What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

11. The Resurrection (1923)

A Half Century in Prison

The Berlin old people’s home is situated on the main street in Rummelsburg, where the first glimmering green of the world beyond factories just begins to show. As the name suggests, old people live there. They have set down their pasts like heavy burdens that they have successfully dragged to their final destinations. There’s not far to go now, from the old people’s home to the grave.

A good many of these old people are actually going back into care. They were institutionalized as juvenile delinquents, then were released out into the world, were picked up and sent back to where they had started. On fine evenings the oldsters sit on benches in the big park, and tell each other about different worlds, about Mexico, or Spain, or the various Capes of Good Hope that they made for in their lives, on whose rocks they beached. The old people’s home is destiny. A man can have wandered many thousands of miles in his life, but in the end he will wind up in Rummelsburg. It lies at the end of every adventurous life. You can’t escape the Rummelsburg your destiny holds for you.

There is one man living in the old people’s home in Rummelsburg, who can look back on a fifty-year death. What for others is the end, to him is the beginning. This old people’s home is, so to speak, his kindergarten. At the end of fifty years this man of seventy is facing a new world.

The man’s name is Georg B., and he was sentenced to life imprisonment fifty-one years ago for being an accessory to robbery and murder. Recently the authorities were in a good mood, and he was released and allowed to go to Rummelsburg. And, at the end of fifty-one years, he found himself back, for the first time, in the great city of Berlin.

This account of a resurrection is only possible because the extraordinary rarity of such a “case,” while not compensating for the man’s past as a violent criminal, at any rate pushes it into the background. He has been sufficiently punished for his crime, and the interesting part of his story would not have been possible without crime and without punishment.

Georg B. remembers Berlin the way it was fifty years ago. If, in the course of his long life behind bars, he thought of the city at all, then he saw before him a city with horse-drawn traffic in its streets, a city that ended at Potsdamer Platz, and the clatter of a cart would have struck him as a metropolitan noise indeed. For fifty years B. carried the picture of such a city in his head. If at times he ventured to imagine progress, if he happened to read in the pages of some newspaper that had been picked up and dropped in his remote fastness, about technical innovations, then his imagination might conjure up maybe a four- instead of a three-story house, and his eye might envision, perhaps, without the incremental aid of reality, a vehicle that was capable of moving by itself. A vehicle whose speed would correspond, perhaps, with that of a carriage drawn by four, or at the most, six, horses. For what else did his understanding have to guide him than the scale of what he knew? A dray horse represented speed to him — and he had never seen a human move more nimbly than a hare, a deer, a gazelle.

Then, all at once, B. climbed out of the S-bahn, and stood in the middle of the twentieth century. Was it the twentieth? Not the fortieth? It had to be at least the fortieth. With the speed of arrows shot from a bow, like human projectiles, young fellows with newspapers darted here and there on flying bicycles made of shiny steel! Black and brown, imposing and tiny little vehicles slipped noiselessly down the street. A man sat in the middle and turned a wheel, as if he were the captain of a ship. And sounds — threatening, deep and shrill, plaintive and warning, squeaking, angry, hoarse, hate-filled sounds — emanated from the throats of these vehicles. What were they shouting? What were these voices? What were they telling the pedestrians? Everyone seemed to understand, everyone except B. The world had a completely new language, a means of communication as universal as German — and yet it was composed of anguished, shattering primal sounds, as from the first days of mankind, from the deceased jungles of the Tertiary period. One man stopped, and another sprinted, arms across his chest, cradling his life, right across the Damm. Potsdamer Platz was no longer the end, but Mitte.* A wailing hoot from a policeman’s cornet gave the orders for quick march and attention, a whole assembly of trams, cars crushing one another’s rib cages, a flickering of colors, a noisy, parping, surging color, red and yellow and violet yells.

And then a network of wires overhead, a slashed and cross-hatched sky, as though some engineer had scrawled his deranged circuits across the ether. If you pressed your ear against a pole, you could hear strange noises within, ghostly voices, as if whole African tribes were howling in blood lust or worship, and you could hear them here in Berlin.

Georg B. bought himself a subway ticket and stood in bewilderment on the platform, allowed himself to be pushed onto a train, and then he thought the underworld had gone crazy too. Could the dead still sleep undisturbed? Were their bones not being rattled in their graves? Did the roar of a train not infect their silence? And what kept the upper world from collapse? How could the road fail to shatter every time a train passed below, throwing thousands of people, cars, horses, wires, and everything else to perdition?

