What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

20. The Man in the Barbershop (1921)

On Sunday morning there was a stifled, almost canned heat in the barbershop: a desiccated temperature.

Sunlight, split into golden bars by the blinds, bullioned its way into the room. Scissors clacked avidly, and a large fly was buzzing about.

(To date no poet has hymned summer in a barbershop in his iambs. That would be a task worthy of a Theodor Storm, or an Eduard Mörike.* Think of the mild scrape of whetting blade on tautened strop; the soft plashing of soapy water; the flushed cheeks of the apprentices, who — because the master and journeyman are too tired today — don’t get their usual smacks: a holiday from discipline!)

But people like to talk at the barber’s, even on hot days. And on that particular Sunday morning they were certainly talking a lot.

The man, however, who suddenly crashed into the summery torpor of the barbershop — ginger blond, bull-necked, pugnacious — he talked the most.

No sooner had he slung his hat on the hook, as hard as if he wanted to tear it out of the wall, than he was tapping a half-lathered customer on the shoulder, bringing the barber’s assistant up short.

What the ginger-haired gentleman talked about was Hamburg.

Entirely without preamble he was off on Hamburg, as though his narrative was nothing but the continuation of a conversation begun on the street.

“The farther north you go, the more nationalist people are. In Hamburg they’re really excited about Flag Day. Well, you’ll see. It’s on its way. Can’t be stopped. On, on!”

His sentences grow ever shorter, he rattles subjects together, his words puff out their chests and march: one-two, one-two. It’s a nightmare.

And if you — I think — were to go south, or west, or east, it would be just the same. Whichever way you went you’d see people getting more nationalistic. Because what you see is blood.

The ginger-haired gentleman has killed off the summery singsong atmosphere in the barbershop with his crashing sentences. His voice rattles along like a yellow weathervane.

“Will you be joining us, Herr Trischke? Eh! When the time comes? Sure you will! Who wouldn’t? And it will come! Mark my words!”

His words rattle, clatter, and bang. Batteries, mortars, rifles, running fire, all come spewing out of his larynx. World wars slumber in his bosom.

Herr Trischke, the barber, would surely have lost a leg — at least! — if he hadn’t successfully lathered up the chops of the gentlemen on the General Staff. If war comes he won’t go.

But Herr Trischke is silent. Who isn’t? Even the fly, buzzing in so summery a fashion a moment ago, now adheres lifelessly to the ceiling, awestruck.

No one speaks, just him, the man. He touched rock bottom, but he didn’t rest; he worked and worked and worked till he had made his way back. He’s at the top of the tree now.

One morning not long ago his business partner came up to him and asked him for a loan. And in the afternoon? In the afternoon he was talking to his partner’s young wife, and she was wearing a diamond ring!

“You won’t catch my wife wearing any diamond ring!”

“My wife doesn’t own three summer hats! My sons don’t hang around in bars!” And if they did, by God — he would knock some sense into them! No matter how old they were! He would knock some sense into them!

He is strict with himself in order to be violent with others. He runs that he may whip others. He fries that others may broil. He wants war so that others may die. He gives up half his hard-earned fortune that others may work.

Oh, he’s not a victim of society, he’s its beneficiary. Socially and morally he is effective. He does the work of a hundred idle people. He’s the go-getting character out of the civics textbook. He puts nothing off till the morrow. His life is a hive of activity, chimney soot, drain smells, sander’s hum.

No motor rattle, no belt drive, no clatter of horses’ hooves. He is the trench digger, the wire cutter, the whetstone, the insect powder, the coffee machine, the guaranteed-infallible lighter, the dry fuse. Only:

He’s my friend from way back. He’s the aunt who scoured me every Saturday with a stiff brush. He’s the Kratzbürste.*

My neighbor was a glazier. His wife was a scold. He’s my glazier’s whining wife.

Our living room had a clock in it that used to clear its throat before striking the hours. He is that harrumphing.

My schoolmate was at the head of the class, and he had an impeccably neat notebook: The man in the barbershop is the neat notebook of my school friend; my school master’s class log; simultaneous equations; a book of logarithms!

