What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

6. Nights in Dives (1921)

The epicenter of the phenomenon known to us as the dive or joint is the Alexanderplatz station (exit Münzstrasse), from where it spreads over the east end of Berlin, and, from there, ultimately, over the rest of the world. It is also quite unthinkable without Neue Schönhauser Strasse, from whose cobblestones — as if they had been lampposts, or some other organic outgrowth of the street — arise pimps and their prostitutes, and the police station, whose gates are already locked and guarded by a couple of Berlin’s finest. What these two policemen are dreaming of is a cigarette (they aren’t allowed to smoke on duty) or an hour in a red-light bar, instead of a tart you can quickly feel up while her pimp is — unconscionably or conscientiously — detained in some gateway, tying up a cigarette deal. Nor can I imagine nights in dives without Weinmeisterstrasse, whose corners are always thick with bad characters. And certainly not without the police spy, in mufti but uniformed, incognito and unmistakable, the tips of his moustache giving away his loyal service and watchman’s vigilance, authority and certainty in his expression, looking out for anyone with any hesitation about him. And even if he were less obtrusive, better camouflaged than he is, I would still know him by his footfall and his expression, by the fearlessness of his looming up suddenly from a bar or a back wall. The others don’t have that fearlessness — they’re just bold as brass.

Café Dalles

The premises of the Café Dalles at 13 Neue Schönhauser Strasse used to be called the Angels’ Palace. Things change. For a time it was a public dining place, and I think that was probably its original function. Angels’ palaces don’t come purpose-built: Instead they come with long passages whose farther end, like a lake’s opposite shore, is obscured by clouds of smoke, and with another entrance on the left, which may have been used as a chambre séparée for after-hours angels, and today has a roulette table and roulette games on the walls, folksy glass-fronted cabinets, with hand-painted picture postcard backdrops, harmless playthings to encourage an underage public.

Kirsch the burglar and Tegeler Willy and Apache Fritz are sitting at a table together, while the policeman stands and watches. At the bottom of the well-like passage, Elli’s sitting on someone’s lap, because she’s got new stockings today. If you’ve got new stockings, you’ve got to show them off. Her little blond ringlets are combed down into her face. They hang there a little stiffly, like starched ruffles. I really think she wants nothing more from the world than to have half a kümmel inside her, and the knowledge that there is another half to come. Let her have it, please. My friend buys her some bread and butter. Now I think she’s happy beyond dreams. New stockings, a kümmel, and some bread and butter. It really is an angels’ palace.

Though I can’t say what terms Kirsch is on with the police just now — there seems to be a standoff with the policeman at least — Kirsch may be planning some new heist, or he’s talking about some perfectly innocent game of cards, or maybe he’s about to exit left, in the direction of the roulette table. To the right of the entrance, there’s someone playing the piano, and Kirsch passes the hat around for him. Maybe he feels he has to be involved in some way. Everyone gives him something, either out of respect or because they want to contribute, even if they can hardly hear the music. Its thin sounds come swaddled in cigar smoke like cotton wool.

Reese’s Restaurant

Reese’s Restaurant is awash in red light. All the lamps have deep red paper napkins thrown over their shoulders like cloaks, and there’s a band on stage, and the clientele is somewhat more refined. Reese’s is an establishment you visit. The others are bars you drop in. When you go to Reese’s, you first take a deep breath. And generally you go after 8 p.m. And the band is called “orchestra.”

Also, you can take your hat off at Reese’s without the risk of anyone staring. From time to time, descending from westerly spheres, a card sharp will put in an appearance. And it’s not Kirsch who’ll pass the hat around for the musicians, but a man armed with little green numbered boxes. That’s how they do things at Reese’s.

At Reese’s the guests may be “politely requested to pay their reckoning promptly,” but the waiter is well bred enough to take himself off if it doesn’t happen that way. At Reese’s you wear an outfit if you’re a lady, and the waiter may even occasionally say, “The lady, please!” But the lady will address the waiter by his first name. New stockings are no rarity at Reese’s.

Plus you can go up three steps to the back room, where they play skat. That young reprobate actor who’s quite talented is a regular here. He’s getting together a foursome for skat.

