif of uniform-worship in German society. The story involved an itinerant cobbler named Wilhelm Voigt, who had spent almost half his life behind bars for fraud. One October afternoon in 1906 Voigt donned a Prussian officer’s uniform he had bought in a Berlin flea market and began strolling the streets, thinking about how he might obtain a passport so he could emigrate to America. The sudden deference he was accorded in the streets gave him an idea. Spotting a company of soldiers, he commanded them to accompany him by train to the suburb of Köpenick. Upon arriving at the town hall he had his men surround the building while he arrested the mayor “for financial irregularities” and demanded a passport. Informed that the mayor had no authority to issue a passport, Voigt settled for 4,000 marks worth of municipal funds, which he confiscated in the name of the Prussian military, leaving a signed receipt. He then dismissed his guard and disappeared. It took the police several weeks to track him down, and in the meantime the Berlin papers had a new folk hero—the “Captain of Köpenick.” Berliners considered the story an excellent joke on fawning suburban officialdom, but of course it was really a joke on the entire city. Kaiser Wilhelm II, a uniform fetishist himself, might have been expected to find this whole business appalling, but instead he found it reassuring: did it not, after all, show that the authoritarian system was alive and well in Berlin despite all the encroachments of urban modernity? When Voigt was returned to prison for fraud, the kaiser arranged a pardon.