Berlin полностью

Unlike in the old café des Westens, the regulars at the Romanisches Café did not sit around all day solving the problems of the world. Rather, they typically stayed for just an hour or two, trading gossip and making deals, much like the Hollywood moguls some of them would later become. Impecunious types who, in old-Bohemian fashion, tried to milk a single drink for an entire day’s stay received a curt message from the owner saying that they must pay up and leave. The Romanisches Café, in other words, was a perfect mirror of the sink-or-swim cultural milieu that it served.

One Romanisches Café regular who did manage to malinger over his “egg-in-a-glass” (this being the standard sustenance of hard-up artists, inspiring the lines: “Once man was like God, but that has been spoiled. Now man rules alone, on an egg, soft-boiled”) was the dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Born and raised in the Bavarian city of Augsburg, and finding nearby Munich too provincial, Brecht visited Berlin often in the immediate postwar era. The capital turned out to be his kind of city: wonderfully vulgar and corrupt. “Everything here is chockfull of tastelessness, but in the greatest dimensions,” he reported, adding: “The swindle of Berlin distinguishes itself from all other swindles through its breathtaking shamelessness.” Yet the big city was hard to crack, and in pursuit of useful contacts Brecht stayed up all night drinking and playing his guitar, hopping from bed to bed, cultivating people who (in his words) “shove, envy, hate, slander, and grind each other down.” The hectic pace took its toll, and Brecht was often obliged to interrupt his ambitious culture-climbing with stays in the Charit’. Arnolt Bronnen, a young playwright who fell in (and later out) with Brecht, described a skinny fellow “with a lean, dry, bristly, sallow face; piercing eyes, and short dark bristling hair that fell over his forehead in two curls. A cheap pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung loosely from remarkably shapely ears across the bridge of his sharp and narrow nose. His mouth was extremely delicate, and seemed to be dreaming the dreams that eyes dream.”

Brecht tasted his first success not in Berlin but in Munich, the city he was about to abandon. There his play Drums in the Night, which dealt with the Spartacist upheaval in Berlin, had its premier in 1922 and won the Kleist Prize. Brecht now turned his intention to another topical work, In the Jungle of Cities. Though set in Chicago (which Brecht had never visited), the scene was really the German capital in its postrevolutionary convulsions, fought over by gangster clans. The plot (borrowing heavily from the story of Verlaine and Rimbaud) chronicles the love-hate relationship between a middle-aged merchant (Shlink) and a poor clerk (Garga). At one point Shlink says to Garga: “The infinite isolation of man makes even enmity an unreachable goal. Understanding, even with animals, is not possible.” Garga uses his youth and superior street smarts to get the upper hand in his relationship with the older man, ultimately driving him to suicide. He then sets off to find his “freedom” in America’s wide-open spaces. Premiering in Munich in May 1923, the play created enough of a succ‘s scandale that Brecht could think of settling permanently in Germany’s own urban jungle on the Spree.

Bertolt Brecht, circa 1925

He made the move a year later and quickly established himself as the enfant terrible of Berlin’s theatrical scene. Abandoning his wife, he took up with a prominent actress, Helene Weigel, whom he eventually married. Max Reinhardt gave him a job as dramaturg at his Deutsches Theater. Although he now had a little money, Brecht carefully cultivated a proletarian street-tough image, replete with (tailored) work shirt, boots, battered leather jacket, permanent stubble, and semishaved head. Zuckmayer, not entirely taken in by Brecht’s pose, said he looked like “a cross between a truck driver, a Black Forest wanderer, and a Jesuit seminarian.” The look effectively masked Brecht’s true character as a shrewd and ruthless artist-businessman who bargained hard with his employers and played off producers against each other. As one of his biographers noted: “Publishers no more had him on an exclusive basis than any of his lovers.” Characteristically, his advice to other artists who wanted to make it in the urban jungle was to remember always that “What is demanded here is chopped beef.”