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Home , 1920s Berlin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bertolt Brecht, Columbushaus, Erwin Piscator, Golden Twenties

CHAPTER 2 DURING THE REPUBLIC

The period of the is divided into three periods, 1918 to 1923, 1924 to 1929, and 1930 to 1933, but we usually associate Weimar with the middle period when the post WWI revolutionary chaos had settled down and before the Nazis made their aggressive claim for power. This second period of the Weimar Republic after 1924 is considered Berlin’s most prosperous period, and is often referred to as the “”. They were exciting and extremely vibrant years in the , as a sophisticated and innovative culture developed including and design, , , painting, , criticism, philosophy, psychology, and fashion. For a short time Berlin seemed to be the center of European creativity where cinema was making huge technical and artistic strides. Like a firework display, Berlin was burning off all its energy in those five short years. A literary walk through Berlin during the Weimar period begins at the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s new part that came into its prime during the Weimar period. Large new movie theaters were built across from the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial church, the Capitol und Ufa-Palast, and many new cafés made the Kurfürstendamm into Berlin’s avant-garde boulevard. ’s theater became a major attraction along with bars, nightclubs, wine restaurants, Russian tearooms and halls, providing a hangout for Weimar’s young . But Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm is mostly famous for its revered literary cafés, Kranzler, Schwanecke and the most renowned, the Romanische Café in the impressive looking Romanische Haus across from the Memorial church. Here writers, painters, actors, theater and movie directors, and critics mingled, among them ’s children Erika and , , , Alfred Döblin, Mascha Kaléko, Erich Kästner, , and the painter . Since the Nazis hated the Romanische Café as a center of Jewish intellectualism, they raided the café on numerous occasions, even before Hitler came to power. Although it was not shut down, the restaurant lost its importance after the Nazi takeover, when most of its illustrious guests emigrated. The building was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943 and replaced by the current Europa-Center, a shopping center built in style of the nineteen- sixties.

Our walk through Berlin’s West continues eastward from Kurfürstendamm to the , which lies a few blocks south of the Gate at the geographic center of Berlin. During the Weimar period the Potsdamer Platz was Europe’s busiest square with two big railroad stations, Potsdamer Platz Bahnhof and the Anhalter Bahnhof to its south. Thirty bus and streetcar lines crossed the square, which was lined by some of Berlin’s largest hotels and its first underground shopping mall. Europe ‘s first traffic light was installed here in 1926 to control the large traffic volume. Some of Berlin’s most vibrant nightclubs such as and the Hotel Esplanade were also located on Potsdamer Platz.

All that remains today of the old architecture is the Weinhaus Huth and the ballroom of the Esplanade hotel, which has been incorporated into the new Sony Center. During the the square was divided by the intimidating wall. It was hard to imagine that there once was life in this no-man’s-land, when the Potsdamer Platz was the heart of Berlin. During the Cold War the death strip around the Potsdamer Platz became one of the most visited spots for western tourists who would try and spot activities in the east from an elevated platform.

Since the architecture with its distinctly nineteenth century appearance seemed out of touch with modern life plans were made to modernize Potsdamer Platz. The Potsdamer Platz hotels, restaurants and clubs were cheap 1880s imitations of neoclassical architecture. Modern signature buildings were supposed to be constructed beginning with Erich Mendelssohn’s Columbushaus of 1930, ’s first air-conditioned building. However since Mendelssohn was Jewish and since the Nazis regarded modernist architecture as decadent, further modernization of the square could not proceed. The Columbushaus is on (west) side of the picture, still obscured by advertising panels due to construction.

Another more prominent building stood on the Eastern extension of the square, Leipziger Platz. Beyond Schinkel’s neoclassical Potsdam Square Gates was Berlin’s largest department store, Wertheim. It contained many modern luxuries, such as elevators and escalators normally not found in department stores at that time. Ironically the Jewish Wertheim store was next to the new Hitler had built in 1938, on Voßstraße across Wertheim’s delivery entrance. Hitler’s infamous “bunker” located directly under the chancellery was also next to the Potsdamer Platz.

Erich Kästner’s 1929 poem “Visit from the Country” captures the atmosphere the square presented to newcomers stepping away from the surrounding train stations: “Confused they wait at Potsdam Square, Berlin seems too loud for them, Night glows like a million. A lady beckons ‘Come along, my darling’. And her legs are terribly bare. They marvel and they are too tense, They walk around in awe. Streetcars screech, tires squeal, They want to be at home, Berlin is too much for them. It sounds as if the city moans Because they made a mistake, Houses sparkle, the subway roars, Everything they see seems fake, And Berlin is far too rough. Their legs are bent with anxiety. They get it all wrong. Their smile is uncomfortable. On Potsdam Square they stand in awe Until run over by a car.”1

1 Besuch vom Lande Sie stehen verstört am Potsdamer Platz. Und finden Berlin zu laut. Die Nacht glüht auf in Kilowatts. Ein Fräulein sagt heiser: "Komm mit, mein Schatz!" Und zeigt entsetzlich viel Haut. Sie wissen vor Staunen nicht aus und nicht ein. Sie stehen und wundern sich bloß. Die Bahnen rasseln. Die Autos schrein. Sie möchten am liebsten zu Hause sein. Und finden Berlin zu groß. Es klingt, als ob die Großstadt stöhnt, weil irgendwer sie schilt. Die Häuser funkeln. Die U-Bahn dröhnt. Sie sind alles so gar nicht gewöhnt.