Georg B., the seventy-year-old, wanders around like a youngster. He wants to work. Energy bottled up inside him for half a century seeks to express itself. Who would believe him? In his bewilderment he’s not allowed to stop and draw breath. Is he dying? Is he facing his own end? The experience of this century mocks human laws. Experience was stronger than death. The conquest of the city is followed by the conquest of work. Man, surrounded by machines, is compelled to become a machine himself. His galvanized seventy years are fidgeting, banging, shaking. B. must work.

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, February 24, 1923

12. The Ride Past the Houses (1922)

The S-Bahn line goes right past the houses, affording its passengers many curious and interesting sights — especially in springtime, when walls are prone to indiscretion, when casements reveal the idylls behind, and courtyards betray their secrets.

Sometimes a ride on the S-Bahn is more instructive than a voyage to distant lands. Experienced travelers will confirm that it is sufficient to see a single lilac shrub in a dusty city courtyard to understand the deep sadness of all the hidden lilac trees anywhere in the world.

Which is why I return from a ride on the S-Bahn full of many sad and beautiful impressions, and when I navigate a little bit of the city, I feel as proud as if I had circumnavigated the globe. If I imagine the courtyards a little more gloomy, their lilac trees a little scrawnier, and the walls a couple of yards higher and the children a shade or two paler — then it’s as though I’d been to New York, having sampled the bitterness of the metropolis, because most major discoveries can be made very locally, either at home or a few streets away. Phenomena and atmospheres and experiences differ not in their essence, but in secondary qualities like scale.

Electric S-Bahn train and steam train together.

A wall has a physiognomy and a character of its own, even if it doesn’t contain a window or anything else that reinforces its connection to life, beyond a billboard for, say, a brand of chocolate, placed so that its sudden flash on our retina (yellow and blue) will make an indelible impression on our memory.

Behind the wall, meanwhile, people will be getting on with their lives, little girls will be doing their homework, a grandmother will be knitting, a dog gnawing its bone. The pulse of life will beat through the cracks and pores of the silent wall, break through the tin simulacrum of the Sarotti chocolate, beat against the windows of the train, so that their clatter acquires a vital, human sound and makes us hearken at the proximity of a related life so close at hand.

It’s a curious thing, how much the people who live in houses bordering the S-Bahn resemble one another. It’s as though there were a single extended family of them, living along the S-Bahn lines and overlooking the viaducts.

I have come to know one or two apartments near certain stations really quite well. It’s as if I’d often been to visit there, and I have a feeling I know how the people who live there talk and move. They all have a certain amount of noise in their souls from the constant din of passing trains, and they’re quite incurious, because they’ve gotten used to the fact that every minute countless other lives will glide by them, leaving no trace.

There is always an invisible, impenetrable strangeness between them and the world alongside. They are no longer even aware of the fact that their days and their doings, their nights and their dreams, are all filled with noise. The sounds seem to have come to rest on the bottom of their consciousness, and without them no impression, no experience the people might have, feels complete.

There is one particular balcony with iron bars, like a cage hung in front of the house, and in one particular place on it, all through the spring and summer, hangs a red cushion, rain or shine, like an implacable fleck of oil paint. There is a courtyard that is quite crisscrossed with clotheslines, as if some monstrous antediluvian spider had spun its stout web there from wall to wall. A dark blue pinafore with big white dobs of eyes always billows in the breeze there.

Over the course of my rides, I’ve also come to know a little blond girl. She sits by an open window, pouring sand from little toy dishes into a red clay flowerpot. She must have filled five hundred of those flowerpots by now. I know an old gentleman who spends all his time reading. The old man must have read his way through all the libraries of the world by now. A boy listens to a big phonograph on the table before him, its great funnel shimmering. I catch a brassy scrap of tune and take it with me on my journey. Torn away from the body of the melody, it plays on in my ear, a meaningless fragment of a fragment, absurdly, peremptorily identified in my memory with the sight of the boy listening.

There are only a few who have nothing to do, and just sit at their windows and watch the trains go by. That tells you how boring life would be without work. Therefore every one of us has a purpose, and even animals have their use. There is no lilac tree in a backyard that doesn’t support drying laundry. That’s the sadness of those backyards: How rare it is for a tree to do nothing but bloom, to have no function but to wait for rain and sunshine, to receive them both and enjoy them, and put forth blue and white blossoms.

