What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

2. The Orient on Hirtenstrasse (1921)

It’s a grotesque contradiction, a spring evening in this part of town whose grime and greasepaint don’t so much conceal its Levantine-working-class nature as emphasize it. Barely a hundred paces from Alexanderplatz and the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, it seems strange that the street names are still bland and European. But if you take a right, you find yourself suddenly immersed in a strange and mournful ghetto world, where carts trundle past and an automobile is a rarity.

Polish Jewish children play in the middle of the road. From time to time they set up a wailing or squawking. The old people go their ways, completely unmoved by howling, children’s games, hoops, bobbing balloons. The old folks have more important things on their minds: They are here on business.

Several traveling brokerages have been established here. For example, there’s one on the corner of Hirtenstrasse, which is noteworthy because it’s even more downbeat than the others, giving it an oddly idyllic aspect. In all the other greater and lesser exchanges in the small, narrow, grimy restaurants, there is a coming and going, an ebb and flow of human bodies, almost as in a real exchange. But on the corner of the main street, there is the tranquillity of a modest business. You can’t pick anything up from the others, that’s how intense and bewildering is the crush of people, words, prices. But at least where I am you can listen and look.

The owner of these premises is a Russian-Polish Jew with a velvet cap and a beard. He is sitting on a green velveteen sofa under a picture of Moses Montefiore, reading a newspaper. His spectacles are in pretty bad shape; their steel frames have a black thread bandage. He shows no interest in his clients, barely even bothering to reply to a greeting, and then only absent-mindedly, to do the other a favor, catching a greeting like a stray ball and tossing it back. The other doesn’t bother to pick it up. He is in a hurry, he has seen an important personage. A personage. .

This personage — well, his real name is something different, but we’ll call him Baruch. Baruch is dressed in a very European manner, high style winds itself around his belly in the form of a belt, such a belt as no Kurfürstendamm Baruch would be ashamed to be seen in.

Baruch is fat, clean shaven, with a black-rimmed pince-nez, and his job is that of a middleman.

In the space of barely ten minutes you see him sitting at half a dozen different tables. With pencil and notebook. I am sure he must have done twenty-five deals in those ten minutes. Oh, Baruch!

The people you see here are Eastern grotesques: a poor, shriveled-up old lady who sells shoelaces for a living — and dabbles in stocks on the side. She discusses Romanian bonds and the state of the leu* with Baruch, and it’s quite grotesque to see how that arbiter of the life and death of marginal currencies takes this shoelace lady seriously. And avails himself of the opportunity to buy—patented fly buttons. He goes so far as to try and woo the favor and the confidence of this old bat. Oh, Baruch!. .

It’s suppertime, but no one eats here. They have good bread, fish in various sauces, and sausage from Cracow. But the woman behind the counter is unemployed. From time to time one of the businessmen will buy a schnapps from her. A strong, Russian schnapps. The drinker tosses his head back, as if it were a bowling ball loosely attached at the neck. Then the drinker’s eyes glisten, he goes Ah! a couple of times, and he leaves without paying. The woman doesn’t write it down either; there’s no need; the customer will pay.

There is little sign of suspicion. People here know one another. No one gives a hoot about the occasional European visitor. So what if he’s a snoop — who cares? We don’t do any shady business here, you can’t pin anything on us. We’re not black marketeers. We just enjoy one another’s company.

And in truth this type of dealer is completely different from the run of black market salesmen. Wonderfully thoughtful eyes, formidable old skulls, the physiognomies of scholars and philanthropists. These trades are done on the side. Who knows? Perhaps these people actually have lives in their time off.

From time to time, one of them might pray. Stand in a corner, muttering to himself, whispering. His lips tremble, his words are gabbled, the prayer is long, and he needs to be finished. No time, no time! No one bothers him, everyone steers clear of him; the aura of divine worship surrounds him, and all thought of percentages is far from him. No sooner has he finished his evening prayer than his expression is once more of this world. He reopens his eyes to the light of these premises, and to the floating percentages.

The door is open. It never occurred to anyone to close it. Till eleven and beyond. It’s not till half past that things start to get quieter. People trickle out into the night, drift around outside for a while, like large buzzing night insects.

