The Hotel Years

47. Spring

I am woken by the sound of carpets being beaten overhead. The muffled thudding provokes my neighbour’s canary, and he cheeps and twitters and warbles like a bird song imitator. In the yard a window flies open, a second, a third: the whole building seems to be tearing off its windows.

A ray of sunshine splashes in my violet inkwell. The bronze maiden on my desk protects her bosoms from the intrusive beam and sweetly tans.

A hurdy-gurdy is playing in the yard. The streams of melody burst through, melting and freed.

From these and other signs, one notices eventually that it’s spring.

On Kurfürstendamm the cafés put out spring awnings, the ladies have new wardrobes, the gentlemen natty yellow twittering gloves. In side streets the children play with shiny buttons and marbles. The blue-bedizened sky checks its reflection in the brass shaving bowl outside the barber’s shop.

Everyone is freshly varnished and “please don’t touch”. Slips of girls wander about on the asphalt in sheer stockings and new boots looking like costumed willow trees.

In the afternoon I sit in the window and think that Sunday is on its way. To Grunewald, for instance.

After six or still later, a girl in purple rings the doorbell. Love is like that.

Freie Deutsche Bühne, 16 June 1921

48. People in Glass Cages

It is the time of year when a yen for freedom cruelly evicts bundled-up individuals from their cosy flats and into their brazen winter gardens.

In the morning a sunbeam or streak of rain strikes a coffee cup. And in the evening a traffic light bleeds to death.

Turned out and visible to all, the bosom of the family, with whatever had kept it hidden all winter. Intimate gestures are enacted in full sight of the prying neighbours.

Lips explode in kisses clattering along the streets, and forks drop from the hands of unfettered paterfamiliases with a whimpering jingle.

Walls have eyes. Man is in a glass cage, shown for what he is in helplessness, rage and shirtsleeves, barely concealed by the odd flower pot. He hangs suspended over the pavement like his own canary.

Dew anoints a nose sniffing the clouds, and a chill evening wind brushes a hairy chest, swelling the tourist’s shirt like a sail.

A sultry haze of aired bedding and other matters fights down the shy scent of a debatably flowering lilac. Oh, the struggle to lead a useful life weighed down by nappies in a rear courtyard!

Das Blaue Heft, 8 July 1922

49. People on Sunday

On Sundays the world is as bright and empty as a balloon. Girls in white dresses wander about the streets like so many church bells, all smelling of jasmine, sex and starch.

The sky is invariably freshly painted. The buildings swim in sunshine, and the towers scramble nimbly upwards. At the edge of the city Nature takes over, as one can tell by the proliferation of Do Not signs. It is mostly green, and consists of postcard views tacked together.

Nature is particularly important on Sundays. Basically, Sunday has been instituted for the sake of nature. All the communications disrupted on weekdays between nature and humanity are restored on Sunday. In fact, Sunday is the bridge to the forgotten and discarded Holies of the world: such things as woods, the Wannsee, the Luna Park and the Almighty.

People ring in Sundays with bells, the beating of carpets, and indolent coffee in bed. They throw open their windows and sniff freedom. They ransack wardrobes and chests of drawers and put on special items to celebrate the day of idleness on which their souls dangle.

On Sunday I stand by the window. The house opposite has thrown open all its windows like glass butterfly wings as though — whoosh, didn’t you see it!? — to fly away. It can’t, though, it is too weighed down by furniture, people and destinies.

Which have changed as well: my neighbour, a double-entry bookkeeper only yesterday (at the same firm for twenty-five years “without a bonus”) — and today, not even a single entry. With God in his heart and the taste of coffee still in his mouth, he hurries over to the window in his shirtsleeves to fill his lungs with a draft of freedom.

When I see him in the week in his threadbare jacket his hands are dangling from his sleeves as though the fingers were a frayed part of the jacket; now he looks to me like the hero of a story, or several stories.* He could, I am thinking, be offered a much better-paid job, but he is unable to resign. Perhaps he even stood once or twice outside his boss’s double doors, and his courage was quelled, as the movements outside the double door are quelled, and his heart resembled a squishy cushion, one of those plump leather cushions a manager likes to sit on.

One Monday morning, after he’s stuffed himself full of courage the whole of the day before, he went to work, and the boss walked in and presented him with some trifling thing, maybe a fountain pen, or an inkwell, and the employees put flowers on his desk, because that Monday marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of his entry into the firm, and he had forgotten about it. And so now he can’t resign.

I think I am going to call him Gabriel.

Today, Sunday, Gabriel will set his gramophone on the table in front of him. And a Caruso record put together from shellac and warble will pour over Gabriel the chant and melody of an unfamiliar world where figures and steel nibs are unknown.

Canaries like to mark Sundays as well. In the first-floor window is the bird cage and the canary recites an Eichendorff ode. Or maybe it’s something by Baumbach.

On the red tablecloth rests a white crocheted doily. The children can’t be dissuaded from propping their elbows on it, and rucking it up.

I have never seen the mother except in a blue dressing gown. She is very quiet, I think she was born in slippers, and I’m sure she has a shuffling and embittered soul.

She scolds the children for rucking up the tablecloth. What does she have to have a tablecloth for, I wonder, and once I sent her a couple of drawing pins in a matchbox, with instructions for their use. But she went on chastising the children.

Today, on Sunday, though, she had cake for them. The children rucked up the tablecloth, but their mother stood in the window and took delight in the declamations of the canary. She had on a white blouse. And no trace of any slippers.

