In 1872, the Prussian army, freshly returned from its overwhelming victory against France, was considered the best military in the world, and the Leibgarde regiments the finest in its ranks. On 26 July of that year, the man of Gardegrenadierregiment No. 1 were called out to ready for action. The enemy: working-class people from the suburbs of their own capital city.
Life in newly imperial Berlin could be harsh. Caught between low wages and rising rents, working-class families faced a precarious existence. While the standard of living had risen – at least in comparison with the hungry times of the early 19th century – people often enough had little or nothing left over after paying for the roof over their heads. An fascinating source on their diet is the 1868 report of the Volksküchen, a private initiative selling basic hot food at affordable rates. Among other things, they served Bouletten, a Berlin favourite ever since. Their recipe is plain and clear:
Nr. 19: Mashed potatoes and Bouletten with sour sauce
Bouletten: 3 lbs (1.5kg) beef, 3 lbs (1.5 kg) pork, 1/3 Metze (1.15 litres) of grated Semmel bread, 2 Metzen (6.9 litres) grated boiled potatoes, 1/2 Mandel (seven) eggs, pepper, spices, onions and salt, 1 lb (500g) of fat to fry 100 Bouletten.
Mashed potatoes: 2 1/2 – 3 Scheffel (110 litres) potatoes, 8 Quart (9.12 litres) milk, 3 lbs (1.5 kg) salt
Sauce: 1 lb fat mixed with 2 lbs flour, 1/2 lb flour added dry to the roux, 2 Quart (2.28 litres) good vinegar, 1 lb sugar, pepper, spices and onions, the necessary quantity of water. Cooking time: 1/2 hour
Among the offerings of the Volksküche, this was one of the richer meals. Far from starvation, it still compares unfavourably to how the upper half ate, but these were popular and not everyone could afford them every day. Bouletten (more usually Buletten today) or Frikadellen belong to the ancestry of the hamburger. They are patties made of ground meat, onions, spices, egg, and a vegetable filler. These consist of more potato than meat, held together with egg and breadcrumbs and fried in hot fat to produce a crust with the coveted Maillard flavours. Depending on how densely the grated potato is packed and how large the eggs are, they should come in somewhere around 80-100 grammes apiece, which is about where a modern-day Bulette weighs in.
The main component here, though, is more potatoes, boiled and stirred to a smooth consistency with milk. On top of about a litre of this mash, a single meat patty and a brown, sweet-sour onion sauce completed a hot, filling meal. A large number of Berlin’s inhabitants had to take recourse to the inexpensive offerings of the Volksküchen regularly, but far more had even less than this, and that goes a long way towards explaining what happened in July of 1872.
Berlin was a rapidly growing city, with space at a premium and housing in short supply. Many inhabitants crowded into the infamous Mietskasernen (literally ‘rented barracks’), often living a family to a room in lightless back alleys. These places were rented out on short leases, often just six months, subject to renewal at higher rents, and the cost of housing increasingly put not just the very poor, but even respectable working-class families at risk of homelessness. Many had no option other than to build a shack in the informal settlements that sprang up wherever there was room, hoping to find an affordable apartment again in the future.
This situation had exploded into protest before, and an eviction on 25 July over unpaid rent, in itself a routine affair, provided the spark. By the end of the day, thousands of people assembled in the street, pelting the police with paving stones and building improvised barricades. The next day, news arrived that the police were clearing out homeless settlements and destroying the possessions of the inhabitants they evicted in preparation for a summit meeting of the emperors of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia in September. People from the settlement and workers from a nearby factory joined the protest, and together they succeeded in driving the police from their neighbourhood and occupying a police station. Protests spread to other working-class quarters and the emperor, away taking the waters, sent indignant instructions to restore order forcefully.
In the end, the police chose to deescalate instead. Perhaps someone had figured out that the people in the streets were angry, but not revolutionary. Though their rulers were spooked by the recent nightmare of the Paris Commune, these were mostly skilled workers and artisans, men who used to have a respectable existence and expected their labour to at least afford them a home. They had no wider political goals, and short of provocation, the unrest dissipated.
There were arrests and trials, and the press spent weeks debating the justice or injustice of the protesters’ cause. The government opened a second homeless refuge and relaxed the harsh conditions attached to aid there, but the Berlin housing crisis was not resolved for over a generation, and never fully. Urban unrest continued in many industrial centers of the German Empire, usually in a similarly unorganised fashion, and the authorities managed to hold it at bay in the same haphazard fashion. Progress towards the beginnings of a welfare state began about a decade later, headed by a conservative government frightened of losing the lower middle classes to the spectre of organised Socialism.