Metropolis

LIKE ANYONE WHO’S read the Bible, I was familiar with the idea of Babylon as a city that was a byword for iniquity and the abominations of the earth, whatever they might be. And like anyone who lived in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, I was also familiar with the comparison frequently made between the two cities. At the Lutheran St. Nicholas’ Church in Berlin where I used to go with my parents as a small boy, our brick-faced, shouty pastor, Dr. Rotpfad, seemed so familiar with Babylon and its topography that I believed he must once have lived there. Which only provoked my fascination with the name and prompted me to look it up in the Conversations-Lexicon, which occupied a whole shelf in the family bookcase. But the encyclopedia wasn’t very enlightening on the abominations. And while it’s true there were plenty of whores and scarlet women and an ample supply of sin to be found in Berlin, I’m not sure it was worse than in any other great metropolis such as London, New York, or Shanghai.

Bernhard Weiss told me the comparison was and always had been nonsense, that it was like comparing apples with oranges. He didn’t believe in evil and reminded me that there were no laws against it anywhere, not even in England, where there were laws against almost everything. In May 1928, the famous Ishtar Gate, the northern entrance to Babylon, had yet to be reconstructed in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, so the Prussian capital’s notoriety as the wickedest place in the world had yet to be underlined in red by the city’s moral guardians, meaning there was still some room for doubt. Perhaps we were just more honest about our own depravities and more tolerant of other people’s vices. And I should know; in 1928, vice in all its endless permutations was my departmental responsibility at the Police Praesidium on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Criminalistically speaking—which was a new word for us cops, thanks to Weiss—I knew almost as much about the subject of vice as Gilles de Rais. But in truth, with so many dead in the Great War and the flu that came immediately after, which, like some Old Testament plague, killed millions more, it hardly seemed important to worry about what people put up their noses or what they did when they got undressed in their dark Biedermeier bedrooms. And not just in their bedrooms. On summer nights, the Tiergarten sometimes looked like a stud farm, there were so many whores copulating on the grass with their clients. I suppose it’s hardly surprising that after a war in which so many Germans were obliged to kill for their country, they now preferred to fuck.

Given everything that went before and everything that followed, it’s difficult to speak accurately or fairly about Berlin. In many ways it was never a pleasant place and sometimes a senseless, ugly one. Too cold in winter, too hot in summer, too dirty, too smoky, too smelly, too loud, and, of course, afflicted horribly with far too many people, like Babel, which is the other name for Babylon. All the city’s public buildings were constructed to the glory of a German empire that hardly ever existed and, like the city’s worst slums and tenements, made nearly everyone who encountered them feel inhuman and insignificant. Not that anyone ever cared much about Berlin’s people (certainly its rulers didn’t) since they were not very agreeable, or friendly, or well mannered; quite often they were stupid, heavy, dull, and relentlessly vulgar; always they were cruel and brutal. Violent murders were commonplace; mostly these were committed by drunken men who came home from the beer house and strangled their wives because they were so befuddled by beer and schnapps they didn’t know what they were doing. But sometimes, it was something much worse: a Fritz Haarmann or a Karl Denke, one of those peculiar, godless Germans who seemed to enjoy killing for its own sake. Even this no longer seemed so surprising; in Weimar Germany there was perhaps an indifference to sudden death and human suffering that was also an inevitable legacy of the Great War. Our two million dead was as many as Britain and France combined. There are fields in Flanders that contain the bones of so many of our young men that they are more German than Unter den Linden. And even today, ten years after the war, the streets are always full of the maimed and the lame, many of them still in uniform, begging for a few coins outside railway stations and banks. It’s a rare day when Berlin’s public spaces don’t resemble a painting by Pieter Brueghel.

And yet, for all that, Berlin was also a wonderful, inspiring place. Despite the many previously listed reasons to dislike the city, it was a large, bright mirror to the world and hence, for anyone interested in living in that world, a marvelous reflection of human life in all its fascinating glory. I wouldn’t have lived anywhere else but Berlin if you’d paid me, especially now that Germany was over the worst. After the Great War, the flu, and the inflation, things were getting better, albeit slowly; things were still hard for a lot of people, in the east of the city most of all. But it was difficult to see Berlin ever going the same way as Babylon, which, according to the Conversations-Lexicon, was destroyed by the Chaldeans, its walls, temples, and palaces razed and the rubble thrown into the sea. Something like that was never going to happen to us. Whatever followed now, we were probably safe from a biblical destruction. It wasn’t in anyone’s interest—not the French, nor the British, and certainly not the Russians—to see Berlin and, by extension, Germany, become the subject of divine apocalyptic vengeance.