But Sunday evenings are sad. I see the tabby cat sitting on the third-floor window sill. The teacher has gone out.

Each time the clock sends a quarter hour ringing out over the copper roofs of the town, the cat stretches. I suspect that she is keeping count of the strokes, and is impatient for her mistress to come home.

Sometimes she looks down, and for want of a handkerchief, waves with her tail when she sees the teacher coming.

The teacher has gone to visit her brother, who is a retired infantry captain with hearing loss. It takes her for ever to tell him there is no news. That’s what has caused the teacher to be gone such a long time.

“I swear I’m going to sack her!” says the cat, and is terribly agitated.

Sunday evenings are thin and mealy, as if they already belonged to Monday. Gabriel is back to being a double-entry bookkeeper, and the girls iron their creased white dresses and smell of bread and butter. The world is full again.

Berliner Börsen-Courier, 3 July 1921

* See J. R.’s 1920 story “Career” in his Collected Shorter Fiction.

50. The Office

Because I am going abroad, I am required to call on various offices, many offices, grey buildings, grey-white rooms, gentlemen at desks, gentlemen behind counters, gentlemen in worn suits, with embittered faces, with moustaches and bald heads, with widening partings and spectacles, with blue pencils in their top pockets — wretched men, wretched offices. There is no more than a partition between us, but it is a whole world. I lean against desks and see red, blue, purple inkpads and hammer-headed rubber stamps, chewed-up pens, toothmarks sunk in brown pencils, old pictures, office calendars with the frayed remnants of old, torn-off days, scraps of paper in tin frames, gnawed by the tooth of time which eats a date for breakfast every morning. I pass through corridors, unreal, almost dream-like corridors, past waiting people propped on umbrellas reading newspapers. Sometimes a door opens, and I steal a look inside and see a man sitting, a desk standing, a calendar hanging, just as in the room I will shortly set foot in, even though the one carries the number twenty-four, and mine is sixty-four. A couple of flies bombard the windowpanes, hurling their little black bodies against the glass, while a third stands on the tin lid of the inkwell rubbing its nose with its frail legs. The ink in the inkwell is drying, crusts are forming round the edges, blue-black crusts, dried, prematurely wizened figures, reminders, files.

At the front desk sits a young man and at the back desk an older man. The young man has white-blond hair, which is nice and unruly, it objects to being parted, and then he has a blobby round nose and a red Cupid’s bow and a dimpled chin like a girl. There is the child in his face still, his blue eye is earnest and adorable like a boy’s playing cops and robbers. His hands have dumpy shapeless fingers, and one of them is already wearing a wedding band. His waistcoat is gently swelling over the beginnings of a pot belly, emblem of his career. His briefcase is still new, the fair hands of a young wife have stuffed it full of sandwiches, a sleepy morning tenderness still clings to his lips, and he is friendly, gentle, fair, he makes a modest joke in order to encourage me, the “pending case”, to a light-hearted rejoinder. He is the man on the other side of the barrier. The sunken wall, the partition dividing us, is shattered; with the longing of a man on a desert island he looks up at me, heart overflowing with gratitude. He is like the stationmaster who sees the express race past him every day without stopping — and I am just as exotic here, just as strange and mysterious as the train that never stops. This young official would like to detain me, he wants to know what it’s like in those countries I have visited, and where I hope to go. He wants to know about more than the countries. He is young, he longs for human conversation, he takes an interest in me, he is still unhappy at his desk, not yet chewing his pencils, he too has bold dreams. He still has the sacred faith in the impossible, he is determined to one day leave this room, to have money, to sit in express trains, to see Mt Fuji for himself. But when I come back to this office in twenty years’ time, then he will be the older gentleman at the back desk who will give me a doubtful look over the top of his bifocals, an elderly gentleman with a bald patch and the dry skin coming off it in little flakes. Fresh ink will have crusted around the edges of the inkwell, the two hundredth generation of flies will be assaulting the windows. And my friend, I fear, will be chewing pencils.

Prager Tagblatt, 20 July 1924

51. The Destruction of a Café

The café was as old as a church.

Stout pillars supported the ceiling, which seemed to disappear in the gloaming. It was flat, and covered with paintings. But because it was propped by pillars, and grey cigar smoke clouded it, you couldn’t help feeling that it was vaulted, that you had arches overhead that sheltered but also swaddled you, a roof and also a robe.

The pillars were dark brown, and a polished bark covered them, as if they had reverted to the status of trees. At eye-level they put out iron hooks, decorated by iron foliage. The tables stood in their shade. One knew the size of the pillars, where each one began and ended; but measured with that measure that has no units, but is nevertheless real and true, the pillars were endless, and whoever leaned on one was alone, as alone as in a room by himself. Someone else might be resting against the other side of the pillar. But he was a hundred years away. The din of conversation was muffled by the coats that hung on the hooks, trapping indiscretions in their folds. It was possible to sit in the middle of the café, and yet remain as concealed as in the middle of a forest.

To enter the café, you had to push aside a heavy green velvet curtain with leather trim. It was heavier and fitted more snugly than a door of iron or oak. It was draped around the shoulders of the entry, like a winter cloak. You batted it aside, walked in, and straightaway it closed behind you. You were in the warm — whether it was autumn or February or even Christmas.

