The Hotel Years

2. Of Dogs and Men

To the many scenes of war misery in Vienna a new one was added, a few days ago.

A man returned from the war in the form of a hinge — invalid with shattered spine — moves almost inexplicably through Kärntner Strasse, selling newspapers. A dog sits on his back.

A clever, well-trained dog, riding on his own master, and making sure he doesn’t lose a single paper. A modern fairy-tale being, combination of man and dog, thrown up by the war and set down in the misery of Kärntner Strasse.

A sign of the times, in which dogs ride men, to protect them from other men. A memory of those great times when men were trained like dogs and were barked at as “Schweinehunde” and so forth, by others who were themselves bloodhounds (though heaven help you if you called them that).

An outcome of patriotism that makes the upright likenesses of the Creator dependent on four-footed creatures who lacked the spiritual distinction to become heroes or cannon-fodder, and at the most did odd jobs in the ambulance service. On the invalid’s chest dangles an Emperor Karl Troop Cross. On the neck of the dog a mere dog-tag.

The bearer of the Troop Cross is a victim. The one with the dog-tag is active. He guards the suffering of the invalid. He keeps the man from further harm. His Fatherland and fellow-beings could only hurt him. He has them to thank for being watched over by a dog. Sign of the times! Once there were sheepdogs who watched herds of sheep, and guard-dogs that guarded houses. Today there are mandogs who watch invalids, mandogs the logical consequence of submissive men. The scene struck me with the force of a revelation: a dog seated on a man. When he remembers what happened when he relied on other men, a man is happy to put his trust in a dog. Is there anything so sad as this sight, which seems so emblematic? All around stroll the war-profiteers with their X-ray vision, and in the midst of everything a mounted dog. The human race has lost, all hail to the animal. We have been through the war that was the last hurrah of cavalry, and at the end of it dogs ride around on men.

Der Neue Tag, 1 August 1919

3. Millionaire for an Hour

Every so often, I like to spend a little time in the lobby of the big hotel where visitors from hard-currency nations come to stay. The coffered ceiling consists of so many gorgeous panels, and in the middle of each one sprouts an electric light. The lamps look like glass flowers, shaded by golden leaves.

The ceiling is low but expansive, the furniture likewise. Everything here tends to breadth and luxury. The low ceiling murmurs: Don’t get up! The broad armchairs say: Kick your shoes off!

I kick off one of my shoes and look with a deal of satisfaction at the crease of my trouser-leg (my only pair, but let that go). I also take pride in the state of my toe caps, which have just had a good shine from the soft flannel cloth of the man on Unter den Linden.

After just a quarter of an hour of sitting like that, and feeling flush and expansive, I start to think I am someone from a hard-currency country, and am staying at the hotel.

The messenger boy who is delivering a letter gives my shiny toecaps a wide berth. The messenger boy has no idea I don’t live here. When I call him, he comes to a stop outside the charmed hard-currency nimbus in whose centre I am sitting, and doffs his brown cap to me with an angular movement of his well-trained arm. He has big blue eyes and gives me his best awestruck stare. He has whole magazines of respect in his eyes. He is apple-cheeked and smells pleasantly of milk, like a clean baby. He has been studying deference to his hard-currency elders for all of two years now.

The white napkin of the waiter starts to twitch respectfully at about ten paces. The hotel manager, striding across the tasteful ornaments of his Smyrna carpet with the dignity of a Grand Vizier, inclines his head when I look at him.

After a while, I shift my focus to my brother millionaires. They are very well dressed. The men smell of new leather luggage and English shaving cream and coal. The women disperse gentle hints of a Russian scent across the room. The bittersweet aroma tickles my nostrils, only to disappear again.

The millionaires are gifted poseurs. The younger ones wear belted lemon-lime raincoats with discreet matte buckles. Their hats are for the most part dove-grey and have a hint of a dent at the top (that might almost be an accident). Their gloves are white, their shoes are brown or tan, and when the young millionaires sit down, they give their trousers a little tweak at the knees to show off their silk socks.

The old millionaires seem generally unaware of the season. It’s not the state of the mercury but the state of the market that matters. The old millionaires sit there in their winter wool coats and padded gloves, and they keep a freshly guillotined cigar clenched so expectantly between their teeth that a waiter leaps by with tails aflutter, in mid-air striking a match on the emery board so as to have it ready when he alights.

I get to know people here: a man with whiskers who looks like a Hamburg senator (and he has the thick ‘s’ to match). Protracted negotiations with a belted youth. The subject is petroleum. The youth seems to be from Poland. He has a piece of paper in his top pocket. Every so often he gives it a meaningful tap. Each time the bewhiskered oldster falls silent and looks wistfully at the youth.

Behind a column, a mulatto leans back in a rattan chair. He is smoking a dense Turkish cigarette and is negotiating with a spiv of an uncertain age who fancies himself a matinee idol. He has a pair of canary-yellow gloves. You can practically hear them cheeping away. He is wearing the right one, the left is lying casually and emptily on the marble table top. Abruptly the spiv bestirs himself, gets to his feet, and gives the mulatto a friendly wave with his empty glove, as though his train were just pulling out. It’s my sense that he’s got one over on the mulatto. Men in canary-yellow gloves should be treated with suspicion.