While the Kurfürstendamm area in Berlin West was developing into Berlin’s major cultural and entertainment center, the Friedrichstraße area had continued as the theater district since the Kaiserzeit. Although crossed by Friedrichstraße had been a fashionable promenade for a while, it was now beginning to look faded and attracted mainly older Berliners. However, this loss of appeal was mitigated by the emergence of Friedrichstraße and adjoining smaller streets that were developing into ’s second fashionable entertainment district. There were forty-nine theaters in Berlin during the nineteen-twenties, with the more serious ones playing in ; among them the Deutsche Theater, the Kammerspiele, and the Großes Schauspielhaus at Weidendammer Brücke across from Friedrichstraße station. The famous Austrian Max Reinhardt worked here, Leopold Jessner, , and Bertolt Brecht who was beginning to make a name for himself by working with Reinhardt. Several of the variety theaters were located on Friedrichstraße as well, such as the Admiralspalast and the Wintergarten across from Friedrichstraße station. Most of Berlin’s forty daily newspapers were printed in the newspaper district in the southern part of Friedrichstraße.

Walking still further east we reach , the center of the Eastern districts, where roads from Berlin’s Eastern, Northern and Southern districts converged. Named after the Russian Czar Alexander, Alexanderplatz was Berlin’s largest farmers’ market and trading center in front of the Frankfurter Tor. For hundreds of thousands of leaving and headed for Berlin, the Alexanderplatz/Rosenthaler Platz area became the first stopping place, where the , one of the largest Jewish districts in Europe developed. Upstream along the from Alexanderplatz the industrial parks of Berlin had been evolving since the nineteenth century, with the Stadtbahn continuing its course along the Spree from Alexanderplatz to Jannowitzbrücke and beyond. Eastern Berlin was always more rural and more proletarian than the rest of Berlin.

Berlin's rapid growth from the ’s small regional capital to Germany’s center of four million people in less than fifty years generated large social and political differences. Berlin saw its greatest surge in cultural innovations after post WWI street-fighting had calmed down. Berlin’s political turmoil began after the end of WWI in November 1918 when the new constitution could not guarantee a stable government and the constituting assembly had to withdraw to the small town of Weimar. Since Goethe and his fellow-artists had established a literary movement in Weimar in the early nineteen-hundreds, German classicism, which became the origin for Germany’s national literature, Weimar has been a synonym for the synthesis of culture and politics.

Rightist violence and Communist refusal to cooperate with Socialists set the stage for Berlin’s chaotic years between 1918-23, which culminated in staggering inflation in 1923. Although its causes are still under discussion, the government’s inability to pay for WWI reparations certainly contributed to the collapse of the old currency system. Despite the disappearance of the middle class through inflation, economic expansion quickly resumed. During those chaotic times, Communists and Nazis were rapidly gaining power not only among the masses, but also

Und finden Berlin zu wild. Sie machen vor Angst die Beine krumm. Sie machen alles verkehrt. Sie lächeln bestürzt. Und sie warten dumm. Und stehn auf dem Potsdamer Platz herum, bis man sie überfährt. among the cultural elite, as radical ideas became fashionable in the literary cafes of Berlin. With the economy gaining strength, by the mid- Berlin became the largest industrial city on the European continent, attracting an ever-increasing influx of industrial and office workers.

On March 29, 1930 the finance expert Heinrich Brüning was appointed Chancellor. Since the two radical parties, the Communists and Nazis had gained enough votes to eliminate a coalition of moderate parties, Brüning ruled by decrees. Brüning drastically cut state expenditures, including unemployment insurance, following the theory that cutting public spending would spur economic growth. The results were disastrous, as unemployment skyrocketed and the Nazis became the largest party. On May 30, 1932, Brüning resigned and was succeeded by Franz von Papen. The following elections held on July 31, 1932 yielded even greater gains for the Nazis, who won over 37% of the vote, replacing the Social Democratic Party as the largest party. On December 3, 1932 in a last attempt to prevent Hitler from taking power General von Schleicher succeeded Franz von Papen as chancellor. However, on the infamous January 30, 1933, the date dubbed Machtergreifung (seizure of power) by the Nazis, Reich’s President Paul von Hindenburg replaced Schleicher by Hitler.

WALTER RUTTMANN, BERLIN, SINFONIE EINE GROßEN STADT (1927)

Our literary excursion to Weimar Berlin begins with Walter Ruttmann's movie Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. Walter Ruttmann’s movie is divided it into five parts or “Acts” and as the subtitle “Visual Symphony” indicates, is supported by a soundtrack.

