berlin, the new york of old europe

PAUL MORAND

Anyone who goes to Berlin with pre-war expectations and ideas will be enormously surprised. Where are the turnouts, the Imperial automobiles which had for a warning signal the first notes of Siegfried's horn? What has become of the dachshunds and the clashing of swords? Berlin has become a great cosmopolitan city, more Jewish and Slav than Prussian, as well lighted at night as Broadway, late in going to bed—as animated and as international as some great seaport.

Beer has been replaced by wine, by drugs, and by strange synthetic drinks; in the bars posters urge you to drink the "Animator". There is no longer such a thing as living cheaply there; Berlin is the most expensive city in Europe. Dealers in antiques are making fortunes; new quarters have sprung up, like bath rooms; you see, on all sides, houses with swollen, rounded fronts, bloated, their walls in glass and white faience, as if, in the last ten years, architects had been replaced by sanitary engineers. The galleries devoted to modern art leave those of 57th Street far behind in their audacities, and a new word has sprung into favour, echoing in our ears with an unaccustomed frequency: this word is "erotic."

Farewell to Götterdämmerung! The theatres offer The Beggar s Opera and The Cap- tive. The Beggar's Opera is played there in a jerky, colourful, and brutal fashion, which reflects, at Piscator's, the direct influence of the stagecraft of Moscow.

"We shall have morals," cry the beggars, "when our bellies are full!"

Reinhardt is becoming a back number.

There are packed houses every night for Rivalen, which is none other than What Price Glory? and the American uniform is loudly applauded, as, after the show, that French singer in the Jockey cabaret will be when, sitting on the piano, she sings La Madelon, with everyone present joining in the chorus. The hostility of the two heroes, which is the theme of What Price Glory? seemed to me to be rendered with much verisimilitude; I soon heard that the two military actors had entered so fully into their parts that they pursued one another still, behind the scenes, with so violent a hatred that the manager was wondering whether he could come to the season's end without bloodshed.

At the cinema Dr. Van der Velde's film about marriage, Die Ehe, is active propaganda for a more intimate understanding of the sexes; we are shown illustrious examples of everything that serves to create discord in the modern menages of Berlin, sadly fallen from the Venusberg; graphs and diagrams teach young people what their elders still know nothing about; the slow course of emotion in the woman is shown, in contrast to the leaping ardour of the male, and this lesson in physiology, in which, from time to time, appears the bearded and spectacled face of the learned doctor, seems to presage a new era of scientific happiness for humanity, a sort of synthetic well being.

Here is a centre of culture that rivals Paris; one sees as many good Picassos and Braques in the Flechtheim Gallery as in the rue de la Boétie; one meets the Crown Prince at the Rot-Weiss playing tennis; one chats with Count Kessler concerning his latest book about Rathenau, with Theodor Wolff about his excavations and researches at Bergama; the Baroness de Goldschmidt-Rothschild and her friend, the Princess Lichnowsky, have a dazzling modern salon in the Pariserplatz, rivalled only by its neighbour, that of Madame Roland de Margerie, at the French Embassy, where one may meet Harold Nicolson, the most brilliant of English diplomats, who is actually writing a life of his father, Sir Arthur; Professor le Coq, who continues to uncover the admirable frescoes of Turkestan; and Professor Einstein, who says, with a modest bearing, that the problems of relativity are very easy to grasp, and that they "demand only a little reflection." The Querschnitt review sounds, most exactly, the note of this brilliant and witty society, of which it is, in a sense, the official organ.

The Germans speak of themselves as very poor, in this Spring of 1929. Are they so poor? The hotels, the theatres, the night cabarets are full; caviare and Impressionist French paintings soar to ridiculous prices; the concrete automobile roads, the electrified railways, the parks devoted to sport, testify, on the other hand, to a definite prosperity. Or, rather, as in all new Europe, there are two camps: that of those who died in the war—the living dead—and that of those born of the war; the German provinces, from Munich to Dresden, are in the first category, but Berlin is in the second.

Let us drop in, a little after the theatres close, at the Vaterland. That is a caravanserai of five stories, divided into as many great rooms as is Europe into nations, so that one may, within the hour, take a glass of port in a sombre Spanish bodega, go on to eat cream cheese and sip a light white wine in a Swiss chalet—to say nothing of the coffee one may taste, while one lies stretched out on the divans of the Turkish room. In the Tzigane room, its sill decorated with red pimentos, gypsies in vivid embroidery will tell your fortune. A vast Bavarian room, a veritable cathedral of beer, a temple of sausage, with bare kneed Tyroleans, good natured girls who sell pretzels and horse radish, wearing spruce leaves, offer the delighted drinkers a vision of glaciers so truly suggestive that one feels that one is suddenly filling one's lungs with the sparkling air of the Herzogenstand and the Starnburg.

