What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

16. Skyscrapers (1922)

For some weeks there has been a fascinating exhibition at the City Hall of designs for large buildings. We hear now that the construction of a skyscraper is to be brought forward. It will be Germany’s first.

“Skyscraper” is no technical term, but the popular word for those huge buildings you see in photographs of Manhattan streets. It’s a picturesque and rather romantic name. It’s the name for a building so tall that its roof, as it were, scratches the sky. There is in the word something of the assertive, revolutionary quality of the builders of Babel.

A skyscraper is the incarnate rebellion against the supposedly unattainable; against the mystery of altitude, against the otherworldliness of the cerulean.

The skyscraper stands at the summit of technical development. It has already overthrown the cold sobriety of “construction,” and has begun to approach the romance of nature. The cloud, that remote, wonderful puzzle of creation, God’s blessing and curse, two-handed mystery bringing life and destruction, prayed to and dreaded by our ancestors, is now to be made habitable, even cozy. We will make ourselves comfortable among the clouds. We will tell them of the absurdities and the serious things of this world. They will hear the clatter of typewriters and the ringing of telephones, the knocking of central heating, and the dripping of faucets.

It will be a sort of return of the evolved human to the primordial forces of nature. This is an important juncture, and it seems to me we have not paid sufficient attention to it. The building of the first skyscraper is a historical turning point.

WHENEVER I LOOK at pictures of New York, I am filled with awe at the omnipotence of human technology. In this next stage of its development, civilization will have the opportunity to draw nearer to the old notions of culture.

When the steam locomotive was first invented, the poets moaned about the defilement of nature; the imagination predicted terrifying dystopias: whole tracts of the world devoid of grass and trees, rivers dried up, plants withered, butterflies poisoned. They didn’t understand that every new development constitutes a mysterious circle, in which the beginning and end touch and become identical.

Because the invention of the airplane was not a declaration of war on winged creatures, quite the opposite: It was fraternization between man and eagle. The earliest miner did not barge his way sacrilegiously into the depths, he returned home to the womb of Mother Nature. What may have the appearance of a war against the elements is in fact union with the elements: man and nature becoming one. There is exhilaration in skyscrapers as much as on mountaintops.

The long-desired fulfillment of some of the profoundest wishes of Earth: to overcome shortage of space by elevation and conquest of vertical space. Exploitation of every dimension: exaltation, visible from outside, that also communicates itself to the spirit within.

It is impossible for the proximity of clouds to have no effect on human beings. The view out of the window, taking in the full boundlessness of the horizon, works on both heart and soul. The lungs take in the air of heaven. Clouds wander past the brows of mortal man as previously only around the brows of Olympians.

I can see the skyscraper: a slender, floating construction on its broad pediment, noble and delicate in its lines, whose white and gray sets itself apart from the blue sky. Strong and safe in its assembly, it matches a natural mountain for strength.

Ten thousand people daily flow in and out of it: little office girls, emerging from the tight courtyards of the north of the city, quick tick of heels, black leather handbags swinging, filling elevators, shooting upward like a swarm of swallows.

Men striding out, purpose in their eyes, enterprise in their loose limbs; machine rattle and clatter of conveyances; shouted order of command; the even beat of mechanical perplexity, working toward a common end.

And up above God is disturbed in his everlasting tranquillity, and compelled to take an interest in our tiny destinies.

OH — AND ALREADY you hear that the first skyscraper in Berlin is to contain a great entertainment palace, with cinemas, dance hall, bar, Negro bands, vaudeville, jazz.

Because human nature will not deny its weaknesses, even where it is seemingly in the process of overcoming them.

And if it were possible for us to build a “planet scraper” and to construct settlements on Mars, the expeditions of scientists and engineers would be accompanied by a delegation of bartenders.

I have a shining vision of a bar in the clouds. It’s raining champagne cocktails.