He is my headmaster’s address at assembly; the kiss of my old-maid aunt; dinner with my guardian; an afternoon in an orphanage; a game of dominoes with my deaf grandfather.

He is duty and decency, sour-smelling and clean.

He isn’t a knave: He’s a navvy.

One does run into people like that, in our part of the world, even in midsummer. It feels like encountering a schoolbook in the middle of a suitcase packed for the beach.

And one lives with the idea of summery lassitude and inactivity in the world — green, quiet, almost extinct, the fly buzz, the silent moth flutter, sunshine (broken into bars), the gentle rasping sounds of a razor being stropped, the sleepy blades of the scissors, the soft plashing of soapy water, the tired sleepy chatter of the customers: morning at the barber’s, a fit subject for a Storm or a Mörike.

But if he weren’t alive, the man, this world would end — this world of whetstones, aunts, logarithm books, pecks on the cheek, knitting needles, school trips.

And of course the world mustn’t end!. .

Berliner Börsen-Courier, July 31, 1921

21. Richard Without a Kingdom (1923)

Richard the Red looks like a king in exile. All he needs is a Shakespeare to build a tragedy around him. He mooches and mopes around: the stuff of drama lacking a dramatist. He sits in other cafés and — oh woe! — is reduced to asking for a newspaper. Richard, formerly the absolute ruler over all printed words, domestic and foreign, turning to other newspaper waiters* for a paper. He, who so to speak enjoyed droit de seigneur, the right to deflower the newest editions, now receiving newspapers secondhand!. .

What?! Do you claim the world no longer knows who Richard is? Richard, the newspaper waiter in the Café des Westens? Richard, who wore his hunchback as a physical sign of intellectual distinction; the crookback as emblem of wisdom and romanticism. His physical defect had the effect of leveling class distinctions, and raised the waiter at least into the ranks of the straight-backed newspaper writers. In the Romanisches Café,* the adopted home of Berlin’s bohemians, there is a well-grown gazette waiter. He has all the papers, the Wiener Journal, the Prager Tagblatt, even the La Plata newspaper. But he doesn’t have a hunchback! My gaze slithers down his boring vertiginous back and finds nothing to catch on to. His collection is somehow incomplete. His existence as a literature bearer is not justified in every regard.

Red Richard. (sketch by Walter Trier)

Now, Red Richard was different! He had red hair. He was a special creation of the Almighty’s literary advisers, and selected as newspaper waiter by the PR boss in heaven. He has seen generations of writers come and go. Seen them wind up in prison or on ministerial chairs. Become revolutionaries and private secretaries. And all of them left owing him money. He knew what the future held for them, he knew the style of their writing, knew where their pieces had been reprinted, and kept them posted. Even as he told them, he handed them the paper — it was like getting the news still in its shell. And, if they were obscure or struggling — he helped them. In the glass-fronted cabinet at the Café des Westens hung, like syntheses in an experimental laboratory, the products of obscure living persons: a portrait, a poster for some reading or signing, copies of a new magazine that Richard hawked around among the clientele. Richard, in fact, was a patron of the arts.

In the afternoon, if things were quiet, Richard worked on his memoirs. Those memoirs were never completed. It would appear that Richard, who always had good taste, finally disdained to write his memoirs, after so many others had fatuously written theirs: It was not for him to be mentioned in the same breath as Ludendorff or Wilhelm.

Admittedly Richard did have one thing in common with all the memoirists of the postwar period: He too was never in the war, in the trenches. First they sieved out the tubercular ones — the hunchbacks’ turn was still to come. But if one happened to ask Richard with a show of surprise why his number hadn’t yet come up, he bent down over the table and breathed his secret: “You know — just between you and me — I’ve got—flat feet.. .”

I still remember the painful night when the old Café des Westens closed its doors forever and Richard went around collecting our signatures. That sampling of immortality for his autograph book was the last service he was able to perform for literature. Then Richard vanished, and it took a while before he surfaced in the Romanisches Café. Imagine the pain he felt, returning home as a visitor and an outsider, calling for newspapers instead of distributing them?!. .