Berliner Börsen-Courier, April 23, 1922

13. Passengers with Heavy Loads(1923)

Passengers with heavy loads take their place in the very last cars of our endless trains, alongside “Passengers with Dogs” and “War Invalids.” The last car is the one that rattles around the most; its doors close badly, and its windows are not sealed, and are sometimes broken and stuffed with brown paper.

It’s not chance but destiny that makes a person into a passenger with heavy baggage. War invalids were made by exploding shells, whose destructive effect was not calculation but such infinite randomness that it was bound to be destructive. To take a dog with us or not is an expression of personal freedom. But being a passenger with heavy baggage is a full-time occupation. Even without a load, he would still be a passenger with heavy baggage. He belongs to a particular type of human being — and the sign on the car window is less a piece of railway terminology than a philosophical definition.

Baggage cars are filled with a kind of dense atmosphere you could cut maybe with a saw, a freak of nature, a kind of gas in a state of aggregation. The smell is of cold pipe tobacco, damp wood, the cadavers of leaves, and the humus of autumn forests. What causes the smell are the bundles of wood belonging to the occupants, who have come straight from the forests, having escaped the shotguns of enthusiastic huntsmen, with the damp chill of the earth in their bones and on their boot soles. They are encrusted with green moss, as if they were pieces of old masonry. Their hands are cracked, their old fingers gouty and deformed, resembling peculiar gnarled roots. A few leaves have caught in the thin hair of an old woman — a funeral wreath of the cheapest kind. Swallows could make nests for themselves in the tangled beards of the old men. .

Travelers on the S-Bahn.

Passengers with heavy loads don’t set down their forests when they themselves sit down. Having to pick up one’s load again after a half hour in which one’s spine has felt free for all eternity seems to weigh heavier than an entire pine forest. I know that with us soldiers, when a few minutes’ rest beckoned after hours of marching, we didn’t undo our packs but continued to drag them with us like a horribly loyal misfortune,* or a foe to whom we were bound in an eternal alliance. That’s how these old bundle carriers sit, not so much passengers with heavy loads, as heavy loads with passengers. And that also goes to demonstrate the fatefulness of carrying loads, that it’s a condition rather than an activity. And what do the forest people talk about? They speak in half sentences and stunted sounds. They keep silent not from wisdom but from poverty. They reply hesitantly, because their brains work slowly, forming thoughts only gradually, and then burying them in silent depths no sooner than they are born. In the forests where their work is, there is a vast silence unbroken by idle chatter; there the only sound is that of a woodpecker attacking a branch. In the forests they have learned that words are useless, and only good for fools to waste their time on.

But in the scraps these people do say is expressed the sorrow of an entire world. They have only to say “butter,” and right away you understand that butter is something very remote and inaccessible, not something you spread with a knife on a piece of bread, but a gift from heaven, where the good things of this world pile up as inaccessibly as in a shop window. They say: “Summer’s early this year”—and that means that they’ll be going out into the forests looking for snowdrops, that the children will be allowed out of bed to play in the street, and that their stoves can be left unheated till the autumn.

Actors, who relate their woes in many clever sentences and with much waving of hands and rolling of eyes — they should be made to ride in the cars for passengers with heavy loads, to learn that a slightly bent hand can hold in it the misery of all time, and that the quiver of an eyelid can be more moving than a whole evening full of crocodile tears. Perhaps they shouldn’t be trained in drama schools but sent to work in the forests, to understand that their work is not speech but silence, not expression but tacit expression.

Evening comes, an overhead light goes on. Its illumination is oily and greasy; it burns in a haze like a star in a sea of fog. We ride past lit-up advertisements, past a world without burdens, where commercial hymns to laundry soap, cigars, shoe polish, and bootlaces suddenly shine forth against the darkened sky. It’s the time of day when the world goes to the theater, to experience human destinies on expensive stages, and riding in this train are the most sublime tragedies and tragic farces, the passengers with heavy loads.

Of all the labels and bits of jargon, the verbose or laconic edicts that regulate the bustle of a city, providing information and instructions, offering advice, and constituting law — of all the impersonal formulations in stations, waiting rooms, and the centers of life — this one is humane, artistic, epigrammatic, concealing and revealing its huge content.

