The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

  Bobby, anyhow, is in deep disgrace. Not only is he out of work and three months behind with the rent, but Frl. Schroeder has reason to suspect him of stealing money from her bag. “You know, Herr Issyvoo,” she tells me, “I shouldn’t wonder at all if he didn’t pinch those fifty marks from Frl. Kost . . . He’s quite capable of it, the pig! To think I could ever have been so mistaken in him! Will you believe it, Herr Issyvoo, I treated him as if he were my own son — and this is the thanks I get! He says he’ll pay me every pfennig if he gets this job as barman at the Lady Windermere . . . if, if . . .” Frl. Schroeder sniffs with intense scorn: “I dare say! If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be an omnibus!”

  Bobby has been turned out of his old room and banished to the “Swedish Pavilion.” It must be terribly draughty, up there. Sometimes poor Bobby looks quite blue with cold. He has changed very much during the last year — his hair is thinner, his clothes are shabbier, his cheekiness has become defiant and rather pathetic. People like Bobby are their jobs — take the job away and they partially cease to exist. Sometimes, he sneaks into the living-room, unshaven, his hands in his pockets, and lounges about uneasily defiant, whistling to himself — the dance tunes he whistles are no longer quite new. Frl. Schroeder throws him a word, now and then, like a grudging scrap of bread, but she won’t look at him or make any room for him by the stove. Perhaps she has never really forgiven him for his affair with Frl. Kost. The tickling and bottom-slapping days are over.

  Yesterday we had a visit from Frl. Kost herself. I was out at the time: when I got back I found Frl. Schroeder quite excited. “Only think, Herr Issyvoo — I wouldn’t have known her! She’s quite the lady now! Her Japanese friend has bought her a fur coat — real fur, I shouldn’t like to think what he must have paid for it! And her shoes — genuine snakeskin! Well, well, I bet she earned them! That’s the one kind of business that still goes well, nowadays . . . I think I shall have to take to the line myself!” But however much Frl. Schroeder might effect sarcasm at Frl. Kost’s expense, I could see that she’d been greatly and not unfavourably impressed. And it wasn’t so much the fur coat or the shoes which had impressed her: Frl. Kost had achieved something higher — the hall-mark of respectability in Frl. Schroeder’s world — she had had an operation in a private nursing home. “Oh, not what you think, Herr Issyvoo! It was something to do with her throat. Her friend paid for that, too, of course . . . Only imagine — the doctors cut something out of the back of her nose; and now she can fill her mouth with water and squirt it out through her nostrils, just like a syringe! I wouldn’t believe it at first — but she did it to show me! My word of honour, Herr Issyvoo, she could squirt it right across the kitchen! There’s no denying, she’s very much improved, since the time when she used to live here . . . I shouldn’t be surprised if she married a bank director one of these days. Oh, yes, you mark my words, that girl will go far . . .”

  Herr Krampf, a young engineer, one of my pupils, describes his childhood during the days of the War and the Inflation. During the last years of the War, the straps disappeared from the windows of railway carriages: people had cut them off in order to sell the leather. You even saw men and women going about in clothes made from carriage upholstery. A party of Krampf’s school friends broke into a factory one night and stole all the leather driving-belts. Everybody stole. Everybody sold what they had to sell — themselves included. A boy of fourteen, from Krampf’s class, peddled cocaine between school hours, in the streets.

  Farmers and butchers were omnipotent. Their slightest whim had to be gratified, if you wanted vegetables or meat. The Krampf family knew of a butcher in a little village outside Berlin who always had meat to sell. But the butcher had a peculiar sexual perversion. His greatest erotic pleasure was to pinch and slap the cheeks of a sensitive, well-bred girl or woman. The possibility of thus humiliating a lady like Frau Krampf excited him enormously: unless he was allowed to realize his fantasy, he refused, absolutely, to do business. So, every Sunday, Krampf’s mother would travel out to the village with her children, and patiently offer her cheeks to be slapped and pinched, in exchange for some cutlets or a steak.