Sometimes politics and crime mix at Reese’s. I saw Kern again here. I’d last seen him in Vienna and Budapest. Those were revolutionary times; I found myself behind bars once in Hungary. . At Reese’s the band plays without a break, and they are all in black. They don’t have a bandleader, but the violinist keeps them in good order by looking at them. They play well.

From time to time there’s even a little scandal at Reese’s. Always a matter of honor. Never money, just women.

That’s Reese’s Restaurant for you.

Albert’s Cellar

By contrast Albert’s Cellar in Weinmeisterstrasse is quiet, no music, no red lights. The owner is a Romanian immigrant by the name of Albert. Albert’s Cellar is an easy name to remember.

Albert’s Cellar has regulars of such fixed habits that they even have their mail sent there. Certain aspects of Albert’s Cellar are reminiscent of a writer’s café. For instance, it is possible to sleep away an entire afternoon in Albert’s Cellar. Paul was just embarking on his fourth hour when we arrived. He lay with his head slumped on the table, as though he were trying to saw through the fake marble with his nose. Beside him Regine, resplendent in her fake diamonds, was watching over his sleep. Paula was there with her pimp. He drank a glass of beer, slapped her on the back, and said: “Good luck then, girl.” She sat in a dirty blouse, with spongy, droopy breasts, and drank up my friend’s coffee. The day before yesterday she’d been at a fancy place on Hirtenstrasse where they had good coffee. She didn’t like the coffee here at all, Yuck! Another girl was leaning against the iron stove. She was shivering quietly, and when she spoke (only to say, “How’s it going?”), you saw that she didn’t have any teeth. Her Rudolf had a mouth full of fillings — a treasure chest, not a mouth.

Therese is a peroxide blond, and I walk her over to her turf on Alexanderplatz. She’s in a crisis just now. Rudolf’s girl was locked up, and since he was on his own, he took on Therese. But then the original girl was let out (after just a week), and she had more experience and a better figure. So Rudolf was dumping Therese. She’s looking for support. “He’s got no character, Rudolf,” she says. “He could have discussed it with me.”

Yes, I quite agree, Rudolf’s got no character. How can you be so unprincipled as always to put your business first?!

I cross my fingers for Therese so that she’ll find someone. And then she’ll be happy. I think she has character.

The Cigar Box

Even the world of dives has its symbols and its holy signs. A drum, for instance, is the emblem for a stout, respectable club with gold lace. And the sign of a burglar is a cigar box.

The cigar box contains not Dutch cigars but, arranged by size: “rippers” and “jacks” and “little aldermen.” Or: “jimmies” and “claw-jimmies.”

Because in the world of dives, even housebreakers’ tools have their nicknames. A picklock is a little alderman, a crowbar is a jimmy, and a drilling tool — which admittedly has become almost obsolete as a tool of civilization — is a ripper. A man who works with rippers cannot gain my respect. He’s a dinosaur. A self-respecting man earns his living with explosives, oxygen and dynamite. A ripper — get away!

The cigar box also contains a few S-hooks. S-hooks are so called because they have the shape of a roman S. An S-hook is enough to take care of your average apartment door. Franz, though, never carries any S-hooks. He opens apartment doors that get in his way with his penknife. Franz is a skilled operator!

Franz always keeps his cigar box in his jacket pocket, but he’s not one for symbols. He doesn’t need any cigar box. After all, he’s Franz!. .

A cigar box — it needs to be old and battered, and to have a warped lid straining against the hinges — that’s the trademark and the emblem. It can’t be any old box! — not a cigarette box, for sure! It needs to be an honest-to-God cigar box.

You see: A man who crosses the threshold without a cigar box — what can he be? A pimp at best! The owner of the dive will say, “Well, how’s business?” with a measure of condescension, as though patting the new arrival on the back with each syllable. Whereas a man who walks in with a cigar box will find the way opening up before him, and riffraff like pimps will give him a wide berth. That’s the aura of the cigar box. You wouldn’t believe what a humble cigar box is capable of. It’s an emblem of authority, and for every uninitiated new arrival in the world of dives, it’s like a case in which he carries his field marshal’s staff. All honor to the cigar box!

