The dormitory looks like a hollow polygon from geometry class. The sofas are small, low, and numerous. They stand there, as it were, guilelessly, as if, say, somebody had just left them there in despair, because there was nowhere else. People come here in their Turkish towels to try and catch a little sleep.
Only they make it impossible for one another. It is quite extraordinary what hidden desires cleanliness is able to flush out of thoroughly sweated souls. The appetite increases prodigiously. I almost think the only reason the steam baths were closed during the war was because of England’s naval blockade. Sixteen thoroughly purified men are capable of consuming at a single sitting enough food to feed a city for six months.
Oh, and if only sandwiches didn’t have to come wrapped in noisy wax paper! As if soft, silent paper wouldn’t do the job just as well! Three gentlemen who have gotten off the train ask for their bags. I hoped one of them would have the provisions for all three in his bag. I hoped, further, that hunger would appear in all three simultaneously, since they’d all arrived on the same train, and stepped out of their baths at the same time too. But they, cunning fellows, used their appetites to provoke and taunt me.
Each of the three took it in turn to open his suitcase, his little key squeaking in the lock like a young puppy dog, and then came the unwrapping, with all the lavishly variegated stages of a proper picnic lunch, as if this weren’t a steam bath at night but a green meadow on a Sunday afternoon.
Over time I grew able amply — hardly — to distinguish the three travelers from one another. One of them unwrapped his sandwiches swiftly and with decision, he didn’t rustle so much as crunch. The other didn’t crunch, but he was impatient and kept ripping his paper. The third took the longest. He folded up his paper minutely afterward. I think he must have had a long journey still ahead of him. Strange, someone taking so much trouble to make it clear to all those present that he didn’t really need to take a bath here. No, by no means. He was clean only yesterday. Who would doubt it? But an odd, enforced bath like this, for want of a hotel room, it’s not such a bad thing. And even though I’m absolutely prepared to believe that he was in a state of tiptop cleanliness when he arrived, he still won’t stop trying to convince me of the fact. He comes from the provinces. It all strikes him as terribly amusing, and I can see him working on his account for the assembled listeners in the bar — the wacky things people get up to in Berlin.
You can sleep quite well on these sofas, if your neighbors have already eaten. If you go out in the corridor, you will see a poster that tells you that it is forbidden, first, to smoke (where would you keep your cigarettes?), and second to enter the manicure room “in a state of undress.” And for all that I saw naked people leaving the manicure room.
People in a state of nature wander through the corridors of the Admiral’s Palace. The world’s highways and byways must have looked like this when the world was in its infancy, and before men’s and women’s fashion became the flourishing industry it is today.
If you go out onto the dark streets at 5 a.m., you will just catch the final farewells between men and women, and the tired homeward trudge of a Friedrichstrasse whore who’s had a bad night and is going home penniless. A truck rumbles past, it’s raining, and it’s bitter.
Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, March 4, 1920
9. Schiller Park (1923)
Schiller Park opens its portals, quite unexpectedly, in the north of the city, a surprising gem beyond the brewery belt of the various Schultheisses and Patzenhofers: like a park in exile. It looks every bit as though it had once been situated in the west of the city, and along with its relegation, it had been stripped of its ornamental lake and its little weather hut with barometer and sundial.
What it’s left with are its weeping willows and its complement of park wardens. These are laconic and, in all probability, good people, because they follow an occupation that is not a soul-destroying one. They are the world’s only harmless police, admonitory notice boards put in place by the Almighty and the local authorities, till one day, out of boredom, they suddenly left their posts and took to ambulating up and down the leafy avenues. On their faces you can read their original, now weathered inscription: citizens, look after your amenities — and the willow wands they hold in their hands are mildly waving exclamation marks. Park wardens, by the way, are the only living beings permitted to set foot on the grass.
I have long been curious as to what park wardens do in the winter. It’s scarcely credible that they should ever leave their parks to share a kitchen with wives and children. Much more likely that they wrap themselves in straw and rags, and passersby take them for rose trees or bits of statuary, or that they dig in for the winter, and come out in the spring along with the violets and primulas. With my own eyes I have seen them feeding off hips and haws, in the manner of shy forest creatures. Ask them a question, and they will think for a long time before replying. There’s always a layer of solitude about them, as there is with gravediggers and lighthouse keepers. .
The people who live around Schiller Park work in the mornings. That’s why the park is as deserted at that time as if it were off limits. One or two unemployed men trudge past; otherwise I see no one.
Then two girls, seventeen and nature-loving, come wandering through its avenues. It’s as if birches could suddenly walk. But real birches are rooted in the ground, and can only sway their hips.
The children arrive at three in the afternoon with pails and shovels and mothers. They leave the mothers sitting on wide white benches and toddle off to the sandbox.
Sand is something that God invented specially for small children, so that in their wise innocence of what it is to play, they may have a sense of the purposes and objectives of earthly activity. They shovel the sand into a tin pail, then carry it to a different place, and pour it out. And then some other children come along and reverse the process, taking the sand back whence it came.
And that’s all life is.
The weeping willows, on the other hand, are evocative of death.
They are a little contrived, a little exaggerated, still green in the middle of all the colors of autumn, and there is a human pathos to them. Weeping willows were not created by God at the same time as the other trees, like the hazelnuts and the apple trees, but only after he had decided to allow people to die. They are a sort of second-generation tree, flora endowed with intellect and a sense of ceremony.
Even in Schiller Park the leaves drop from the trees in a timely fashion, in the autumn, but they are not left to lie. In the Tiergarten, for instance, a melancholy walker can positively wade through foliage. This sets up a highly poetic rustling and fills the spirit with mournfulness and a sense of transience. But in Schiller Park, the locals from the working-class district of Wedding gather up the leaves every evening, and dry them, and use them for winter fuel.
Rustling is strictly a luxury, as if poetry without central heating were unnatural.
The rosehips look like fat red little liqueur bottles, distributed for promotional purposes. They fall from the trees free of charge, and are collected by the children. The park wardens look on, feeling no alarm. For they have placed their trust in the Lord, who feeds the wardens in the fields and arrays them in local-authority caps.