Across from the entrance on a raised platform was the wide dark bar. Looming in the background were innumerable bottles of various shapes and sizes, colourful gold-rimmed labels, and in front of them a regiment of gleaming glasses, opalescent cups and a jingling, singing heap of frivolous teaspoons — a lady sat or stood behind the bar. One couldn’t see quite where she was rooted. Her growth was a mystery. It was possible that she perched on a bar stool. Her complexion was pale, a little subterranean, as though lit by ancient candles. The outline of her face was fine — her face was little more than outline — she reminded one of a well-preserved spring. Perhaps she didn’t exist at all, and someone had sketched her with fawn crayon on soft paper. Because it was as though she was looking out of a frame, or from a high window over rooftops. Her eye strayed, without aim…

A mannerly gentleman made his way quietly through the room. He knew all the customers. He would suddenly pop up behind a pillar to help someone into his coat, he had clearly been following the man’s movements for some time — and now there he was, at the right time. He offered a restrained greeting with the dignity of someone who has been greeted himself with considerably less warmth over decades. — Good evening — his inclined head seemed to say — no need to thank me. I don’t need thanks. — As he held out the coat, he seemed to turn into a hat stand with extended arms. If a waiter was negligent, the gentleman got his attention with a long look. Like a general he surveyed the terrain, like a doctor he offered diagnoses, like the master of a house he welcomed visitors, like a theatre director he supervised the waiters’ entrances and exits, like a protective angel he watched over the forsaken and alone, and like God he was unchanging. He was neither young nor old, his hair was neither white nor dark, his expression was neither animated nor listless, and never did I see him sit and rest.

This was the café where my friend Krac would come in the evenings, with books and manuscripts, the evening paper, and a roll (filled). Other people would go home at this time, or out to dinner, but he, secum portans, liked to eat his supper here. He held it under the table in his left hand, and with his right helped himself to little unexplained titbits. Other people would take a couple of soft-boiled eggs in a glass, reddish-yellow, with scraps of shell mixed in. He for his part would order a cup of coffee, not even an espresso, just a common or garden coffee. The whole of the café where we sat, the table, the chairs, the pillar behind us, the waiter, the mannerly gentleman, the lights, the bar and the lady were like condiments for my friend’s roll. Meanwhile the café was happy to act as though it had requested him to come, bringing his supper. Such was the hospitality of this institution.

It’s not so easy any more.

The café has been redecorated. There is no longer a curtain in the entrance. To keep the pillars clear, a wardrobe has been installed to the right of the door. You are supposed to surrender your coat when you walk in, as at the theatre. The large windows have narrow green sills. The pillars are white, the ceiling is white. Away with the wall-paintings! — said the spirit of the age — the smoke obscures them anyway. The colour of the age is white, laboratory white, as white as the room where they invented lewisite, white as a church, white as a bathroom, white as a dissecting room, white as steel and white as chalk, white as hygiene, white as a butcher’s apron, white as an operating table, white as death, and white as the age’s fear of death! Let’s brighten up the ceiling! — Because it is the age’s belief that white is cheerful. It wants by brightness to attract cheerful people. And the people are as merry as patients, and the present is as merry as a hospital.

The ceiling hasn’t been lowered, it’s sufficient to have had it painted white. Now it presses down on our heads, unremitttingly hygienic. Light is cast not by lamps, but by glass columns that resemble thermometers — perhaps they take the room’s temperature at the same time. Light streams in from the side, not harmful to the eyes, so that blind people with artificial eyes can read faits divers. The floor is no longer wood, but grey stone marked with white lines — or so it appears. (Your feet tell you that the stone is actually rubber or linoleum.) A cowardly stone that makes no sound, a stone for tiptoeing around on. Hygienic. Deaf-mutes can listen to the radio in this silence. The number of tables has been increased by a third, and the comfortable armchairs have been thrown out. The new chairs are straight-backed for straight backs, they steel the body, they are steel seats. The bar looks like the counter of a pharmacy. The waiter has a prescription pad. A boy with gold buttons, a milk and blood face, bum-freezer jacket, Cupid, Mercury and messenger-boy in one, doles out nicotine-free cigarettes. On special application you are served coffee that will cure heart-patients and put you to sleep. The lady behind the bar is gone, vanished, airbrushed out, removed. The mannerly gentleman is gone. (Will you ever be greeted like that again?) He couldn’t go along with the evolution of the café, the way that claims to go from Germany to Broadway, but never gets past Kurfürstendamm.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 October 1927

52. Music in the Volksgarten

The music in the Volksgarten began at five in the afternoon. It was spring, and the blackbirds were still warbling in the shrubbery and the flowerbeds. The army band was seated behind the gold-tipped iron railings that separated the restaurant terrace from the park concourse, and thus parted the paying guests from other listeners without means. Among these were many young women. They had come to enjoy the music. But music on those evenings meant more than music, it was a chance to hear the voice of nature and of spring. The leaves overarched the proud melancholy of the trumpets — and a fitful breeze seemed for long moments at a time to whisk away the whole band and all the noises on the terrace to unknown distances. At the same time, one could hear the slow, crunching footfall of walkers on the footpath. Their settled tempo gave back the pleasure the music gave the ears. When the instruments sounded again, the drums began to roll, and the cymbals to clash, then it was as though the trees had grown louder, and the excitable arms of the bandleader had not only the musicians at his beck and call, but also the soughing leaves. Now, when suddenly a solo flute broke through the storm, it didn’t sound like the voice of an instrument, but like a singing pause. Then the birds too resumed — as though the composer had written a part for blackbirds. The scent of the chestnuts was so strong that it drowned out the sweetest melodies, and it batted your face like a brother to the wind. And from the many young women in the avenue there came a lustre, and a whispering and in particular a laughter that was even closer than the women themselves, and more familiar. Then if you addressed a strange girl you thought you had already heard her speak. And if you went away with her from this avenue into another, more secluded, then you didn’t have just the girl with you, you had something of the music, and you entered into the silence there as into one of the singing pauses.

