Your property …
… was allowed to rest for a long time. Until well into the 20th century, at most carrots, potatoes, cabbage & co. were planted on it.
There was a little more action around here. Especially north of the Spree in Moabit. The architect Peter Behrens was one of the pioneers of modern industrial design. He co-founded the German Werkbund and employed some of the later most important heads of the famous Bauhaus in his architectural office. At the beginning of the 20th century, he developed the first corporate design for AEG. The gas turbine plant he designed is located in Huttenstraße. Now operated by Siemens AG, gas turbines are still being manufactured there today – not just any gas turbines, but the most powerful in the world with an output of over 500,000 HP.
The people in the factories in Moabit worked hard and had to fight again and again for fairer working conditions. In 1910 they went on a heavy strike to get an increase of their meagre hourly wage of 43 pfennigs. AEG workers also took part in the work stoppages. The owner of the factory, from which the strike originally started, first demanded more and more police against the strikers from the Minister of the Interior, in the end even from the Chancellor himself. A total of 30,000 people on both sides were involved. Professional, partly armed strike breakers from Hamburg aggravated the conflict. The strikers, for their part, armed themselves with metal tools, threw coal and stones at the police and cut the harnesses of the horses and teams. The labor dispute escalated, the population also sided with the strikers and there were solidarity strikes in other Berlin factories.
Strikers from Ludwig Loewe & Co. were also involved. This name is never missing when it comes to the first large companies north of our Charlottenbogen. Tools and weapons were produced in this factory after the initial sewing machine production had been abandoned. Perhaps participation in the strike during the lifetime of the founder Ludwig Loewe would have been cancelled. After all, about two decades earlier he had been a member of the “German Liberal Party”, which even advocated the strengthening of “workers’ self-help associations” and was accused of progressive social policy in his own factories.
The famous pathologist Rudolf Virchow of the Charité said of Loewe: “He was one of those men who did not embark on a career as a politician out of calculation, passion or the pursuit of an unjust goal […] but rather his heart and thoughts pointed equally powerfully to that goal.
The strike in Moabit did not produce any result, and work was resumed by the workforce. Certainly, however, it shaped the working culture in the area. To this day, strike action has remained a means of bringing industrialists and workers closer together to reach compromises. Even if in a more peaceful way than in Moabit.