On Mulackstrasse

Eleven at night, and Mulackstrasse looks like part of an archaeological site. A streetlight on the corner of Schönhauser Strasse squinnies across at it apprehensively. A girl patrols up and down, like a pendulum in her regular unceasing motion, as if she’d been set going by some invisible clockwork.

On the opposite corner is Willy’s bodega. Hans, Willy’s assistant, is there too. He has the most exquisitely parted and Brylcreemed and innocently styled hair. And Gustav, the lithographer, feels utterly at home. He wears soft felt slippers, and his face is like a stubble field in autumn.

Willy is a bookie. Once, a couple of officers came his way, who shouldn’t really have had any business dealing with bookies. Willy was just greeting a friend getting out of a car. The car impressed the officers. They concluded that a bookie who had a friend who owned a car couldn’t really be a bookie. They left Willy some money. An awful lot of money. And then Willy scrammed.

“Long Hermann” rolls up at about half past eleven. He has a very placid, broad face. His eyes are tiny and unfocused; it’s as though they were hiding behind a soft veil of tears, to see without being seen.

And just then Gustav disappears. I don’t know what Gustav gets up to in the cellar.

The Tippel Pub

The Tippelkneipe, or Tippel Pub (on Linienstrasse), is where panhandlers and street sweepers go to drink. Panhandlers wear baggy clothes, with plenty of room in them for “stray merchandise.” They’re all thin and frozen; they feel the cold in every pore. The heat of ten African summers wouldn’t be enough to thaw them out. It can’t be easy, being a panhandler.

They play cards. On the table the grimy bits of cardboard make a noise like muffled slaps.

Fred and Karlchen are not panhandlers. It’s nice of them to be sitting here at all. By the grace of God, they don’t need to be here. Fred and Karlchen: They must make a couple of hundred marks a day.

Fred and Karlchen work in the west. As lightbulb specialists. Only expensive houses.

The passages in these expensive houses often have electric light. Karlchen will hop up on Fred’s shoulder and unscrew the bulbs. There are a couple of businesses on Elsasser Strasse that will pay four to six marks apiece for bulbs. The electricians don’t ask where the bulbs come from. Electricians are not curious people by nature.

Now do you see that it’s nice of Fred and Karlchen to spend their time here? Playing skat with panhandlers?

It’s very quiet in the Tippel Pub. An old dog is stretched out in front of the iron stove. The smack of the cards doesn’t bother him in the least. It’s a dog’s life for me! he thinks.

Gipsdiele

So called because it’s on Gipsstrasse. If only everything in life were as straightforward!

I like it very much in the Gipsdiele. It’s a cosy sort of place, small and tight, and the man behind the bar — who looks like a little costume-party beer barrel that somebody’s stuck a head on — occupies a substantial portion of it himself. He doesn’t leave much room for the other twenty or so people here.

I have a lot of old friends here. There’s Big Max, the plasterer (his day job, anyway); Grete, whose real name is Margot; Little Bertha, Else (no surname); and finally Annie — Annie from Silesia, as opposed to Bavarian Annie.

It’s important not to get those two mixed up. Bavarian Annie has her turf next to Schönhauser Tor, and is never seen around here. Besides, she’s only been back for a week. She claims she was banged up in prison, but I don’t believe her. I’m sure she was banged up another way, as Max says, and is back from the hospital but is embarrassed to say so.

Annie from Silesia is counting her money. When I look across at her, she stops. I don’t know why — I’m not going to tell anyone.

Someone’s set down his cigar box and orders a couple of kümmels. The order and the setting down of the box have made a big hole in the general conversation: There’s silence for a moment. A man wearing a hotel porter’s visored cap is racking his brain: Now, what was he in for?

Max says to the man in the cap: “I need a woman and a claw-jimmy.” The claw-jimmy won’t be a problem. As early as tomorrow. But a woman — apparently that’s not so easy.

In case of any misunderstanding, Erna screeches: “I’m spoken for!” Erna loves Franz. Erna got a gold filling a week ago, and she hasn’t stopped laughing since. She can’t just let her mouth hang open like a hungry crocodile’s! Oh, no! So if the world is to see her gold filling, Erna will just have to laugh. Erna laughs at the saddest things.

Franz is big and wide and has just walked in. For a moment or two, he completely fills the little bar with his personality. He radiates authority. All the pimps shrivel up and dwindle away like rubber balloons.