In the lobby cocaine, sugar, political systems, revolutions and women are on offer. A Russian count ponders the advisability of a move for the naval base of Kronstadt. A carpet dealer discusses terms with an only recently “made” man. A lawyer takes receipt of half a dozen passports from a Russian family. “We’ll get it done,” his eyes seem to blink. He jabs his pince-nez against the bridge of his nose, and with sudden resolve clacks his briefcase shut. As he reverses out of the door he bows three times to the Russian head of household, who waves avuncularly.

At five the band launch into the Peer Gynt Suite. The millionaires turn away from their business and towards their womenfolk. The millionairesses drink mocha and eat ice cream and nibble little cakes and make sure their right pinkie is always extended, as though it were an especially holy thing that mustn’t ever touch the side of a cup.

When I leave the hotel the porter stands beside the revolving door, primed to greet me, like a talking fork. His owner’s monogram decorates him heart and head. A chauffeur asks me whether I would like a ride somewhere.

I would not. I am no longer a millionaire.

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12 Uhr-Blatt, 1 April 1921

4. The Umbrella

It was raining the day before yesterday. The asphalt of the Kurfürstendamm was slippery, and a woman with an open umbrella ran into a moving car, slipped, and was run over. Her umbrella was lying on the pavement. People rushed over, the woman was picked up; she was badly shaken, nothing more — all this had to be established in a nearby café. But before it could be established, and while she was still lying in the road, covered with blood in the imagination of all the passers-by who had witnessed the accident, and possibly with severed limbs, a man had the presence of mind to pick up the lady’s umbrella and walk off with it.

I had never supposed that people’s decency was a match for their self-interest. But that their meanness was even greater than their curiosity, that was brought home to me by this incident, which shows that it isn’t difficult to strip the pillow off someone’s deathbed, and sell the feathers at the next street corner.

The woman who had escaped with her life now wept for the loss of her umbrella and was not at all grateful that her limbs were intact. As evidenced here, people come in two sorts: unscrupulous and plain dim.

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12 Uhr-Blatt, 29 May 1921

5. The Emigrants’ Ship

ON BOARD THE PITTSBURGH

The emigrants’ ship is called the Pittsburgh, and it is due to leave Bremerhaven at exactly 2 minutes past 11. The emigrants are people from the East, mainly Jews, lucky to have escaped the Europe of pogroms; also Russian peasants and young Ukrainian women, with colourful headscarves like summer meadows, sprinkled with cheery red and blue flowers. The White Star Line, which owns the Pittsburgh, has finally ended its rather anachronistic policy of “steerage passengers”, by abolishing the ’tween decks, and introducing third-class cabins. The proletarian romance of a chaos of people and suitcases is over. All are tucked away in tight cabins like lockable pigeonholes set in the walls. The Jews, children or bearded, the Russian peasants, their faces furrowed like their fields, and the shining Ukrainian peasant women are all boxed up. Their emigrant poverty hidden, no longer open to the shameless prying eye. Still, there is a good deal of misery on show before it is all packed away. The luggage — strange, eccentric-looking items, down pillows bagged up in hessian, coverlets, red and white striped privities, tied and endlessly retied bundles and baskets with antediluvian padlocks. Everything is loaded onto small wagons running on electric motors and taken to port. Even so, the emigrants are still carrying a lot. There are things a person doesn’t like to lose from sight, not even for half an hour. And so the Jews are left to sweat under their cherished loads which they lug on their crooked backs and in their frozen hands as far as the plump, helmeted policeman. This policeman is a splendid instance of a half-terrestrial, half-marine authority. His round cheeks are of a red that seems to glow from within, as if he had a lit candle in his mouth like a paper lantern at a summer fete. Ships’ cooks all look like that. The helmet, the dark cloak, and the sabre, none of them go with the salt water face. A great calm radiates from that broad, improbably luminous face, and a benevolence that denies the severity of the blinking badge on the helmet, and quite disavows the sabre. The policeman stands at the far end of the narrow bridge that connects terra firma to the great sea. The emigrants need to go past him with their heavy loads. Clumsily as can be, they set their loads down, looking for a clean spot; ideally they would spread one of their red and blue check handkerchiefs on the ground before setting their bundle down on top of it. All that takes a good five minutes, and already a gong is being sounded on board: in ten minutes the Washington is due, and so the Pittsburgh will have to leave its berth. But the policeman radiates the calm and ease of a traffic light; they look at him, and think they have all the time in the world, whatever the urgency of the ship. They produce passports and tickets sewn into undershirts or variously secreted about their bodies. The policeman, by the light of his own countenance, studies them assiduously.