  At the far end of the Potsdamerstrasse, there is a fair-ground, with merry-go-rounds, swings, and peep-shows. One of the chief attractions of the fair-grounds is a tent where boxing and wrestling matches are held. You pay your money and go in, the wrestlers fight three or four rounds, and the referee then announces that, if you want to see any more, you must pay an extra ten pfennigs. One of the wrestlers is a bald man with a very large stomach: he wears a pair of canvas trousers rolled up at the bottoms, as though he were going paddling. His opponent wears black tights, and leather kneelets which look as if they had come off an old cab-horse. The wrestlers throw each other about as much as possible, turning somersaults in the air to amuse the audience. The fat man who plays the part of loser pretends to get very angry when he is beaten, and threatens to fight the referee.

  One of the boxers is a Negro. He invariably wins. The boxers hit each other with the open glove, making a tremendous amount of noise. The other boxer, a tall, well-built young man, about twenty years younger and obviously much stronger than the Negro, is “knocked out” with absurd ease. He writhes in great agony on the floor, nearly manages to struggle to his feet at the count of ten, then collapses again, groaning. After this fight, the referee collects ten more pfennigs and calls for a challenger from the audience. Before any bona fide challenger can reply, another young man, who has been quite openly chatting and joking with the wrestlers, jumps hastily into the ring and strips off his clothes, revealing himself already dressed in shorts and boxer’s boots. The referee announces a purse of five marks; and, this time, the Negro is “knocked out.”

  The audience took the fights dead seriously, shouting encouragement to the fighters, and even quarrelling and betting amongst themselves on the results. Yet nearly all of them had been in the tent as long as I had, and stayed on after I had left. The political moral is certainly depressing: these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything.

  Walking this evening along the Kleiststrasse, I saw a little crowd gathered round a private car. In the car were two girls: on the pavement stood two young Jews, engaged in a violent argument with a large blond man who was obviously rather drunk. The Jews, it seemed, had been driving slowly along the street, on the look-out for a pick-up, and had offered these girls a ride. The two girls had accepted and got into the car. At this moment, however, the blond man had intervened. He was a Nazi, he told us, and as such felt it his mission to defend the honour of all German women against the obscene anti-Nordic menace. The two Jews didn’t seem in the least intimidated; they told the Nazi energetically to mind his own business. Meanwhile, the girls, taking advantage of the row, slipped out of the car and ran off down the street. The Nazi then tried to drag one of the Jews with him to find a policeman, and the Jew whose arm he had seized gave him an uppercut which laid him sprawling on his back. Before the Nazi could get to his feet, both young men had jumped into their car and driven away. The crowd dispersed slowly, arguing. Very few of them sided openly with the Nazi: several supported the Jews; but the majority confined themselves to shaking their heads dubiously and murmuring: “Allerhand!”

  When, three hours later, I passed the same spot, the Nazi was still patrolling up and down, looking hungrily for more German womanhood to rescue.

  We have just got a letter from Frl. Mayr: Frl. Schroeder called me in to listen to it. Frl. Mayr doesn’t like Holland. She has been obliged to sing in a lot of second-rate cafés in third-rate towns, and her bedroom is often badly heated. The Dutch, she writes, have no culture; she has only met one truly refined and superior gentleman, a widower. The widower tells her that she is a really womanly woman — he has no use for young chits of girls. He has shown his admiration for her art by presenting her with a complete new set of underclothes.

  Frl. Mayr has also had trouble with her colleagues. At one town, a rival actress, jealou
s of Frl. Mayr’s vocal powers, tried to stab her in the eye with a hatpin. I can’t help admiring that actress’s courage. When Frl. Mayr had finished with her, she was so badly injured that she couldn’t appear on the stage again for a week.

  Last night, Fritz Wendel proposed a tour of the “dives.” It was to be in the nature of a farewell visit, for the Police have begun to take a great interest in these places. They are frequently raided, and the names of their clients are written down. There is even talk of a general Berlin clean-up.

  I rather upset him by insisting on visiting the Salomé, which I had never seen. Fritz, as a connoisseur of night-life, was most contemptuous. It wasn’t even genuine, he told me. The management run it entirely for the benefit of provincial sightseers.

