My street is only half built-up. The other half wends between fields of potatoes, cabbages, and sugar beet. It hardly looks like a suburban street. The idea we have of a suburb doesn’t hold true in this city: Berlin doesn’t possess that belt of dirtier streets, full of children, workers in blue overalls and dewy-eyed, conceited girls you find in so many cities. Here, if you will, it’s either suburb or city. Berlin is a machine-built city and when they decide to construct a row of houses or part of a district, they do so thinking it’s come to stay. This means that apart from its old city center Berlin is completely uniform. Every district is alike. Reinforced concrete in the bourgeois district of Charlottenburg is perhaps a little more expensive than that used in the poorer district of Moabit, but the atmosphere is the same everywhere. Life in these neighborhoods is also uniform. The shopping streets, dotted around, are strategic hubs always thronging with people. Every shopping street is surrounded by a network of sad, lonely, grimly silent streets. There are no unusual nooks or crannies. Everything is geometrically angled and four-days old. Imagine the Eixample of Barcelona, a looser, vaster Eixample that’s not so uniform or monotonous. Take away the sun, the delicate, not entirely African layers of white gauze in Barcelona; add in the same tendency of stone, on overcast days, to assume the color of porridge and you have something approximating Berlin. Of course, there is more reinforced concrete, the houses have two-meter long front gardens behind a fence, but the architecture is equally bland and equally cold: it’s the mass-produced way to accommodate large, orderly families. The tone is perhaps not so bright; it’s the tone of the first layers of cork on the oak or, if you prefer, a grayish pumpkin hue … Think on that and don’t say you didn’t like it. That would be the limit!
However, one aspect of Berlin I can’t stomach is the mania Berliners have for covering their houses in ivy and climbing plants. These clerks in their tailcoats and paste collars, or those fat, sallow bourgeois must think that living in a house with an ivy-clad façade is like life in a medieval castle on the banks of the Rhine. Nature softens the German and poetry makes him go dreamy-eyed. I, for one, am unimpressed by a scene of ruins. I’m horrified by the variety of lizards, rats, salamanders, insects, creepy-crawlies, beetles, and all kind of strange beasts that thrive in the ruins rhapsodized by poets. These little creatures made by Our Lord Almighty — well, it beggars belief, doesn’t it? — must live in the holes, crannies, and crevices of houses in Berlin, as God disposes. They must be animals that have adapted to the comforts of civilian life, and must be delighted by the tender or passionate and ever interesting musical exercises played by the young ladies who live in those blocks. But what can I say? Despite the miracles wrought by adaptation to the environment, they don’t fill me with joy. If I lived in one of these places, I’d always be worried I’d find a lizards’ nest in my waistcoat.
The house where I live tends to the other extreme. It’s so prosaic and bare, so cold and spare you could weep. It is huge, rectangular, with a small, sad, interior garden. The building has four staircases that correspond to its four wings. If we so wished, we residents could spend our lives peering into that inner yard, looking at each other, admiring ourselves and waving our handkerchiefs in greeting. My bedroom is on one of the side wings. From the outside, the house is a mixture of barracks, factory, and human beehive. Frau Berends’ flat is rather big. The door from the stairs opens on to the passage and that makes the flat feel like a cul-de-sac. The kitchen, bathroom, my room, and the two rooms that are presently unoccupied look over the inner yard. The dining and sitting rooms and other rooms have never seen the light of day.
I was scrutinizing my room today. I’d never thought it was so small and gloomy. It’s a rectangle with a rather low ceiling. Down one long wall is a wardrobe, a washbasin with accompanying paraphernalia, and a window over the communal yard. Down the other, a divan with two or three cushions covered with that so-called Japanese fabric, now tattered and dirty, and a splendid stove. At the back is a bed and facing the window, the table where I write. The middle of the bed sags terribly and must have previously been occupied by an Italian with a black beard and treacherous eyes who won lots of battles thereon. A table stands in the center where I have placed my suitcase between two bunches of paper flowers. The suitcase occasionally reminds me of a child’s coffin. The walls are papered a horrible purple, and among the objects stuck on them are a set of postcards from Egypt complete with pyramids, lions, palm trees, camels, and tourists dressed 1908 style — ladies with leg-of-mutton sleeves and forward tilting, beribboned hats, men wearing white képis and fancy waistcoats. There are two prints over the bed: Madame de Recamier and a lady I thought must be by Reynolds, with a mouth like a carnation. Not forgetting the ubiquitous seated figure of Frederick the Great playing a flute.
Do you think this room is ripe for crime? Would you even think you could lose two telegrams in this place? The neighborhood is certainly out of the way and the house impersonal and insipid, but even if it were closer in than we’d like, Frau Berends is too sensible to play stupid tricks on me. And the telegrams? I don’t know what’s happened to them, and I never will. I have a friendly relationship with Frau Berends but I dare not ask her anything that’s not absolutely necessary. I’m sure that if I made her talk any more she’d bill me for her words. My impression is that she has some very original ideas, for example, about the act of opening a door. Germans are cosmic, opaque and contradictory but that’s not to say they don’t like their céntims.
What happens in the house is really strange. The six beings that live there have very well-defined personalities and if we ever do interact, it’s out of pure need. We are individualists and jealous of our independence. This means there is always an atmosphere of suspicion, an icy silence and total ignorance of what goes on beyond the door to one’s respective bedroom.
I think it’s obvious that Frau Berends’ main drive is a feeling of repulsion towards her subtenants. Even when I’m paying my rent she looks at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. Why is this? Has Frau Berends concluded that inside each subtenant hides a spoilsport who entered this world with the sole purpose of interrupting her in full flow? Or is she someone who’s gone down in the world and now finds that her miserable dealings with tenants remind her of a life that was once elegant and prosperous? Or does she think her trade is below her and demeaning? I’ve often thought about Frau Berends’ curious attitude and I find it absurd. If she doesn’t want subtenants, why does she have them? If she’s forced to have them, why doesn’t she resign herself? I know it’s painful — and how! — to accept that one must act pleasantly and go through the motions, but this lady has no excuses, and in her line of business you can’t occupy middling, reformist, equivocal positions. You can’t claim she is a tenderhearted, easygoing, impressionable youngster, since she must be at least forty-five and her worn looks hardly single her out as a woman completely ignorant of the ways of the world.
Frau Berends is a tall, stout, and imposing figure; she tends to walk with a stoop, and around the house you sense she’s beginning to eye her growing belly. It’s a stance that could spark memories of a procuress, however charming and pious she might seem. Full of surplus flab, her face is generally the purplish yellow of people with a heart condition; her eyes are blue and watery, her nose tiny and damp, her hair sparse with a pink skull smoldering beneath, mauve bags under her eyes, and peculiar eyelashes and lids, seemingly made of fluff. Frau Berends always wears a chocolate Spanish-style housecoat, with a tasseled belt, Scotch plaid slippers, and bed socks. When she wants to read, she puts on spectacles that dangle over her chest on a big black ribbon. Frau Berends doesn’t take a single step around the house or outside without her patent leather handbag.