The ship (it has a tonnage of 16,000) carries 1,800 passengers. About a third of these are emigrants. They come from Russia and the Successor states, Poland and Lithuania. The East of Europe pours them out. These Eastern Jews and peasants have been emigrating westwards for hundreds of years, leaving their old homes behind, looking for a new one. A great sadness emanates from them, their grey beards, their wrinkled faces, their adorable, helpless bundles. A family from Kowel is here, an old matron swaddled in black, two young daughters with cropped curls, and a twenty-year-old son, with broad shoulders and red hands dangling from his sleeves like giant appliances. He laughs and shrugs his strong shoulders. For two years now he and his family have been wandering through the sorry, moribund West of Europe, in search of his father, who left Kovel ten years before — God only knows where he is. They were in Budapest, six months in constant dread of the expatriation that might come at any hour of day or night; finally it came and they were chased to Vienna, where they hung on for a year in a basement hole on Kleine Schiffergasse. Here too they were viewed as a burden on the state — the son engaged in unauthorized selling of clothes — and they drifted on to the wretched east of Berlin, to Hirtenstrasse, where the black market promises undreamed-of riches and doesn’t deliver. Finally a cousin got in touch from New York, a street vendor of oranges and lemons and he sent them steamer tickets and ten dollars apiece — God helps those who are abandoned. Now they are on their way to America and a vast, beautiful freedom beckons to the children, a grave to their old mother, but they will have got away from Europe, the continent of pogroms, of the police, the black market and unauthorized dealing in second-hand clothes. The Ukrainian peasants are fleeing hunger, the plague, and a creeping charity. One has a brother-in-law there — Nikita is his name — another has a nephew, Timofei. The barely legible addresses are scribbled on old crumpled envelopes. For many weeks the peasants have been carrying them tucked into waistcoat pockets, in snuff boxes, and in carved pipe bowls of cherry wood. The peasants’ wives have the timid, flickering eyes of frightened animals as they watch the bustle, great ships’ cranes taking up huge quantities of coals, slowly swiveling in mid-air, the scoops opening like giant hands, and spilling their load into the hold. They hear the unfamiliar clang of the heavy ship’s bell, the warning cries of the dockers, the thunder or clatter of the rolling trucks. They see how the harbour goes on and on, offering the illimitable ocean to the eye, a never-before-seen endlessness of blue.

Way up in the air the Stars and Stripes flutter over the international shipping banner, which is as blue as the sky and the sea, and with a white circle in the middle, like a perfectly regular cloud. On the bridge stands a man with his cap strapped over chin and ears, giving out orders in incomprehensible terms. His commands are as mysterious as the great sea itself. A little tug tows the ship with thick hawsers; like a willing triumphal gate the harbour locks slowly and ceremonially open. The emigrants are on board; they call out to the disappearing land. No one has come to see them off, so they wave to strangers, to the luminous policeman, to the dockers and porters. Up at the rim of a huge chimney appears a black figure, a chimneysweep, a toy figure compared to the enormous liner, so tiny is his silhouette against the endless blue background. Out of the perfectly round windows of their cabins the emigrants’ faces catch their last sight of Europe.

Prager Tagblatt, 18 February 1923

6. The Currency-Reformed City

The only affordable currency-reformed city in Germany is Hamburg. It has introduced its own currency, the much-praised, much-sought-after Hamburg Gold Mark, which sells at a premium on the black market. I have seen one for myself, a Hamburg Gold Mark, it’s a little scrap of paper that proclaims that the Hamburg banks will vouch for its full convertibility. And as people know the world over, Hamburg banks are solid and reliable, and so Hamburg has become the cheapest, most affordable city in Germany.

A hotel room costs half a dollar, lunch costs a quarter of a dollar, a taxi ride costs half a dollar, a pound of meat costs a dollar. There is unemployment. Unemployed dockworkers, laid-off sailors and factory workers. A month ago there was a risk that this great mass of unemployed, cultivated assiduously by communist and nationalist propaganda, might spark a revolution, or at the very least a series of disturbances. And lo! The Hamburg Gold Mark came along, and everything went quiet. It’s one of the mysteries of economics why a great mass of hungry people, none of whom have so much as a Hamburg gold pfennig to their name, are pacified by the existence of the Hamburg Gold Mark. Greybeard economists scratch their heads at this wonder. Although no one knows how long it will last.

No one knows, because in waterside dives, in shady bars haunted by desperate people, sailors who have missed their ships, criminals hunted by the police forces of various cities and countries — in these sinister breeding-grounds of international crime, what has been on the agenda for the last few months is politics. A curious kind of politics. People who were left cold by the European economy or the constitutional arrangements of the German Reich, for whom swastika and red star are emblems of foreign worlds, not for outsiders, for people outside of society, these same people now spend all their evenings in smoke-filled rooms — not because they’re interested in the speeches, but because they are given food there, and schnapps and — money. The Hamburg Gold Mark, as they say, rolls almost as well as the Soviet rouble, and a lot better than the old Czarist one. It appears that forces unknown are competing over the lumpenproletariat of port cities. Nowhere is the propaganda of left and right more virulent than in Hamburg and Bremen. Odd that these are two cities with a particularly conservative middle class. One might have supposed that looking out every day at so much water would have broadened their intellectual horizons and their sense of the political necessities of the fatherland. But it is in these places that social progress encounters the toughest resistance. The contradictions are unbridgeable. Nationalist propaganda appeals to the irate middle class, which one wouldn’t have thought so absurdly susceptible. Communist propaganda is favoured by the stiff necks of the merely rich middle class. In no German city is there such fierce hatred of the poor. Nowhere is the obstinacy of the propertied classes stronger.

For the time being, the Hamburg Gold Mark has calmed people down. In the long run, though, no unemployed man can take comfort from the fact that his fellow in work can now afford to buy butter. Without the free food he gets in assembly halls he would starve to death. And in these assembly halls, where people used to go to smooch and drink, they are now daubing swastikas and Soviet stars on the grimy walls.