The honest man who came up with “Passengers with Heavy Loads” for practical purposes can’t have known that at the same time he found a title for a great drama.

This is how poetry is made.

Berliner Börsen-Courier, March 4, 1923

14. Some Reflections on Traffic (1924)

For the past several months, the question of traffic control has been painfully acute in Berlin. Important stretches of major roads are blocked off to traffic of all kinds. Potsdamer Platz looks like a suppurating wound.* And day after day, night after night, workmen scrabble around. It is now two weeks since the traffic control tower was put up. One had an expectation, perhaps, of something soaring and magnificent. But one day there stood a little gray metal stump of a tower, with large, and at that stage, still-closed round eyes on its top edge. Those eyes, sending out colored beams, were meant to regulate the traffic automatically. But instead the traffic regulator remains the blond, chunky policeman on his wooden platform. In the newspapers there are reports almost every other day of streetcar collisions. (With the compensation sums that are paid out every year to the victims of accidents in Berlin, one could set up a traffic system truly worthy of a great city.) Experts were paid to go out into the world to make studies of traffic systems in great cities. When they got home, they produced a new traffic plan in which a proliferation of confused paragraphs collided like so many streetcars. A few newspapers set up squeals in “Cicero bold”—as if it were they themselves that had been run over. With mighty majuscules* from the arsenal of typesetting, they crushed the new traffic plan. They ran responses from hackney-coach drivers, chauffeurs, bus drivers, and motorists; and if the traffic plan hadn’t been withdrawn, then they would have summoned fresh evidence from people who had little or nothing to do with it: from chimney sweeps, presumably, rat-catchers, hairdressers — why not? — they all would have been solicited for their unprofessional opinions. . It was a chance to prove all over again that they were not going to let up on those in power. It could have been a chance to offer more advice and less of a tongue-lashing. But good advice is as expensive as bad mockery is cheap. .

Roadwork in 1930.

I’m not offering my thoughts on traffic in Berlin with the clear conscience of an expert, convinced he has something helpful to say, but with the right of the lay person, who is a victim of the bad traffic and who even faces the prospect of eventually becoming something of an expert in it (given his protracted education in poor conditions and various experiments). By the time the streetcars of this city finally become completely unnegotiable, I’ll probably be able to drive one myself. Today I only know what I see and suffer. And that’s sufficient authority.

It seems to me that the use of streetcars is incompatible with the traffic levels of a metropolis. In an age of air travel they are the equivalent of post coaches. Generally the tracks they run on go down the middle of the street. If there happens to be another vehicle on the tracks, they’re stuck behind it. They block the pedestrian’s view so that he won’t see a vehicle coming toward him on the other side of the street. They stand motionless, as though rigid with fear, for minutes on end, making a wall with little cracks in it through which it would be possible to force one’s way, only one is wary of being swiped by a rapidly approaching car from the other side. This defect of the streetcars is so blatant that even the experts seem to be aware of it. Therefore they are thinking of abandoning the streetcars for omnibuses. But it’s a very long way from having an idea to putting it into practice — a way, as it were, to be covered by streetcar. And in the meantime cars are proliferating, and on December 1 the tax on them is being cut, so that motor cabs will become (comparatively) affordable, thereby adding a further complication to this already highly complicated situation.

Berlin has very few trained traffic policemen. There is no “traffic police” as such, only an administrative department that consists of a few specialist civil servants. Traffic duty is done by regular policemen, as it were, on secondment. And these good and eager fellows tend to wave their arms about with unnecessary, vague flourishes. They aren’t precise, and therefore produce confusion and misunderstanding. In the dark — a further source of trouble and grief — they are hard to make out. They are at constant risk of being run over themselves. Their gray-green uniforms merge into the gray night. They are generally sharp, “bright,” and independent-minded enough to use a little flexibility in the way they interpret the regulations. But they are also called upon to supply information and to bring irate drivers to their senses. And all the time ill-considered newspaper articles undermine the authority of the police, and any heavy-goods driver you ask will invariably claim to be in the right as opposed to the policeman, who can see more of a scene because he is standing right in the middle of it. He ought to be more economical with his movements and gestures. After dark a flashlight would be a useful thing, or, better yet, some proper street lighting. Even some populous and quite central parts of Berlin still look like the deepest and darkest of provinces after nightfall. The economizing of the city authorities must have cost quite a lot of people their lives.