The film begins with a steam locomotive riding through fields and then through suburban housing and living quarters before coming to a stop at Anhalter Bahnhof. After panning over the roofs of the sleeping city the film focuses on Berlin’s streets, continuously interrupted by the image of the Berlin Rathaus clock. The streets slowly fill with workers on their morning commute. The rhythm of the city and the movie increase, the cuts become more frequent and are intercut between factories, offices, street life and traffic. With the 12-noon bell speed collapses while people take their lunch break. In the afternoon the city comes back to its frantic pace, which only breaks in late afternoon when peace and quiet return. In the late afternoon and early evening the movie shows the many sports and leisure time activities on water, in parks and in many entertainment venues.

With its train ride the movie imitates a typical arrival in the city. The fictional characters in the following text are newcomers to Berlin; Emil in Emil und die Detektive hails from Neustadt, Pinneberg in Kleiner Mann, was nun? from Ducherow, and Doris in Das kunstseidene Mädchen from . As a decentralized country, Germany had never developed a large metropolis as Britain had with London and with . Berlin had become a big city only after German unification in 1870/71. The movie, released in 1927, illustrates the city’s attraction to Germans who were clearly flocking to the city, either as tourists or as permanent residents to benefit from the ever-increasing employment possibilities. As a documentary, the movie gives an excellent introduction to Berlin’s life during the Weimar Republic.

The film focuses on speed, which became Weimar Berlin’s prominent characteristic. The establishing shots of the film leap from nature represented by water to characterized by the train hurtling towards Berlin. Trains, speed and traffic became characteristic of Berlin, and Ruttmanns’s movie uses them as symbols to hold the many episodes together. There are more than twenty scenes with moving trains. The first train introduces us to the increasingly complex city traffic and sets the tone with its changing rhythm. Other urban vehicles are soon introduced, bicycles, streetcars, cars and trucks, and most prominently, Berlin’s S-Bahn and underground train which had been electrified a few years before the movie was made. Ruttmann is a master in inter-cutting moving trains with buildings and doorways to give the impression that the city is connected by its moving parts. Traffic is the motor that holds this huge city together. With its juxtaposition of traffic and buildings, the movie focuses on inorganic elements, its vehicles and buildings. To highlight this effect, scenes often end with a close-up of motors or clocks.

Although we see most people in vehicles, the film also shows crowds. The camera often focuses on individuals taking a walk in hectic traffic: an old woman climbing stairs, an excited man advertising a product, soon to be surrounded by curious customers, another man arguing and eventually fighting with an opponent. The movie singles out women going about their business, walking or sitting on sidewalk café terraces eating, or meeting men at street corners. Two scenes stand out in this movie: a woman dressed in an elegant white outfit with a gorgeous hat meeting her equally elegant gentleman friend at a street corner, and another woman looking at a man who turns to look at her through an angled shopping window and eventually takes off with her. These scenes and a staged scene of a woman jumping of a bridge in an apparent suicide attempt have generated a lot of discussion as important footage of women in urban life.

The movie aims to give an introduction to the actual mood of Berlin in 1927 by presenting a snapshot of life. Ruttmann achieved this mood of the slowly awakening city and its hectic life during the day and its gradual slowing down in the evening with his analogy to a symphony. As one of the first music Ruttmann cut the film to synchronize it with a musical score. His model was the Russian formalist filmmaker Dziga Vertov who considered “the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people” and abandoned fictitious film making as subjective. Berlin, Sinfonie einer großen Stadt wants to present an aesthetic statement based on the principles of (“Neue Sachlichkeit”), a stark realism. Ruttmann was obsessed with form, evident in the introductory scenes with abstract lines and railroad tracks, waves and sunlight. The message of the film is therefore one of form and nature, as repeatedly shown in crosscutting people and animals. It reinforces the relationship of man and nature on the one hand, but also on the other hand it stresses the message that the city had left its natural origins.

ERICH KÄSTNER, EMIL UND DIE DETEKTIVE (1927)

Erich Kästner’s famous detective begins in the provincial town of Neustadt. His father has died and his mother raises him alone working as a hair stylist. She sends Emil to Berlin with one hundred twenty marks to give to his grandmother and twenty marks for himself. Emil is careful not to lose the precious money and uses a needle to pin it to the lining of his jacket. But on the train to Berlin, Emil falls asleep in the compartment he shares with a man named Grundeis. After he wakes up the money and Grundeis are gone. Emil gets off at Zoologischer Garten in Berlin, and when he is able to find Grundeis, he follows him. Emil dares not call the since the policeman in Neustadt had seen him paint a moustache on a monument and he worries about the consequences. While he is watching Grundeis, a Berlin boy named Gustav offers to help and calls twenty-four children he knows, "the detectives", to assist in the search. After many adventures, including watching Grundeis at a café, following him in a taxi, and observing him during his night in a hotel, Emil gets his money back when Grundeis tries to exchange it at a bank for smaller bills. Emil proves that the money was his by describing the holes left by the needle he used. As Grundeis tries to run away, Emil's cousin Pony Hütchen brings a police officer to the bank. Once he is arrested, Grundeis is discovered to be a bank robber and Emil receives an award of 1000 marks. After everything is straightened out, Emil's grandmother says that the moral of the story is: "Never send cash - always use a money order."

