2 - Mentors

Summary

“Berolinum lumen orbi” (“Berlin, light of the world”)—so went the longstanding anagram that projected Prussian pride in Berlin. But the real metropolis of 1873 hardly corresponded to such grand idealism, caught as it was in a profoundly transformative period between the old city of the Enlightenment and the new industrialized center of a united German Empire. Berlin in 1850 had 412,000 residents. By 1871 it had 826,000; by 1910 2,071,000. This sort of meteoric growth, which reflected a larger migration toward the cities, articulated the transition to a modern, capitalist economy with its attendant socio-economic troubles. The Straube family was not immune to the crash of the German and Austrian markets in May 1873, with the ensuing recession and “great deflation” lasting well into the 1890s. Johannes surely felt the effects upon his instrument building business. More important, the dire financial crisis of 1873, accompanied by a similarly critical predicament in German agriculture, eroded the economic optimism that had fueled an investment boom in the years before unification and in its wake. The result was above all psychological, casting aspersions on “the culture of progress” that buoyed the new Reich. The mature Straube would develop a marked distaste for what he saw as the materialist values of the United States, Britain, and other European nations, in opposition to the immaterial verities of the German cultural tradition—the transient-superficial juxtaposed with the timeless primacy of the inner. That attitude represented an older stereotype perpetuated both inside and beyond German borders, hardly original to Straube's generation. But Straube's version of it undoubtedly was forged in the fires of imperial Germany's shaken economic confidence during his early years. During the last decade of his life, he would maintain darkly that Berlin's atmosphere had been no friend to his early formation in the priorities of a spiritual culture. “The effect of millions of people in the city was completely levelling,” he wrote. “We lived only for ourselves in a dismissive, smug manner. From these conditions arise the fact that a big-city dweller is an inwardly impoverished and therefore unproductive person, since he is completely unaware of life's real powers.