Across from the entrance on a raised platform was the wide dark bar. Looming in the background were innumerable bottles of various shapes and sizes, colourful gold-rimmed labels, and in front of them a regiment of gleaming glasses, opalescent cups and a jingling, singing heap of frivolous teaspoons — a lady sat or stood behind the bar. One couldn’t see quite where she was rooted. Her growth was a mystery. It was possible that she perched on a bar stool. Her complexion was pale, a little subterranean, as though lit by ancient candles. The outline of her face was fine — her face was little more than outline — she reminded one of a well-preserved spring. Perhaps she didn’t exist at all, and someone had sketched her with fawn crayon on soft paper. Because it was as though she was looking out of a frame, or from a high window over rooftops. Her eye strayed, without aim…
A mannerly gentleman made his way quietly through the room. He knew all the customers. He would suddenly pop up behind a pillar to help someone into his coat, he had clearly been following the man’s movements for some time — and now there he was, at the right time. He offered a restrained greeting with the dignity of someone who has been greeted himself with considerably less warmth over decades. — Good evening — his inclined head seemed to say — no need to thank me. I don’t need thanks. — As he held out the coat, he seemed to turn into a hat stand with extended arms. If a waiter was negligent, the gentleman got his attention with a long look. Like a general he surveyed the terrain, like a doctor he offered diagnoses, like the master of a house he welcomed visitors, like a theatre director he supervised the waiters’ entrances and exits, like a protective angel he watched over the forsaken and alone, and like God he was unchanging. He was neither young nor old, his hair was neither white nor dark, his expression was neither animated nor listless, and never did I see him sit and rest.
This was the café where my friend Krac would come in the evenings, with books and manuscripts, the evening paper, and a roll (filled). Other people would go home at this time, or out to dinner, but he, secum portans, liked to eat his supper here. He held it under the table in his left hand, and with his right helped himself to little unexplained titbits. Other people would take a couple of soft-boiled eggs in a glass, reddish-yellow, with scraps of shell mixed in. He for his part would order a cup of coffee, not even an espresso, just a common or garden coffee. The whole of the café where we sat, the table, the chairs, the pillar behind us, the waiter, the mannerly gentleman, the lights, the bar and the lady were like condiments for my friend’s roll. Meanwhile the café was happy to act as though it had requested him to come, bringing his supper. Such was the hospitality of this institution.
It’s not so easy any more.
The café has been redecorated. There is no longer a curtain in the entrance. To keep the pillars clear, a wardrobe has been installed to the right of the door. You are supposed to surrender your coat when you walk in, as at the theatre. The large windows have narrow green sills. The pillars are white, the ceiling is white. Away with the wall-paintings! — said the spirit of the age — the smoke obscures them anyway. The colour of the age is white, laboratory white, as white as the room where they invented lewisite, white as a church, white as a bathroom, white as a dissecting room, white as steel and white as chalk, white as hygiene, white as a butcher’s apron, white as an operating table, white as death, and white as the age’s fear of death! Let’s brighten up the ceiling! — Because it is the age’s belief that white is cheerful. It wants by brightness to attract cheerful people. And the people are as merry as patients, and the present is as merry as a hospital.
The ceiling hasn’t been lowered, it’s sufficient to have had it painted white. Now it presses down on our heads, unremitttingly hygienic. Light is cast not by lamps, but by glass columns that resemble thermometers — perhaps they take the room’s temperature at the same time. Light streams in from the side, not harmful to the eyes, so that blind people with artificial eyes can read faits divers. The floor is no longer wood, but grey stone marked with white lines — or so it appears. (Your feet tell you that the stone is actually rubber or linoleum.) A cowardly stone that makes no sound, a stone for tiptoeing around on. Hygienic. Deaf-mutes can listen to the radio in this silence. The number of tables has been increased by a third, and the comfortable armchairs have been thrown out. The new chairs are straight-backed for straight backs, they steel the body, they are steel seats. The bar looks like the counter of a pharmacy. The waiter has a prescription pad. A boy with gold buttons, a milk and blood face, bum-freezer jacket, Cupid, Mercury and messenger-boy in one, doles out nicotine-free cigarettes. On special application you are served coffee that will cure heart-patients and put you to sleep. The lady behind the bar is gone, vanished, airbrushed out, removed. The mannerly gentleman is gone. (Will you ever be greeted like that again?) He couldn’t go along with the evolution of the café, the way that claims to go from Germany to Broadway, but never gets past Kurfürstendamm.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 October 1927
52. Music in the Volksgarten
The music in the Volksgarten began at five in the afternoon. It was spring, and the blackbirds were still warbling in the shrubbery and the flowerbeds. The army band was seated behind the gold-tipped iron railings that separated the restaurant terrace from the park concourse, and thus parted the paying guests from other listeners without means. Among these were many young women. They had come to enjoy the music. But music on those evenings meant more than music, it was a chance to hear the voice of nature and of spring. The leaves overarched the proud melancholy of the trumpets — and a fitful breeze seemed for long moments at a time to whisk away the whole band and all the noises on the terrace to unknown distances. At the same time, one could hear the slow, crunching footfall of walkers on the footpath. Their settled tempo gave back the pleasure the music gave the ears. When the instruments sounded again, the drums began to roll, and the cymbals to clash, then it was as though the trees had grown louder, and the excitable arms of the bandleader had not only the musicians at his beck and call, but also the soughing leaves. Now, when suddenly a solo flute broke through the storm, it didn’t sound like the voice of an instrument, but like a singing pause. Then the birds too resumed — as though the composer had written a part for blackbirds. The scent of the chestnuts was so strong that it drowned out the sweetest melodies, and it batted your face like a brother to the wind. And from the many young women in the avenue there came a lustre, and a whispering and in particular a laughter that was even closer than the women themselves, and more familiar. Then if you addressed a strange girl you thought you had already heard her speak. And if you went away with her from this avenue into another, more secluded, then you didn’t have just the girl with you, you had something of the music, and you entered into the silence there as into one of the singing pauses.
It wasn’t thought proper to lounge outside by the rails and let the girls know that you were in no position to go inside and order a coffee. And so I walked up and down the avenue, fell in love, despaired, got over it, forgot, and fell in love again — all in the space of a minute. I would have liked to stop and listen and nothing else. But even if I had been friends with a lieutenant who — all jingle and elegance — was sitting eating butter biscuits within, I would still have fallen for the distant and inaccessible charms of the lightsome ladies who sat at white garden tables, like so many spring clouds, impossible to speak to because one never saw them out on the streets anywhere. At that time, some of the “grand monde” would foregather on the restaurant terrace, and the barrier was the border that separated us. And just as the young lady I was kissing took me for a mighty knight, so on the terraces of the great restaurants I saw damsels I would straightaway have died for. I would get a chance later. But to be able to promenade up and down and discreetly watch life going on, and pretend it wasn’t behind lock and key, that was something I owed myself.