In a city like Berlin there are stock companies that are capable of satisfying the entertainment needs of several social classes at once, catering to the “cosmopolite” in the West End, providing “solid bourgeois” pleasures in other parts of the city, and in a third supplying that part of the lower middle class that wants to have some inkling of the “grand monde” with its very own “third-class establishments.” And just as in a department store there are clothes and food for every social class and even for the myriad delicate nuances in between, carefully graded by price and “quality,” so the great names of the pleasure industry supply every class with the appropriate entertainment and the appropriate — and affordable — drink, from champagne and cocktails to cognac to kirsch to sweet liqueurs down to Patzenhofer beer. In the course of a single night, in which my mournfulness was such that it compelled me to experience the pain of every class of big-city dweller athirst for joy, I slowly made the rounds from the bars of the West End of Berlin to those of the Friedrichstrasse, and from there to the bars in the north of the city, finishing up in the drinking places that are frequented by the so-called lumpenproletariat. As I went, I noticed the schnapps getting stronger, the beers lighter and brighter, the wines more acidic, the music cheaper, and the women older and stouter. Yes, I had the sensation that somewhere there was some merciless force or organization — a commercial undertaking, of course — that implacably forced the whole population to nocturnal pleasures, as it were belaboring it with joys, while husbanding the raw material with extreme care, down to the very last scrap. Saxophonists who have lost their wind playing in the classy bars of the West End carry on playing to the middle class till they lose their hearing, and then they wind up in proletarian dives. In accordance with a strict plan, dancers start out reed thin, to slip slowly, in the fullness of time and their bodies, down from the zones of prodigality to those where people keep count, to the third where people save their pennies, to the very lowest finally, where the expenditure of money is either an accident or a calamity.
One of these places — it was already far along in years, a hoary ancient among the clubs of Berlin — was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, and was giving out detailed anniversary programs, complete with unobtainable photographs of long-gone vaudeville stars and popular favorites and a “historical look back.” From this it appeared that the establishment, having once been founded and run by a single man, has fallen into the numerous hands of a consortium, a consortium, I like to imagine, of deadly serious fellows, heavyweight fat cats. There is the photograph of the founding father: the broad round face of a man who knew to live and let live, with the twinkling eyes of a connoisseur, with a mighty upturned moustache betraying a kind of martial good humor, and a slow smile that legitimates the man’s unquestioned desire for profit.
There follow pictures of the “famous numbers,” the “diseuses,” a race of courageous women setting foot on the stage as on a battlefield, armored in corsets, in long skirts, under which peep out — flirtatiously, seductively, sinfully — snow white or salmon pink stockings and tightly laced dancing shoes, Boadiceas with bare throats and powerful shoulders and with abundant piled-up hair on their heads, such that a little nodding double-entendre can’t have been an easy matter; and finally the dancers with round, shapely legs, sewn, one would think, into the whirling expanse of ruffled and lacy underskirts, loose girls of sweet harmlessness and easy virtue. Yes, that’s the way it was then. The clubowner walked around among the tables, and nodded and smiled and allowed his patrons to live and encouraged them to sin as hard as they could. The jokes were terrible, but the people were cheerful, the women were very dressed, but at least they were flesh and blood, and not the product of hygienic training. Pleasure was always a business, but at least it wasn’t yet an industry.
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, May 1, 1930
Part VIII. An Apolitical Observer Goes to the Reichstag
29. The Tour Around the Victory Column (1921)
The sky has got itself all blued up, as though it were going to get its picture taken, and the March sun is friendly and eager to please. The Victory Column* soars up into the azure, naked and slender, as though sunbathing. Following the law that governs the popularity of all outstanding personalities, it has now, following its accident, attained the level of popularity that only failed assassinations may confer.
For many years it was neglected and lonely. Street photographers with long-legged flamingoesque equipment liked to use it as a free backdrop for the vacant smiles of their human subjects. It was a little knickknack of German history, something that appeared on picture postcards for tourists, a suitable destination for school outings. No grown-ups or locals would dream of going up it.
But now, at lunchtime, two or three hundred Berliners stand around the Victory Column, sniffing what’s left of an averted calamity, and politicizing.
I know for a fact that the gentleman in the cape and the broad-brimmed hat, who looks like a giant mushroom that’s sprouted somewhere in the shadiest depths of the Tiergarten, is a private scholar, working on such matters as the crystallization of quartz. For a quarter of a century, he’s had the habit of taking his daily walk on a particular avenue, back and forth, with the regularity of a brass pendulum, and then home again. But today, see! He only walked once up the avenue, and then made straight for the Victory Column. And here he is, listening with interest to the disquisition of a little fellow who’s standing hat in hand and mopping his bald head with a blue-bordered handkerchief, about picric acid.
I don’t know whether picric acid comes into quartz crystallography or not. But the interest taken in it by the quartz expert seems positively boundless.
“Dynamite”—I hear—“is dangerous stuff. You use dynamite to blast tunnels. It’s even more dangerous on account of it’s kept in cardboard boxes.”
“What amazes me is that no one smelled the fuse right away!” observes a lady. “When I’m at home, I can tell if anything’s burning.” The lady sniffs as though some trace of the fuse might still be lingering in the air. All the other women sniff along with her, and duly agree: “Ooh, yes!”