Erna gets a poke in the ribs that sends her sprawling along the bench. But Erna laughs. .

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, February 23/28, 1921

7. With the Homeless (1920)

The Declaration

Case No. . P. B.

Was heard by the court in Berlin, on. . 1920.

Mr. [No Name] was instructed to find himself alternative accommodation within five days, failing which, notwithstanding the most strenuous efforts on his behalf to do so, he would be punished for making himself homeless. The appellant was further warned that in accordance with #361, subsection 8, of the Criminal Law of the German Empire, such punishment will consist of up to six weeks in prison, and, in accordance with #362 ibid., transferral to the police authorities, for placement in a workhouse.

approved and signed.

Signature of the homeless man in question.

Signature of the police case worker.

Here is to be found the true cause of the Homeless Revolt of two days ago in Fröbelstrasse. The rioters were for the most part young people, egged on by a somewhat colorful individual from East Prussia. The young homeless held a meeting in Weissensee, and decided to storm the shelter. An official who tried to placate them was so badly beaten that he ended up in hospital. The police were called. A few of the miscreants have already been taken into custody. It is unlikely that they will all be caught.

The document quoted above is the so-called declaration, which has to be signed by anyone entering the homeless shelter on Fröbelstrasse. The German in which this philanthropical document is couched corresponds to the philanthropy it expresses. The youthful quasi revolutionaries certainly did not rise up because they were critical of deficiencies in its style or its humanitarian mission. They just wanted to let off steam — to prove they were people “to be reckoned with,” and, broadly, to remind themselves (and others) of the existence of the republic. But the physical expression of their indignation would be understandable (though not condoned), if it were just that, honest indignation and not a result of the unscrupulous conduct of an unethical individual. “Failing which”—and if someone were unable to prove that despite all his endeavors he had not found himself an abode — is six weeks in prison really appropriate punishment for that? Is punishment appropriate at all? Isn’t it rather the case that finding accommodation within five days in Berlin these days should be taken as proof of criminality? This is an old and musty decree, and it is finally on its way out. Though only after a conscientious and humane official has found himself the victim of violence unleashed in those whom the law has left with no other option.

The Building

Red brick. The chill uniform of stern durability in which our state institutions, hospitals, prisons, schools, post offices, and churches show their character. A garden’s autumnal colors are a vain effort to lend a pleasant or stirring aspect to what remains, all too evidently, a state enterprise. The building remains brick red, and looks as though it’s been plonked down in the middle of nature. Fröbelstrasse, by the way, is in a part of Berlin where that brick-red atmosphere tends to dominate. On the right a board fence rings a bit of — hardly — open ground, and further on, a caravan, evidently the property of tinkers. Prenzlauer Allee owes its alluring name to the presence of a few scrawny trees, sprung from the stones of a city precinct, trees not by nature but by municipal decree. Then the hospital at the front, the shelter for the homeless at the back. At the entrance the police have a pleasant greeting for all those merely going by. The corridors are bare, their faces pancaked over with official white. The chief inspector, a large, kind, fair-haired man, is full of understanding because he has seen so much already. All the officials wear humanity under their uniforms. Anyone called upon to supervise misery will view criminality differently. All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love.

The Dormitory and the People in It

The dormitory is vastly long and relatively narrow. You could easily take a walk in it, if it weren’t for the two rows of beds jutting out, barracks-style, from either side. A line of beds runs down the middle too. Naked iron bedsteads, wire-mesh beds for penance. Every homeless person is given a thin blanket of papery stuff, which, admittedly, is clean and disinfected. And on these beds they sit and sleep and lie, the homeless people. Grotesque-looking figures, as though hauled from the lower depths of world literature. People you wouldn’t believe. Old graybeards in rags, tramps hauling a motley collection of the past bundled up on their crooked backs. Their boots are powdered with the dust of decades. Middle-aged men, with sunburned faces chiseled by hunger and toughness. Young fellows in baggy pants, with eyes that look at you with a mixture of fear and confrontation. Women in brown rags, shameless and shy, curious and apathetic, quivering and resigned. A hundred of them to a room. Women, grown men, and youths kept apart. It takes about two hours to fill an intake. Admission is between four in the afternoon and nine at night. Everyone is given a steaming bowl of soup. Anyone who looks particularly wretched, a little more. Every morning there’s a sick call. There are always plenty of applicants. Many are footsore. Some of these people have walked all their lives. Roughly half have sexually transmitted diseases. The majority have lice. It’s difficult to persuade them to get cleaned up. Their clothes don’t survive disinfection. They’d rather go around with their lice intact than look still more ragged than they do already.