Prager Tagblatt, 6 January 1924

7. Baltic Tour

The “season”—it’s a technical term — has begun very auspiciously on the Baltic coast. Here too, as in watering places the world over, there is early, late and high season. High is just beginning now, in July, late won’t start till the end of August. Both have so many subscribers already that most hotels, villas and B&Bs are booked up. This summer promises to be exceptionally profitable for the leisure industry and the local inhabitants of the Baltic beaches. They deserve it. The summer visitor, who only sees the sea and the coast by sunshine, or at worst, in wretched squalls lasting several days, has of course no notion of the difficulties faced by the locals in autumn, winter and early spring. The Baltic is not always as clement as it is during the “season”. When tourists are a distant twinkle, the coast often plays host to a primal struggle between inhabitants and elements. What these not overly well-off little communities spend a deal of money and patience building, in the way of bridges, beach huts and little wooden towers, can quite easily be destroyed by a storm in the course of one spring night. The first and most important prerequisite for living here is a basic toughness. I have talked to locals, they have told me about the harsh, white, unending winters, winters in which no one goes out of doors, in which the snow buries the buildings, the electricity and gas don’t work, water freezes in the wells, and the onshore gale blows with such merciless force that no living being can stand up to it. Summer means more to the residents than recovery, or getting well or resurrection. In the course of those cruel winters they have learned to be tight-lipped, tough, suspicious, stubborn. Even so, a generous humanity stirs in them, their hospitality is sincere, their expressions simple, their greetings curt but friendly. In our many-faceted, tribal Germany this is one of the most interesting populations. Their songs are as simple as the rhythm of the sea; their language is rich in foursquare consonants that resist the prevailing wind, to make themselves heard. One can’t hold it against these people that they charge such relatively high prices, higher for the moment than in the South of France. The beauties of the Baltic coast are worth it. Further, the baths are closer than foreign resorts, and then — they are ours. We go there and do well for ourselves. A room and board costs between seven and ten marks per visitor per day. The early season is three marks less.

The Baltic sea baths have a greater array of natural beauties than most European spas. They are characterized by an almost improbable combination of rural variety and the eternal monotony of the sea. One can walk for days with the sea on one side, and a landscape of the most variable composition on the other. Hills, dales, woods and sea, sea, sea. One rises early and hears the surf beat on the shore, a swelling and ebbing crash. There is the kiss of the wave which combines coming and going, arrival and departure, greeting with the pain of separation — and at the same time there is the song of myriad wood-birds, an almost exotic choir, so that you would think yourself somewhere far in the south. You come here expecting only sea and screaming seagulls. But here is the melodious variety of a continental broad-leaved forest, opposing the water’s monotony with dedication and energy. It’s so unexpected to hear bird-twitter and surf-crash at once that you think you must be dreaming and it takes a while to gradually get used to the fairy-tale pairing of contrasting melodies.

The leading resorts, Swinemünde, Heringsdorf, Bansin, Ahlbeck, are well known; the island of Rügen less well. Most landlubbers come over all awestruck at the idea of an island; places like that must be wildly inaccessible. And so, even though, or perhaps just because it’s so self-evident, you say it again: the sea-bathing on Rügen is as comfortable, as European, and as civilized as anywhere on the European coast. They have electricity, gas, running water, telephone, hairdressers, baths, hotels. And they have more, too: namely that smidgeon of intact nature that serves to guarantee the civilized townie respite from civilization. You can get a shave, send a telegram, listen to the band, and yet still go on a solitary ramble through charmed scenery, and run into a fisherman who might have lurched from the pages of Grimm. In Binz, the largest of the Rügen resorts, it’s difficult to avoid the jazz. Poetically inclined natures and canny admen have dubbed it “the Sorrento of the north”. It has twenty hotels and two hundred villas to let, a two-mile seafront promenade, is stuffed with make-up, powder, atropine, tennis racquets and sharp pleats, cocktail bars and tipsy customers; a spa hotel with dancing opportunities for black tie and evening gowns; and even some swastika flags. In Sassnitz you can be one of 26,000 visitors, and still do something for your immortal soul, and visit an Evangelical and Catholic Mass. It lies in a dip, protected to the north by beech-clad hills, and not far, a two-hour walk, is Stubbenkammer. Here the sand and clay soil is relieved by chalk. This is the terrain of the old pirate legends. The chalk cliffs are extraordinary, at night they have a ghostly glow, they seem predestined for pirate tales. The chalk bluffs have faces and eerie formations, and there’s a very strange contradiction between the deathly pallor of the material and its lively, grimacing forms.

If you’re looking for quiet, national characteristics, idylls — you will look up the small resorts of Sellin, Baabe, Göhren, Thiessow, Putbus, or Lauterbach. Here the waiters wear less rigidly starched shirtfronts and the hosts speak Plattdeutsch. Hens peck about on the streets, and a beautiful woman may walk through the little town in a bathrobe. The village-like quiet is disturbed only by the occasional marching band. No jazz stirs the wrath of Neptune and his fellow sea-gods. And if you’re in luck, you’ll see some of the old Mönchgut residents dancing in their traditional costume. They wear homespun clothes, black robes, colourful waistcoats, golden chains and short, baggy white pantaloons, billowing round short rubber boots, looking like bells. Their legs are like thin clappers — even with the boots. They are the last of the dancers. The young farmers have given up weaving, and don’t dance any more. A whole way of life is coming to an end.

Visitors eager to avoid politics should seek out Baabe, which is one of the quietest and cheapest of the Baltic resorts and which is run by its clever, efficient and modern mayor, Thormann.* But in other places too the locals have not had their heads turned by swastikas, and what there is by way of nationalist propaganda is imported by the visitors.