But where the Vaterland attains to the sublime is in the Rhenish room! Everything is dim. The decorations amid which one drinks sparkling Moselle and Riesling from long necked bottles vanish into the night. It is a Walpurgis night, with artificial clouds which pass to and fro, while invisible choirs sound the motif of the Rhine Maidens, and illuminated boats float on the stream; everyone present is seated, religiously, ready to see the day break; an electric dawn appears at last over the Black Forest, and the old, sacred river is to be seen. Hoch! Hoch! And all the while an avalanche of liverwurst, of hot dogs, of hamburgers, of Viennese sausages, of Prague or Westphalia ham, falls from the heights of the Wagnerian skies, and one hears the constant rattling of metal from the lids of the steins!

But in the South-East of Berlin there are places still more picturesque. At the Alexander Quelle, a sort of popular Bal-Musette adorned with flags, communists, in capes and black skin helmets, in the Moscow style, wearing a bunch of lilacs, dance among themselves; the Spartacist groups, in scarlet blouses, come there to empty a dish after the exertion of preparing for civil war; at the Groben Gottlieb, in a setting of rural chalets, recalling the Tyrolean cabarets of East 86th Street, in New York, they serve you with sausages in an individual dish, a very German sort of pleasantry, the while that, in the subcellars, skeletons emerge from their coffins to clink their glasses.

(Continued on page 110)

(Continued from page 81)

In the cellars of Lutter and Wegner (not Luther and Wagner) students sing, as in Old Heidelberg, the while they embrace their blonde fiancees. At the Nussbaum, that cabaret with a sinister appeal such as one imagines Hollywood to have, in a Sixteenth Century house, which is to Berlin what the Lapin Agile is to Paris, one must visit the rooms decorated by the cartoonist Zille. Besides, in a "dancing" that is very fashionable—the "Resi" bar—there is an automatic telephone on each table; you can call any lady who has appealed to you without leaving your chair; they send for her, she answers, and then you ask her to dance. It is the custom, in Germany, to ask ladies you haven't met to dance; those who are only waiting for something of the sort generally have bare arms, while the others retain their wraps.

Finally, there are bars, like the Mikado or the Silhouette, where ladies with voices too solemn, with feet too big and large hands, with false hair and bosoms swathed in elastic, would have enchanted certain of Marcel Proust's heroes. Further down still, around the Stettin station of the Schlesischer bahn of, there are queer places, where Polish emigrants are robbed on their way to America. Stevedores sleep there, heads in their hands, waiting for dawn; drunken women try to lure young men for bawdy purposes, while, on a table, a trained dog watches to see that no robber steals the pink sausages which hang over the counter like strings of beads.

But there is more than this Berlin of the night; there is another, in the suburbs, muscular, athletic, that of the open air clubs where people gather for the dances and the games which no clothing hampers.

That which strikes you, as you pass through the great pine woods, and as you see the Navel, and all those lakes full of white sails, of canoes in bright colours and gleaming yachts, is the health and the beauty of these fine young people. It is a new race, finer, less well fed, more akin to America than to the old Europe, which revels in the water, swims, dives, dries itself in the sunlight.

Germania no longer wears a helmet, but a tennis visor, like that of Helen Wills. Adjutants have given way to Boy Scouts; philology yields its place to sports, and the brasseries to the open country. But the implacable German love of system remains; in a travel exposition which took place, last Spring, at Dresden, one could see an artificial forest, with false turf, over which greasy papers and empty tins were spread, and a sign, reading: "The Forest As It Must Not Be Left." Close by was a spot green and virgin, and the sign: "The Forest As It Should Be Left on Sunday Evening."

Already the fat Germans, with cropped heads, with gross, shaven cheeks, have disappeared, with the Tyrolean hats and the moustaches a la William II. In the empty halls of the Palace, in the Emperor's apartments, at Berlin, abandoned, now, to tourists, stripped of all their furniture, except the desk on which the declaration of war was signed, despoiled of all their arrogance, one feels, far more keenly than in Paris or London, that a new capital is being born, more human, more intelligent, more beautiful, than the old military and political city.

"Movement and frankness," Harold Nicolson, very justly, wrote of this new city. "Berlin is the New York of the old Europe."