Outside, a couple of policemen are on patrol. Then the man gets up from his green velveteen sofa, stows his fragile spectacles in their case, and slowly walks over to the door to lock up.

His wife counts empty bottles behind the bar. The bottles plink like keys on a glass piano.

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, May 4, 1921

3. Refugees from the East (1920)

Fürst Geza* (because in Hungary they put the surname before the first name, and some whim of fate likes to give beggars lordly attributes) — or, if you prefer, Geza Fürst — worked as a clerk in a Budapest grocery from the age of eleven. When he was sixteen the Hungarian Soviet Republic took over, and the grocery store was shut down. For his part, Geza joined the Red Army.

When the counterrevolutionary forces gained power in Hungary, Geza Fürst and his parents fled to the part of Hungary that was occupied by Romania. The Romanians expelled the Fürst family. Fürst père, a Jewish master tailor, moved to Slovakia with his wife and four daughters, scissors, ruler, thread, needle, and young Geza. The sixteen-year-old, having served in the Red Army, could not go back to Budapest. Instead he made his way to Berlin.

Not, please understand, to remain here. The commissioner in charge of demobilization wouldn’t allow him to in any case. Geza Fürst, now barely seventeen, wants to go on to Hamburg. He wants to take ship, be a cabin boy. Is he supposed to go back to twisting paper bags in a grocery store, pulling herrings out of barrels of brine by their stiff tails, or spilling raisins across a counter? Or go and get himself recruited again? Geza Fürst is perfectly right to want to go on a ship. Sirens toot, white chimneys belch smoke, ships’ bells ring, and the world is round. Geza Fürst will make a first-class sailor. He has broad shoulders but is still light on his feet, and with his gray eyes he can already see boundless horizons and blue infinity.

A Jewish hotel on the corner of Grenadierstrasse and Hirtenstrasse.

However, Geza Fürst hasn’t been able to get to Hamburg yet because he doesn’t have papers.

Geza Fürst sleeps in a boardinghouse on Grenadierstrasse, which is where I met him. I met others besides him. That boardinghouse is currently home to 120 Jewish refugees from the East. Many of the men arrived straight from Russian POW camps. Their garments were a weird and wonderful hodgepodge of uniforms. In their eyes I saw millennial sorrow. There were women there too. They carried their children on their backs like bundles of dirty washing. Other children, who went scrabbling through a rickety world on crooked legs, gnawed on dry crusts.

They were refugees. We know them as “the peril from the East.” Fear of pogroms has welded them together like a landslip of unhappiness and grime that, slowly gathering volume, has come rolling across Germany from the East. A few clumps of them have come to rest for the time being in the East End of Berlin. A small minority of them are young and healthy, like Geza Fürst, the born cabin boy. Mostly they are old and frail, if not broken.

They come from Ukraine, from Galicia, from Hungary. Back home they fell victim, in their hundreds of thousands, to pogroms. The survivors make their way to Berlin. From here they head west, to Holland and America, or south, to Palestine.

The boardinghouse smells of dirty laundry, sauerkraut, and masses of people. Bodies all huddled together lie on the floor like luggage on a railway platform. A few old Jews are smoking their pipes. Their pipes smell of scorched horn. Squealings and screechings of children in the corners. Sighs disappear down the cracks between the floorboards. The reddish sheen of an oil lamp battles its way through a veritable wall of smoke and sweat.

Geza Fürst can’t stand it anymore. He thrusts his hands into his frayed jacket pockets, and — a tune on his lips — goes out on the street to get some air. Maybe tomorrow he’ll get a place in the hostel on Wiesenstrasse that’s been set up for homeless Eastern Jews. If only he had papers. Because they’re very strict over on Wiesenstrasse; they won’t just take anyone who turns up.

All in all some fifty thousand people have come to Germany from the East since the war. I have to say, it can seem as if there were millions. The impression of so much wretchedness is double, treble, tenfold. That’s how much there is. Among the fugitives there are more workers and artisans than traders. According to the employment statistics, there are 68.3 percent workers, 14.26 percent wage laborers, and only 11.13 percent self-employed traders.

