But don’t think Berlinish is just a collection of jokes. It is very much a real and wonderful language. It even has a proper book of grammar, which was written by Hans Meyer, director of the old Gray Cloister School in Berlin. It’s called “The True Berliner in Words and Phrases.”8 As much as any other language, Berlinish can be spoken in a manner that is refined, witty, gentle, or clever, but of course, the speaker must know when and where to do so. Berlinish is a language that comes from work. It developed not from writers or scholars, but rather from the locker room and the card table, on the bus and at the pawn shop, at sporting arenas and in factories. Berlinish is a language of people who have no time, who often must communicate by using only the slightest hint, glance, or half-word. It’s not for people who meet socially from time to time. It’s only for those who see one another regularly, daily, under very precise and fixed conditions. Special ways of speaking always arise among such people, which you yourselves have a perfect example of in the classroom. There is a special language for school kids, just like there are special expressions used among employees, sportsmen, soldiers, thieves, and so on. And all these ways of speaking contribute something to Berlinish, because in Berlin all these people from all walks of life live piled together, and at a tremendous pace. Berlinish today is one of the most beautiful and most precise expressions of this frenzied pace of life.
Of course, this was not always the case. I will now read you a Berlin story from a time when Berlin was not yet a city of four million people, but just a few hundred thousand.
BRUSHMAKER (carrying his brushes and brooms, but so drunk that he’s forgotten what he’s actually selling). Eels here! Eels here! Get your eels here! Who’s got cash!
FIRST BOOTBLACK: Listen up, Sir Scrubber, whoever eats a couple eels gets swept away. (He leaves the drunkard and runs madly through the streets, screaming.) Holy cow, this one takes the cake! No more smokin’ from the window!
SEVERAL PEOPLE: What are you talkin’ about? Really? You can’t smoke from the window anymore? Now they’ve gone too far.
FIRST BOOTBLACK (running away): Yep! You gotta smoke from a pipe! — Hah!
BRISICH THE LOAFER (in front of the museum): I like this building, it cracks me up.
LANGE THE LOAFER: How come it cracks you up?
BRISICH (staggering a bit): Well, because of the eagles on top!
LANGE: What’s so funny about the eagles?
BRISICH: Well, they’re royal eagles but still they sit there loafin’ on the corner! Just think if I was a royal eagle and got to loaf on the corner of the museum just for decoration! I tell you what I’d do. If I was thirsty, I’d quit my decorating for a while and pull out my bottle, take a couple swigs and holler down to the people: “Don’t think bad about the museum! A royal eagle’s just takin’ a break!”9
All languages change quickly, but the language of a metropolis changes much more quickly than does language in rural regions. Now, compare the language you just heard to that of a crier in a story from today. The man who wrote it is named Döblin, the same Döblin who told you about Berlin one Saturday not long ago.10 Of course, he wouldn’t have heard it exactly as he wrote it. He often just hung around Alexanderplatz and listened to the people hawking their wares and then cobbled together the best bits of what he heard:
How come the elegant man in the West End wears a tie and the prole wears none? Gentlemen, come closer, you too Fräulein, that’s right, the one with the man on your arm, and minors are allowed too, they’re for free. Why are there no ties on a prole? Because he can’t tie ‘em. So he buys himself a tie-holder and once he’s got it, it’s no good ‘cuz he can’t tie it. It’s a scam and it embitters the masses and sinks Germany into even deeper misery than she’s in already. Tell me, for example, why no one wears these big tie-holders? Because no one wants to tie a dustpan around his neck. Not men, not women, not babies if they had a say. It’s no laughing matter, gentlemen, laugh not, we don’t know what goes on in that sweet little baby brain. Dear God, the sweet little head, what a sweet little head, with its little hairs, but what’s not pretty, gentlemen, is paying your alimony, that’s no joke, that gets a man into trouble. Go buy yourself a tie at Tietz or Wertheim, or somewhere else if you won’t buy from Jews. I’m an Aryan man. The big department stores don’t need me to pitch for ‘em, they do just fine without me. So buy yourselves a tie like I have here and then think about having to tie it every morning. Ladies and gentlemen, who has time nowadays to tie a tie in the morning and give up an extra minute of precious sleep? We need all the sleep we can get because we all work so much and earn so little. A tie-holder like this makes you sleep easier. It’s putting pharmacists out of business, because whoever buys one of these here tie-holders needs no sleeping potion, no nightcap, no nothin’. He sleeps safe and sound like a baby at his mother’s breast, because he knows there’s no hustle in the morning; what he needs is right there on the dresser, tied and ready, just waitin’ to be shoved into his collar. You spend your money on so much rubbish. You must have seen the crooks last year at the Krokodil Bar, there was hot sausage in front, and behind lay Jolly in his glass case, with a beard like sauerkraut growing around his mouth.11 Every one of you saw it — come a little closer, now, I wanna save my voice, I haven’t insured my voice, I’m still saving up for the down payment — how Jolly was lying in the glass case, you all saw it. But how they slipped him some chocolate? You didn’t see that! You’re buyin’ honest goods here, not celluloid, but galvanized rubber, twenty pfennigs apiece, fifty for three.12