The book introduces Berlin to children with an exciting chase through the city, which gives an opportunity to get acquainted with Berlin’s many areas. After Emil gets off at Zoo station (“Berlin Zoologischer Garten”) instead of Friedrichstraße where his grandmother and his cousin are waiting, he follows Grundeis and boards streetcar number 177. The streetcar travels down Kaiserallee, today Bundesallee, where Grundeis gets off at Trautenaustraße and sits down at the Café Josty. Emil hides behind an advertising column, a Litfaßsäule, where he meets Gustav and later the whole gang of detectives. They decide to send a message to the frustrated grandmother who has returned to her apartment at Schumannstraße near Friedrichstraße station where she had been waiting for Emil. The thief meanwhile continues his journey by cab through Berlin’s west, which the kid detectives follow in another cab. Grundeis ends up at the Hotel Kreid on Nollendorfplatz just west of the Zoo station where he stays for the night. While waiting outside of the hotel the detectives call many other children they know and eventually, when Grundeis emerges from the hotel the next morning, he is followed by hundreds of children. The chase is soon over in Kleiststraße when Grundeis tries to exchange the stolen money in a bank and gets caught. The thief is arrested and Emil and his friends are invited to police headquarters on Alexanderplatz where Emil is handed his reward.

It is obvious that Emil und die Detektive shows the area of Berlin that Kästner knew best, Berlin’s affluent western district with its theaters and literature cafes around the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, the Bahnhof Zoo station and the expensive Kaufhaus des Westens. Poorer parts of Berlin, such as the apartment of Emil’s grandmother near Friedrichstraße are excluded, while the police headquarters building near crime-ridden Alexanderplatz is only mentioned in the final chapter. There are other interesting autobiographical elements in the novel. Kästner, whose second name was Emil, had experienced a similar situation in when he was chasing a thief who had stolen money from his mother. Kästner appears twice in the novel with his real job as newspaper reporter, once in the chapter “Street Car 177” where he buys a ticket for Emil, and again to interview Emil after the chase is over.

As Kästner’s Emil und die Detektive is Germany’s most famous children’s novel translated into many languages, the book acquainted more children and adults to Berlin’s topography and culture than any other work of Berlin fiction. The book has all the ingredients of a children’s adventure novel, a quest where the city represents the obstacles the young heroes have to master. By reading this book, the reader views Berlin from a child’s perspective and explores the vast metropolis as a jungle. Emil is clearly overwhelmed when he enters the city in the beginning and is amazed by the traffic, noise, and lights. While the city confuses and energizes, Emil soon realizes how easy it is to get lost. Nobody seems to care for the little boy from the German provincial town. However, Kästner does not let his hero and his readers despair and he introduces a group of detectives to give a sense of solidarity, which he describes as the only way to survive in the anonymous city.

The children represent the city’s varied social groups, that are absent in the small town where Emil comes from. They represent a social microcosm and their interaction is clearly intended as a utopia where rich and poor help to defeat crime. The children overcome impossible odds to defeat evil and in the end receive a surprise reward. The author’s other lesson is expressed by the grandmother: “Life is difficult sometimes but there are many kind people in the world and a true friend comes when you need help.”

Emil und die Detektive is foremost a rites of passage story about a young, frightened country boy, lost and penniless in a big city, who faces up to his situation and deals with every problem that he encounters. By the end of the story, Emil is no longer a wide-eyed innocent, but has learned that strangers can be dangerous. Kästner saw himself as a moralist vis-à-vis the cynical atmosphere he encountered in Berlin during the nineteen-twenties. Although he began his career writing in the style New Objectivism (Neue Sachlichkeit), he soon realized that a new generation of children was needed to change the atmosphere.

The novel was put on screen as one of Germany’s first sound films in 1931 under the direction of with a script by . As an expressionist production along the lines of earlier silent movies, with the thief played by as a demonic character, it was considered an avant-garde film, especially with its original location shots. It is still worth watching because it shows Berlin as a complex and exciting city with a lot of space for adventure and discovery. This big city effect is obviously the product of Wilder’s fast documentary narrative style.

As Kästner’s story is still a classic, the movie industry capitalized on its success by producing frequent remakes of Emil und die Detektive. Disney changed the plot considerably with its 1964 production. Though the story is still set in Berlin, the younger characters have been extensively Americanized, especially the teenage detective Gustav. In the Disney production, Grundeis is in league with a master criminal known as “baron”, who is planning a major heist. Franziska Buch’s 2001 version expands the Disney story further and copies American gangster elements with exploding dynamite and the children like counterparts to the gangsters. Buch also changes the story from a single mother to a single father who has lost his job after a traffic accident. Emil is sent to his aunt in Berlin who is a protestant minister. Another change concerns the fact that the gang is now led by Pony Hütchen, who is not Emil’s cousin in this version. One of the gang members, a gypsy, is sent to the aunt, pretending to be Emil, but he is soon discovered by Gustav, the minister’s son and Emil’s cousin. Berlin in Franziska Buch's movie is very hip and the city’s rampant multicultural and cosmopolitan atmosphere sets the tone. The chase takes the detectives down die Straße des 17. Juni and the thief ends up in Berlin’s most expensive hotel, the Adlon. In a key scene when all the detectives are introduced to Emil by Pony Hütchen in a rap song, they run, bike and skateboard all over the city and highlight key buildings in this scene, that emanates the pop song atmosphere of Run Lola Run.