Berliner Börsen-Courier, March 12, 1922

17. Architecture (1929)

It happens from time to time that I fail to distinguish a cabaret from a crematorium, and pass certain scenes actually intended to be amusing, with the quiet shudder that the attributes of death still elicit. Such confusions would not have been possible in previous years. Ugliness, coarseness, and failure could always be brought into some relation to beauty, elegance, and good quality. A building that bore a fleeting, if distressing, resemblance to a classical temple was certain to be a theater for light opera. Something resembling a church was a main railway station. It was embarrassing, but somehow handy. You knew exactly how the deception operated, and never failed to recognize the fake when you saw the true. If you thought you saw marble, you knew you were in the presence of plasterboard. But ever since people have had the idea that modern times needed “modern styles,” all the old rules of thumb have stopped helping me. It’s as if all the gobbledygook I’ve learned with so much effort has suddenly been invalidated. It happens from time to time that in my hurry to catch a train I look for a cinema, thinking thereby to find the station. But my method no longer works. The building I took for the station turns out to be a “five o’clock tea” house in a sports palace. The facades of these modern times are unsettling me.

Redesigning facades on the Kurfürstendamm, 1927.

Still more confusing is interior design. I have learned that those hygienic white operating theaters are actually patisseries. But I continue to mistake those long glass tubes mounted on walls for thermometers. Of course, they are lamps, or as people more correctly say, “sources of illumination.” A glass tabletop isn’t really there to permit the diner to view his own boots in comfort during a meal, but to help a metal ashtray produce those marrow-piercing, grating sounds when slid across it. There is a class of objects that are wide, white, hard-wearing, deep, and hollow; have no feet; and look like chests. On these, it seems, people sit. Of course they aren’t anything as straightforward as chairs, but rather “seating accommodation.” Similar confusions are also possible with those living objects collectively referred to as “staff.” A girl in red pants and blue jacket with gold buttons, with a round fez on her head, whom — but for the fact that the treachery of these times has begun to dawn on me — I would certainly have taken for a man, but then was foolish enough to take for a sort of royal guard in a costume drama. In fact this girl is in charge of the cloakroom, and of the sales of cigarettes and of those long, slender unjointed silk dolls, who look like merry hanged corpses.

Domestic interior design is a fraught affair. It makes me hanker for the mild and soothing and tasteless red velvet interiors in which people lived so undiscriminatingly no more than twenty years ago. It was unhygienic, dark, cool, probably stuffed full of dangerous bacteria, and pleasant. The accumulation of small, useless, fragile, cheap, but tenderly bred knickknacks on sideboards and mantelpieces produced an agreeable contempt that made one feel at home right away. Countering all the tormenting demands of health, windows were kept closed, no noise came up from the street to interrupt the useless and sentimental family conversations. Soft carpets, harboring innumerable dangerous diseases, made life seem livable and even sickness bearable, and in the evenings the vulgar chandeliers spread a gentle, cheerful light that was like a form of happiness.

The lives of our fathers’ generation were lived in such poor taste. But their children and grandchildren live in strenuously bracing conditions. Not even nature itself affords as much light and air as some of the new dwellings. For a bedroom there is a glass-walled studio. They dine in gyms. Rooms you would have sworn were tennis courts serve them as libraries and music rooms. Water whooshes in thousands of pipes. They do Swedish exercises in vast aquariums. They relax after meals on white operating tables. And in the evening concealed fluorescent tubes light the room so evenly that it is no longer illuminated, it is a pool of luminosity.

Münchner Illustrierte Presse, October 27, 1929

18. The Very Large Department Store (1929)

Large department stores are nothing new in Berlin. But there seemed to be the odd person who bemoaned the lack of a very large department store. Some were not content with the existing four- or five- or six-story department stores, and they dreamed ambitiously of department stores that were to have ten or twelve, or even fifteen stories. It was not part of their plan to be nearer to God — which would have been a futile endeavor in any case — because, on the basis of everything we know, we don’t get any nearer to him by climbing up toward the clouds, but if anything perhaps the opposite: the nearer we are to the dust of which we are made. No! The people who dreamed of very large department stores were only out to lift themselves above the smaller department stores, just as with today’s runners, one of whom tries to outstrip the other not to reach his target the sooner, but merely to reach some arbitrary mark before the other does. The dreamers of department stores dreamed of a skyscraper. And so one day they built the very large department store, and everyone went along to look at it, and I went with them. .

