Cabinet Is Safe

Advertisements on vitreous enamel first appeared on German streets at the end of the nineteenth century. These beginnings could be said to be sweet, in that the first person to make use of them for marketing was chocolate factory owner Ludwig Stollwerck. Historically speaking, however, fire insurance–related enamels may have had a more bitter taste associated with them, especially in the larger European context. That is because one of the primary functions of these plaques was to distinguish between those individuals whose properties were insured against fire and those who could not afford such protection.

This was particularly true in England, where a flourishing private fire insurance business had emerged in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Until the founding of a municipal fire brigade in the 1860s, these private insurers had agreements with various independent firefighting corps. The fire marks—made from simple brass or iron, before vitreous enamel became available—thus served as a kind of guarantee that in the case of a fire, the expenses related to extinguishing it would be reimbursed. What happened to buildings that lacked the necessary plate remains unclear. As historian Simone Ladwig-Winters has pointed out, “There is no evidence that a fire brigade that had shown up at a site would have left a house not insured by them to burn—but that doesn’t exclude the possibility.” Despite the lack of documentation, one suspects that a building without a fire mark was anything but safe.

Berlin, however, took a different path. In contrast to British insurers, the Feuersozietät was from its very beginning a statutory fire insurance company subject to public law, and the city required all citizens to pay a fee in order to be insured. Berlin’s fire brigades were also relatively unified; at first organized at the level of neighborhoods with the support of the police, they became increasingly professionalized and were eventually remunerated by the Feuersozietät itself. Given that fire insurance in Berlin was mandatory and that the firm had been given a monopoly, the Feuersozietät never needed to use fire marks to indicate which buildings they protected. Nor did its enamel marks—which appeared for the first time in the 1920s, after it began competing with companies from the suburbs that had been newly incorporated into the city to establish Greater Berlin—initially have an advertising function in the narrow sense. They might perhaps best be described as branding par excellence, a word that leads back both to the historical function of a brand—the original fire mark, whose etymological origin lies in the High Old German verb brinnan, to burn—and to its application as an aesthetic tool that signifies economic belonging.

Little is known about what the Berlin public thought of the Feuersozietät’s plates, but fire marks were in fact already a familiar sight in the city. In the early nineteenth century, a Berlin firm began offering the city’s residents a new type of fire insurance. Following the model of English insurance companies, some of which had already expanded their operations to select German cities, the Berlinische Feuer-Versicherungs-Anstalt (The Berlin Fire Insurance Institute) introduced coverage for personal effects. Its founder, Georg Friedrich Averdieck, was a former employee in the Hamburg office of the fire insurance firm Phoenix of London; in keeping with English practice, Averdieck’s company placed fire marks on buildings whose contents they had insured.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, such signs had become a familiar sight in many parts of Germany. In The Intercepted Love Letter, an 1850s painting by the Munich-based artist Carl Spitzweg, a young man is lowering a secret note from a garret window to his beloved sitting at the window one floor below. On the facade of the house, between the two floors, can be seen the fire mark of the Munich insurer Deutscher Phoenix, which bears a depiction of the mythical bird. Interestingly, the placing of the fire mark must have been a deliberate painterly choice, as such marks were never placed at such a height. Prominently displayed in this unusual location, the sign is perhaps intended to indicate to the viewer the social station of the young woman, who clearly comes from a good (Phoenix-insured) home. But it is also a risk-averse home, one that presumably would not encourage fiery love, love that shuns middle-class calculations about long-term security, financial and otherwise. It has been noted, however, that the pair of doves (read: lovebirds) to the right of the fire mark are presented slightly enlarged, perhaps an indication that, unlike fire, love finally cannot be extinguished. Whichever reading one subscribes to, Spitzweg’s painting figures the fate of love in the age of modern insurance, a history that has yet to be written.

There is less intrigue surrounding the enamels of the Berliner Feuersozietät, but the particular edition on the building that houses Cabinet nevertheless merits closer inspection. One of several dozen designs that the Feuersozietät has employed over the years, it incorporated for the first time the “Red Flame F” logo that the company had adopted in 1947; first appearing on buildings in 1956, the mark would be used, with some variation, for the next several decades.^[2] It was the first enamel not to incorporate into its design Berlin’s heraldic bear, instead tending toward abstraction. As with most of the Feuersozietät’s designs, the creator of the flame logo is unknown, but its literal approach could be read as a whispered commentary on the degree-zero iconography of war-ravaged Berlin. But there is also something else that makes the “Red Flame F” special; it became the company logo just as the city of Berlin was being divided up between the four victorious powers. This would result in the Feuersozietät losing all of its contracts in East Berlin, though it was allowed to take over policies in West Berlin that had been serviced by the Brandenburg Feuersozietät until the end of World War II. It also faced a completely new economic situation in West Berlin, where it was stripped of its monopoly everywhere except the districts of Wedding, Kreuzberg, and Tiergarten; the same free market approach to building fire insurance that had first been introduced in the former suburbs incorporated into the city in the 1920s was now being extended to much of so-called Old Berlin. The plaque we see on the magazine’s building bears the design the company chose in order to assert itself in this new economic terrain. After a long period of subtle “branding,” the enamel turned explicitly commercial, an advertising tool that foregrounded the company’s products. It is also the first time a proper slogan rounds off the design: Versicherungen jeder Art (“insurance of every kind”).

At some point before 1989, the slogan was removed from the plaques and the heraldic bear was snuck back in. And when Brandenburg—the federal state that surrounds Berlin—became an accessible market once again after German reunification, the company also reprised the heraldic eagle of the Brandenburg Feuersozietät. The country’s past imperial ambitions, one is inclined to deduce, were now considered distant enough that its bears and eagles could be resuscitated without objection. Which prompts me, once again, to start at the beginning.