The renewed updating of Emil’s story shows that Berlin’s most popular narrative story is still alive and serves as an important literary ambassador for the city’s ever changing culture.

HANS FALLADA, KLEINER MANN, WAS NUN? (1932)

In Fallada’s famous depression-era story Johannes Pinneberg loses his job in the small town of Ducherow and moves to Berlin. He works at Mandel’s department store where he experiences the work atmosphere of a big city with efficiency standards imported from America that will soon cost him his job. In a bizarre scene Pinneberg cajoles a customer who he recognizes as a movie star and begs him to buy something to fill his quota for the week. He fully expects the movie star to understand his plight since he had played a “little man” in a movie. But obviously the movie star shows no mercy, which results in Pinneberg’s dismissal.

As one of six million unemployed in depression-era Germany, Pinneberg is struggling to make ends meet and, when all else fails, his wife Bunny pitches in with several small jobs. The novel captures the role reversal of Weimar society with the increasing social competence of women while men lose their social standing. Pinneberg takes this very hard since it challenges these traditional images with the father as the head of the family. He recognizes change only reluctantly. In the scene in Berliner Spaziergänge Pinneberg begins to understand his social position by watching himself in a delicatessen store window reflection, while musing, “Could this be him, this downtrodden example of a human being?”

With this scene the novel captures the political situation in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic. In what direction was the country headed? What party would the unemployed and downtrodden vote for in the next election? After Weimar’s centrist parties, including the Social Democrats, were no longer able to provide stability who would be able to help the economy turn around, the Communists or the Nazis? Towards the end of the novel Pinneberg considers voting Communist, largely influenced by his wife Bunny who comes from a communist family. But in the end it is Bunny, who advises him against voting Communist since she recognizes that Pinneberg still has his middle class pride to preserve amid all the misery of the poor driven to stealing and prostitution.

Fallada’s novel Kleiner Mann, was nun? is a well-known Weimar novel depicting the plight of middle class citizens during the depression. The book’s protagonist Johannes Pinneberg comes to Berlin with his new wife expecting to find a better life. However, Pinneberg never finds his own place, but instead is pushed around like the majority of people. The novel captures the plight of large numbers of Germans who felt powerless in the economic turmoil. In its stark realism the book is a pessimistic and honest account that shows the fertile ground for the Nazi movement during the nineteen-thirties.

Although Pinneberg's desperate search for a job covers the entire city, he cannot be called a flaneur. A flaneur was always a carefree affluent gentleman who roamed the city for pleasure and watched the crowds for fun, but never had to care for his needs. Pinneberg’s walks are those of an impoverished job seeker who has no eye for anything other than his own concerns. After Pinneberg and his wife move to Berlin from the provincial Ducherow, they are met by his mother at Stettiner Bahnhof (now Nordbahnhof), from where she takes them to her apartment in , a working class neighborhood northwest of the city. After his mother offers a room in her apartment to the young couple for which she expects rent, Pinneberg finds out to his dismay that his mother is running an escort and dating service. Although an unlikely scenario for the very proper and middle-class young Pinneberg, Fallada chose this constellation to accentuate the ever-increasing entertainment industry in Weimar Berlin with its seedy reputation.

Jachmann, the boyfriend of Pinneberg’s mother, is a fashionable shady Berlin underworld figure. He finds a job for Pinneberg at Mandel's department store, based on the Wertheim chain, which operated its flagship store on Leipziger Platz. Wertheim tried to dazzle customers with its grand design, merchandize and its eight escalators which most non-Berliners had never seen. Since many large Berlin department stores were Jewish, Fallada chose the store for the novel to reflect the political reality of Weimar Berlin. During the Nazi period the Wertheim and all other Jewish stores were “aryanized”, which meant they were taken away and sold to non-Jews at a bargain prize. Ironically Wertheim was larger than Hitler’s Reich’s chancellery built by Hitler’s architect in 1938 in neighboring Voßstraße, whose fancy main front faced Wertheim’s delivery entrance.

Pinneberg eventually moves out of his mother’s apartment and rents his own place above a Moabit movie theater, where he and Bunny decide to raise a family. They soon have a child, Murkel. However, Jachmann the pimp breaks into their quiet life again and takes them to a movie theater in Berlin’s fancy western district around Kurfürstendamm. The poverty-stricken Pinnebergs are very excited about the movie, a Chaplinesque comedy with the little man trying to break away from his miserable life, while his wife runs away with another man. Pinneberg loses his job a week later, but when he begs the movie’s actor to buy anything to improve his sales quota, Pinneberg reasons that because he has played a poor person so well that he should understand the poor, but he is disappointed.