  The Salomé turned out to be very expensive and even more depressing than I had imagined. A few stage lesbians and some young men with plucked eyebrows lounged at the bar, uttering occasional raucous guffaws or treble hoots — supposed, apparently, to represent the laughter of the damned. The whole premises are painted gold and inferno-red — crimson plush inches thick, and vast gilded mirrors. It was pretty full. The audience consisted chiefly of respectable middle-aged tradesmen and their families, exclaiming in good-humoured amazement: “Do they really?” and “Well, I never!” We went out half-way through the cabaret performance, after a young man in a spangled crinoline and jewelled breast-caps had painfully but successfully executed three splits.

  At the entrance we met a party of American youths, very drunk, wondering whether to go in. Their leader was a small stocky young man in pince-nez, with an annoyingly prominent jaw.

  “Say,” he asked Fritz, “what’s on here?”

  “Men dressed as women,” Fritz grinned.

  The little American simply couldn’t believe it. “Men dressed as women? As women, hey? Do you mean they’re queer?”

  “Eventually we’re all queer,” drawled Fritz solemnly, in lugubrious tones. The young man looked us over slowly. He had been running and was still out of breath. The others grouped themselves awkwardly behind him, ready for anything — though their callow, open-mouthed faces in the greenish lamp-light looked a bit scared.

  “You queer, too, hey?” demanded the little American, turning suddenly on me.

  “Yes,” I said, “very queer indeed.”

  He stood there before me a moment, panting, thrusting out his jaw, uncertain, it seemed, whether he ought not to hit me in the face. Then he turned, uttered some kind of wild college battle-cry, and, followed by the others, rushed headlong into the building.

  “Ever been to that communist dive near the Zoo?” Fritz asked me, as we were walking away from the Salomé. “Eventually we should cast an eye in there . . . In six months, maybe, we’ll all be wearing red shirts . . .”

  I agreed. I was curious to know what Fritz’s idea of a “communist dive” would be like.

  It was, in fact, a small whitewashed cellar. You sat on long wooden benches at big bare tables; a dozen people together — like a school dining-hall. On the walls were scribbled expressionist drawings involving actual newspaper clippings, real playing-cards, nailed-on-beer-mats, match-boxes, cigarette cartons, and heads cut out of photographs. The café was full of students, dressed mostly with aggressive political untidiness — the men in sailor’s sweaters and stained baggy trousers, the girls in ill-fitting jumpers, skirts held visibly together with safety-pins and carelessly knotted gaudy gipsy scarves. The proprietress was smoking a cigar. The boy who acted as a waiter lounged about with a cigarette between his lips and slapped customers on the back when taking their orders.

  It was all thoroughly sham and gay and jolly: you couldn’t help feeling at home, immediately. Fritz, as usual, recognized plenty of friends. He introduced me to three of them — a man called Martin, an art student named Werner, and Inge, his girl. Inge was broad and lively — she wore a little hat with a feather in it which gave her a kind of farcical resemblance to Henry the Eighth. While Werner and Inge chattered, Martin sat silent: he was thin and dark and hatchet-faced with the sardonically superior smile of the conscious conspirator. Later in the evening, when Fritz and Werner and Inge had moved down the table to join another party, Martin began to talk about the coming civil war. When the war breaks out, Martin explained, the communists, who have very few machine-guns, will get command of the roof-tops. They will then keep the Police at bay with hand-grenades. It will only be necessary to hold out for three days, because the Soviet fleet will make an immediate dash for Swinemünde and begin to land troops. “I spend most of my time now making bombs,” Martin added. I nodded and grinned, very much embarrassed — uncertain whether he was making fun of me, or deliberately committing some appalling indiscretion. He certainly wasn’t drunk, and he didn’t strike me as merely insane.