For a while a rumor did the rounds that Richard was going to open a new Café des Westens. Nothing would have been more natural. His physical condition, his training, his outlook — all qualified him as an ideal host for modern literature. But nothing happened; Richard did not open another establishment. Half a year later he was forgotten. Not only because people still owed him money; he was forgotten for historical reasons, like a writer who has outlived himself. Richard once had a part in a movie that dealt with the literary milieu of the West End of Berlin. Who knows where that film is playing now? Not once but twice Richard’s portrait was hung, painted by renowned artists — one of them was König — in the Sezession. Art treated him as a patron merits. Today the portraits are hanging in some chilly drawing room somewhere, where no one has any idea of Richard’s character. . And a new generation of writers is growing up, without Richard to stand over their cradles. To think that they will never know Red Richard!

One day he showed me a box of butterflies. They were wonderful butterflies and moths, velvety, particolored, red ones and red-and-black and black-and-yellow ones. Someone had invented a process that kept the delicate covering of dead butterflies intact. Richard bought the — as it were — embalmed butterflies to make brooches out of. There are women who will wear insects on their bosoms, I thought. Richard is saved.

A couple of months later, I saw that Richard had a postcard from Leopold Wölfling, the well-known Habsburg archduke. “Dear Richard,” the card began. It was the parallel between their historical circumstances that had brought them together. Richard the Red, ex-king, and Leopold Wölfling, ex-prince, were friends. Leopold Wolfling wanted to open a butterfly exhibition in Vienna. But the ladies didn’t want butterflies. Brooches are worn on exposed and strategic places — and the lacquered butterfly wings were not robust enough to be certain of withstanding an energetic male attack! Now, if Richard had come up with something revealing, say an original form of décolletage, that would have been another matter! But he had offered a barrier instead. The times are not that interested in barriers.

The business did badly, and now Richard is doing badly. But his personal destiny, which in spite of everything seems to put news on his path, chose him of all people to discover Rathenau’s murder. Richard happened to be walking along Königsallee, ten minutes after the assassination. He knew just what to do. Richard called the newspapers. If it hadn’t been for him, the extra editions could have been delayed by — why, an hour or by even more!

That was the last time Richard made contact with history. Every evening he sits at a little café on the Kurfürstendamm and reads the papers — papers that have passed through others’ hands. He is said to own some shares on the stock market. Maybe he is able to live on them. His soul wanders the hunting grounds of the past. Whenever I see him I feel as melancholy as if I had just been looking at an old newspaper, or reading old articles of mine.

That’s how dear Richard is to me. .

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, January 9, 1923

22. The Word at Schwannecke’s (1928)

“At Schwannecke’s”

Although the noise of the chattering clientele is much more significant than the topics of their chatter, it does finally constitute that type of social and indistinct expression that we refer to as rhubarb. The very particular volume in which people tell each other their news seems to generate all by itself that acoustic chiaroscuro, a sounding murk, in which every communication seems to lose its edges, truth projects the shadow of a lie, and a statement seems to resemble its opposite. And, just as it is difficult to see an object clearly by the light of a harsh but flickering flame, so it is difficult for the man straining his ears to evaluate what he has just heard, particularly — as is most often the case — when it is told him in confidence.

The watering hole for Berlin artists and literary figures — where one can be sure to find at midnight all those who only hours before had sworn that they would never go there again, yes, that they hadn’t set foot there for years — houses a class of established bohemian whose creditworthiness is beyond question. None of the clientele really needs to go to bed any later than his bourgeois instincts would tell him to. And each of them, at the end of every evening, promises himself not to go there tomorrow. But the fear that his friends, who are waiting to have a nice talk with him, would say nasty things about him behind his back, prompts him bravely to show his face when it might actually be more courageous to stay away. He comes so as not to disturb the harmony — formed of fear and distrust — of the nooks and corners, and to protect himself and his table mates from the calumnies that are waiting on the lips of those at the next table. If someone had the ability to sit at every table at once, he would hear nothing but good about himself, and yet even such contortions would pale in comparison to those of the others. Still, many approach the very cusp of the miraculous by table-hopping very quickly to keep tabs on what is being said. But even so they fail to match the speed with which those who remain seated change the subject — and, on occasion, their minds as well.