It wasn’t thought proper to lounge outside by the rails and let the girls know that you were in no position to go inside and order a coffee. And so I walked up and down the avenue, fell in love, despaired, got over it, forgot, and fell in love again — all in the space of a minute. I would have liked to stop and listen and nothing else. But even if I had been friends with a lieutenant who — all jingle and elegance — was sitting eating butter biscuits within, I would still have fallen for the distant and inaccessible charms of the lightsome ladies who sat at white garden tables, like so many spring clouds, impossible to speak to because one never saw them out on the streets anywhere. At that time, some of the “grand monde” would foregather on the restaurant terrace, and the barrier was the border that separated us. And just as the young lady I was kissing took me for a mighty knight, so on the terraces of the great restaurants I saw damsels I would straightaway have died for. I would get a chance later. But to be able to promenade up and down and discreetly watch life going on, and pretend it wasn’t behind lock and key, that was something I owed myself.

From time to time I would spot a graceful ribbon that the silver-tipped conductor’s baton of black lacquer had set spinning into the air. It hung there in my sight, a billowing memory. Sometimes, when I happened to be standing beside the exit, the seductive and supercilious look of a lady would brush me. She would get in a carriage, followed by a suite of gentlemen. But on the brief way from the threshold of the garden to the running board of the carriage, she demanded from my worshipful eye confirmation that she was beautiful. I fell in love instantly — meanwhile the carriage trundled off, and the dapper clopping of the horses mimicked my heart. I was still bewailing her disappearance, but already melancholy began to give way to the hope that the lady might leave the restaurant at the same time tomorrow, and I, a chance passer-by, would be on hand to see it and be noticed. And even though the music had recalled me to the avenue and the vulgar chancers, I was perfectly convinced that I was standing on the threshold of a magnificent existence that would begin tomorrow.

Already night had fallen, lamps came on among the leaves, and you couldn’t see the young ladies any more, only hear them. In the dimness they seemed to have become more numerous. Giggling became their principal communication. Since I could no longer see their cheap blue dresses, the young ladies could almost compete with those within the enclosure. The public part of the garden was closing, and the band was getting ready to finish for the evening. One of the players went from desk to desk, gathering in the sheet music like so many school exercise books. The last piece — it was almost always the Radetzky March — wasn’t played from the score, but from empty desks. The march seemed not to exist on paper. It had passed into the players’ flesh and blood, and they were playing it from memory, as you breathe from memory. Now the march rang out — the Marseillaise of reaction — and while the drummers and trumpeters still stood at their places, you thought you could see the drums and trumpets march off by themselves, drawn along by the melody that poured from them. Yes, the entire Volksgarten was marching. People wanted to stroll and to dawdle, but the rolling drums got their limbs moving. They echoed long after in the street beyond, and suffused the noise of the evening city like a smiling and rapid thunder.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 8 April 1928

53. The Strange City

For the past week, I’ve been living on a new street, and it feels like a different city. As yet I know little about the customs, population and dimensions of this city, but at least I have established its chief quality: it has balconies.

The man who built it was an architect with an obsession with the south. For twenty years his soul went about pregnant with gables and oriels and turrets and weathervanes, his soul was a sort of compressed version of Nuremberg, and then in the twenty-first it was let loose on some open space. And the architect gave expression to his dream of the south. Because this town was supposed to give a home to as many people as possible, he had to build large buildings, which meant setting one apartment over another and then another, till there were four or five squatting on top of each other. And then he dropped a pert Nuremberg gabled roof on top of the ensemble, and carved little balconies out of the bellies of the individual flats, and teased round and square bay-fronts out of the forms of the rooms. So that his yearning was satisfied, but only up at the top. The lower parts of the buildings have the usual facades, wide gateways, glass doors, tarnished door handles and zoological doorbells, for instance lions’ heads with panting tongues you have to tickle to get the bell to ring. Along the corridors he set unframed mirrors. So that the people liked to go up — in the lift if they were well-off, taking the stairs if they weren’t — and inspect themselves, though without getting to know themselves at all.

These buildings, which are still haunted by the architect’s soul, make me indescribably sad, because they are so compromised. They were built for a purpose, which was to be habitable and durable, and full of light and air. But they aspired to be beautiful, and as impractical as beauty always is. They were forced to yield to the ridiculous duress of their physical being, and only in their upper reaches was it permitted to them to be luxurious, and even then under conditions of strict practicality. They symbolize the lives of thousands of architects, and the gulf between what they intended and what they actually built.

Some people like to say veran-dah. That sounds as though they had already fallen off them, with a flowerpot and half a window to follow. Because here everyone loves their veran-dah, and tricks it out with geraniums and begonias and pelargoniums, and other blooms that sounds like faraway countries. That comes from the longing of people who spend half their lives trying to set themselves apart from the rest of us, and the other half (in accordance with the proverb) to create order.* They may never get to anywhere with a name like one of their flowers. They plant these exotic things outside their houses and in their hearts, and so make the symbol of the thing-attained-with-difficulty domestic. In the same way their love of outdoors is best seen in brick promontories where they spend a great part of their lives, either with a watering can, or with love, appetite and illumination.

