Berlin полностью

Like Kisch and Roth, the essayist Franz Hessel was fascinated by Berlin’s vibrant street life, which for him constituted a mutable theater of modernity. A native of Stettin, he had spent his childhood in Berlin before moving on to Munich and Paris, where he fell in with Gertrude Stein and her circle. Believing that Berlin, not Paris, harbored the most exciting metropolitan scene, he moved back to the German city after World War I and took a job as an editor at Rowohlt. He considered his real job, however, to be that of observing and recording the urban scene around him, a task he undertook by walking the streets with the “aimlessness” of the flaneur. Hessel fully understood that in a city like Berlin, where everyone was always in a hurry to get someplace fast, the flaneur was regarded as a “suspicious” character: “In this city, you have to ‘have to,’ otherwise you can’t. Here you don’t simply go, but go someplace. It isn’t easy for someone of our kind.” Nonetheless, Hessel persisted in his quiet, slow-paced flanerie, convinced that the city streets could be read like a book. As he wrote in his Ein Flaneur in Berlin (1929): “Flanerie is a way of reading the street, in which people’s faces, displays, shop windows, café terraces, cars, tracks, trees turn into an entire series of equivalent letters, which together form words, sentences, and pages of a book that is always news. In order to really stroll, one should not have anything too specific on one’s mind.”

As an urban “reader,” Hessel was attracted to those icons of modernity—electric lights, commercial signs and posters, shop windows, train stations. But he also cherished artifacts of the past, and he was profoundly aware that such objects would probably not be around for long in a city that had little tolerance for anachronism. Moreover, if Berlin’s streets in the 1920s were not always friendly to the aimless peregrinations of the flaneur, they would become even less so in the 1930s, when so many public spaces were taken over by the state. Hessel became “suspect” to the new rulers not only as an intensely private observer, but also as a Jew. He chose to stay on in Berlin as long as he could, in order, as he said, “to be close to the fate of the Jews.” Finally, in late 1938, he fled the city for Paris, where he joined his friend and fellow flaneur, Walter Benjamin.

Romanisches Café, 1925

Hessel, Kisch, and Roth were regulars at the Romanisches Café, which in the 1920s replaced the old café des Westens as the primary watering hole for Berlin’s cultural arbiters and their hangers-on. The Romanisches Café’s name derived from the Romanesque architectural style of the building in which it was housed. Located on a busy corner across from the Gedächtniskirche, it was anything but gemütlich. A revolving door, constantly in motion, gave access to two rooms and a gallery. Herr Nietz, the imperious doorman, supervised the traffic. “Artists whom Nietz does not know simply do not exist,” averred one customer. The smaller room on the left called the “swimming pool,” was reserved for generous tippers with fat wallets and big names, along with their “little girls” like “Takka-Takka” and “Nadya,” famous tarts who had been named in many a divorce suit. The larger room on the right, the “wading basin,” accommodated aspiring artists who had not yet learned to stay afloat in the deep end of the cultural pool, as well as writers and painters with prominent names but somewhat thinner wallets. This is where Kisch held court, “conducting excited conversations at all the tables at the same time, reading all the newspapers as well, without neglecting the fascinating gaze he reserves for all the women passing by the pool.” Guests who wanted to play chess or simply to stare at the social paddling went up to the gallery, which was reached by a circular staircase. Celebrity-searching tourists, instructed by guidebooks that the Romanisches Café was the best place in Berlin to see famous artists, were confined to a glassed-in terrace outside the main rooms. Günther Birkenfeld, a young writer who frequented the café, aptly captured its unique mixture of banality and brilliance:

Everybody who was anybody or who hoped to be somebody in the world of culture between Reykjavik and Tahiti assembled here. Just across from the revolving door stood a buffet, which in terms of architectural hideousness and culinary tastelessness was the equal of any Prussian railway waiting room. Over it hung one of those mass-produced wagon wheel chandeliers. And yet this was the place where [Max] Slevogt, [Emil] Orlik, and Mopp [Maximilian Oppen-heimer] drank their daily coffee.