Admittedly there are also some seated customers of such seniority that their rank just about permits them to stand when required, but no longer to visit other tables. Even they are not proof against the fear that somebody somewhere might be saying bad things about them. But they bear the burden of being unpopular as proof of their importance — and these eminences turn the suspicion that less elevated customers are careful to disguise as courtesy into naked contempt and disdain. All the people one doesn’t need right now are — for the person who will need them in a year’s time — no more than air* which he breathes but doesn’t need to see. Softly, softly! Before long they will have roused themselves from their transparent anonymity into that pseudonymous corporality without which it would be impossible to occupy a seat behind an office desk. Those who even today ask for nothing better than to be shadows of bodies will one day cast shadows of their own, shadows of patronage over new, anonymous, transparent airy shades. It will fall to them to dole out the movie-reviewing assignments, which today fall into their laps once or twice a year like manna from heaven. They themselves will be participants at conferences they are today sent out to cover, and they will attend premieres sitting next to critics, critics themselves, but representatives of some “new direction,” with a new terminology, which will help save them from making judgments and ensure that they stick to prejudices. Therefore it is advisable for cautious spirits not to overlook anyone here, to take in even the least of those present with a certain respect, and to greet the shades in such a way as to suggest that they had the power of speech and were capable of replying. In the long years I have observed the German literary business, I have seen zeroes attach themselves to real numbers, and amount to totals that need to be reckoned with. Yes, a few of the company at Schwannecke’s who seemed merely to serve the negligible function of being ornamental vertical lines have become strokes that put paid to the innocent plans of others.* And some illiterates whom one might come upon in the anterooms of editors, trying to spell their way through newspaper headlines, are now all at once reviewing books themselves.

Enmities among the clientele at Schwannecke’s can also take surprising turns, and it would take a naive person indeed to put his trust in one, and hope to use it, say, for his own advantage. Even after an unmistakable declaration of a so-called ink feud — which, along with the ink vendetta, is about the most dangerous custom among the Schwannecke tribes — no one can predict how quickly a feuilleton writer is capable of ending a long-standing campaign against an author that has gone on for days if not weeks. Quite suddenly there is a long and admiring review, without anyone being able to give the how, why, and wherefore. Sources close to both parties have been known to claim that a shared interest in a new type of sports car has brought about a “speedy” reconciliation between the two foes. Because for some time now the mania for speed, with which the construction, destruction, and reconstruction on the Kurfürstendamm and elsewhere has been taking place, seems to have taken hold on the priests of the intellect and their acolytes, and every one of them seems to be capable of forgetting their principles over a fifty-mile-an-hour joyride. The experience of measured speed tearing down the road seems to eclipse for them the sensation of that unmeasured speed with which they forget a commitment. And since, in our contemporary literature, a monocle is a fair stand-in for an eye, it is no longer possible to distinguish sympathy or the lack of it, even in the way ostensible foes regard each other. For which reason I have long made a point of reading personal attacks and diatribes in our literary pages as if they were merely a particular, inverted form of overture.

I have reason too to be irked by the design of Schwannecke’s: the long, narrow interior, with square niches stitched along both sides, so that various groups of clients are kept separate from one another, as if they didn’t all belong together. I am annoyed by the narrowness of the room, and by the fact that it can’t hold everyone who ought to be there. It is one of my favorite fantasies, when I find myself sitting in one of the niches in the early morning, which, here, is an extension of the night. I imagine a colossal, panoptical Schwannecke’s with a domed roof, big enough to house all the writers and all the critics, the film producers and their reviewers, the stage and its scribblers, even encompassing the studios and ateliers of individuals who profess the snobbism of a solitude that is not theirs by nature, collapsed and broken-up studies, where only the hammering of a typewriter punctuates the empty thrumming of ideas. I see before me an infinite, as it were hyperreal Schwannecke’s, a pantheon of the living — if not live — artistic scene, with room in it too for the garages of the bold poets of speed, and a racetrack for the bards of now, and even a landing strip for the tabloid Homers of aviation.*