Worst of all are the slow roadworks. I know of no other city where the streets are patched as glacially slowly as they are in Berlin. There are some corners where the paving stones are carefully lifted out every night and put back in the morning. Around midnight ten or twelve workmen start to lever out the paving stones and lay them by the side of the road. Then work begins on the underpinnings of the street, and on the streetcar tracks. Before the first tram comes through in the morning, the street has to be smooth again. It’s like replacing bandages every day after an operation. And there are too few men. Sometimes you see a sorry little bunch — three or four fellows — standing on a corner lifting stones either with some rudimentary equipment or even with their bare hands, pouring tar, eerily and garishly lit by bright darting flames, looking like bizarre seekers after treasure, lonely, mysterious, and contemplative.

These are a few of the more visible defects, and their causes. But there are other factors besides, which materialists would laugh to scorn, there are — I should like to whisper this, if only one could write in a whisper — there are: psst! metaphysical factors.

Much of the trouble and irritation in daily public life is the fault of the public, in other words the undisciplined character of the postwar generation, the bitterness that erupts out of people. I will be so bold as to offer this theory: that a bus full of rancorous, quarrelsome, and aggressive passengers is bound sooner or later to have a collision. The mood of the passengers communicates itself to the driver. Everyone is fed up. No one offers his seat to a woman. Everyone is at odds with everyone else. People send one another furious looks. This one is taken for a Jew, that one for a “Bolshie.” This lady’s fur is provocatively expensive. The woman sitting next to her is not only furious — which one could understand — she makes no secret of her fury. A mildly intoxicated bowling team boards the bus. They announce their political views at the tops of their voices, because that’s the most provocative way. If a woman is wearing a hat, they will stare her in the face. If she has a male escort, so much the better! At last a long-desired pretext for a quarrel or a fight. A catastrophe always seems just around the corner. You read the paper over the other man’s shoulder. You press him into the corner or against the side of the bus. You are your neighbor’s not keeper but policeman. If he stumbles, you shout at him to hold on to something. Everyone is an officious amateur conductor, and says: “Go to the back of the bus.” But because the other man is also an amateur conductor, he won’t do what you say.

Above all there’s a lack of personal discipline, manners, decorum, natural discretion. If everyone causes their own individual catastrophes, how can there fail to be more general catastrophes? After all, the passengers on a bus or streetcar make up a community of a kind. But they don’t see it that way, not even in a moment of danger. As they see it they are bound always to be the others’ enemy: for political, social, all sorts of reasons. Where so much hate has been bottled up, it is vented on inanimate things, and provokes the celebrated perversity of inanimate things. Sending experts into other countries won’t help much, so long as each individual refuses to work out his own personal traffic plan. There is a wisdom in the accident of language by which there is a single word, “traffic,” for movement in the streets, and for people’s dealings with one another.

On top of all the chronic traffic ailments of Berlin mentioned already, there is a new and acute one that threatens to eclipse them entirely. The subway is going on strike. The subway is Berlin’s most important traffic artery. The streetcar companies and the management of the bus companies have put out all their available vehicles. But they are not enough. The crush is extraordinary even when the weather is cool and dry. If we should get a wet November day, then there will be the long awaited gridlock. The Ministry of Labor is supposed to arbitrate in the conflict, but the employees of the Berlin subway have let it be known that they will not be bound by its decision. This seems to have provoked a catastrophic torpor in both the Ministry of Labor and the management. There is no movement, even though a strike by the Berlin subway is not just a private matter between employers and employees, but one that affects the welfare of the city, and even of the whole country.

Frankfurter Zeitung, November 15, 1924

15. Affirmation of the Triangular Railway Junction (1924)

I affirm the triangular railway junction. It is an emblem and a focus, a living organism and the fantastic product of a futuristic force.

It is a center. All the vital energies of its locus begin and end here, in the same way that the heart is both the point of departure and the destination of the blood as it flows through the body’s veins and arteries. It’s the heart of a world whose life is belt drive and clockwork, piston rhythm and siren scream. It is the heart of the world, which spins on its axis a thousand times faster than the alternation of day and night would have us believe; whose continuous and never-ending rotation looks like madness and is the product of mathematical calculation; whose dizzying velocity makes backward-looking sentimentalists fear the ruthless extermination of inner forces and healing balance but actually engenders life-creating warmth and the benediction of movement. In the triangles — polygons, rather — of tracks, the great, shining iron rails flow into one another, draw electricity and take on energy for their long journeys and into the world beyond: triangular tangles of veins, polygons, polyhedrons, made from the tracks of life: Affirm them with me!

