1907
Market
A weekly market is something bright, lively, sumptuous, and gay. Through the broad streets that are usually so still stretch two long rows of stands, interrupted by gaps, where lies and hangs everything that households and families require for their daily needs. The sun that in these parts can usually lie about haughtily and idly is now compelled to leap and glint, to flail about, as it were, for every mobile thing here present, every object, every hat, apron, pot, sausage, absolutely everything wants to be given a sparkle. Sausages bathed in sunshine look so splendid. The meat shows off in all its glory, proud and purple, on the hooks from which it hangs. Vegetables are greening and laughing, oranges jesting in stunning golden profusion, fish swimming about in wide tubs of water. You stand like this, and then you take a step. You take … It’s not so terribly important whether the planned, ventured, and executed step is indeed an actual one. This joyful, simple life — how unpretentiously attractive it is, with what middle-class domesticity it laughs at you. And then the sky with its top-notch, first-rate blue. First-rate! One wouldn’t want to go so far as to employ the word “sweet.” Where poesy can be felt, poetic flights are superfluous. “Three urnges fur a grosch’n.” So tell me, mister, could it be you’ve uttered these words once before? What a selection of splendid, plump women! Coarse human figures make us think of the soil, of country weals and country woes, of God himself, who surely doesn’t have so exaggeratedly handsome a physique either. God is the opposite of Rodin. How enchanting this is: being permitted to take a bit of pleasure in something rustic, even only a grosch’n’s worth. Fresh eggs, country ham, country and city liverwurst! I have to admit: I do like standing and scallywagging about in the proximity of tempting comestibles. Again I am reminded of the most vivid ephemeralities, and what is alive is dearer to me than the immortal. Flowers here, crockery over there, and right beside it cheese: Swiss, Tilsiter, Dutch, Harzer, with the accompanying odors. If you gaze off now into the distance, hundreds of subjects for landscape paintings come into view; if you look down, you discern apple peels and nut shells, scraps of meat, bits of paper, half and whole international newspapers, a trouser button, a garter. If you look straight up, there’s a sky, and if you glance right in front of you, the face of an average person — though we don’t speak of average days and nights or an average nature. But isn’t the average actually what is solidest and best? I have no use for days or weeks of genius, or an extraordinary Lord God. What is mobile is always the most just. — And how prettily farmwives can look at you. With what odd, quiet gestures they turn this way and that. The market always leaves behind an inkling of country life in this city neighborhood, as if to shake it out of its monotonous pride. How lovely it is that all these wares are lying out in the fresh open air. Boys buy themselves warm sausages and have mustard spread up and down their entire juicy lengths so as to devour them skillfully on the spot. Eating seems so appropriate beneath this lofty blue sky. How enchanting these voluptuous bunches of cauliflower look to me. I shall compare them (somewhat reluctantly) to firm female breasts. The comparison is impertinent if it doesn’t work. So many women all around one. But the market, I see, is now coming to an end. Time to pack up shop. Fruit is raked into baskets. Kippers and sprats are stowed away, stalls dismantled. The throng has moved on. Soon the street will have recaptured its former appearance. Adieu, colors. Adieu, all you various things. Adieu, you sprinkling of sounds, scents, motions, footsteps, and lights. By the way, I’ve struck a bargain for a pound of walnuts. So now I can go trotting home to my apartment full of wee-wee and waa-waa, children’s cries. I like to eat just about everything, but when I eat nuts I’m truly happy.
1908
Aschinger
A lager please! The tap man’s known me for ages. I gaze at the filled glass a moment, take it by the handle with two fingers, and casually carry it to one of the round tables supplied with forks, knives, rolls, vinegar, and oil. I place the sweating glass in an orderly fashion upon the felt coaster and consider whether or not to fetch myself something to eat. This food-thought propels me to the blue-and-white-striped cold-cuts damsel. I have this lady serve me a plate of assorted open-face sandwiches and, thus enriched, trot rather indolently back to my seat. Neither fork nor knife do I use, just the mustard spoon, with which I paint my sandwiches brown before inserting them so cozily into my mouth that it is perhaps tranquillity itself to witness this. Another lager please! At Aschinger, you quickly adopt a familiar food-and-drink tone of voice; after a certain amount of time there, a person can’t help talking just like Wassmann at the Deutsches Theater. Once you have your fist around your second or third glass of beer, you’re generally driven to engage in all manner of observations. It is imperative to note with precision how the Berliners eat. They stand up as they do so, but take their own sweet time about it. It’s a myth that in Berlin people only bustle, whizz, and trot about. People here have a nearly comical understanding of how to let time flow by; after all, they’re only human. It’s a sincere pleasure to watch people fishing for sausage-laden rolls and Italian salads. The payment is extracted mostly from vest pockets, almost always just a matter of small change. Now I’ve rolled myself a cigarette, which I light at the gas flame beneath its green glass shield. How well I know it, this glass, and the brass chain to pull on. Famished and satiated individuals are constantly swarming in and out. The dissatisfied quickly find satisfaction at the beer spring and the warm sausage tower, and the satiated dash out again into the mercantile air, each generally with a briefcase beneath his arm, a letter in his pocket, an assignment in his brain, firm plans in his skull, and in his open palm a watch that says the time has come. In the round tower at the center of the room reigns a young queen, the sovereign of the sausages and potato salad — she’s a bit bored up there in her quiver-like surrounds. An elegant lady enters and with two fingers skewers a roll spread with caviar; at once I bring myself to her notice, but in such a way as if being noticed were of no concern to me at all. Meanwhile I’ve found time to lay hands on another beer. The elegant lady is somewhat hesitant to bite into the caviar marvel; of course I immediately assume it to be on my account and none other that she is no longer fully in control of her masticatory senses. Delusions are so easy and so agreeable. Outside on the square is a racket no one really hears: a tumult of carriages, people, automobiles, newspaper hawkers, electric trams, handcarts, and bicycles that no one ever really sees either. It’s almost unseemly to think of wanting to hear and see all these things, you’re not new in town. The elegantly curved bodice that was just nibbling bread now quits the Aschinger. How much longer am I planning on sitting here anyhow? The tap boys are enjoying a calm moment, but not for long, for here they come rolling in again from out-of-doors to throw themselves thirstily upon the bubbling spring. Eaters observe others who are similarly working their jaws. While one person’s mouth is full, his eyes can simultaneously behold a neighbor occupied with popping it in. And they don’t even laugh; even I don’t. Since arriving in Berlin, I’ve lost the habit of finding humanity laughable. At this point, by the way, I myself request another edible wonder: a plank of bread bearing a sleeping sardine upon a bedsheet of butter, so enchanting a vision that I toss the whole spectacle down my open revolving stage of a gullet. Is such a thing laughable? By no means. Well, then. What isn’t laughable in me cannot be any more so in others, since it’s our duty to esteem others more highly than ourselves no matter what, a worldview splendidly in keeping with the earnestness with which I now contemplate the abrupt demise of my sardine pallet. A few of the people near me are conversing as they eat. The earnestness with which they do so is appealing. As long as you’re undertaking to do something, you might as well set about it matter-of-factly and with dignity. Dignity and self-confidence have a comforting effect, at least on me they do, and this is why I so like standing around in one of our local Aschingers where people drink, eat, talk, and think all at the same time. How many business ventures were dreamed up here? And best of alclass="underline" You can remain standing here for hours on end, no one minds, and not one of all the people coming and going will give it a second thought. Anyone who takes pleasure in modesty will get on well here, he can live, no one’s stopping him. Anyone who does not insist on particularly heartfelt shows of warmth can still have a heart here, he is allowed that much.