The light is dimmed to pink, and looks like a small-scale forest fire on the horizon, or a Light Everlasting in a wayside chapel somewhere. Now God has given me sufficient desire for beauty on the one hand to multiply the forest fires, and to quench them, and also a devoutness that is susceptible to the occasional wayside chapel. But a whole parade of these wayside chapels, plastered on a row of trees, and animated by the earthly rattle of dinner-plates and clink of cutlery, is able to knock a sizeable hole in my spirit of reverence. So I sometimes direct an impious eye at the inner life of my neighbours, which they have turned inside out, to give it some air on their veran-dahs. On occasion I am ashamed of my overweening mind and my secret shame, which prevents me from doing as my neighbours. I see isolated lights and I think of the wayside chapels. Maybe, I think, people would be more discreet and pious, if the essence of the veran-dah didn’t consist in giving the illusion of being cast away on a desert island of swinging baskets. And the pinkish light — as I’ve discovered — is only another illusion. The one who sees it thinks he is not seen. And is seen, in the pink… Perhaps people actually want to be seen.

One thing is certain: that I am all alone in this strange city, and that as I make my way through its streets, a shudder of homelessness will befall me one morning in the midst of so much homely activity. The energetic sound of a matutinal piano; the white net curtains behind a window; a man in shirtsleeves; a woman in her nightcap; a Litfass column dripping with fresh glue; a porter gone out to Brasso the doorknob; a spit-and-shined shoe-polish boy; a crisp lady baker; a hairdresser standing outside his premises like a white atomizer — they all are strange to me, because they don’t know me, even though they tell me everything. They greet each other with familiar expressions, and every eye reflects the other’s experiences.

People here are so clean. They smell of soap, those brown cubes of soap that my aunt used to use on me. The women here wear their hair straight back, exposing their ears. There’s an atmosphere of spiritual chastening about them. Their hours overbrim with busy-ness, and their papers are all in order. They carry their souls in the palms of their hands. Their past is as stainless as the brass sink outside the barber’s shop. Their pursuit is shopping. Their future is doing sums. They collect their days in an album, like so many stamps. They are collectors of days and years.

Never was anything mysterious in their lives, nor yet anything ugly. They grew and prospered in the shadow of their virtues.

How I envy them.

Every day I meet a gentleman on the stairs, who is by profession a representative.

I don’t know what or whom he represents, but he’s a representative. Even when he isn’t wearing gloves, his hands are solemn, as though carrying mourning candles. He has a straw hat on, but I understand that it’s really a topper. His stride is managerial. His eye rests heavily, punishingly on things. He is quiet, but I can hear the drone of his voice — a deep voice with thunderous aspects. I don’t greet him, but it feels as though I did. Perhaps he is an undertaker, and is on his way to today’s funeral.

He was a good and industrious son. Surely he was the apple of someone’s eye once. I would sit down next to him in class, and unhesitatingly copy his answers.

I don’t see his forehead, but it is certainly high and rounded. It must have room for the many solemn thresholds in his brain.

Sometimes I see him taking a blue-eyed girl by the hand, by the name of Lili. On those occasions he is ex officio. Once he bent down to her because she had lost her glove and it was as though an emperor had suddenly begun to laugh, or something human had happened to him.

I am getting to feel more at home in the strange city.

Berliner Börsen-Courier, 21 August 1921

* Die Ordnung ist das halbe Leben: order or organization is half of life.

54. Travel

Guarded by customs inspectors and framed by passport regulations, abroad only starts to blossom beyond national frontiers; and that object of our desires called Far Away is only another jurisdiction with its own head of state and military, population statistics and tax regime. If you take an exotic sound for a cry of longing, it was probably nothing more than a locomotive’s whistle. All the world’s stations smell of anthracite rather than distant promise. The express train is muggy, stuffed with snoring well-set individuals who look nothing like travellers, are not redolent of mystery, but carry sandwiches in greaseproof paper, and exhibit all the frailties of their wretched humanity in the cramped compartment, sending the alarmed observer scuttling into the next one instead. Once, a beautiful damsel entered my compartment and my soul gave a lurch. The next morning, her eyes blinked open in the direction of the luggage rack, and I saw a creature in feminine apparel, her complexion ravaged by an agitated night with little sleep. The wind that came whistling through the open window mixed soot among her powder, and sleep had gummed up her eyelids. I dread to think what I looked like.

I entered another country, and pressed my ticket into the hands of a strange porter, instead of the visiting card I should have had. In the other city, I saw green copper cupolas and Gothic towers climbing into the sky. Beggars clustered outside church doors, stubble-faced lady beggars among them. They lay in wait for believers, and assaulted their impressionable souls with a litany of ills. Children, old people and women dropped coins in the laps of the beggars, thinking: God is my witness.

I looked into strange offices, and the desk-clerks who were working in them wore black sleeve-protectors, just as they do here at home. Blond and other variously dyed secretaries perched at typewriters, and pined for six o’clock, which is the hour of relief for the women of this century. It was a shade after two. A nearby clock rang the quarter-hour, and the girls pricked up their ears, hoping a miracle had taken place and they would hear it strike six. But just as obdurately as though it had been here at home it stuck to its assigned quarter past two, and the girls went back to their clacking. In other countries too, clocks are soulless pieces of machinery. And girls, increasingly, as well…

I came to a hospital, and it too, like every other hospital in the world, smelled of camphor and iodine. The sisters fluttered from bed to bed in their white wimples like starched wings, and the patients groaned in such a familiar fashion, I had the sense I was at home. Evidently, so I thought, people only speak foreign languages when they are well. But pain is the greatest, all-conquering international movement there is, and truly its expression is as universal as music.

