Roadwork in 1930.
I’m not offering my thoughts on traffic in Berlin with the clear conscience of an expert, convinced he has something helpful to say, but with the right of the lay person, who is a victim of the bad traffic and who even faces the prospect of eventually becoming something of an expert in it (given his protracted education in poor conditions and various experiments). By the time the streetcars of this city finally become completely unnegotiable, I’ll probably be able to drive one myself. Today I only know what I see and suffer. And that’s sufficient authority.
It seems to me that the use of streetcars is incompatible with the traffic levels of a metropolis. In an age of air travel they are the equivalent of post coaches. Generally the tracks they run on go down the middle of the street. If there happens to be another vehicle on the tracks, they’re stuck behind it. They block the pedestrian’s view so that he won’t see a vehicle coming toward him on the other side of the street. They stand motionless, as though rigid with fear, for minutes on end, making a wall with little cracks in it through which it would be possible to force one’s way, only one is wary of being swiped by a rapidly approaching car from the other side. This defect of the streetcars is so blatant that even the experts seem to be aware of it. Therefore they are thinking of abandoning the streetcars for omnibuses. But it’s a very long way from having an idea to putting it into practice — a way, as it were, to be covered by streetcar. And in the meantime cars are proliferating, and on December 1 the tax on them is being cut, so that motor cabs will become (comparatively) affordable, thereby adding a further complication to this already highly complicated situation.
Berlin has very few trained traffic policemen. There is no “traffic police” as such, only an administrative department that consists of a few specialist civil servants. Traffic duty is done by regular policemen, as it were, on secondment. And these good and eager fellows tend to wave their arms about with unnecessary, vague flourishes. They aren’t precise, and therefore produce confusion and misunderstanding. In the dark — a further source of trouble and grief — they are hard to make out. They are at constant risk of being run over themselves. Their gray-green uniforms merge into the gray night. They are generally sharp, “bright,” and independent-minded enough to use a little flexibility in the way they interpret the regulations. But they are also called upon to supply information and to bring irate drivers to their senses. And all the time ill-considered newspaper articles undermine the authority of the police, and any heavy-goods driver you ask will invariably claim to be in the right as opposed to the policeman, who can see more of a scene because he is standing right in the middle of it. He ought to be more economical with his movements and gestures. After dark a flashlight would be a useful thing, or, better yet, some proper street lighting. Even some populous and quite central parts of Berlin still look like the deepest and darkest of provinces after nightfall. The economizing of the city authorities must have cost quite a lot of people their lives.
Worst of all are the slow roadworks. I know of no other city where the streets are patched as glacially slowly as they are in Berlin. There are some corners where the paving stones are carefully lifted out every night and put back in the morning. Around midnight ten or twelve workmen start to lever out the paving stones and lay them by the side of the road. Then work begins on the underpinnings of the street, and on the streetcar tracks. Before the first tram comes through in the morning, the street has to be smooth again. It’s like replacing bandages every day after an operation. And there are too few men. Sometimes you see a sorry little bunch — three or four fellows — standing on a corner lifting stones either with some rudimentary equipment or even with their bare hands, pouring tar, eerily and garishly lit by bright darting flames, looking like bizarre seekers after treasure, lonely, mysterious, and contemplative.
These are a few of the more visible defects, and their causes. But there are other factors besides, which materialists would laugh to scorn, there are — I should like to whisper this, if only one could write in a whisper — there are: psst! metaphysical factors.
Much of the trouble and irritation in daily public life is the fault of the public, in other words the undisciplined character of the postwar generation, the bitterness that erupts out of people. I will be so bold as to offer this theory: that a bus full of rancorous, quarrelsome, and aggressive passengers is bound sooner or later to have a collision. The mood of the passengers communicates itself to the driver. Everyone is fed up. No one offers his seat to a woman. Everyone is at odds with everyone else. People send one another furious looks. This one is taken for a Jew, that one for a “Bolshie.” This lady’s fur is provocatively expensive. The woman sitting next to her is not only furious — which one could understand — she makes no secret of her fury. A mildly intoxicated bowling team boards the bus. They announce their political views at the tops of their voices, because that’s the most provocative way. If a woman is wearing a hat, they will stare her in the face. If she has a male escort, so much the better! At last a long-desired pretext for a quarrel or a fight. A catastrophe always seems just around the corner. You read the paper over the other man’s shoulder. You press him into the corner or against the side of the bus. You are your neighbor’s not keeper but policeman. If he stumbles, you shout at him to hold on to something. Everyone is an officious amateur conductor, and says: “Go to the back of the bus.” But because the other man is also an amateur conductor, he won’t do what you say.
Above all there’s a lack of personal discipline, manners, decorum, natural discretion. If everyone causes their own individual catastrophes, how can there fail to be more general catastrophes? After all, the passengers on a bus or streetcar make up a community of a kind. But they don’t see it that way, not even in a moment of danger. As they see it they are bound always to be the others’ enemy: for political, social, all sorts of reasons. Where so much hate has been bottled up, it is vented on inanimate things, and provokes the celebrated perversity of inanimate things. Sending experts into other countries won’t help much, so long as each individual refuses to work out his own personal traffic plan. There is a wisdom in the accident of language by which there is a single word, “traffic,” for movement in the streets, and for people’s dealings with one another.