The Families

Families are accommodated in separate wooden cubicles that are set up in the halls. A few look almost cosy. Every corner of the hall has a gas burner and a little range at which the women can do their cooking. Washing is hung up to dry in the miasma of cooking smells, digestion, and communal living. Every little room has a gaslight. The people here are refugees. From Prussia, from the Rhineland, from Holstein. They know one another. They pay calls on one another. Some may have brought along a few sticks of furniture they’ve salvaged from somewhere, others have managed to acquire this or that. I can picture the women arguing among themselves, over a child or a cooking pot, say. Poor people come to blows over such little things. The children are fair-haired and slightly dirty. They don’t have any nice toys. Their world consists of a courtyard, a dozen bits of gravel, a tree, and one another. The one another is the best of it.

The Lieutenant Colonel

I sat with him, in his little wooden cubicle. Lieutenant Colonel Bersin is a czarist Russian officer, and a refugee. He has been in Berlin since April. He is old and stiff and proud. His gait is a little crooked, but after all the world has become so crooked. Revolution! And the Little Father is no more. Where is the czar? Where are his epaulettes? Where is the General Staff? He is a veteran of the Chinese war, the Japanese war, the Great war. He was lieutenant colonel on the General Staff. Most recently in Riga. He speaks excellent German but is still pleased that he can speak to me in Russian. He has newspapers and books piled up next to his bed. He reads everything he can lay his hands on. His officer’s cap is on the wall. He shows it to me with a great deal of pride, touching pride, like a child showing off his drum. He would like to work. He wishes he didn’t have to be a burden on the city. He is a lieutenant colonel. How much longer can the Bolsheviks last? Only a little bit, surely! It’s insane! A revolution! Ripping the epaulettes off officers’ uniforms! Where is the czar? The Little Father? Where is Russia? He has a family. His children — perhaps they are married by now; or fled, or even dead! What sort of world is this? A crooked world! Poor, poor lieutenant colonel! History has performed a somersault, and a lieutenant colonel winds up in the shelter for homeless people.

Thousands of people used to pass through the homeless shelter. Now there are a thousand every night. In the morning two or three of the dormitories are combed by the police. They find the people they have been looking for, sometimes.

Others they don’t bother with at all. They know who they are. They have been coming to the shelter for ten years now, or more. Residents. Resident homeless. The provisional or the contingent has become their normal way of life, and they are at home — in their homelessness.

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, September 23, 1920

8. The Steam Baths at Night (1920)

The steam baths in the Admiral’s Palace are once more open all night. During the war their nighttime hours were first curtailed, then stopped altogether. Now you can once more take a steam bath at night.

Before the war a visit here represented the inevitable and indispensable conclusion to a night on the town, and the rejuvenation or rehumanizing of the night owl. Yesterday is swilled off him into the basins, and he emerges from the waters of the Admiral’s Palace clean shaven, reconsecrated, ready for fresh deeds, into the morning air of Friedrichstrasse. The steam baths consituted the break — the “clean break”—between the bacchanals of the night and the day’s gainful employment. It interposed itself between the bar and the desk. Without its ministrations — cast your minds back — it would have been impossible to sustain a rowdy nightlife with anything like the same stamina.

Nowadays, with the domestication of pleasure, with the fact that contemporary man no longer needs to bathe in pure waters, the steam baths have been turned into a night shelter. If you can’t find a hotel room, you go to the baths. One night costs twenty marks. For that you can sweat the night away, if you like, or sleep yourself clean. The baths should have some sort of inscription. Something like: PER SUDOREM AD SOLEM! or white nights.

The men’s lounge in the Admiral Baths.

Travelers may be seen arriving from the nearby Friedrichstrasse station at midnight, with suitcases. Returned from fruitlessly making the rounds of the city’s hotels, they sigh with relief at the entrance to the baths. Slowly they have become a pivotal metropolitan institution — a bolt- and water hole for the tourist in his hour of need.