There are no jobs for these people with German companies, even though the only way they pose any sort of threat is if they are not allowed to work. Then of course they will become black marketeers, smugglers, and even common criminals. The Association for Eastern Jews in Berlin does all it can to persuade the authorities and public opinion that by far the best solution would be to disperse this newly arrived immigrant workforce over the entire German labor market. But even the expulsion of these people seems too difficult for the authorities to manage. Instead of authorizing the immediate departure of all those applying for an exit visa, the authorities do their utmost to slow down and prolong the process. The refugees spend weeks upon weeks here, literally dying on the charity of their fellow men before they are allowed to make themselves scarce. To date, 1,239 people have successfully negotiated Berlin without first starving to death.

In Wiesenstrasse, in what was once a hostel for the city’s homeless, a shelter for Jewish refugees from the East has now been set up. They are bathed, disinfected, deloused, fed, warmed, and put to bed. Then they are offered the chance to leave Germany. It is quite one of the most blessed preventative measures for dealing with the “Eastern peril.”

The odd one among these people will have intelligence and initiative. He will go on to New York and make a million.

Maybe Geza Fürst will manage to get to Hamburg and become a cabin boy — Geza Fürst, who may now be found walking up and down Grenadierstrasse, hands in his pockets, ex — Red Guard, adventurer, and pirate in spe. Recently I heard him singing a Hungarian song that contained these words: “The wind and I, we’re two of a kind; / no house or yard or body to shed a tear over us. . ”

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, October 20, 1920

4. Solomon’s Temple in Berlin (1920)

King Solomon, famous for his sayings and judgments and for his authorship of the Psalms, reigned at a time when history was still proceeding backward, namely from 1015 to 975 b.c. He loved high life and splendor, and was open handed both to God and to his own subjects. The latter he presented with tax edicts and tithes, and the former with devout prayers and a magnificent temple. The king turned to his neighbors for the gold, marble, and similar materials he needed for his building projects. He built his royal palace with the aid of King Hiram of Tyre, and that proved what an untenable idea anti-Semitism is. Because what happened was that Hiram — as cunning as if he had been Solomon — extended King Solomon unlimited credit, and King Solomon — as green and gullible as if he had been Hiram — drew and drew on it until the anti-Semite Hiram, showing his true Jewish nature, called in his loan. Thus he was able to gain a score of fertile territories in the north of the Jewish kingdom, for King Solomon was unable to pay his debts. Altogether King Solomon behaved like a reckless baron. He had baronial manners, and if the swastika supporters had come across him, they would have had to change their views.

Herr L. Schwarzbach,* who hails not from Ophir but from distant Drohobycz, has undertaken to rebuild the Temple of Solomon, “in miniature, of course,” as he says in his advertisement, on a scale of 1 to 70. L. Schwarzbach has worked nine full years on his construction of the Temple of Solomon. I looked at the photograph of this man who has given nine years of his life to building the temple of a deceased king, without even the prospect of an architectural diploma at the end of it. It’s the photograph of a bearded Polish Jew with velvet cap and side curls and large, dark, philosophical eyes, in which speculation stands no chance against mysticism. His picture hangs above the table on which the Temple of Solomon is exhibited. And the whole ensemble is to be found in a little Jewish restaurant on the corner of Hirtenstrasse.

Tickets to Solomon’s temple may be purchased either in the restaurant itself, or, for the more cautious, in Sternkucker’s bookstore on Grenadierstrasse. Another two marks will buy a brochure, and a further two marks will buy one in Hebrew. The literature is essential if you want to know the Temple of Solomon. Without it one would be helpless as a bridegroom.

Herr L. Schwarzbach’s Temple of Solomon is made of hard-wearing cardboard, painted in red and white and gold, and has any number of pretty doors and windows and towers and oriels, and is altogether good, true craftsmanship.† Slender little pillarets thrust upward to a thin arch they have grown expressly to support. Idiosyncratic battlements teeter aloft like little jokes of God, at the expense of this building in his praise. Green quartz windows continually prepare one for prayer, the coolness of service and confirmation. Narrow flights of stairs swarm up the heights in even and obtrusive diagonals. Little houses surprise one with their illogical presence, like boulders in the middle of a path, on the smooth parquet of a quadrangular courtyard. Alert watchtowers squinny out at the world around this restaurant table. A well, no bigger than a waistcoat button, harbors miniature deeps of water, all on a scale of 1 to 70. The whole thing, a Lilliputian institute, converts pomp into cuteness. A sweetly affecting pathos.