I visited the parks and gardens of the strange city too, those places where love flowered. Men and women came and went, and sat down together on benches, and assured one another of their feelings, which was unnecessary, because they were perfectly evident. Evening prowled along the footpaths, presumably waiting for night to fall. A constable plodded up and down, not noticing, even though he had a whole notebook for suspicious behaviour.

The people spoke differently. Their houses looked unfamiliar. (It was after all abroad.) But the representative things, the things that show the nation’s face to the world, namely the border police and the customs inspectors — they are the same everywhere. They all have the same rapacious hands, and prying intrusive looks that feel like hands.

I have no idea what a man finds to say for himself after he’s been abroad. I could sit at home for years on end, and be perfectly content. If only it weren’t for the stations. You swear a shrill sound that pierces the night is just the whistle of a locomotive. It is a cry of longing. And every so often, exquisitely beautiful women walk into your compartment…

Berliner Börsen-Courier, 2 October 1921

55. The “Romance” of Travel

The joyful anticipation before a journey is always outweighed by the irritation of actually going. Nothing so irritating as a hulking station that looks like a monastery, at the sight of which I always wonder whether I shouldn’t slip off my shoes, instead of hailing a porter. Nothing so irritating as an iron rail before a ticket office. In front of me hovers a rucksack. Behind me a pair of knitting needles pushed through the side of a basket stab me in the back. I need to practically bend double to tell the obtuse employee my destination. He has just one little window through which he takes in money and destinations. I am sure he would rather listen to my hands…

All I know of the porter who has made off with my things is his number. I am dependant on his recollection of faces. What if he has none? What if some double of mine shows up? What if the porter has some kind of mishap? My friend needs a platform ticket if he is to see me off. What’s the point of a platform ticket? The rails are off limits, and yet you pay to go on the platform. A man who sets foot on the platform in order not to travel, is doubly left behind. You might as well ask everyone in the whole station to have a ticket.

Next, there are the dauntingly high steps up to my carriage. Why not just have ladders? You clamber up into the carriage as into an attic to dry clothes. The compartments are like matchboxes sitting on one of their emery board sides. The seats are so parsimoniously designed that there is not an inch of space between my knees and those of the fellow opposite. We could set out a chess board on them. We can’t open our eyes to look up — that would mean looking at the other. If we’re really unlucky, then there are people either side of us as well. To take a cigarette out of our pockets we poke our neighbour in the ribs.

The so-called music of the wheels feels like hammer blows on my cerebellum and temples. If I stretch my leg, I involuntarily brush my neighbour’s trousers. And we look at each other continuously: while cutting apples, eating sausages, peeling oranges. Of course we squirt juice into the other’s eyes.

Our hands, our collars, our shirts, our handkerchiefs are blackened. The locomotive pours soot on my face. Often it takes us through so-called tunnels, which are the pride of modern engineering. We ride through the underworld, no coal-miners we. If we move to open a window, those with colds protest. If I leave the compartment I need to issue half a dozen excuse-me’s first. The so-called communication cord is sealed. If you use it to communicate, you pay a fine. In case of a difference of views, the conductor’s decision is final. Always to my disadvantage…

If I should elect to go in a sleeping-car, that entails sharing a small cupboard with a large gentleman. A shared night is a night halved. (Passengers are segregated by sex, worse luck.) Wives require proof. If I eat lunch on board, plates, waiters and wine-bottles are all kept shaking in iron rings. Woe if they were set at liberty…!

Conductors change about as often as April weather. They are there to draw lines on your ticket. Just lines. For that purpose, they like to wake me. These simple lines (sometimes perforations) I could do myself. Head-conductors like to check up on the lines left by the conductors. Lethally heavy suitcases teeter on luggage racks. At the frontier, customs inspectors come on board, and help themselves to my cigars. In the corridors are framed axes and saws, forever hinting at the worst.

When you reach your destination, you fall over suitcases. If your suitcase is travelling separately, it entails waiting for it for an hour. All stations are built on a prodigal scale, but with very narrow exits to the world beyond. Tickets need to be surrendered. I wonder what the railways do with so much cardboard.

No one is so badly off as a traveller. It’s a curious thing that this mediaeval torture of travelling should strike everyone as being so romantic. Our clothes are wrecked. We ruin our digestion with hot sausages and cold beers. We all have reddened eyes and dirty, greasy hands. And that should make us happy…!

Sometimes in films I see the saloon cars of American millionaires. They dictate business letters to typists. They sit in tubs and bathe, whilst travelling. A black valet rubs them dry. A cook prepares their favourite dish. Some travel in automobiles, which are independent of rails. A few take to the skies — capitalist birds. Why don’t we demand these things? Our train tickets cost enough. We shouldn’t have to pay for cinema seats as well.

Our so-called modes of transport lag far behind the times. They stand in no relation to the pride we take in our advanced civilization and the contempt we feel for post-chaises. Anyway, railway compartments are more like post-chaises than the railway authorities like to think. We’re living in the wireless age, and still they like to punch holes in cardboard! The contemporaries of the dirigible balloon still lug their own suitcases! We are contemplating travelling to the moon. We are thinking about Mars. We have hit upon the Theory of Relativity. Just because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean we are happy to roost on chicken ladders when we have shelled out for beds.

