Berlin on the loose

CHARLES G. SHAW

Casting an eye on the more popular gaieties and diversions of Europe's most modernized metropolis

Be it cafe or kabarett, dance hall or supper club, beer house or tanz-bar, there is no dearth of them in Berlin. What is more, the majority, even the costliest are packed— not with tourists from the wastes of Little Rock, or heights of bustling Bronxville, but with honest-to-goodness, flesh-and-blood Germans! It is true the whole town over. The fun halls of this kaiser city hang not on foreign patronage. But as Berlin nowadays works late (many of its offices doing business until 7 p.m. and after) the evening's start may be a trifle tardy. The show bewilders; so varied is the choice of entertainment.

Down the Kurfürstendamm the laughing lights wink through the blue-grey veil. A trio of shop girls, breathless and giggling, pile aboard a motor bus, much to the interest of a bearded professor in pince nez and black fedora. The doors of the Gloria Palast are opening to the "first house" rabble. In blazing bulbs "Weisz Csarda" flashes a golden welcome, while across the way a twisted pencil vendor gapes before the Cafe Schilling. A shaven-pated, cheek-scarred student lurches past the Pilsator. A street walker. More giggling shop girls. A monocled fop, swinging an ebony walking-stick. An aproned waiter, hailing a newsboy a half block off. An old woman, in scrubby shawl, with a face like a baked apple. . . . But the cloak of twilight tightens. The smell of night draws nigh. Let us go to the Romanisches Cafe.

The Romanisches, a mixture of London's pre-war Cafe Royal, and the Dome, is Berlin's literary cafe par excellence, as well as a favorite hangout for artists and composers. It flaunts a spacious terrasse, and from six to nine bubbles with the hum of gossip. To the right of the entrance, just around the corner, is its stammtisch, or "club table," meeting spot of the local intelligentsia. Here a hard-up poet sponges a beer off a somewhat less stripped playwright; there a theatre manager scans the evening paper. The blonde sitting opposite, in the patent leather boots, is a cabaret dancer; the red-head, with the amber cigarette-holder —a salesgirl. Art—and its sundry offshoots— is the chief topic discussed at the Romanisches, and coffee the principal beverage.

But perhaps you would prefer a cocktail. Good. Only a pretzel's toss away and you have as trim a bar as any you will lean against in a goodish spell. Its name: the Eden Bar. Location: amidships the Eden Hotel. Its specialty: champagne cocktails. A grill, as well, graces this cosy rendezvous, where, if he be in town, Ferenc Molnár, the playwright may be glimpsed at a corner table. There is usually a gay group at the Eden and often enough a sprinkling of toothsome fraiileins, too. Another cocktail? By all means. The night is still a child. Besides, no one dreams of dining in Berlin at this precocious hour. And there is much ahead of us.

There are cafes, for example, by the bushel. Cafes of every magnitude and kidney. The Cafe des Westerns, where Rupert Brooke wrote Granchester and cheese is served with two kinds of brown bread and a fine, fat radish; the Cafe Europa, that features teadancing and boasts a waiter who can balance seven coffee set-ups on a single tray; the Cafe Berlin, that numbers among its specials "Prasid Hoover Sundae Creme de Menthe" and pineapple-chocolate with rum; the Cafe Josty that a hundred years ago was a little Swiss pastry shop; the Cafe Moritz Dobin with the grandest terrasse in all the town; the Rheingold, with its baroque hall and fountain; the König, in Unter den Linden, filling two colossal floors and a whole flock of rooms; the Cafe Muller, that includes, for the price of a kirsch, the joys of a cabinet particulier. . . . But enough. The task is a staggering one. Let us turn, for the moment, to the more distinguished beer houses.

Naturally there is plenty of beer to be had in Berlin. In the hot summer months the noted "Weisse", an insidious draught served in enormous goblets, too, is obtainable, and there are countless places where the froth-topped beverage, blonde or brunette, mild or potent, domestic or imported, is the feature. In the Friedrichstrasse, centre of commerce, there are any number of beer palaces like Spatenbräu, with its world-plastered trade-mark; and in the new West End it is the Kurfürstendamm that harbors the big percentage.

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If the month be June, however, and the skies loom thick with stars, it is not within such haunts as these the German quaffs his hops, but in the cool, fresh fragrance, say, of Griinewald, under the moonlit trees. Or it may, perchance, be Wannsee—network of pine-edged waters—in the garden of the Swedish pavilions or the Haus am See. Or Kadou, across the lake. Or at Hasenherde's "Neue Welt," that lies to the south and is famed for its Bockbier jollities. But I rant perhaps too loudly of beer, too long on sudswashed taverns. Time passes and if we would sound the city's night life, it is better to hasten. To repeat, the choice is no meagre one.

