Of the revolution, real or feigned, through which it had recently passed, the city bore surprisingly few scars. Three or four government buildings were pockmarked with bullet-holes that carried the mind back to “election” days in the capitals of tropical America; over in Alexanderplatz the bricks and stones flaunted a goodly number of shrapnel and machine-gun wounds. But that was all, or almost all, the proof of violence that remained. The palaces of the late Kaiser stood like abandoned warehouses; the Reichstag building was cold and silent, testifying to a change of venue for the government on trial, if not of régime. Yet it could not, after all, have been much of a “revolution” that had left unscathed those thirty-two immense and sometimes potbellied images of the noble Hohenzollerns, elaborately carved in stone, which still oppressed the stroller along the Sieges Allee in the otherwise pleasant Tiergarten. The massive wooden Hindenburg at the end of it, a veritable personification of brute strength from cropped head to well-planted feet, stared down upon puny mankind as of yore, though, to be sure, he looked rather neglected; the nailing had never been completed and the rare visitors passed him by now without any attempt to hammer home their homage. Farther on that other man of iron gazed away across the esplanade as if he saw nothing in this temporary abandonment of his principles to cause serious misgivings.
But perhaps all this will in time be swept away, for there were signs pointing in that direction. The city council of Berlin had already decreed that all pictures and statues of the Hohenzollerns, “especially those of the deposed Kaiser,” must be removed from the public halls and schoolrooms. That of itself would constitute a decided change in the capital. In these first days of May several hundred busts and countless likenesses of Wilhelm II and his family had been banished to the cellars of municipal buildings, not, be it noted, far enough away to make restoration difficult. “Among the busts,” said one of the local papers, “are some of real artistic value”—I cannot, of course, vouch for the esthetic sense of the editor—“as for example the marble ones of Kaiser Wilhelm I and of Kaiser Friedrich III, which for many years have adorned the meeting-place of the Municipal Council itself.” For all this there was no lack of graven images of the discredited War Lord and his tribe still on exhibition; the portraits “adorning” private residences alone could have filled many more cellars. It would be difficult to eradicate in a few brief months a trade-mark which had been stamped into every article of common or uncommon use.