The sea, meanwhile, is as it always is, clean and untouched by the childish and violent games of men. You gaze at the infinity of water and sky, and forget. The wind that billows out the swastika banner does so in all innocence. The wave in which it is reflected isn’t to blame for its own desecration. So foolish are people that even in sight of these eternal things, they do not shrink in awe.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 July 1924

* Politics: there is a late shadow cast over this enthusiastic piece by the phenomenon of “Bäder-Antisemitismus”, the anti-Semitism prevalent in some North German resorts from about 1890. Roth handles it discreetly and a little disdainfully, but it’s very evidently there

8. Melancholy of a Tram Car in the Ruhr

A thin, persistent rain. The tram leaves at twelve-fifteen. At one-forty-five it will be in the next town. The stop is outside a bar. I sip kirsch, and peer out at the street through the ornaments in the net curtains. Rain like this stifles sounds as much as snow does. Yes, if these curtains had no ornaments, if this bar had no curtains — why curtains? — then I could probably have seen the tram approach. I shudder at the thought of it leaving without me, and at the same time I wish it would. Then I might take the quicker, more comfortable, reliable train instead. But I am under the spell of a freely chosen torment. The more time, patience, chill, kirsch and loathing I sink into this endeavour, the more difficult it is for me to give it up. Time flows, rain flows.

Quite punctually, no reason it should, the tram comes. Its running board is high and sodden; the floor on the inside is damp too. An old man is smoking a pipe, a woman sits with a covered basket on her lap, schoolgirls clamber aboard, with rough, ugly satchels on their backs that the rain has darkened — like soldiers’ knapsacks with dangling sponge attached. Two workingmen lean on the back platform, keeping the conductor company. There is a country maid as well, with gold-rimmed spectacles and bare feet. She puts me in mind of a plough pulled by a locomotive. No one speaks. All are preparing themselves for the ordeal of a long ride. Such concentration demands complete silence. The hard seats of shiny polished wood are not only short; they also have a downward slope. Sitting on them means: continually and hopelessly shuffling back up.

We go along a long road with dark buildings and dark spaces between them; plots with boards and fences that make no sense, no hope of ever becoming a garden, a field, or a house. The dead bodies of plots. The town refuses to end. If it ever does, though, you can be sure the next one will begin immediately. The towns hand the streets on. Each time, we stop in front of brown shelters of creosoted wood that look like the primal forms of stations in the wilder parts of America. Next come allotments, little hutments of roofing cardboard, the summer castles of the little man and the little rabbit. Jugs, pots and bowls have been spiked on fence-posts like so many severed heads. A red-brick factory, an iron fence, a little white stone gate-house with a visible clock-punch, behind it big puffing chimneys, four, five, six of them, ready to reproduce at a moment’s notice.

The country keeps being on the point of taking over, and making country again — and then it can’t. There are no buildings. The road could turn into a country road at this point. There are even trees at either side, preparing to speak up for it. But our tram needs its overhead wires, and the wires need long, bare, wooden poles, with a couple of china pots flowering at the top end, for purposes of electricity. A caricature of a snowdrop.

In the far distance, on the very horizon, nature is at pains to produce a wood. But there is no wood. There is a kind of beginning vegetative bald patch with comb-over fronds of pine. Next come the inns, one after the other, and each one announcing “picturesque garden location”. What can they mean, what is picturesque here? I imagine a restaurant with painted orange trees and laurel in flower pots; or a bit of a cabbage patch with a veranda; four fences festooned with wild Virginia creeper. There are no limits to the imagination.

Next comes a completely unscheduled stop. The driver gets out, the conductor follows suit, they meet somewhere in the middle. We listen to the rain. There are no signs anywhere. Chimneys, some stout, some slender, puff away in unrelieved torment. The rain shreds the thick smoke, pulverizes it, evenly, without rancour. The rain pulls curtains in front of the scene, curtains without ornaments. There is no landscape, just a kind of extended townscape, industrial-scape — punctuated with picturesque garden locations.

Then, barely visible through the rain, we catch a glimmering of an undertaker on one side, and on the opposite side Persil, the epitome of life. No one speaks. Each time the door opens, someone slams it shut. It’s cold. When we stop, it’s colder. We feel like pulling our feet up on to the seats, but that’s almost certainly forbidden. We have leisure to read the notices: twenty seats; no spitting. I have half a mind to.

Now we’re on the move again. And here is the beginning of the next conurbation. We reach our destination. It looks like where we began from. It’s as though there are no spatial destinations here, only temporal ones, like the certain, final and irrevocable death of the last patch of native earth.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 March 1926

9. Smoke Joins up the Towns

Here the whole sky is smoke. It connects all the towns. It hangs in a grey pall over the land that has made it and that continues to make more of it. The wind that might scatter it is choked and buried under it. The sun that might tunnel through it is deflected and buried in thick clouds. Like something not earthborn and ephemeral, it ascends, conquers celestial regions, acquires mass, spins substance out of nothing, bundles its shadow into a body and incessantly increases its specific weight. It draws new sustenance from massive chimneys. It rises voluminously into the air. It is sacrifice, god and priest all at once. Billions of specks of dust are exhaled by it. By the mere fact of producing it, we worship it. We create it with an industry that is more than reverence. We are filled with it.