The grotesque spectacle of a hot room at night, containing sixteen naked homeless people, trying to sweat out the soot and coal smoke of a train journey, gives rise to a positively infernal range of interpretations. A series of illustrations, say, to Dante’s journeys in the underworld. The only creature permitted to be fully clothed, standing there purposefully and conscientiously with scrubbing brush and torturer’s gauntlet in hand, could quite easily be some underdevil, if you happened not to know that his infernal character will be appeased, and his true character revealed by a small tip, once you have withstood his torments.

I don’t know if people in hell look as ridiculous as they do here. If the fashion there is for them to be likewise stripped naked, then they will do, for all their grimness and tragedy. I have a feeling that the witching hour does something to exacerbate the already intrinsically comical condition of nudity. It’s such a bizarre notion that between midnight and 2 a.m. there are people being steamed.

Somebody with frail, uncoordinated joints that look as though they’d been provisionally held together with string performs swimming motions in a pool for a whole nocturnal hour. Another, a fat man, who might be advised to borrow the equator from the earth as a belt for his dressing gown, looks on with a grimly sadistic expression, until he starts to feel the chill and has to take himself to the hot pool to recoup the calories that his Schadenfreude has cost him. He cautiously extends the tip of his right big toe into the water, but it’s too hot for him. He would like to watch himself enter the water — only his belly isn’t made of glass.

The dormitory looks like a hollow polygon from geometry class. The sofas are small, low, and numerous. They stand there, as it were, guilelessly, as if, say, somebody had just left them there in despair, because there was nowhere else. People come here in their Turkish towels to try and catch a little sleep.

Only they make it impossible for one another. It is quite extraordinary what hidden desires cleanliness is able to flush out of thoroughly sweated souls. The appetite increases prodigiously. I almost think the only reason the steam baths were closed during the war was because of England’s naval blockade. Sixteen thoroughly purified men are capable of consuming at a single sitting enough food to feed a city for six months.

Oh, and if only sandwiches didn’t have to come wrapped in noisy wax paper! As if soft, silent paper wouldn’t do the job just as well! Three gentlemen who have gotten off the train ask for their bags. I hoped one of them would have the provisions for all three in his bag. I hoped, further, that hunger would appear in all three simultaneously, since they’d all arrived on the same train, and stepped out of their baths at the same time too. But they, cunning fellows, used their appetites to provoke and taunt me.

Each of the three took it in turn to open his suitcase, his little key squeaking in the lock like a young puppy dog, and then came the unwrapping, with all the lavishly variegated stages of a proper picnic lunch, as if this weren’t a steam bath at night but a green meadow on a Sunday afternoon.

Over time I grew able amply — hardly — to distinguish the three travelers from one another. One of them unwrapped his sandwiches swiftly and with decision, he didn’t rustle so much as crunch. The other didn’t crunch, but he was impatient and kept ripping his paper. The third took the longest. He folded up his paper minutely afterward. I think he must have had a long journey still ahead of him. Strange, someone taking so much trouble to make it clear to all those present that he didn’t really need to take a bath here. No, by no means. He was clean only yesterday. Who would doubt it? But an odd, enforced bath like this, for want of a hotel room, it’s not such a bad thing. And even though I’m absolutely prepared to believe that he was in a state of tiptop cleanliness when he arrived, he still won’t stop trying to convince me of the fact. He comes from the provinces. It all strikes him as terribly amusing, and I can see him working on his account for the assembled listeners in the bar — the wacky things people get up to in Berlin.

You can sleep quite well on these sofas, if your neighbors have already eaten. If you go out in the corridor, you will see a poster that tells you that it is forbidden, first, to smoke (where would you keep your cigarettes?), and second to enter the manicure room “in a state of undress.” And for all that I saw naked people leaving the manicure room.

People in a state of nature wander through the corridors of the Admiral’s Palace. The world’s highways and byways must have looked like this when the world was in its infancy, and before men’s and women’s fashion became the flourishing industry it is today.

If you go out onto the dark streets at 5 a.m., you will just catch the final farewells between men and women, and the tired homeward trudge of a Friedrichstrasse whore who’s had a bad night and is going home penniless. A truck rumbles past, it’s raining, and it’s bitter.