Frankfurter Zeitung, June 2, 1928

23. The Kurfürstendamm (1929)

In the evening I walk along the Kurfürstendamm. I slink along the walls like a dog. I am on my own, but I have a certain sense that my destiny has me on a leash. From time to time I have to step aside to avoid a fence that has a garden behind it. I am not allowed to set foot there. I envy the streetcars, which are allowed to glide coolly and briskly over the strips of lawn that have been laid in the middle of the thoroughfare. They have been laid expressly for them, as if they were wild animals brought to Berlin from their lush green homes and, like the animals in the Zoologischer Garten, had to be offered a pathetic suggestion of their habitat. Sometimes, instead of a little patch of lawn behind the fence, there’s a little gravel patch. Framed by bricks, in a sort of flat distinction, it contains myriad little stones, the sight of which makes one grate one’s teeth. I should like to know who the inventor of this stone flora was, and whether the gravel is sprinkled daily so that it doesn’t wither and die. Strips of asphalt run parallel to the streetcar lines and lawns, and down these omnibuses and cars clatter, causing traffic jams. Often they enlist the help of traffic lights, which alternate automatically among red, yellow, and green without any visible cause. They are suspended from wires in the air wherever there is a crossroads — eyes that shine but are sightless. When they are angry they turn red, and when their temper tantrum is over, they turn green once more. When they are red the traffic must stop. Sometimes the traffic lights succeed in turning red just at the right moment, which is to say just as a couple of trucks are coming out of the side street. Mostly though, they lose their temper each time a bicyclist seeks to come out of the side street, or a man pushing a handcart. Even the policemen, who are of course still the representatives of the law, are powerless against the traffic lights on high, the true eyes of the law, compared with which the eyes of the police are just a likeness.

Sometimes the rows of dwellings are interrupted by cafés, cinemas, and theaters. It is to these, really, that the Kurfürstendamm owes its significance as a traffic artery. God knows what it would be without them! That’s why they bend all their efforts to add to its greatness. Having heard of its claims to international importance, they try to be international. A restaurant is a little piece of America, a café of France. Of course it looks nothing like New York or Paris, but it awakens a little echo of this or that. In their modesty the places think of themselves as successful copies, but in fact what they are is botched originals. In the American restaurant the menu is in English. I should say that German is the first language of most of the diners, but perhaps their language changes according to their mood and whereabouts.

They don’t mind, they can understand a little English. In the French café, they sit out on the terrace, feeling chilly but ever so Parisian. In fact, all the more Parisian for being in Berlin. Evidently because of some police bylaw, the terraces have to be fenced in and set back from the street. Of course this separation distinguishes them from Parisian terraces. But then it is resemblances that are at issue, and not differences. On some terraces a violet light shines, reminiscent of an undertaker’s salon. Even so, people are laughing in this light. The collisions between people leaving the terraces, and others entering them, defines the life and the movement of the pedestrians. When they want to cross the street, they go to one of the crossings. If they’re in luck, the traffic light will be green, and they will get to the other side, unimpeded, where more café terraces await them.

Trees are planted on the edge of the sidewalk, and newspaper sellers in front of the railings. The news is alarming. The newspapers move faster than the times, not even the cult of speed, for which they are partly responsible, can keep up with them. The afternoon runs panting for the late-evening edition, and the evening chases the first edition of the morning papers. Midnight eyes the threat of the following afternoon, and crosses all its fingers and toes for a printers’ strike, which would allow it to behave like midnight for once.

And so the Kurfürstendamm stretches out endlessly day and night. Also, it’s being renovated. These two facts need to be emphasized, because of the way it’s continually ceding particles of its true self to its designated cultural-historical role. Even though it never stops being “a major traffic artery,” it still feels as though it weren’t a means to an end but, in all its length, an end in itself. But for the fact that another street takes up where it leaves off, it could have gone on even longer. But even so, its dimensions are appalling enough. Its terrible gift for self-renewal — for “renovating” itself — flies in the face of all natural laws. For a long time I’ve tried to guess its secret, the quality that enables it to remain itself through all the sudden changes in its physiognomy — yes, to become still more Kurfürstendamm. It is immutable in its mutability. Its impatience is heroic. Its inconsistency is insistent. A whimsical piece of whimsy on the part of Creation, you might say, if you could be sure it was intended.

But unfortunately it seems more likely that it wasn’t. .

Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, September 29, 1929