Nabokov believed that during his early years in Berlin he must have ridden the elevated railway with another literary émigré—Franz Kafka. He might indeed have done so, for Kafka, who had moved to the city in September 1923, occasionally took the train from his lodging house in Steglitz to the city center. He had visited Berlin often before the war, and, like so many transplants from the Austrian empire, found the place invigorating compared to Vienna, where he had also lived. “As a city Berlin is so much better than Vienna, that decaying mammoth village,” he wrote in 1914. Unlike Nabokov, who could support himself in Berlin by giving tennis and English lessons to wealthy Russians, Kafka was obliged to get by on a tiny pension from the insurance company for which he had toiled in Prague. (Had he not been paid in Czech kronen, he would not have been able to survive at all.) He lived in squalid rooms which he could not afford to heat in the winter. Already seriously sick with the tuberculosis that would soon kill him, he compared his move to Berlin to Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812. Yet he also saw the big anonymous city as a refuge from the noisy relatives and dreary professional duties that had burdened his days in Prague. Here he wrote his last stories—“The Hunger Artist” and “Josephine, the Singer”—which deal with the eternal opposition between the painstaking artistic craftsman and a public that wants only entertainment and diversion. It is perhaps not accidental that Kafka wrote these stories in Berlin, whose cultural marketplace was as merciless as any in the world.
Unlike Kafka, the Czech journalist Egon Erwin Kisch was drawn to Berlin for its hectic pace, bright lights, busy streets, and technological innovations. “A lot of work and even more amusement, the telephone always ringing, people constantly around, and just enough money”—such was Kisch’s Berlin. As an émigré from Prague, Kisch was particularly interested in Berlin’s Czech community, whose influence over the local theatrical scene was one of his pet subjects. His only regret in coming to Berlin was the dearth of good Czech food—no decent dumplings, Prague
While residing in the German capital Kisch invented the modern concept of the reporter as part entertainer, part crusader. Although he claimed that “in a world flooded with lies . . . nothing is more amazing than the simple truth . . . nothing is more imaginative than objectivity,” he slanted his reportage to fit his own political bias, which was leftist. After the Nazis came to power he was lucky to be deported rather than murdered. His books were among those burned in Berlin in May 1933.
Kisch was friends with Joseph Roth, another refuge from “Kakania”—Robert Musil’s term for the Austro-Hungarian empire. Roth was best known as a novelist, but he too worked as a reporter, and his reportage on Weimar Berlin constitutes a perceptive portrait of the republican capital. Like so many outsiders, Roth moved to Berlin with the hopes of making money and building a career. He managed to do both, and in the process to illuminate parts of the city, such as the above-mentioned Scheunenviertel, where few reporters ventured. For him the metropolitan streets were a living stage whose daily dramas were as significant as world events. In a piece entitled “Spaziergang” (A Walk), he wrote of a café terrace “planted with pretty women waiting to be picked,” a beggar whose story was notable “precisely because no one notices it,” a cripple cleaning his nails with a file dropped by a society lady, “and thereby symbolically leapfrogging a thousand social steps.” Roth did not confine himself to such tiny dramas, and his leftist-oriented stories about German politics, like Kisch’s, earned him the enmity of the right. In 1932 he decided that it was time for him to escape to Paris. Before leaving Berlin he predicted that the Nazis “will burn our books and mean us.”