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, March 4, 1920

9. Schiller Park (1923)

Schiller Park opens its portals, quite unexpectedly, in the north of the city, a surprising gem beyond the brewery belt of the various Schultheisses and Patzenhofers: like a park in exile. It looks every bit as though it had once been situated in the west of the city, and along with its relegation, it had been stripped of its ornamental lake and its little weather hut with barometer and sundial.

What it’s left with are its weeping willows and its complement of park wardens. These are laconic and, in all probability, good people, because they follow an occupation that is not a soul-destroying one. They are the world’s only harmless police, admonitory notice boards put in place by the Almighty and the local authorities, till one day, out of boredom, they suddenly left their posts and took to ambulating up and down the leafy avenues. On their faces you can read their original, now weathered inscription: citizens, look after your amenities — and the willow wands they hold in their hands are mildly waving exclamation marks. Park wardens, by the way, are the only living beings permitted to set foot on the grass.

I have long been curious as to what park wardens do in the winter. It’s scarcely credible that they should ever leave their parks to share a kitchen with wives and children. Much more likely that they wrap themselves in straw and rags, and passersby take them for rose trees or bits of statuary, or that they dig in for the winter, and come out in the spring along with the violets and primulas. With my own eyes I have seen them feeding off hips and haws, in the manner of shy forest creatures. Ask them a question, and they will think for a long time before replying. There’s always a layer of solitude about them, as there is with gravediggers and lighthouse keepers. .

The people who live around Schiller Park work in the mornings. That’s why the park is as deserted at that time as if it were off limits. One or two unemployed men trudge past; otherwise I see no one.

Then two girls, seventeen and nature-loving, come wandering through its avenues. It’s as if birches could suddenly walk. But real birches are rooted in the ground, and can only sway their hips.

The children arrive at three in the afternoon with pails and shovels and mothers. They leave the mothers sitting on wide white benches and toddle off to the sandbox.

Sand is something that God invented specially for small children, so that in their wise innocence of what it is to play, they may have a sense of the purposes and objectives of earthly activity. They shovel the sand into a tin pail, then carry it to a different place, and pour it out. And then some other children come along and reverse the process, taking the sand back whence it came.

And that’s all life is.

The weeping willows, on the other hand, are evocative of death.

They are a little contrived, a little exaggerated, still green in the middle of all the colors of autumn, and there is a human pathos to them. Weeping willows were not created by God at the same time as the other trees, like the hazelnuts and the apple trees, but only after he had decided to allow people to die. They are a sort of second-generation tree, flora endowed with intellect and a sense of ceremony.

Even in Schiller Park the leaves drop from the trees in a timely fashion, in the autumn, but they are not left to lie. In the Tiergarten, for instance, a melancholy walker can positively wade through foliage. This sets up a highly poetic rustling and fills the spirit with mournfulness and a sense of transience. But in Schiller Park, the locals from the working-class district of Wedding gather up the leaves every evening, and dry them, and use them for winter fuel.

Rustling is strictly a luxury, as if poetry without central heating were unnatural.

The rosehips look like fat red little liqueur bottles, distributed for promotional purposes. They fall from the trees free of charge, and are collected by the children. The park wardens look on, feeling no alarm. For they have placed their trust in the Lord, who feeds the wardens in the fields and arrays them in local-authority caps.

Berliner Börsen-Courier, October 23, 1923

10. The Unnamed Dead (1923)

The city’s unnamed dead may be seen laid out, in tidy rows, in the photograph cabinets on the ground floor of the police headquarters. It’s a grisly exhibition drawn from the whole grisly city, in whose asphalt streets, gray-shaded parks, and blue canals death lurks with revolver, chloroform, and gag. This is the hidden side of the city, its anonymous misery. These are her obscure children, whose lives are put together from shiftlessness, pub, and obscurity, and whose end is violent and bloody, a murderous finale. They stumble unconsciously into one of the numberless graves that have been dug beside the path of their lives, and the only trace of themselves they bequeath to posterity is their photograph, snapped at the so-called scene of the incident by a police photographer.