The “modern” insurance business, which in the context of Berlin we can date to the foundation of the Berliner Feuersozietät, was founded on a different approach. Risks such as fire—and fire it would be exclusively for some time—were considered to be collective, and they were to be borne collectively. The inauguration of the Feuersozietät can thus be equally conceived as the implementation of a new way of thinking, of a “risk society” (Risikogemeinschaft) based on secular empathy and a shared financial pool. Still, this risk society developed slowly. As mentioned earlier, coverage by the Feuersozietät was compulsory for Berlin’s population as early as 1718, and yet, as late as 1794, this mandate had to be once again reinforced by means of a new regulation. Too many strands of society had stayed away, and not just those who simply couldn’t afford the fees; also uninsured were parts of the upper middle class, as well as those who belonged to the so-called Eximierte, the “exempted” class of nobles and senior clergy. By the 1770s, some political commentators had begun to criticize the church’s provision of the Abgebrannte with begging permits, and, in 1775, this alternative aid system came to an end in Berlin, when it was declared illegal. Clearly, the idea was to institute a politics of deterrence, one that would “encourage” Berlin’s population to participate in the insurance program. The work remained ongoing. Painted more than a century later, Christian Ludwig Bokelmann’s Nach dem Brand, which shows a family seeking refuge with their neighbors after losing their house in a fire, can be read in the light of increasing insurance regulations as a (late) addition to the visual politics that felt necessary to the promotion and establishment of this “risk society.”

In many regards, this secular “guardian angel” system provided the basis for progress. But, as with any system, it also generated a new type of fallen angel, loitering about town. And there were more to come.

The year 1718, it could be argued, was a bad year for “real” angels. Angelic protection against fire found itself out of favor, and the citizens’ faith was transferred to the new guardian angel that was compulsory insurance. Water cannons of all kind came into vogue. Georg Friedrich Händel’s Water Music was premiered in 1717, whereas it would take him three more decades to dare extol the realm of fire—albeit in a domesticated version—with Music for the Royal Fireworks (1748). And earlier that century, when Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was director of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin, he was particularly keen to collect expert literature from the new science of fire suppression for his library, and even discussed the possibility of creating a “fire research department” among the academic disciplines of the academy.

In light of such enthusiasm and the assumption that fire was beginning to be tamed, it is interesting to observe the emergence of quite a different kind of fire being. The fact that buildings were publicly insured incited the interest and curiosity of arsonists, who developed an alternate narrative to that of tamed flames—perhaps to escape the poverty of bondmanship, or to avenge themselves against their masters, or simply for the sake of notoriety. The eighteenth century witnessed such an increase in the number of young persons turning to arson that one is inclined to consider this phenomenon a youth culture in its own right—an invocation of the gothic that brought the black spirit of the fallen angel back into an all-too-regulated “risk society.” So too a wide range of people began to understand the benefits of setting their own homes on fire as a means of generating cash quickly. (Even today, it is estimated that at least 50 percent of all fires are the result of insurance fraud.)

The major paradox that followed was the maintaining of a rather unmodern law in the context of a purportedly modern society. Under no circumstances—and here the juridical system and the Feuersozietät agreed—could such acts of incendiarism be tolerated. In response, recourse was made to the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (CCC), the German criminal law from 1532 that defined arson as a capital crime punishable by death. Arson was to be a capital crime regardless of whether or not it had caused the death of others, a departure from the historical criminal code toward an even greater lack of mercy. Throughout the eighteenth century, it was frequently applied, usually by burning at the stake. Even more astonishing is the extended application of this law; whereas the CCC, also known as the Hoch-Nothpeinliche-Halsgericht, was officially abolished in 1805, Berlin was allowed to retain the section of the penal code regarding arson, and continued to execute arsonists publicly until at least 1813. The continued use of this one brutal law at a time when penal codes increasingly mandated less draconian punishments knows little comparison in the history of Germany.

The exercise of this law burnt its trace into the archives. In this way, we learn about two youths—a maid and a servant—on a fatal morning in 1813:

Around 7 o’clock, [the procession] reached the outermost row of the National Guard. The criminals had to get off the wagons, and the verdict was read to them again. Then a cowhide was spread out on which they had to sit, their backs turned against each other, and with the cowhide, they were dragged to the front of the wooden stairs leading to the stake. … The two main actors of the horrible drama showed a cheekiness and courage that earned them loud applause from the people. Horst cheekily threw up his hat once more, then he followed his lover, the very pretty twenty-two-year-old Christiane Delitz, who had been led to the stake before him. Here, he embraced her again before death, then took his place on her left. Calmly, he had his body, arms, and neck tied to his seat. The executioners then pulled caps over the criminals’ faces and set fire to the stake. The strong wind soon kindled the fire into bright flames, so that the bodies of the dying disappeared from the eyes of the spectators.^[3]

According to the record, Horst and Delitz were the last arsonists to be burned at the stake in Germany. In 1818, their trial was revisited in the publication Kurze Geschichte des Criminal-Prozesses wider den Brandstifter Johann Christoph Peter Horst und dessen Geliebte, die unverehelichte Friederike Louise Christiane Delitz. In 1858, they are mentioned again in the comprehensive survey of German criminality Das deutsche Gaunerthum (German roguery)—around the same time that Spitzweg’s young man was lowering the famous love letter past the Phoenix insurance plate. Perhaps, then, the painting is not solely an account of the struggle between love and risk, but also positions, in close historical proximity to the notorious executions, the fire mark as an indicator of distance from a past that was, in fact, not so distant. If so, the enamel on the facade of the Cabinet building might not be as “solitary” as its design would have us think. Perhaps it is actually in quite some historical company, in which medieval practices, modern risk management, arsonists, fallen angels, and insurance men are separated by nothing but a plate of metal.