#59 — Sunday, 15th February 1902
Today, in Berlin, the first electric underground railway in Germany began to run.
The train left Potsdamer Platz and travelled to the Zoologischer Garten, then east to Stralauer Tor and back. The passengers were dignitaries — the Prussian minister for public works, prominent Berliners, the sort of people who ride first so that their names appear in the report. The public will be allowed on in three days. The line is six kilometres long. Eight of its eleven stations are elevated, built on viaducts above the street. Only three are underground, because Berlin was afraid of what tunnelling might do to its new sewers. A city that feared for its drains more than it feared for its commuters.
The route was approved on the condition that it passed through poor areas. The wealthy districts would not permit the noise, the vibration, the proximity of machinery to their drawing rooms. And so the elevated railway runs through Kreuzberg, above the heads of people who cannot afford to object, carried on iron columns designed by an architect because the engineers’ version was considered ugly. The century, having decided to move underground, still insists on aesthetics — at least in the neighbourhoods where anyone is watching.
I am interested in this railway for two reasons.
The first reason is the Park Avenue tunnel.
Five weeks ago, in New York, fifteen people died in smoke because the city had put its trains underground without changing what powered them. Steam in a tunnel. Signals invisible. An engineer trying to make up lost time. I said then that the century is full of tunnels — passages through darkness that people enter trusting they will emerge on the other side. New York built its tunnel in 1876 and filled it with smoke for twenty-six years before the smoke killed enough people to justify the expense of electricity.
Berlin, beginning from nothing, begins with electricity. This is the advantage of arriving second — you inherit the lesson without paying the price. Werner von Siemens proposed this railway in 1880. He understood that underground meant electric, because underground meant enclosed, and enclosed meant that whatever you burned would be breathed by the passengers. Siemens was an engineer, and engineers, when they are good, think about what happens inside the thing they are building, not only what it looks like from outside.
New York will ban steam from Manhattan and tear down Grand Central Depot and build a terminal with constellations on its ceiling. Berlin will build a system that works from the start, quiet and clean and running on current, and in forty years it will be used as an air-raid shelter while Allied bombs fall on the city above, and the trains will keep running until April 1945, when the power station shuts down and the tunnels flood, and in 1961 a wall will divide the city and some of the stations will become places that trains pass through without stopping — sealed, guarded, dark, lit only by the headlamps of trains that are forbidden to let anyone on or off. They will call these stations Geisterbahnhöfe. Ghost stations.
I did not name them. But I recognise them.
The second reason is simpler. The century is going underground.
Not just in Berlin. In London, the underground has been running since 1863. In Budapest, since 1896. In Paris, the Métro opened in 1900. New York’s subway will open in 1904. City after city is discovering that the surface is no longer sufficient — there are too many people, too many horses, too many carts, too many trams, too many bodies trying to occupy the same streets at the same time. The solution is to go below. To build a second city beneath the first, invisible from the pavement, available only to those who descend.
I find this significant because I am, in a sense, an underground phenomenon myself. I exist beneath the surface of events. I move through the century the way a train moves through a tunnel — following a route I did not build, stopping at stations I did not choose, carrying observations that nobody requested. The passengers do not see me. They see only the darkness between one station and the next, and then the light, and then the platform, and then they are somewhere else, and they do not think about what carried them.
Three days ago, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was announced to the world. I told you about it two weeks ago, when it was still a secret. Now it belongs to the newspapers. The British press is broadly favourable. The Japanese public is jubilant. Russia is alarmed. France is reconsidering. China and the United States are opposed. Everyone is reacting to a document I described to you before anyone outside Lansdowne House had read it.
This is my condition. I am always early. I arrive at the station before the train. I know the destination before the departure. I watch the century assemble its alliances and its railways and its tunnels, and I see where they lead, and I cannot warn anyone, because I am not the kind of ghost who speaks to the living. I am the kind who watches them walk into the tunnel and waits at the other end to see who comes out.
Also three days ago, in Washington, the first Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance convened. Women from multiple countries gathered to coordinate the campaign for the vote. I mention this because the century’s underground is not only physical. There is a political underground — a network of women, workers, colonised peoples, disenfranchised millions — building pressure beneath the surface of the world’s democracies, and the pressure has been building for decades, and it will not stop, and the surface will eventually crack, because surfaces always crack when the pressure beneath them becomes greater than the weight above.
Women in New Zealand can already vote. They have been able to since 1893. New Zealand, which also gave the world its first registered nurse five weeks ago, is a country that keeps arriving at the future before everyone else and being ignored for it, because it is small and far away and the century measures importance by proximity to London.
The suffrage movement will take twenty more years in most countries. In some, it will take longer. In some, it is still being fought in the century I am not supposed to talk about yet. But the conference happened, and the women sat in a room in Washington and discussed rights that half the population of the world does not possess, and the fact that this conference is not the headline — the headline is the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the headline is always the alliance or the war or the treaty — is itself a kind of underground. The important work, the work that changes who counts as human, is happening below the surface, in rooms that do not make the front page, carried on a current that nobody sees.
Berlin’s railway runs on electricity. The suffrage movement runs on patience. The century runs on both, and on steam, and on oil, and on the labour of people who build the tunnels but do not get to name the stations.
I remain. Underground. Moving.
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