Each time I stop in front of a photographer’s window to view the pictures of the living in their finery, the newlywed couples, the confirmees, the smiling faces, the white veils, the confetti, the rows of medals on some excellency’s breast, the sight of which seems to tinkle and jingle in the mind’s ear — I remember the case with the dead in the police station. It shouldn’t be in the corridor of the police station at all, but somewhere where it is very visible, in some public space, at the heart of the city whose true reflection it offers. The windows with the portraits of the living, the happy, the festive, give a false sense of life — which is not one round of weddings, of beautiful women with exposed shoulders, of confirmations. Sudden deaths, murders, heart attacks, drownings are celebrated in this world.

It is these instructive photographs that should be shown in the Pathé Newsreels, and not the continual parades, the patriotic Corpus Christi processions, the health spas with their drinking fountains, their parasols, their bitter curative waters, their terraces from Wagner myths. Life isn’t as serenely beautiful as the Pathé News would have you believe.

Every day, every hour, a great many people, many hundreds of people, pass through the corridor of the police headquarters, and no one stops in front of the glass cases to look at the dead. People go to the Alien Registration Office,* to the Passport Office to get a visa, to the Lost Property Office to look for an umbrella, to the Criminal Investigations Department to report a robbery. The people who come to police headquarters are concerned, in one way or another, with life, and with the single exception of your correspondent, not one of them is a philosopher. Who among them would take an interest in the dead?

These dead people are ugly and reproachful. They line up like prickings of conscience. They look as they did when they were first found, mortal terror on their faces. They stand there open mouthed, their dying screams are still in the air, you can hear them as you look. Their death agonies keep their eyes half open, the white shimmers under their eyelids. They are bearded and beardless, men and women, young and old. They were found on the street, in the Tiergarten, in the river Spree or the canals. In some cases the place where they were found is not given or is unknown. The drowned bodies are puffed up and slime encrusted, they resemble badly mummified Egyptian kings. The crusts on their faces are cracked and split like a poor-quality plaster cast. The women’s breasts are grotesquely swollen, their features contorted, their hair like a pile of sweepings on their swollen heads.

If these dead had names, they would be less reproachful. To judge by their faces and garments, they were not exactly prosperous in life. They belonged to those called the “lower classes,” because they happened to be worse off. They were laborers, maids, people who have to undertake heavy physical labor or crime if they are to live. It is unusual for one of the dead heads to emerge from a stiff collar, which in Europe is the emblem of the middle class. Almost always from open-collared shirts in dark colors that show the dirt less.

And the place where their gruesome death caught up with them, that now seems to color their entire lives. One was found on December 2, 1921, in the Potsdam Station toilets. On June 25, 1920, this woman, age unknown, was pulled ashore on the Reichstagsufer of the Spree. On January 25, 1918, that bearded, toothless head died on Alexanderplatz. On May 8, 1922, this young man with a rapt expression died, on a bench on Arminiusplatz. He must owe his peaceful countenance to that wonderful May night on Arminiusplatz. Probably a nightingale was singing when he died, the lilac was fragrant, and the stars were shining.

On October 26, 1921, a man, aged about thirty-five, was beaten to death on a piece of waste ground, somewhere off Spandauer Strasse. A thin line of blood leads from the temple to the lip, thin and red. The man himself has long since been buried, and his blood has stopped, but here in the picture it will always flow. Futile to wait for cranes, like the legendary cranes that once revealed the identity of the murderer of Ibycus. No cranes swarm over the waste ground off Spandauer Strasse — they would long ago have been roasted and eaten. God, beyond the clouds, watches the conflagration of a world war quite unmoved. Why would he choose to get involved over one poor individual?

There are perhaps one hundred photographs in the display cases, and they are continually being replaced by others. Thousands of unknown people die in the city. Without parents, without friends, they lived lonely lives, and no one cared when they died. They were never part of the weave of a society or community — a city has room for many, many lonely people. If a hundred of them are murdered, thousands live on, without a name, without a roof, like pebbles on the beach, practically indistinguishable one from another, all one day to meet a violent end — and their death has no particular resonance and never makes the newspapers like that of some Talat Pasha.

Just one anonymous photograph making its mute appeal to indifferent passersby in the police station, vainly asking to be identified.

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, January 17, 1923