Also filled with it is the metropolis that is made up of all the towns of the Ruhrgebiet. An unholy expanse of greater and lesser conurbations, linked by rails, wires, interests and surrounded by smoke, cut off from the rest of the country. If it was just one single, great, gruesome city, it would still be a fantastic place, but not so menacingly ghostly. A big city has centres, rows of streets joined up by the sense of a structure, it has history, and its checkable expansion is somehow calming. It has a periphery, a limit, a line where it stops and goes over into country. Here, though, are a dozen beginnings; and it ends a dozen times. Land wants to resume, poor, smoke-pregnant land, but along comes a wire and says: not here you don’t. Great cubes of brick factory advance unceremoniously, stand there, more firmly set than mountains or hills, more naturally decreed than woods. Every small town has its focus, its edges, its development. But since they are all to be united by smoke to a single city, the separate forms and histories lose credibility, certainly function. Why? Why? Why is Essen here? Why are Duisburg, Hamborn, Oberhausen, Mülheim, Bottrop, Elberfeld, Barmen there? Why so many names, why so many mayors, so many officials for a single town? And as if all that weren’t enough, a provincial border runs through the middle of things. The inhabitants have the delusion of being Westphalians on the right, Rhinelanders on the left. But what are they really? Inhabitants of the smokeland, smoke worshippers, smoke makers, children of smoke.

It’s as though the inhabitants of the cities were outdistanced by the wisdom and the aspirations of the cities themselves. Things have a better feeling for the future than people do. People feel historically, i.e. retrospectively. Walls, streets, wires, chimneys feel prospectively. People get in the way of progress. They hang sentimental weights on the winged feet of time. Each one wants his own church tower. In the meantime chimneys grow over the heads of church towers. The smoke eats up the sound of bells. It swaddles them in its black wool, so that they cannot be heard, much less told apart. Each city has its theatres, its monuments, its museum, its history. But none of these things has any lasting resonance. For historical or so-called cultural things live off the echo that sustains them. Here though is no room for echo and resonance. The sounds of bells live from echo, and they all fight each other, until the smoke comes along and chokes them.

Some of the smaller towns here have their old gabled romantic parts. These are referred to as idyllic. Time drones all round them. Busy wires enmesh them. All the trembling airwaves are full of the radio-borne words of the present. What is the point of these slumbering nooks, these dreamy beauties? While there was a blue sky over them they were in their element, but now grey smoke hangs over them. They are buried under billions of dust and carbon particles. They will never experience a resurrection. Never will a pure naked sunbeam gild them. Never will a pure rain rinse them clean. Never will an actual cloud lend them shade. In all their fixity they are doomed. They were built for the ages in lasting stone, and their durable construction is the only reason they still exist now. Not because they have any force or presence. They are like old silver coins that have no value as currency. The flimsiest banknote is more actual.

It is of just such ridiculous thin material that the new parts of cities are built. There are walls you can pinch between finger and thumb. There are tenements of wood and hollow brick. There are shingle roofs that children might have draped. Things stand and fall and are rebuilt. Moments ago they were white and gleaming with fresh paint. Now they are black as rotten teeth. Each street a gaping mouth.

People live here. People with ambitions and desires. Even the unemployed. They step out. Why hang about? What is there to see here? Children play in the middle of the streets. All the windows are identical. All the doors are identical. Only the numbers on them are different. All the people are grimly determined to reach their destination. Perhaps it is the dole office. Perhaps the co-op. Perhaps it is a meeting hall. Perhaps a break-in. Perhaps the revolution. Perhaps it is the cinema.

Oh, but it matters so little! One destination is like the other. One city like the next. Each street like the next. Climb on the tram. In half an hour you’ll be in the next place. Is there any difference? Smoke over the world! You go to Oberhausen, and then Mülheim, and then to Recklinghausen, to Bochum, to Gladbeck, to Buer, to Hamborn, to Bottrop. Smoke over the world! No sky, no clouds. Rain precipitated from smoke: black rain. A hundred chimneys, so many fingers, pillars of the smoke sky, altars of the Almighty Smoke. Rails along the ground, corresponding wires through the air. All one grim city made of stacks of city, of bundles of towns. In amongst it all runs the abstract provincial boundary. But overhead is the uniform sky, and that is smoke, smoke, smoke.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 18 March 1926

10. Germany in Winter

There is something half-hearted about this winter. The calendrical harshness of nature is nothing to the boundless cruelty of history. Snow melts away a couple of hours after falling. A mild zephyr blows over the land. There is a relation between the desires and the fears of the hungry, the cold, the unshod and the unclothed, and the permanent laws of the changing seasons. God’s fist has never oppressed us so much; the hand that doles out frost and bitterness every year was never so mild. There is some compensatory mechanism.

I come from abroad, where they pack up mercy parcels for Germany’s army, and where the newspapers mount withering attacks on German politicians on their front pages, but their back, human pages stick up for German victims; where the window displays of banks and exchange parlours exhibit endless Reichsmark notes, not as negotiable objects of exchange, but as curiosities; where Germany’s best actors appear, not for fame, but for rustling currency; where the money still has a good oily sheen, and feels soft and smooth in the hand, as though coloured by the sacred, kingly fat of the Golden Calf.

But in this abroad the station-guard goes hungry, the trains come and go unpunctually, the heating doesn’t always work, the porters haggle, the toilets don’t flush, and the lighting in the compartments is wretched. Whereas in Germany railway carriages are full of embittered businessmen, and a hungry inspector checks your tickets — but the heating works, and a beaming lamp, worthy of a nice sitting room, sheds its light. The porters certainly have set fees. The timetable isn’t a work of fiction. The trains actually stick to it. Officials man the counters. Water flows into the WCs. The machinery of public life is well and dependably oiled. In the cities, busy brooms whisk canine excrement into purpose-built gutters. Outside food shops stands the tidy rank and file of the great army of hungry Germans.

