There is one particular balcony with iron bars, like a cage hung in front of the house, and in one particular place on it, all through the spring and summer, hangs a red cushion, rain or shine, like an implacable fleck of oil paint. There is a courtyard that is quite crisscrossed with clotheslines, as if some monstrous antediluvian spider had spun its stout web there from wall to wall. A dark blue pinafore with big white dobs of eyes always billows in the breeze there.
Over the course of my rides, I’ve also come to know a little blond girl. She sits by an open window, pouring sand from little toy dishes into a red clay flowerpot. She must have filled five hundred of those flowerpots by now. I know an old gentleman who spends all his time reading. The old man must have read his way through all the libraries of the world by now. A boy listens to a big phonograph on the table before him, its great funnel shimmering. I catch a brassy scrap of tune and take it with me on my journey. Torn away from the body of the melody, it plays on in my ear, a meaningless fragment of a fragment, absurdly, peremptorily identified in my memory with the sight of the boy listening.
There are only a few who have nothing to do, and just sit at their windows and watch the trains go by. That tells you how boring life would be without work. Therefore every one of us has a purpose, and even animals have their use. There is no lilac tree in a backyard that doesn’t support drying laundry. That’s the sadness of those backyards: How rare it is for a tree to do nothing but bloom, to have no function but to wait for rain and sunshine, to receive them both and enjoy them, and put forth blue and white blossoms.
Berliner Börsen-Courier, April 23, 1922
13. Passengers with Heavy Loads(1923)
Passengers with heavy loads take their place in the very last cars of our endless trains, alongside “Passengers with Dogs” and “War Invalids.” The last car is the one that rattles around the most; its doors close badly, and its windows are not sealed, and are sometimes broken and stuffed with brown paper.
It’s not chance but destiny that makes a person into a passenger with heavy baggage. War invalids were made by exploding shells, whose destructive effect was not calculation but such infinite randomness that it was bound to be destructive. To take a dog with us or not is an expression of personal freedom. But being a passenger with heavy baggage is a full-time occupation. Even without a load, he would still be a passenger with heavy baggage. He belongs to a particular type of human being — and the sign on the car window is less a piece of railway terminology than a philosophical definition.
Baggage cars are filled with a kind of dense atmosphere you could cut maybe with a saw, a freak of nature, a kind of gas in a state of aggregation. The smell is of cold pipe tobacco, damp wood, the cadavers of leaves, and the humus of autumn forests. What causes the smell are the bundles of wood belonging to the occupants, who have come straight from the forests, having escaped the shotguns of enthusiastic huntsmen, with the damp chill of the earth in their bones and on their boot soles. They are encrusted with green moss, as if they were pieces of old masonry. Their hands are cracked, their old fingers gouty and deformed, resembling peculiar gnarled roots. A few leaves have caught in the thin hair of an old woman — a funeral wreath of the cheapest kind. Swallows could make nests for themselves in the tangled beards of the old men. .
Travelers on the S-Bahn.
Passengers with heavy loads don’t set down their forests when they themselves sit down. Having to pick up one’s load again after a half hour in which one’s spine has felt free for all eternity seems to weigh heavier than an entire pine forest. I know that with us soldiers, when a few minutes’ rest beckoned after hours of marching, we didn’t undo our packs but continued to drag them with us like a horribly loyal misfortune,* or a foe to whom we were bound in an eternal alliance. That’s how these old bundle carriers sit, not so much passengers with heavy loads, as heavy loads with passengers. And that also goes to demonstrate the fatefulness of carrying loads, that it’s a condition rather than an activity. And what do the forest people talk about? They speak in half sentences and stunted sounds. They keep silent not from wisdom but from poverty. They reply hesitantly, because their brains work slowly, forming thoughts only gradually, and then burying them in silent depths no sooner than they are born. In the forests where their work is, there is a vast silence unbroken by idle chatter; there the only sound is that of a woodpecker attacking a branch. In the forests they have learned that words are useless, and only good for fools to waste their time on.
But in the scraps these people do say is expressed the sorrow of an entire world. They have only to say “butter,” and right away you understand that butter is something very remote and inaccessible, not something you spread with a knife on a piece of bread, but a gift from heaven, where the good things of this world pile up as inaccessibly as in a shop window. They say: “Summer’s early this year”—and that means that they’ll be going out into the forests looking for snowdrops, that the children will be allowed out of bed to play in the street, and that their stoves can be left unheated till the autumn.
Actors, who relate their woes in many clever sentences and with much waving of hands and rolling of eyes — they should be made to ride in the cars for passengers with heavy loads, to learn that a slightly bent hand can hold in it the misery of all time, and that the quiver of an eyelid can be more moving than a whole evening full of crocodile tears. Perhaps they shouldn’t be trained in drama schools but sent to work in the forests, to understand that their work is not speech but silence, not expression but tacit expression.
Evening comes, an overhead light goes on. Its illumination is oily and greasy; it burns in a haze like a star in a sea of fog. We ride past lit-up advertisements, past a world without burdens, where commercial hymns to laundry soap, cigars, shoe polish, and bootlaces suddenly shine forth against the darkened sky. It’s the time of day when the world goes to the theater, to experience human destinies on expensive stages, and riding in this train are the most sublime tragedies and tragic farces, the passengers with heavy loads.
Of all the labels and bits of jargon, the verbose or laconic edicts that regulate the bustle of a city, providing information and instructions, offering advice, and constituting law — of all the impersonal formulations in stations, waiting rooms, and the centers of life — this one is humane, artistic, epigrammatic, concealing and revealing its huge content.
The honest man who came up with “Passengers with Heavy Loads” for practical purposes can’t have known that at the same time he found a title for a great drama.
This is how poetry is made.
Berliner Börsen-Courier, March 4, 1923
14. Some Reflections on Traffic (1924)
For the past several months, the question of traffic control has been painfully acute in Berlin. Important stretches of major roads are blocked off to traffic of all kinds. Potsdamer Platz looks like a suppurating wound.* And day after day, night after night, workmen scrabble around. It is now two weeks since the traffic control tower was put up. One had an expectation, perhaps, of something soaring and magnificent. But one day there stood a little gray metal stump of a tower, with large, and at that stage, still-closed round eyes on its top edge. Those eyes, sending out colored beams, were meant to regulate the traffic automatically. But instead the traffic regulator remains the blond, chunky policeman on his wooden platform. In the newspapers there are reports almost every other day of streetcar collisions. (With the compensation sums that are paid out every year to the victims of accidents in Berlin, one could set up a traffic system truly worthy of a great city.) Experts were paid to go out into the world to make studies of traffic systems in great cities. When they got home, they produced a new traffic plan in which a proliferation of confused paragraphs collided like so many streetcars. A few newspapers set up squeals in “Cicero bold”—as if it were they themselves that had been run over. With mighty majuscules* from the arsenal of typesetting, they crushed the new traffic plan. They ran responses from hackney-coach drivers, chauffeurs, bus drivers, and motorists; and if the traffic plan hadn’t been withdrawn, then they would have summoned fresh evidence from people who had little or nothing to do with it: from chimney sweeps, presumably, rat-catchers, hairdressers — why not? — they all would have been solicited for their unprofessional opinions. . It was a chance to prove all over again that they were not going to let up on those in power. It could have been a chance to offer more advice and less of a tongue-lashing. But good advice is as expensive as bad mockery is cheap. .