The Dormitory and the People in It
The dormitory is vastly long and relatively narrow. You could easily take a walk in it, if it weren’t for the two rows of beds jutting out, barracks-style, from either side. A line of beds runs down the middle too. Naked iron bedsteads, wire-mesh beds for penance. Every homeless person is given a thin blanket of papery stuff, which, admittedly, is clean and disinfected. And on these beds they sit and sleep and lie, the homeless people. Grotesque-looking figures, as though hauled from the lower depths of world literature. People you wouldn’t believe. Old graybeards in rags, tramps hauling a motley collection of the past bundled up on their crooked backs. Their boots are powdered with the dust of decades. Middle-aged men, with sunburned faces chiseled by hunger and toughness. Young fellows in baggy pants, with eyes that look at you with a mixture of fear and confrontation. Women in brown rags, shameless and shy, curious and apathetic, quivering and resigned. A hundred of them to a room. Women, grown men, and youths kept apart. It takes about two hours to fill an intake. Admission is between four in the afternoon and nine at night. Everyone is given a steaming bowl of soup. Anyone who looks particularly wretched, a little more. Every morning there’s a sick call. There are always plenty of applicants. Many are footsore. Some of these people have walked all their lives. Roughly half have sexually transmitted diseases. The majority have lice. It’s difficult to persuade them to get cleaned up. Their clothes don’t survive disinfection. They’d rather go around with their lice intact than look still more ragged than they do already.
The Families
Families are accommodated in separate wooden cubicles that are set up in the halls. A few look almost cosy. Every corner of the hall has a gas burner and a little range at which the women can do their cooking. Washing is hung up to dry in the miasma of cooking smells, digestion, and communal living. Every little room has a gaslight. The people here are refugees. From Prussia, from the Rhineland, from Holstein. They know one another. They pay calls on one another. Some may have brought along a few sticks of furniture they’ve salvaged from somewhere, others have managed to acquire this or that. I can picture the women arguing among themselves, over a child or a cooking pot, say. Poor people come to blows over such little things. The children are fair-haired and slightly dirty. They don’t have any nice toys. Their world consists of a courtyard, a dozen bits of gravel, a tree, and one another. The one another is the best of it.
The Lieutenant Colonel
I sat with him, in his little wooden cubicle. Lieutenant Colonel Bersin is a czarist Russian officer, and a refugee. He has been in Berlin since April. He is old and stiff and proud. His gait is a little crooked, but after all the world has become so crooked. Revolution! And the Little Father is no more. Where is the czar? Where are his epaulettes? Where is the General Staff? He is a veteran of the Chinese war, the Japanese war, the Great war. He was lieutenant colonel on the General Staff. Most recently in Riga. He speaks excellent German but is still pleased that he can speak to me in Russian. He has newspapers and books piled up next to his bed. He reads everything he can lay his hands on. His officer’s cap is on the wall. He shows it to me with a great deal of pride, touching pride, like a child showing off his drum. He would like to work. He wishes he didn’t have to be a burden on the city. He is a lieutenant colonel. How much longer can the Bolsheviks last? Only a little bit, surely! It’s insane! A revolution! Ripping the epaulettes off officers’ uniforms! Where is the czar? The Little Father? Where is Russia? He has a family. His children — perhaps they are married by now; or fled, or even dead! What sort of world is this? A crooked world! Poor, poor lieutenant colonel! History has performed a somersault, and a lieutenant colonel winds up in the shelter for homeless people.
Thousands of people used to pass through the homeless shelter. Now there are a thousand every night. In the morning two or three of the dormitories are combed by the police. They find the people they have been looking for, sometimes.
Others they don’t bother with at all. They know who they are. They have been coming to the shelter for ten years now, or more. Residents. Resident homeless. The provisional or the contingent has become their normal way of life, and they are at home — in their homelessness.
Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, September 23, 1920
8. The Steam Baths at Night (1920)
The steam baths in the Admiral’s Palace are once more open all night. During the war their nighttime hours were first curtailed, then stopped altogether. Now you can once more take a steam bath at night.
Before the war a visit here represented the inevitable and indispensable conclusion to a night on the town, and the rejuvenation or rehumanizing of the night owl. Yesterday is swilled off him into the basins, and he emerges from the waters of the Admiral’s Palace clean shaven, reconsecrated, ready for fresh deeds, into the morning air of Friedrichstrasse. The steam baths consituted the break — the “clean break”—between the bacchanals of the night and the day’s gainful employment. It interposed itself between the bar and the desk. Without its ministrations — cast your minds back — it would have been impossible to sustain a rowdy nightlife with anything like the same stamina.
Nowadays, with the domestication of pleasure, with the fact that contemporary man no longer needs to bathe in pure waters, the steam baths have been turned into a night shelter. If you can’t find a hotel room, you go to the baths. One night costs twenty marks. For that you can sweat the night away, if you like, or sleep yourself clean. The baths should have some sort of inscription. Something like: PER SUDOREM AD SOLEM! or white nights.
The men’s lounge in the Admiral Baths.
Travelers may be seen arriving from the nearby Friedrichstrasse station at midnight, with suitcases. Returned from fruitlessly making the rounds of the city’s hotels, they sigh with relief at the entrance to the baths. Slowly they have become a pivotal metropolitan institution — a bolt- and water hole for the tourist in his hour of need.
The grotesque spectacle of a hot room at night, containing sixteen naked homeless people, trying to sweat out the soot and coal smoke of a train journey, gives rise to a positively infernal range of interpretations. A series of illustrations, say, to Dante’s journeys in the underworld. The only creature permitted to be fully clothed, standing there purposefully and conscientiously with scrubbing brush and torturer’s gauntlet in hand, could quite easily be some underdevil, if you happened not to know that his infernal character will be appeased, and his true character revealed by a small tip, once you have withstood his torments.
I don’t know if people in hell look as ridiculous as they do here. If the fashion there is for them to be likewise stripped naked, then they will do, for all their grimness and tragedy. I have a feeling that the witching hour does something to exacerbate the already intrinsically comical condition of nudity. It’s such a bizarre notion that between midnight and 2 a.m. there are people being steamed.
Somebody with frail, uncoordinated joints that look as though they’d been provisionally held together with string performs swimming motions in a pool for a whole nocturnal hour. Another, a fat man, who might be advised to borrow the equator from the earth as a belt for his dressing gown, looks on with a grimly sadistic expression, until he starts to feel the chill and has to take himself to the hot pool to recoup the calories that his Schadenfreude has cost him. He cautiously extends the tip of his right big toe into the water, but it’s too hot for him. He would like to watch himself enter the water — only his belly isn’t made of glass.