In Leipzig I saw a man from a firm of undertakers. He wore a gleaming top hat. He had a pomaded, uptwirled black moustache. He looked like a first-class funeral. He provoked fear and respect. Round about him blew gusts of eternity. He was a representative intercessor between this world and the next; a Middle European Charon; a splendidly ceremonial death. Only — he wasn’t riding on a calèche drawn by a couple of black stallions, or in a black-lacquered automobile, not even on a tramcar; nor was he on shanks’s pony. This awe-inspiring figure was mounted — on a bicycle. He pedalled. He pedalled to the cemetery and back. He sat hunched over the handlebars, and pedalled for all he was worth. His sinister black trousers bore shiny metal clips, and were bunched at the ankles, looking like umbrellas in fair weather. This distinguished apparition couldn’t afford a tram ticket. All his metaphysical dread was wasted. It wasn’t possible to have any respect for this agent of eternity — not on a bicycle. If I had been a corpse awaiting burial, this undertaker would have taken away all my fear of the coming assizes.

Then, in Chemnitz station, I saw a conductor eating chocolates. He had found the rest of a box of pralines in a compartment. The conductor was a gentleman in what they call the “best years”, big, hairy fists, a square head, a short, squat body, and big, solid, waterproof boots. This man was wolfing down frivolous liqueur-filled confectionery, and lost all the gravity he was supposed to have as an aspect of his profession. The conductor was eating a young ladies’ cinema nibble with a rigid, humourless expression, as though it was the doorstop or hunk of sausage that would have accorded with his personality. Six months ago, this conductor certainly wouldn’t have been tucking into chocolates. But today he is hungry. What to a passenger was a frippery, to him is a necessity. If it had been a dry crust of bread he had picked up — the effect couldn’t have been more abject. Things in Germany are at such a pass that its railway conductors help themselves to expensive fripperies in their desperation. One party carelessly leaves them behind, to the other they’re a lifesaver. That’s where Germany is right now.

In Dresden I spoke to a policeman. I slipped him five Czech crowns, and they loosened his tongue. All his personal and professional grimness disappeared. A week ago, he had no money at all. He was out of work. Unemployment support wasn’t enough. He picked up a rucksack and went out into the country — to beg. A farm dog ripped his last pair of trousers. He patched them — with rope, for want of thread. The stout rope had the effect of widening the tear in the trousers. Before long, the policeman will go around clad in a rope.

These are the kind of things that happen to you in Germany. Abroad, you read the speeches. They are unimportant. They are rhetorical and political wrecks. They can do little harm and no good. But then in Germany, you see a train conductor eating pralines; a rope in lieu of a pair of trousers; death on two wheels. A clumsy foolishness attaches to these things. Their evident symbolism looks like an invention. Life doesn’t always take the trouble to come up with something convincing. It makes jokes as crass as any music hall entertainer. Who laughs about large, well-off families in Germany making their own money? And using it to buy bread with? It’s a grotesque implausibility in the column of “other news”. A dismal twopenny romance twines round death by starvation. In the West End of Berlin I saw two high-school kids. They were walking along the wide, busy road, arm in arm, like a pair of drunks, and singing:

Down, down, down with the Jewish republic,

Filthy Yids,

Filthy Yids!

And passers-by got out of their way. No one stopped to slap their faces. Not out of political indignation. But because in any other country the irritation of a kid bothering the street with his half-baked politics would have provoked someone to a pedagogic measure. In Germany the convictions of high-school boys are respected. That’s how law-abiding people are in Berlin. And that discipline is heading for a tragicomic ending. Whether it’s a schoolboy treating us to his political views on the Jewish republic or a conductor so hungry he wolfs down a box of chocolates — they are so laughable and tragic that no visitor could understand. No one understands Germany. It is the least understood nation in Europe.

A Japanese student in Berlin told me: when foreign students are matriculated in Berlin University, the rector Professor Roethe says, “We have accepted you, even though you are foreign. Thank God we are not dependent on your friendship…” Do you see a connection between the hysteria of the chanting schoolboys and the speechifying professor? They are both instances of the decline of Germany. That’s the way people in a fever rave. Anyone who has sat at the bedside of a sick patient will know that the hours are not all pathos and anguish. The sick man will talk all kinds of nonsense, ridiculous, trivial, unworthy of himself and his condition. He is missing the regulating consciousness.

That’s just what is missing in Germany: the regulating consciousness.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 December 1923

11. Retrospect of Magdeburg

I arrive before midnight. I knew it would be raining, and so it was: diligently and with conviction. Through the draped windows of the cafés streamed a yellowish light, along with muffled drums and cymbals. With a bold show of resolve that was worthy of an actual storm at sea, some customers left the cafés. The silver streetlamps on the empty streets seemed to be there more for the benefit of the rain than the homecomers. Old facades look moving, in amongst the distinctly neutral new buildings, and old street names had a ring of home to me, even though I was seeing them for the first time. Undeniably, the town moved me, before I started to take against it. How a man softens over time! The more you take in, the less you trust the evidence of your senses. Behind the impression given by things, you sense a secret hidden truth you are afraid of violating. No one is as cautious as an elderly mocker, especially when he knows how sensitive the local press and rotary club are. They will deny everything, even impressions! So let’s be conciliatory. In my recollection — a few weeks have passed since my visit to Magdeburg — it has acquired a sheen of melancholy.