They are stronger than the weakling who despises them and is afraid of them. They will not merely outlast him: They will crush him. Whoever is not shattered and daunted and uplifted by the sight of them does not deserve the death that the divine machine is preparing for him. Landscape — what is a landscape? Meadow, forest, blade of grass, and leaf of tree. “Iron landscape” might be an apt description for these playgrounds of machines. Iron landscape, magnificent temple of technology open to the air, to which the mile-high factory chimneys make their sacrifice of living, brooding, energizing smoke. Eternal worship of machines, in the wide arena of this landscape of iron and steel, whose end no human eye can see, in the horizon’s steely grip.

Such is the realm of the new life, whose laws are immune to chance and unaffected by mood, whose course is merciless regularity, in whose wheels the brain works, sober but not cold, and sense, implacable but not rigid. For only stasis produces coldness, whereas movement, raised by calculation to the limits of the possible, always creates warmth. The weakness of the living, forced to give in to exhausted tissue, is not proof of life — and the durability of iron, a material that isn’t subject to fatigue, is no proof of lifelessness. In fact it is the highest form of life, livingness struck from unyielding, equable, steady material. What holds sway in the arena of my triangular railroad junction is the decision of the logical brain, which, to be sure of success, has implanted itself in a body of unconditional certainty: in the body of a machine.

That’s why everything human in this metal arena is small and feeble and lost, reduced to an insignificant supporting role in the grand enterprise — just as it is in the abstract world of philosophy and astronomy, the world of clear and great verities. A man in uniform wanders about among bewildering systems of tracks, a tiny human, in this context functioning only as machine. His significance is no greater than that of a lever, his efficacy no farther reaching than that of a set of points. In this world every human form of expression counts for less than the mechanical indication of an instrument. A lever is more important than an arm, a signal than a gesture. Here it is not the eye that is useful but the colored light, not the shout but the wailing whistle from an opened steam vent, here it is not passion that is omnipotent but regulation and law.*

The little house of the guard, the human being, looks like a little toy box. It is all so tiny and inconsequential, whatever he does in it, whatever happens to him. Irrelevant that he has children and that they fall ill, that he digs potatoes and feeds his dog, that his wife scrubs the floors and hangs out the wash. Even the great tragedies within his soul are lost here, as if they were no more than minutiae of his existence. His “eternal human” attributes are — if anything — merely an irritating side effect to his professional functional ones.

Can little heartbeats still make themselves heard where a big booming one deafens a world? Look at the triangular railroad junction on a still night, its vale silvered by the light of ten thousand lamps — it is as exalted as the spangled night with stars: caught in it, as within the glass bell of the atmosphere, are yearning and satisfaction. It is beginning and stopping-off point, the introduction to a beautiful and audible future music. The rails slip and glimmer away — transcontinental hyphens. Their molecules carry the hammering sound waves of distant clattering wheels, switchmen spring up by the trackside, and signals blossom in their lovely luminous green. By the grace of a mathematical system that itself remains concealed, steam escapes, hissing, from opened vents, levers move of their own accord, the miraculous becomes real.

So vast are the dimensions of the new life. That the new art which is to shape it cannot find a form for it is perfectly understandable. The reality is too overwhelming to be adequately represented. A faithful “depiction” is not enough. One would have to feel the heightened and ideal reality of this world, the Platonic ideal of the triangular railroad junction. One would have to affirm its harshness with enthusiasm, see the operation of “Ananke”* in its deadly effects, and prefer destruction by its laws to happiness by the “humane” laws of the sentimental world.

The world to come will be like this triangular railroad junction, raised to some unknown power. The earth has lived through several evolutionary stages — but following always natural laws. It is presently experiencing a new one, which follows constructive, conscious, and no less elemental laws. Regret for the passing of the old forms is like the grief of some antediluvian creature for the disappearance of a prehistoric habitat.

Gray, dusty grasses will sprout shyly between the metal tracks. The “landscape” will acquire a mask of iron.

Frankfurter Zeitung, July 16, 1924