After some time of unemployment, Pinneberg does not realize how shabby his outfit has become, and that he is suspicious to the affluent theatergoers taking a leisurely stroll in the Leipziger/Friedrichstraße district. Kleiner Mann, was nun? captures Pinneberg’s dilemma at an important location in Berlin’s center, Friedrichstraße, where Berlin’s social and cultural contrasts came together. West of the axis of Friedrichstraße was Potsdamer Platz, the entrance to the and affluent west, and east of Friedrichstraße was the old city core with Alexanderplatz, the entrance to Berlin’s poorer classical working class neighborhoods of , and .

The novel shows the political plight of the middle class citizen deciding whether to vote Communist, Nazi or to stay with middle class parties at this time. It also captures another important change in modern life, the changing role of the woman. In the beginning of the novel Bunny is the innocent housewife only interested in taking care of the apartment and the child, but later becomes a major moral and financial support for Pinneberg. While he falls apart she is still able to pull the family through, first with her ability to find employment when he fails and with her adaptable moral standards with which she is able to adjust to the failing economic situation. Where Pinneberg can only act like a typical middle class citizen with strict social standards, Bunny quickly adapts and although she does not condone Pinneberg’s situation she advises him to stick it out.

Pinneberg’s choices were difficult ones since no political party in Weimar Germany had a solution for the economic debacle of 1929 when the New York stock market crash hit Germany. Soon the economy had almost collapsed with more than one third of the population out of work, radically cut back unemployment benefits, without housing and little savings. Berlin became a disaster zone with squatters occupying large parts of the suburbs. Through the generosity of a friend, the Pinnebergs eventually find a small cottage on a garden plot (Schrebergarten) where they hope to weather out the bad times.

IRMGARD KEUN, DAS KUNSTSEIDENE MÄDCHEN (1932)

Doris, ’s young, working class protagonist sees advertisements and watches movies and becomes infatuated with images of glamour in Das kunstseidene Mädchen. She steals a fur coat, leaves her hometown, and travels to Berlin to be a star (“ein Glanz”), Finally, she is overwhelmed by Berlin’s dazzling lifestyle.

As in most Berlin of the Weimar era, this book includes a wealth of autobiographic elements from the author’s life, giving the novel a strong sense of authenticity. Like her protagonist, Keun came to Berlin from Cologne looking for a life of fame in the movies. The stolen fur coat serves as a symbol for the glamorous life she is dreaming of. Like a picaresque hero, Doris is in awe of everything she experiences in the exciting city and writes her experiences down as they come to her. But unlike a flaneur, Doris does not come from a privileged background and has to work hard for a living. She turns to dating men who will feed, clothe, and house her when she realizes how hard her dreams are to fulfill.

Doris loves the city: “I love Berlin with an anxiety in my knees and I don’t know what I will eat tomorrow, but I don’t care, since now I sit at the Café Josty at the Potsdamer Platz.” Since fame eludes her, the novel portrays Doris’ gradual social downfall and her constant struggle against becoming a prostitute. She is taken in by various men, among them a blind war veteran and later a more educated man whose wife has left him. As Doris moves from a girlfriend's apartment to a filthy rented room and then to a park bench, the novel’s narrative style disintegrates into a jumble of emotions and impressions: "And the light oozed from the earth like silken white fog, and my tired head wondered how it was possible that it could come out of such hard pavement.” But eventually Doris has learned her lesson: the desire to strike it rich and to trick yourself to the top is not the right approach to life. She hopes to return to a working class friend whose offer of a place in his small house on the outskirts she had initially declined.

The naiveté of Keun’s protagonist is shown in her first arrival at Friedrichstraße station, where she runs into a political for the French politicians Laval und Briand. Although Doris had never heard of the politicians before, she is soon swept away by the enthusiasm of the rally and cheers with the others in front of the where the politicians are staying. Like the demonstrators, Doris screams for world peace, because she senses if she does not demonstrate there will be war. At the rally Doris picks up her first male acquaintance in Berlin. He buys her food, but is only interested in discussing sex with her, not French politicians.

In another scene (reprinted in Berliner Spaziergänge) Doris befriends Brenner, a blind war veteran, who is interested in her experiences in the city. She describes Berlin’s glittering world to him, the world of coffeehouses, bars, streetwalkers, advertisements, traffic, and the atmosphere of frantic exhilaration the city provides. It is in these scenes where Keun excels and where her modernist style shines. Her description is written in a true flaneur style when Doris records her impression with camera-like precision and excitement. When Doris takes Brenner out later, she desperately seeks to describe Berlin's energy for him. “I just want him to like my Berlin”. But her images do not convince Brenner: “The city isn’t any good and the city isn’t happy and the city is sick.”

Keun’s model for her book was Anita Loos’ 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes that describes the successful adventures of a blonde Arkansas bombshell who worked various cities in the US and Europe as a gold digger. But, unlike her model, Keun shows her tongue-in-cheek humor in scenes, which the critic Kurt Tucholsky praised as "a woman with humor”. Keun writes, Doris “made the side of [her] nose quiver like a giant Belgian rabbit eating cabbage”, when she wants to seduce a man. With her style, Keun imitates life as she perceives it: I want “to write like a movie, because my life is like that and its going to become even more so. … And it will be good to be writing just for myself without commas for a change, and in real language – not the unnatural stuff from the office.”