I name you first the Residenz Casino—or "Resi" as it is affectionately known to Berliners—not as the gayest of the city's dance haunts, but as the gayest of the world's. For here, in an age of pseudo joys and hollow chuckles, is a home that really rings with honest merriment. It is crowded, inaccessible, unstylish. But—rarest of things rare—it is a genuine and unfaked supper club. Its leading feature is of course the "telephones" and postoffice, by which messages, verbal and otherwise, not to mention perfume, compacts, cigars, liqueurs, etc. etc., are transmitted from table to table— to the ladies. There is no lack of fair ones at "Resi"—the girls outnumbering the boys four to one—and the prices are anything but high.

For doggy razzle-dazzle, I suggest the Cascade, a recent bloom whose spot of dance floor is pack-jammed and whose band (complete with megaphones) serves Yankee and German jazz. Evening get-up is of course favored and the pop of vintage corks is frequent through a haze of smoke, balloons, and paper snow-balls. For this is Berlin's smartest supper house and such, as you know, is the current mode of spending a smart evening— which means anywhere from midnight till 3 a.m. Still another is the Casanova, best known perhaps of all, for it is huge and new and calls itself the finest cabaret in Europe. But it fails, alas! to typify Berlin. Indeed, it might be New York, Paris, or even London. There is the Konigin, too, whose jovial chief, Herr Heinroth, will greet you at its portals with a beaming smile and low salaam; and again you will be given a chance to fling more "snow-balls" to the crash of more cymbals and chuckle of more saxophones. For the Konigin makes merry till the night is well worn away.

Yet these are not all, by any means. There are other halls—and many— in this city's golden west. For example, the Femina, lavish and modern, with a maze of rooms and, as at "Resi", tables equipped with "telephones"; the Tscherkess, of Caucasian tang, where a four-piece band plays Russian and gipsy strains, in a silkswathed, dim-lit nook; the Kakadu, with its dazzling bar; and the Ambassadors and Barbarina, both of which have a Montmartre atmosphere. For real late diversion there are, of course, the "Kuka" that opens at three in the morning and caters to artists, bar-girls, journalists, and waiters; the Kunstler Ecke, a snug little hole, full of carven figures and dim lights, where a blind man plays the piano with a far-off smile; and the Kaffee Roland, whose hours are from 3:00 till 6:00 a.m.—a hangout of the "wanted,"—in another part of town. For it is not only the West End that houses nocturnal fiesta. Not by a long shot. You will glimpse it, in Berlin, in whatever direction you gaze.

Of course you have heard of Kempinski. The name is a justly famous one. So too Haus Vaterland, which stands in a class by itself and boasts beneath the same roof eight separate and different restaurants. There are orchestras here, as well, that blow and fiddle tunes all the way from Texas to Stamboul in a daze of staircases and fountains, while in the Grinzing Room there are fresh wine on tap and a troupe of girls who dance a "laundress ballet." Next comes a Bavarian tavern in the Alps, with thunder and lightning and alpenglow. There are a Wild West Bar, as well, that puts on a Cowboy act, an Italian inn, overlooking the bay of Naples—a background familiar to all frequenters of New York speakeasies— a Turkish cafe, a Spanish bodega, and an all-too-real Rhine terrasse, not to forget its giant Palm room, which gives vaudeville from eleven o'clock on.

But we forget the Alkazar— "Palais de Danse" of yesteryear—that flaunts a wine garden and concourse of comely maidens, the Bonbonniere, with its semi-nude revues, the Jockey, Dschungel, and those other halls— Wien-Berlin and Weisse Mans. Of still plainer fabric is the Englischerhof, of once-a-week galas and a tin-pan orchestra; the Palais des Centrums, or "P.D.C."; the Krug Zum Grünen Kranze—that occupies a cellar but politely forbids the Charleston; and the "Mexico", just round the corner, whose clientele hails from the waterfront and whose specialties are noodle soup and lager.

And still these are by no means all. Far from it, indeed. For in Berlin— Die Weltstadt—lurk places by the score, the like of which you will not find in London or Paris; bars and dance halls of a nature unknown in the Land of the Free. Thus, I mark you El Dorado, with its "Daisy Bar" and fewer females than it seems at first glance; the Mikado and Johnny's Night Club; the Tropen—Terrassen Zauberflote, and "64", in the Alte Jakobstrasse; are resorts of a similar patronage. Besides, the skies of Lichtenberg already fill with rose. No longer is it ripe for frolic. Another morrow dawns. Another day of rush and hustle; of "speed" and "new ideas." For Berlin works as well as it plays.