You may see:

the foundations, at an elevation of three hundred cubits, and five hundred cubits square, under which flows the river Kidron;

the entrance to the flower garden, “from where the scent of flowers came up into the Holy of Holies”;

the seventy-one golden chairs for the judges of the Sanhedrin;

the women’s courtyard, a square space “measuring 135 by 135 cubits”;

the chamber for the Nazarenes, where they took their pledge not to drink wine, and not to cut their hair;

the fifteen steps of the Levites, on which the fifteen psalms were sung, one psalm on every step;

the watchtower where the priests kept watch while the sacrificial fire burned;

the roof of pure gold over the Holy of Holies, studded with spikes a cubit long, to keep away bad-mannered birds;

and finally the altar, which measured 32 cubits square.

No one comes to Hirtenstrasse to see the Temple of Solomon. The people are godless and republican. In the adjacent restaurant, drying tench lie on sticky plates and stick their forked tails into the air. Sorry preserves fill a terrine with their mourning. A woman’s dress flops emptily over the back of a chair.

In the bar a group of people chew over the day’s news and the exchange rates.

They don’t talk about King Solomon the Wise, who was, I suppose, an aesthete and an eccentric. I can just see him sneaking into the “women’s courtyard, measuring 135 cubits in length and 135 cubits in breadth,” and, if there was no one watching, creeping into the flower garden to pluck an Oscar Wilde — style green carnation and pop it in his buttonhole.

Then he would have gifted the Queen of Sheba a wonderful golden roof. And in return Hiram set the bailiffs on him and made him the poorer by twenty estates. Twenty whole estates!. .

That’s how beautiful she was, the Queen of Sheba.

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, October 2, 1920

5. Wailing Wall (1929)

The view along Grenadierstrasse from a window on Münzstrasse.

In these days when Jews are being killed in Palestine, I chose to go to Grenadierstrasse — not to Jerusalem. I had the feeling it was better to be with the bereaved than the dead. I paid a condolence call on Grenadierstrasse. It was a hot day. All the doors were open, as were many windows. There was a reek of onions, fish, fat, and fruit, of infants, mead, wash, and sewers. The Jews were milling or walking around in Grenadierstrasse, showing a clear preference for the middle of the road over the sidewalk, and most of all for the edge of the pavement. They formed a kind of running commentary to the pavement. A kind of traffic fixture on Grenadierstrasse, cause unknown, and purpose mysterious; as if, for instance, they had been taken on by the Jewish faith to demonstrate some particular ritual. Women and children clustered in front of fruit and vegetable stands. Hebrew letters on shop signs, nameplates over doors, and in shop windows, put an end to the comely roundness of European Antiqua type with their stiff, frozen, jagged seriousness. Even though they were only doing commercial duty, they called to mind funeral inscriptions, worship, rituals, divine invocations. It was by means of these same signs that here offer herrings for sale, phonograph records, and collections of Jewish anecdotes, that Jehovah once showed himself on Mount Sinai. With the help of these terrible jagged letters he gave the Jews the first terrible moral law, for them to spread among the cheerful, blithe peoples of the world. It takes, I thought, a truly divine love to choose this people. There were so many others that were nice, malleable, and well trained: happy, balanced Greeks, adventurous Phoenicians, artful Egyptians, Assyrians with strange imaginations, northern tribes with beautiful, blond-haired, as it were, ethical primitiveness and refreshing forest smells. But none of the above! The weakest and far from loveliest of peoples was given the most dreadful curse and most dreadful blessing, the hardest law and the most difficult mission: to sow love on earth, and to reap hatred.