With Doris the figure of the “femme flaneur” entered Berlin culture. They were professional women, who worked as secretaries in offices from eight to six, and roamed Berlin’s exciting streets at night. These “new” women used their financial freedom to decide when and if they wanted to get married or lead a party life, sit in bars until the sun rose, and walk the boulevards watching others and being watched themselves. All of these activities had previously been dominated by men, but now women became interested in nightlife and flanerie, always on the verge of going one step too far and loosing their reputation. Women began to develop a sense of fashion appropriate to the occasion, shortened their skirts, danced the “Charleston” and lived life to its fullest. Several female artists began to record the new freedom of the “femme flaneur”, such as Jeanne Mammen, a passionate flaneur who recorded Berlin’s libertine entertainment world. Doris is Keun’s version of ’s , an American bar singer at Berlin’s Kit Kat nightclub that turned into the successful 1972 movie .

Like Keun Doris was a regular barfly at the Romanische Café, located in Berlin West across from the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Although Doris questioned the legitimacy of writers with their long hair she is still intrigued by their lifestyle. Unlike her naive protagonist however, the real Irmgard Keun was an intellectual who frequented literary circles and was a serious writer. She was friends with many of Weimar Germany’s critical establishment, among them Alfred Döblin, who encouraged her to write. From 1936 to 1938 she lived with the Austrian writer Joseph Roth with whom she traveled throughout Europe. After the German invasion of the in 1940, Keun returned to and, protected by false reports of her suicide, lived undercover until 1945. Keun’s books were rediscovered by the women’s movement in the nineteen-eighties shortly before her death in 1982.

It was Keun’s literary colleague Mascha Kaléko, another regular at the Romanische Café, who captured the atmosphere of young women roaming the streets of Berlin West in her poetic Lyrisches Stenogrammheft. In her poem “Julinacht an der Gedächtniskirche”, reprinted in Berliner Spaziergänge, she describes the feeling of drifting along the glittering windows of Tauentzien Street where the pulse of the city beats among hundreds of movie posters. Although Kaléko like Keun searches for happiness and love, she also realizes its futility. The melancholic recognition of failure established her poetry volume as an important document of poetic expression during the Weimar period.

ALFRED DÖBLIN, (1929)