Modern aeroplanes are more comfortable than trains. If I were of an aphoristic bent — which God knows I’m not — then I would say: It’s better to crash by aeroplane than arrive by train. There are no parachutes for train crashes. Nor have I seen life-jackets, come to that…

Even doing fifty mph, you’re still not travelling at the speed of time. Time passes at a hundred thousand miles per second. While I’m sitting in a speeding train, I’m still racing ahead of it. That’s what the Theory of Relativity allows…

I can transmit my likeness in an instant by telegraph. Transporting myself takes twelve hours. By the time I arrive, I’m no longer recognizable. You can’t shave on a train. My beard grows faster than the train travels. You can’t use the toilet at “station stops”. While the train is moving it’s continually occupied.

In third class you sit on wooden pallets, as in prison. If someone turns off the overhead lamp, there is no option but sleep all round. It’s too dark to read the paper. When the light’s on, the editorial jumps all over the place. You take the feuilleton page and bend it over your knee, just to prove it can be done.

If you put your head out of the window, you’ll never see it again. It’ll be in a well somewhere. If you lean against a door, you’ll fly out like a piece of orange peel. And yet, it’s forbidden to throw things out.

“All infractions are punishable.” Luggage thieves “may be prosecuted”. Not that you’ll ever get your luggage back. Anyone supplying information leading to the conviction of a thief will be rewarded. But anyone who’s ever tried will know how hard it is to get a reward from the railways.

On the contrary, there are often “supplementary fares” to be paid. (You even get given a receipt.) You can stick it in the mirror of the toilets — which are blind anyway.

Jumping onto a moving train is not allowed. Jumping off one is for criminals. In any case, ordinary humans are incapable of opening the door, unless, that is, they have the misfortune to lean against it accidentally while the train is in motion. Children must be kept on a leash. Dogs may not be taken at all. Meanwhile, chatty travellers are left criminally unmuzzled…

There are luxury trains, expresses, local trains, various fees and classes, a forest of instructions, prohibitions, discouragements. All these are felt to be “romantic”.

Even so, I would sooner travel to Monte Carlo first class than fill in a tax declaration on foot…

Ed.: We assure our readers that in spite of everything he says about “romance”, our author spends very little time at home.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 June 1926

56. The Lady in the Compartment

A beautiful lady entered the compartment where I was reading the newspaper. She looked at my newspaper, not at me, told the porter to put up a large silver-studded leather case, sat down, and didn’t have the right change. There was a long moment, filled with the silence of the porter, who was in a hurry. One could clearly feel the intensity with which the man was looking for an expression of impatience, haste, and possibly also bitterness. But seeing as he had no business looking impatient and embittered, he emanated a silence that was as pungent as any oath. At that moment I felt a great irritation with the beautiful lady. She was forcing me out of my tranquillity deepened by the enjoyment of the exciting newspaper to a painful pondering of how to find a swift and satisfactory solution to this predicament. Other men think on their feet, make remarks that win them the admiration of both ladies and porters. Whereas I was in the position that if I didn’t quickly do something, I would be despised by the one, and laughed at by the other. I therefore asked: “What are you owed?”; was informed, gave the porter a tip that compelled him to thank me more loudly than I would have liked, and sat back to await developments. The lady, still hunting for change, came up with a big bill, and not looking at me, asked me whether I could change it for her. “No!” I said, and the lady looked some more. Her confusion must be very great; I resolved to take pity on her, but I couldn’t do it, because I needed all my pity for myself. Was I to exclaim: “How delightful to be in credit with such a ravishing individual!” What a compliment! Was it not impertinent to disturb her in her search, was it not glib to seek to base an acquaintance on such a vulgar premise? I was unable to watch the lady, her hurried movements were of a private, even an intimate nature, and I thought I shouldn’t stare at the contents and lining of her handbag.

But nor could I muster the cool to resume my reading. So, although I wasn’t much interested in nature, I stared out of the window, and saw advertising hoardings, guard-huts, ramps and telegraph poles. At the end of a quarter hour the lady found some change, handed it to me, said thank you, and joined me in looking out of the window. I took up my newspaper and read. The beautiful lady stood up, stretched, reached for the luggage rack, was unable to reach her suitcase, and stood there piteously. I felt compelled to get up, take down the surprisingly heavy suitcase, pretending that its weight was negligible, my muscles were bands of iron and steel, and the suitcase a down feather. I had to keep the blood from rushing into my face, discreetly mop the sweat that beaded on my brow, and with an elegant bow, say, “Madam!” I managed this feat, the lady opened her suitcase, a little gasp of perfume, soap and powder escaped from it, pulled out three books, and was evidently hunting for a fourth. All the while I sat there strickenly pretending to read, but actually wondering how I would ever get the suitcase back up on the luggage rack. Because there could be no doubt that I was condemned to return it to its resting place. Condemned to pick up an item that weighed more than I did, with effortless ease, and return it without turning purple. I silently tensed my muscles, loaded up with energy, and told my heart to be calm. The lady found her fourth book, shut the suitcase and made an attempt to lift it.

