From time to time, one of them might pray. Stand in a corner, muttering to himself, whispering. His lips tremble, his words are gabbled, the prayer is long, and he needs to be finished. No time, no time! No one bothers him, everyone steers clear of him; the aura of divine worship surrounds him, and all thought of percentages is far from him. No sooner has he finished his evening prayer than his expression is once more of this world. He reopens his eyes to the light of these premises, and to the floating percentages.
The door is open. It never occurred to anyone to close it. Till eleven and beyond. It’s not till half past that things start to get quieter. People trickle out into the night, drift around outside for a while, like large buzzing night insects.
Outside, a couple of policemen are on patrol. Then the man gets up from his green velveteen sofa, stows his fragile spectacles in their case, and slowly walks over to the door to lock up.
His wife counts empty bottles behind the bar. The bottles plink like keys on a glass piano.
Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, May 4, 1921
3. Refugees from the East (1920)
Fürst Geza* (because in Hungary they put the surname before the first name, and some whim of fate likes to give beggars lordly attributes) — or, if you prefer, Geza Fürst — worked as a clerk in a Budapest grocery from the age of eleven. When he was sixteen the Hungarian Soviet Republic took over, and the grocery store was shut down. For his part, Geza joined the Red Army.
When the counterrevolutionary forces gained power in Hungary, Geza Fürst and his parents fled to the part of Hungary that was occupied by Romania. The Romanians expelled the Fürst family. Fürst père, a Jewish master tailor, moved to Slovakia with his wife and four daughters, scissors, ruler, thread, needle, and young Geza. The sixteen-year-old, having served in the Red Army, could not go back to Budapest. Instead he made his way to Berlin.
Not, please understand, to remain here. The commissioner in charge of demobilization wouldn’t allow him to in any case. Geza Fürst, now barely seventeen, wants to go on to Hamburg. He wants to take ship, be a cabin boy. Is he supposed to go back to twisting paper bags in a grocery store, pulling herrings out of barrels of brine by their stiff tails, or spilling raisins across a counter? Or go and get himself recruited again? Geza Fürst is perfectly right to want to go on a ship. Sirens toot, white chimneys belch smoke, ships’ bells ring, and the world is round. Geza Fürst will make a first-class sailor. He has broad shoulders but is still light on his feet, and with his gray eyes he can already see boundless horizons and blue infinity.
A Jewish hotel on the corner of Grenadierstrasse and Hirtenstrasse.
However, Geza Fürst hasn’t been able to get to Hamburg yet because he doesn’t have papers.
Geza Fürst sleeps in a boardinghouse on Grenadierstrasse, which is where I met him. I met others besides him. That boardinghouse is currently home to 120 Jewish refugees from the East. Many of the men arrived straight from Russian POW camps. Their garments were a weird and wonderful hodgepodge of uniforms. In their eyes I saw millennial sorrow. There were women there too. They carried their children on their backs like bundles of dirty washing. Other children, who went scrabbling through a rickety world on crooked legs, gnawed on dry crusts.
They were refugees. We know them as “the peril from the East.” Fear of pogroms has welded them together like a landslip of unhappiness and grime that, slowly gathering volume, has come rolling across Germany from the East. A few clumps of them have come to rest for the time being in the East End of Berlin. A small minority of them are young and healthy, like Geza Fürst, the born cabin boy. Mostly they are old and frail, if not broken.
They come from Ukraine, from Galicia, from Hungary. Back home they fell victim, in their hundreds of thousands, to pogroms. The survivors make their way to Berlin. From here they head west, to Holland and America, or south, to Palestine.
The boardinghouse smells of dirty laundry, sauerkraut, and masses of people. Bodies all huddled together lie on the floor like luggage on a railway platform. A few old Jews are smoking their pipes. Their pipes smell of scorched horn. Squealings and screechings of children in the corners. Sighs disappear down the cracks between the floorboards. The reddish sheen of an oil lamp battles its way through a veritable wall of smoke and sweat.
Geza Fürst can’t stand it anymore. He thrusts his hands into his frayed jacket pockets, and — a tune on his lips — goes out on the street to get some air. Maybe tomorrow he’ll get a place in the hostel on Wiesenstrasse that’s been set up for homeless Eastern Jews. If only he had papers. Because they’re very strict over on Wiesenstrasse; they won’t just take anyone who turns up.
All in all some fifty thousand people have come to Germany from the East since the war. I have to say, it can seem as if there were millions. The impression of so much wretchedness is double, treble, tenfold. That’s how much there is. Among the fugitives there are more workers and artisans than traders. According to the employment statistics, there are 68.3 percent workers, 14.26 percent wage laborers, and only 11.13 percent self-employed traders.
There are no jobs for these people with German companies, even though the only way they pose any sort of threat is if they are not allowed to work. Then of course they will become black marketeers, smugglers, and even common criminals. The Association for Eastern Jews in Berlin does all it can to persuade the authorities and public opinion that by far the best solution would be to disperse this newly arrived immigrant workforce over the entire German labor market. But even the expulsion of these people seems too difficult for the authorities to manage. Instead of authorizing the immediate departure of all those applying for an exit visa, the authorities do their utmost to slow down and prolong the process. The refugees spend weeks upon weeks here, literally dying on the charity of their fellow men before they are allowed to make themselves scarce. To date, 1,239 people have successfully negotiated Berlin without first starving to death.
In Wiesenstrasse, in what was once a hostel for the city’s homeless, a shelter for Jewish refugees from the East has now been set up. They are bathed, disinfected, deloused, fed, warmed, and put to bed. Then they are offered the chance to leave Germany. It is quite one of the most blessed preventative measures for dealing with the “Eastern peril.”
The odd one among these people will have intelligence and initiative. He will go on to New York and make a million.
Maybe Geza Fürst will manage to get to Hamburg and become a cabin boy — Geza Fürst, who may now be found walking up and down Grenadierstrasse, hands in his pockets, ex — Red Guard, adventurer, and pirate in spe. Recently I heard him singing a Hungarian song that contained these words: “The wind and I, we’re two of a kind; / no house or yard or body to shed a tear over us. . ”
Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, October 20, 1920
4. Solomon’s Temple in Berlin (1920)
King Solomon, famous for his sayings and judgments and for his authorship of the Psalms, reigned at a time when history was still proceeding backward, namely from 1015 to 975 b.c. He loved high life and splendor, and was open handed both to God and to his own subjects. The latter he presented with tax edicts and tithes, and the former with devout prayers and a magnificent temple. The king turned to his neighbors for the gold, marble, and similar materials he needed for his building projects. He built his royal palace with the aid of King Hiram of Tyre, and that proved what an untenable idea anti-Semitism is. Because what happened was that Hiram — as cunning as if he had been Solomon — extended King Solomon unlimited credit, and King Solomon — as green and gullible as if he had been Hiram — drew and drew on it until the anti-Semite Hiram, showing his true Jewish nature, called in his loan. Thus he was able to gain a score of fertile territories in the north of the Jewish kingdom, for King Solomon was unable to pay his debts. Altogether King Solomon behaved like a reckless baron. He had baronial manners, and if the swastika supporters had come across him, they would have had to change their views.