Magdeburg’s principal street is Breite Strasse. The name has remained unchanged for a very long time. Its simple but confident assertion seems to me to speak for the good sense of the citizens of Magdeburg. Other towns would long since have given their main thoroughfare a more sonorous name. In that simple unchangingness I sense history and tradition. Germany has few streets in which the character of a historical thoroughfare has remained so clearly visible. Even so, there is a fight going on between the old constancy and the new zealotry, that “neue Sachlichkeit” that leaves no place, no movement, no association, no community untouched, disrupting the honest features of the preserved facades with a wilful cool boldness, with smooth, neutral, disagreeably emphatic concrete. Modern apartment blocks are simplistic; in their large windows and flat roofs, the brutal intention of putting space, light and air to work, to save money, and implacably to further the health of man, beast and machine, lives the whole rampant, improving arrogance of our time that knows no self-restraint; and the small towns, afraid they might end up behind the times, instead anticipate them, adopt their tempo, and so make a mess of their best architectural virtues. Opposite the old and really beautiful cathedral set in a dignified and pensive ring of dark green, lurks the Reichsbank building, a gruesome instance of contemporary barrack- and factory-culture, a stone slap in the face, spattered down at the feet of the house of prayer. They are just now in the process of cutting down a few trees giving their own shade in the shade of the cathedral. I would bet that within ten years the vogue for skyscrapers and tower blocks will have utterly destroyed the cathedral square and possibly the cathedral itself. Then the fine café, the Café Dom, a holy temple of ancient chess players where the smoke of innumerable cigars has magically tinted ceiling, pillars and walls, will have given way to a modern “metropolitan” cafeteria of linoleum, glass and chrome, one of those hygienic execution sites with dance music that we have nowadays.

The little booklet in which the town hall of Magdeburg is described is prefaced by an introduction from the mayor of Magdeburg. “To know our town hall is to love it!” he says.

One probably shouldn’t ever take a mayor at his word. But the limited lexicon of human feeling that gives us “love” is surely unable to cope with the enormous dimensions of this town hall. The only feeling I can muster towards this newest of German constructions is awe. This town hall strikes me as a successful effort to construct a palace for the people; the attempt to orchestrate such a thing as the dignity of the masses. The least of the details of this enormous construction is calculated not to let the masses lose human dignity. Wardrobes you don’t have to cluster around. Entrances and exits you don’t have to fight to use, an economical excess of space, space, space, in which all possibility of panic is quenched: this is the masses being educated to self-control. Noble blond wood, no carpeting, plain red and blue velvet curtains; ceilings of silvery brown wood, horizontal bank of lights on the stage, shimmering nickel ornamentation; the biggest organ in Germany (if not the whole world), with ten thousand pipes! It’s a triumph of size, number and utility. The practical is promoted to the ranks of the dignified, and dignity is confusingly close to utility.

On the quiet morning when I wander through the town hall, I am taken with the linguistic play between echo and corridor, and I hear the exaggerated crashing echo of my footfall on the naked boards.* When there are thousands going up and down the stairs on evenings of celebration and joy, then the echo surely won’t sound so hollow, sorry and unfestive. Probably the wood then is just as quiet as carpets would be, it just needs one condition: that a sufficient mass of people be there to walk about on it. When there is just me, I feel like a solitary gymnast. As I leave the town hall and look at the cathedral opposite, I wonder whether I am allowed to say that actually I love carpets, and that bare boards always seem a trifle unadorned to me. I am standing in the so-called exhibition space. Almost every town in Germany now has such a space, in which the excessive numbers of fairs, the tournaments of trade and industry, are held: grassy asphalted spaces, airy filmy walls that in actual fact may have a trusty steel frame within them. So why is it that I feel closer to the fourteenth-century cathedral than to the town hall which was completed in 1927? Why? I can’t tell you. Our grandchildren, of whom the mayor remarks that the town hall will show them what German determination was able to accomplish, may understand me better…

And now from this excess more calculated to win my respect than my heart, let me come to a subject I am able to approach with affection: the people of Magdeburg struck me as more estimable than their new buildings. I knew no one when I got here, I knew several when I left. That speaks for the town. It’s not possible to remain a stranger here for long. They were quiet, critical, warm-hearted people. A few with that blessed trait of having returned home after wanting to see the world and feeling homesick that is sometimes called “humdrum” or “prosaic”. No doubt it has its narrow-minded citizens, every town does. But it also accommodates a few un-bourgeois free spirits. They patronize a modern bookshop, and put on literary evenings. Yes, it even seems to me that this practical-minded, industrious, and architecturally inclined town is blessed with that sort of atmosphere in which native and stranger alike may lapse into forgetfulness and settle. The past nestles in the old buildings and blows from the Elbe port through the old part of town. The people are small-townish enough to have whims and eccentricities. The best of them have no desire to be metropolitan. They have time. The trams are reassuringly slow. The women are attractive. And the curfew hour is late.

From time to time I think of describing the “German”, or defining his “typical” existence. Probably that isn’t possible. Even when I sense the presence of such a thing, I am unable to define it. What can I do, apart from writing about individuals I meet by chance, setting down what greets my eyes and ears, and selecting from them as I see fit? The describing of singularities within this profusion may be the least deceptive; the chance thing, plucked from a tangle of others, may most easily make for order. I have seen this and that; I have tried to write about what stuck in my senses and my memory.

Kölnische Zeitung, 3 May 1931

* Echo and corridor: German allows a rather superior play on words here—Hall und Widerhall.