Berlin Alexanderplatz is the story of a small-time criminal, Franz Biberkopf, who after his release from prison, is drawn back into Berlin’s underworld. The city, a chaotic collection of buildings, people, newspapers, advertising, and blaring lights thrives on petty criminals, prostitutes and bars full of jazz music. Biberkopf is “befriended” by the criminal Reinhold, but Reinhold betrays him and almost causes his death in a car accident. When Biberkopf becomes a pimp, Reinhold rapes and kills his girl, over which Biberkopf almost goes insane, but eventually recovers. Biberkopf is beaten down three times in his confrontation with the city, the first time, after discovering that a widow who he enticed into sleeping with him had been robbed because an acquaintance had misrepresented him. Biberkopf is so embarrassed that he leaves his girlfriend and goes into hiding, drinking himself into a stupor. His second breakdown occurs after another partner, Reinhold urges him to participate in a crime caper, but pushes him in front of a car when Biberkopf wants to quit. After losing his arm in this incident Biberkopf still tries to be loyal to Reinhold. Biberkopf is so naïve that he does not realize that Reinhold is after his girl, Mieze. When Mieze refuses to leave Biberkopf, Reinhold gets mad and strangles her. As a consequence, Biberkopf almost goes insane and is sent to the city asylum. After his release he helps convict Reinhold. Biberkopf finally picks up where he left before the accident and continues working, now without fighting the city. “I have nothing further to report about his life”, are Döblin’s last words about this tragic character, adding “Cursed are those who rely on others”. At over six hundred pages, Berlin Alexanderplatz is not a simple novel. Berlin’s topography represents only one of the many layers of meaning in this collage-like novel. Initially, the city is Biberkopf’s adversary, a hostile environment, as Biberkopf senses after leaving jail in the northern district of , “the punishment begins.” The punishment means mounting a streetcar, facing other people, seeing the streets, houses and stores again. Bouts of terror strike him over and over again as he walks around. The next stop is Rosenthaler Platz, his old haunt, where many petty criminals hung out in the nineteen-twenties. The Rosenthaler Platz area used to be one of the few places where Jews could enter Berlin through the Rosenthal Tor, which was torn down in 1861. It is the notorious Scheunenviertel area that Fallada describes in his memoirs (in this book in chapter 1). Two Jews Biberkopf meets help him overcome his fear that life in Berlin is punishment and he is off again to walk the city. The next stop is a cinema, then a prostitute, and finally the sister of his ex-girl friend who he had killed, the crime he was sent to jail for. Franz is finally off to a new start and feels at home again in this dubious district of Rosenthaler Platz/Alexanderplatz. Döblin uses the nine books of his lengthy novel to show Franz’s progress in his relationship with the city. Book I showed Franz’ gradual emergence from his feeling of claustrophobia, the second book introduces the ways in which the city functions; Franz registers with the police as an ex-convict, and starts working as a street vendor. The middle parts of the book show Franz running repeatedly into the violent side of the city, where industrial force is equaled with violence against people. This excerpt is reprinted in Berliner Spaziergänge. Franz’ struggle in the sixth book is compared with the struggle of the city of Babylon whose sinfulness angered God and caused him to destroy the place. Döblin sees Biberkopf’s struggle as a struggle between man and the city he must conquer before he can become a decent person. Berlin has become Babylon, the ultimate sinful city that tries to seduce Biberkopf to a life of immorality. In Fassbinder’s movie version we see several scenes of prostitution and persuasion to prostitution, which Biberkopf’s steadfastly resists. Babylon is the ancient city known in Old Testament as the city of the Tower of Babel where man tempted God by dancing around the golden calf. The Babylonians were punished by God by confusing all languages so that people could no longer communicate. Interesting enough, the tower of Babylon was used again in ’s movie Metropolis, completed only two years before Döblin’s novel, to show the sinfulness of fictitious Metropolis. Döblin knew that Berlin’s Pergamon Museum possessed the magnificent Ishtar Gate from ancient Babylon. It had been assembled under the Kaiser as an expression of imperial glory to rival the British museum, but was now seen as a sign of hubris. If the central parts of the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz constitute a battle between Biberkopf and the city of Berlin, the end indicates that Berlin has won. An amorphous mass of concrete, bricks and steel never changes but simple devours its people. Franz is now one of those millions, without any ambitions. The book is not merely a novel about Berlin but also cacophonic city life. Fragmented scenes are presented in different styles such as in Berlin dialect, in advertising language, or as excerpts from science books, along with allusions to mythology and the . The result is a confusing blend of information, allowing the reader to experience Biberkopf’s utter bewilderment. Biberkopf attempts to cope, but the city turns out to be stronger and almost crushes him. A popular revival of Döblin’s novel began with ’s 1978 TV movie version. At fifteen and a half hours, the film was the longest narrative film ever produced in Germany. With Berlin Alexanderplatz Fassbinder created a melodrama not just about Berlin, but about German history. Fassbinder altered Döblin’s novel in setting Biberkopf’s death scene in a concentration camp to turn the story into a universal symbol. Fassbinder identified closely with Biberkopf and explored his intense friendship with Reinhold. According to Fassbinder, these two men love and hate one another, but refuse to admit their feelings, because there is "something mysterious [that] brings them closer together than is normally considered decent between men". Fassbinder does not see them as homosexuals, for "there is nothing more and nothing less between them than a pure love that is not jeopardized by anything social". Franz Biberkopf is a man full of contradictions, as we can never predict how he will react. Mieze’s murder scene stands out as an unsettling film portrayal where neither the culprit nor the victim realizes they were heading towards disaster.

The ambiguity of the story is underlined in Fassbinder’s cinematic interpretation, which he filmed in low light, almost in darkness. When the movie was first presented on TV in 1980 Fassbinder’s choice of lighting was heavily criticized. In the digitally remastered and lighter version of 2007 more details are visible, where the stylized use of studio light makes sense, since “real sunlight in real streets would have transformed the film's realism into something documentary and thus destroyed it” (William Roth).

QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

1. Look at the map and locate some of Berlin’s prominent buildings. What has changed after the end of WWI? What do these changes suggest about the development in the city? When was this map printed and what might have been the reason for its publication?

2. Take a look at the picture of Potsdamer Platz and locate the buildings on the map. Look at Kästner’s poem and imagine stepping off the Potsdamer Platz train station. What would a first-time visitor explore?

3. Locate the buildings and streets in the excerpts of Keun’s, Fallada’s and Döblin’s novels. Where do the locations differ from those in Erich Kästner’s novel Emil und die Detektive?

4. Single out a sequence of Ruttmann’s film Berlin, Sinfonie einer großen Stadt, and explore some of the movie’s guiding principles, form and city life. Where do you see crosscutting between abstract forms and buildings or traffic?

5. What “story” does Berlin, Sinfonie einer großen Stadt tell? Analyze whether it is a true documentary or whether there are enough elements for a feature film.

6. Discuss the overall appeal of Kästner’s story, considering that it is one of the most popular children’s novels ever written. In order to be popular a children’s book has to appeal to adults as well. What might adults see in this novel?

7. Fallada’s novel was another a very popular novel of the Weimar period, not least due to its memorable title. Told in a chatty style it combines elements of pulp fiction with a serious social topic. Make a list of serious and less serious elements of this book.

8. Read the new English translation of Irmgard Keun’s novel Das kunstseidene Mächen? How does Keun’s style match her approach to life? Give specific examples.

9. Döblin uses Berlin’s Alexanderplatz as a symbol for the city’s contentious class society. Unlike Potsdamer Platz in the West, Alexanderplatz was swarming with small time crooks and homeless people. What was Döblin’s intention of placing his novel in a crime district?

10. What is your overall perception of Weimar Berlin after reading the excerpts and books? Why has Weimar Berlin still such appeal to present-day Berliners?