The Karstadt department store on Hermannplatz with swastika flags flying (1939).

The old, the merely large, department stores are small by comparison, almost like corner shops, even though in its essence there is little to distinguish the very large department store from the merely big ones. It is simply that it has in it more merchandise, more elevators, more shoppers, flights of stairs, escalators, cash registers, salesmen and floorwalkers, uniforms, displays, and cardboard boxes and chests. Of course the merchandise appears to be cheaper. Because where there are so many things close together, they can hardly help not thinking of themselves as precious. In their own eyes they shrink, and they lower their prices, and they become humble, for humility in goods expresses itself as cheapness. And since there are also so many shoppers crowded together, the goods make less of a challenge or an appeal to them; and so they too become humble. If the very large department store looked to begin with like a work of hubris, it comes to seem merely an enormous container for human smallness and modesty: an enormous confession of earthly cheapness.

The escalator seems to me to typify this: It leads us up, by climbing on our behalf. Yes, it doesn’t even climb, it flies. Each step carries its shopper aloft, as though afraid he might change his mind. It takes us up to merchandise we might not have bothered to climb an ordinary flight of steps for. Ultimately it makes little difference whether the merchandise is carried down to the waiting shopper, or the shopper is borne up to the waiting merchandise.

The very large department store also has conventional stairs. But they are “newly waxed” and anyone going up them runs the risk of slipping and falling. I think they would like to have dispensed with them altogether, those old-fangled things, that in the context of elevators and escalators seem little better than ladders. To make them appear yet more dangerous, they are newly waxed. Almost unused, they do nothing but carry their own sheer steps aloft. Leftovers from the old days of ruined castles and merely large department stores — before the advent of the very large kind we have now.

The very large department store would perhaps have been built much higher still if it weren’t that people believed it required a roof terrace where the shoppers could eat, drink, look at the view, and listen to music — and all without getting too cold. This seems a rather arbitrary belief, as it doesn’t seem to be ingrained in human nature that, following the successful purchase of bed linen, kitchenware, and sports equipment, the shopper should feel the need to drink coffee, eat cake, and listen to music. But what do I know? Perhaps these requirements are built into the human character at some deep level. Anyway, it is to cater to them that the roof garden was built. In the daytime a lot of people do sit there, eating and drinking, and though it is not for me to assume that they do so without pleasure, it still looks to me as if they were merely sitting and drinking to justify the existence of the roof terrace. Yes, even such pleasure as they do evince may have nothing more than justificatory motives. If the people themselves, having been borne aloft by the escalators, were still, even in their diminished mobility, recognizable as shoppers, then, by the time they got to the roof, they had reached such a degree of passivity that utterly equated them to merchandise. And even though they pay, still it seems as though they were paid for. .

In complete torpor they are regaled with the sounds of an excellent orchestra. Their eyes take in distant steeples, gasholders, and horizons. Rare delicacies are offered in such profusion and with such insistence that their rarity is lost. And just as, within, the merchandise and the shoppers became modest, so too the delicacies on the roof become modest. Everything is within reach of anyone. Everyone may aspire to anything.

Therefore the very large department store should not be viewed as a sinful undertaking, as, for example, the Tower of Babel. It is, rather, proof of the inability of the human race of today to be extravagant. It even builds skyscrapers: and the consequence this time isn’t a great flood, but just a shop. .

Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, September 8, 1929

19. “Stone Berlin” (1930)

Berlin is a young and unhappy city-in-waiting. There is something fragmentary about its history. Its frequently interrupted, still more frequently diverted or averted development has been checked and advanced, and by unconscious mistakes as well as by bad intentions; the many obstacles in its path have, it would seem, helped it to grow. The wickedness, sheer cluelessness, and avarice of its rulers, builders, and protectors draw up the plans, muddle them up again, and confusedly put them into practice. The results — for this city has too many speedily changing aspects for it to be accurate to speak of a single result — are a distressing agglomeration of squares, streets, blocks of tenements, churches, and palaces. A tidy mess, an arbitrariness exactly to plan, a purposeful-seeming aimlessness. Never was so much order thrown at disorder, so much lavishness at parsimony, so much method at madness. If fate can have arbitrariness, then this city has become the nation’s capital through a whim of German fate. As if we wanted to prove to the world how much harder it is for us than it is for anyone else! As if there had been one contradictory detail — a capstone — lacking from the structure of our contradictory history! As if we had felt challenged to come up with an aimlessly sprawling stone emblem for the sorry aimlessness of our national existence! As if we had required one more proof that we are the most long-suffering of the peoples of the earth — or, to put it more malignly and medically: the most masochistic. The story of how absolutism and corruption, tyranny and speculation, the knout and shabby real estate dealings, cruelty and greed, the pretense of tough law-abidingness and blathering wheeler-dealing stood shoulder to shoulder, digging foundations and building streets, and of how ignorance, poor taste, disaster, bad intentions, and the occasional very rare happy accident have come together in building the capital of the German Reich is most fascinatingly told in Werner Hegemann’s book: Stone Berlin.

Here in Germany expert understanding tends to go hand in hand with barely comprehensible jargonizing. Expertise lacks style, knowledge stammers just as if it were ignorance, and objectivity has no opinions. Werner Hegemann is one of the rare exceptions (no less German for all that) in whom expert knowledge makes for passion, and passion feeds hunger for knowledge. Style sharpens his judgment, the facts plead for his opinion — if it needed a plea — truths underpin his convictions, and a winning edge of malice sharpens, points, and rounds the writing. This edge of malice produces something close to a vendetta when the subject turns to Frederick the Great, whose sobriquet the author has evidently vowed never to use without encasing it in quotation marks. He is Werner Hegemann’s special enemy. Not since Voltaire, it seems to me, has Frederick the Great had to suffer a wittier antagonist. Here is the embodiment of the vengeance of German literature on the Frenchified Prussian. The present writer lacks the historical knowledge to refute or uphold the author’s views. He is a “layman,” but the “reader” in him would affirm that the passages of the book he most enjoyed were where Hegemann’s stylistic adroitness fed on the weakness of his historical enemy, and where the sharpness of the writing is surely sufficient to make even Frederick’s fans admire Hegemann’s authorship.

It is, so far as I know, the first successful attempt to follow the stone traces of history in such a way that makes it possible to hear the soft and vanishing tread of the past. Reading it is like looking at someone’s testament and hearing it read in the testator’s voice. Anecdotes, seemingly merely tossed in, acquire symbolic weight through the way in which they are used and the context in which they appear. The author’s near-omniscience in the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and architecture is fused together by his overall historical perspective and his style, so that his “expertise” becomes unobtrusive, and no more than a natural element of his language. The private in the historical is raised to the level of the human, thanks to his fine passion for justice. Passion for justice: That seems to me particularly to characterize this book and its author. With the zeal of the true writer he pursues injustice throughout history, like God following sin through generations still unborn. The striking relevance of the book to today is also rooted in this quality. It is fortunate enough to appear at a time when the scars of the absolutist lash are healing over rapidly, but confusion shows no signs of lessening. The stupidity that is our inheritance and the ignorant snobbery that we have learned from our recent rulers dim and becloud our freedom. Now we have this capital city. Its interests are the same as ours. From its past, for which we are only partly responsible, we ought to learn how to shape its future, for which the whole of Germany is now taking responsibility. Stone Berlin (designed and illustrated, by the way, with great beauty and attention to detail) appears just as further damaging scandals are shaking the city and the nation, which seems as yet unaware that Berlin is its chosen representative. From the fact that it has found a historian of this stamp, we ought to acquire confidence that it has a future more wholesome and less warped than its past has been. A city that has had so much knowledge and passion devoted to it surely has a historical mission. It may indeed be young and unhappy, but we may hope it is a city for the future.

Das Tagebuch, July 5, 1930