Her effort incensed me. Why did she pretend not to know that I was bound to relieve her of the task? Why not ask me directly for help, as required by morality and very nearly the law? What was she doing with such a heavy suitcase anyway? And seeing as she was, why hadn’t she packed her reading matter separately? Why did she have to read, seeing as she would certainly enjoy herself more talking to me right away, instead of allowing an hour to pass for the sake of decency? Why was she so beautiful that her helplessness was multiplied tenfold? And why was she a lady, and not a gentleman, a boxer, a sportsman, who might have picked up the suitcase with superb ease? My indignation was unavailing, I had to get up, say my “Allow me!” and with a superhuman effort hoist the suitcase up in the air. I stood on the seat, the suitcase was shaking in my hands — what if it should fall and crush the beautiful lady? It would have been unfortunate, but I don’t think I would have felt any guilt. Finally, the suitcase lay up on the rack, and I flopped back into my seat.

The lady thanked me and opened a book. From that moment on, I pondered how best to leave compartment and lady. I wholeheartedly envied any man with the good fortune of travelling with such a beautiful woman. But seeing as it was me, I did not envy myself. With honest alarm, I speculated about further useful objects the suitcase was bound to be harbouring. I no longer had eyes for my newspaper. The scenery had my contempt. Just as well a gentleman entered the compartment, a young, bold, athletic-seeming gentleman, and much dimmer than me. The lady set down her book. After a quarter hour, the gentleman made an idiotic remark, and the beautiful woman tinkled. He had presence of mind, quick-wittedness, he was capable of being entertaining, and surely of lifting a suitcase as well. He had no apprehensions, he would surely vanquish me and win the heart of the beautiful lady. I on the other hand had my peace of mind back, watched with indifference as the suitcase went up and down, my heart no longer pounded, and I followed with deep enjoyment the movements of the beautiful lady and the unfolding of the adventure. I was happy to have pleasant companions who were irked by my presence and wished me to the devil. For turbid natures like mine there is no better society.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 19 September 1926

57. Morning at the Junction

High summer. The train stops, and we hear the indefatigable chirping of crickets in the fields, and the song of telegraph wires, which sounds like the whooshing of dark, eerie, otherworldly scythes. The railway junction lies at the confluence of mountains, fields, larks and sky. We get there at four in the morning, no sooner and no later. The thoughtful timetable has arranged for the June sun and the passenger to reach the junction at the same time.

The porters are already up, so we aren’t on our own. Rails run off in every direction, elastic as stretched rubber bands, tightly held by far-off stations to keep them from snapping back to the junction. The station has a cosy restaurant in first, second and third class. Hospitable as it is, it accommodates a red vending machine with gold writing, six apertures for coins, a curly-wurly handle and a baroque gable that looks like a nod to some miniature gatehouse. All the stations I ever saw in my childhood had vending machines like that. I associate their aspect with the mysterious sound of the signals, the sound of the golden spoon in the glass that experts can interpret, but which to the layman says only that a train is coming from who knows where. Throughout my childhood, I saw those red vending machines. If I were to throw in a coin now, I could pull out the chocolate I would have wanted twenty years ago that I no longer care for.

The small green news-stand is still closed, as it’s thought to be too early for tobacco. The restaurant however is already giving out coffee, in freshly rinsed glasses, that a girl lifts out of their bath and holds up against the sun. Yesterday’s newspapers are on sale, not knowing that they are yesterday’s. But the sense of today is so strong that the newspapers look very old. The sunrise alone is enough to refute their news.

If you leave the station, you will see a hamlet so small that you wonder why the junction is here of all places, and if it is here, by blind chance, then why it hasn’t grown into a city; and how it can be the aim of a place to remain a junction and concentrate its whole significance outside itself, in the railway station; and how this place, even though every morning a train stops and passengers alight, is so deeply asleep it doesn’t even seem to know it is a junction at all. Only the cocks in all innocence are crowing. Not until five o’clock does a man with a rake and a watering can potter down the single street to his allotment. The barber is still asleep behind the fence that has his gleaming bronze basin affixed to it, a mirror in the sun. No. 76 is where the fire brigade’s trumpeter lives, there is a sign that says as much. His ground floor window is open, he gets up, kisses his wife, pulls a shirt on, and goes out to perform his ablutions. I stand outside his window in the hope that he will play me something, even though there’s no fire. An intellectual summer visitor is awake already. He is just setting off, swinging his cane, traces of soft boiled egg about his lips, up a mountain, the newspaper in his pocket, a subscriber to the bitter end, the highest peak.

How time creeps, when observed like this through a magnifying glass! Another three hours — and the clock on the church tower is slow. A stream drives a mill, a shepherd his sheep, a wind the morning fog. The news-stand at the station is still closed. It has glass walls, like someone sleeping with their eyes open. The girl at the buffet is still rinsing glasses. She has a plait, an apron, and her mouth is a little red splotch. Were you out for a walk? her mouth asks, while her hands rinse glasses. Are you travelling far?

Yes. — Will you take me with you then? — And because I fail to say yes (the junction makes one so slow on the uptake!), I answer her question with another: Would you like to come with me then?

Oh yes, she says.

Probably she asks the question every morning, aloud or to herself, to some man who’s waiting for the train, travelling far away, and hence likeable. I should like to be old now, to cover my cowardice. If I had a white beard, or was at least bald, then I could say to her: Stay here in the junction, miss! It’s sometimes better to watch men leave, than be whisked away by them. Because if you’re old, you’re allowed to comfort girls — and yourself as well — with sage lies.

I don’t take her with me, but I do take her hand. She wipes it on her apron — the movement is expressive of her resignation. She has wiped out her desires, with a sponge. Bon voyage! she says. I’m looking at the rails, I don’t look her in the eye, otherwise we would have had to kiss — which we’re afraid to do, because we’re stupid, scared and practical-minded.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 24 June 1927