In May 1881, Werner von Siemens opened the world's first public electric tramway in the Berlin suburb of Lichterfelde, Germany. The 2.5-kilometer line ran from the Lichterfelde station to the Cadet School, powered by electricity generated at a small station along the route and transmitted through the rails. This demonstration in Berlin-Lichterfelde proved that electric traction was practical for public transportation, launching the era of the electric tram and eventually the electric subway that would transform urban life in cities around the world.

The electric tram in Berlin-Lichterfelde, replacing horse-drawn transport with silent electrical power, symbolized the new pace and character of modern urban life that would become a central preoccupation of twentieth-century literature. The experience of moving through the city at a steady, mechanically regulated speed, without the visible exertion of horses, changed the phenomenological experience of urban space in ways that influenced the stream-of-consciousness techniques of modernist writers. The Berlin electric railway, running through the same streets where Brecht, Doblin, and Isherwood would later set their works, initiated the electrified urban experience that modernist literature would seek to capture.