No! If Jews are being beaten up in Palestine, there is no need to go to Jerusalem and study the question of the British Mandate to understand why. It’s not only in Jerusalem that there is a Wailing Wall. Grenadierstrasse is one Wailing Wall after another. The punishing hand of God is clearly visible over the bent backs of the people. Of all the thousand ways that they have gone, and go, and will go, not one is a way out, not one leads to a concrete, earthly goal. No “fatherland,” no “Jewish homeland,” no “place of refuge,” no “place of liberty.” There are various opportunities to discern the so-called will of history. And nowhere does it show itself as plainly as in all the many Grenadierstrassen in which Jews don’t so much live as drift up and down. (Theirs is no pathological-degenerative unrest so much as a historically conditioned one.) Clearly it is the secret “will of history” for this people to have no country to live in but to wander the roads. And that daunting will corresponds to the daunting constitution of the Jews. In seeking a “homeland” of their own, they are rebelling against their deeper nature.

They are no nation, they are a kind of supranation, perhaps the anticipation of some future form of nation. The Jews have already lived through all the others: a state, wars, conquests, defeats. They have converted infidels with fire and sword, and many of them also have been converted to other religions, by fire and sword. They have lived through, and emerged from, their primitive periods of “national history” and “civic culture.” The only thing that was left to them is to suffer as strangers among strange peoples, because they are “different.” Their “nationalism” is of no material kind. There is not even an absolute physical identity in common; not even a fixed form of belief. The religion of their forefathers has softened into the common daily life of the descendants; it has become a way of life, of eating, of sleeping and sexual conjunction, of trading, or of working and studying. Only, the conditions of their external surroundings were more tempting and more binding than the laws that were left of their religion. It is impossible to adhere to these laws and live. And, above all the commandments of the Jewish faith, there is the supremely implacable commandment: to live. Every day demands a further concession. It’s not that they fall away from the faith of their fathers — their faith falls away from them. Or: It becomes sublimated in their descendants. It determines the way they think, act, and behave. Religiosity becomes an organic function of the individual Jew. A Jew fulfills his “religious duties,” even if he doesn’t fulfill them. Merely by being, he is religious. He is a Jew. Any other people would be required to affirm their “faith” or their “nationality.” The Jew’s affirmation is involuntary, automatic. He is marked, to the tenth generation. Wherever a Jew stops, a Wailing Wall goes up. Wherever a Jew settles down, a pogrom goes up. .

It should be understood, at long last, that Zionism can only be a bitter experiment, a temporary, opportune degradation of Judaism, or perhaps merely the reversion to a primal, long since outmoded, form of national existence. Maybe it has succeeded in arresting or delaying the “assimilation” of Jewish individuals or groups. But in return it seeks to assimilate an entire people. If it appeals to the warlike traditions of Judaism, then one should counter that the conquest of Canaan is less of an achievement than the Bible, the Psalms, and the Song of Songs; also, that the present of the Jews is greater, possibly, than their past: being more tragic. .

It might even be more “practical” in a “political” sense, if the young Jews who are “going back” to Palestine today, did so as the grandchildren not of the Maccabees, but of the priests and prophets. In the course of my wanderings through the Jewish ghetto in Berlin, I bought some Jewish nationalist newspapers from Eastern Europe. Their reporting of the fighting in Palestine was indistinguishable from the war reports we read in our German newspapers. In the same dreadful Borgis bold type, in comparison to which spilled human blood seems a pretty thin and inconsequential fluid, those Jewish nationalist newspapers report on the Jewish “victories over the Arabs.” And in the war correspondents’ familiar gobbledygook you could read, in appalling black on white, that these were, thank God, not pogroms, but honest- to-goodness “battles.” Here you could finally understand that the view of the Jews as cleverer than other peoples is erroneous. Not only are they not cleverer, they are even sometimes more stupid. They aren’t ahead of the times, but if anything lagging behind. They are aping the recently failed European ideologies. Now,

of all times, they are setting about their original Jewish

steel baths. Of course it’s only natural that they should put up a fight in Palestine. It’s too bad that they were attacked. But to have their heroism confirmed to them in the newspapers — having been uncommonly heroic over thousands of years without journalistic clichés — that furnishes final proof that there are no seven wise men of Zion directing the destiny of the Jewish people. No, there are several hundred thousand idiots of Zion, who have failed to understand the destiny of their people.

Das Tagebuch, September 14, 1929