  Presently, a strikingly handsome boy of sixteen or seventeen came into the café. His name was Rudi. He was dressed in a Russian blouse, leather shorts and despatch-rider’s boots, and he strode up to our table with all the heroic mannerisms of a messenger who returns successful from a desperate mission. He had, however, no message of any kind to deliver. After his whirlwind entry, and a succession of curt, martial handshakes, he sat down quite quietly beside us and ordered a glass of tea.

  This evening, I visited the “communist” café again. It is really a fascinating little world of intrigue and counter-intrigue. Its Napoleon is the sinister bomb-making Martin; Werner is its Danton; Rudi its Joan of Arc. Everybody suspects everybody else. Already Martin has warned me against Werner: he is

  “politically unreliable”— last summer he stole the entire funds of a communist youth organization. And Werner has warned me against Martin: he is either a Nazi agent, or a police spy, or in the pay of the French Government. In addition to this, both Martin and Werner earnestly advise me to have nothing to do with Rudi — they absolutely refuse to say why.

  But there was no question of having nothing to do with Rudi. He planted himself down beside me and began talking at once — a hurricane of enthusiasm. His favourite word is “knorke”: “Oh, ripping!” He is a pathfinder. He wanted to know what the boy scouts were like in England. Had they got the spirit of adventure? “All German boys are adventurous. Adventure is ripping. Our Scoutmaster is a ripping man. Last year he went to Lapland and lived in a hut, all through the summer, alone . . . Are you a communist?”

  “No. Are you?”

  Rudi was pained.

  “Of course! We all are, here . . . I’ll lend you some books, if you like . . . You ought to come and see our clubhouse. It’s ripping . . . We sing the Red Flag, and all the forbidden songs . . . Will you teach me English? I want to learn all languages.”

  I asked if there were any girls in his pathfinder group. Rudi was as shocked as if I’d said something really indecent.

  “Women are no good,” he told me bitterly. “They spoil everything. They haven’t got the spirit of adventure. Men understand each other much better when they’re alone together. Uncle Peter (that’s our Scoutmaster) says women should stay at home and mend socks. That’s all they’re fit for!”

  “Is Uncle Peter a communist, too?”

  “Of course!” Rudi looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Oh, no special reason,” I replied hastily. “I think perhaps I was mixing him up with somebody else . . .”

  This afternoon I travelled out to the reformatory to visit one of my pupils, Herr Brink, who is a master there. He is a small, broad-shouldered man, with the chin, dead-looking fair hair, mild eyes, and bulging, over-heavy forehead of the German vegetarian intellectual. He wears sandals and an open-necked shirt. I found him in the gymnasium, giving physical instruction to a class of mentally deficient children — for the reformatory houses mental deficients as well as juvenile delinquents. With a certain melancholy pride, he pointed out the various cases: one little boy was suffering from hereditary syphilis — he had a fearful squint; another, the child of elderly drunkards, couldn’t stop
laughing. They clambered about the wall-bars like monkeys, laughing and chattering, seemingly quite happy.

  Then we went up to the workshop, where older boys in blue overalls — all convicted criminals — were making boots. Most of the boys looked up and grinned when Brink came in, only a few were sullen. But I couldn’t look them in the eyes. I felt horribly guilty and ashamed: I seemed, at that moment, to have become the sole representative of their gaolers, of Capitalist Society. I wondered if any of them had actually been arrested in the Alexander Casino, and, if so, whether they recognized me.

  We had lunch in the matron’s room. Herr Brink apologized for giving me the same food as the boys themselves ate — potato soup with two sausages, and a dish of apples and stewed prunes. I protested — as, no doubt, I was intended to protest — that it was very good. And yet the thought of the boys having to eat it, or any other kind of meal, in that building made each spoonful stick in my throat. Institution food has an indescribable, perhaps purely imaginary, taste. (One of the most vivid and sickening memories of my own school life is the smell of ordinary white bread.)

  “You don’t have any bars or locked gates here,” I said. “I thought all reformatories had them . . . Don’t your boys often run away?”

  “Hardly ever,” said Brink, and the admission seemed to make him positively unhappy; he sank his head wearily in his hands. “Where shall they run to? Here it is bad. At home it is worse. The majority of them know that.”

  “But isn’t there a kind of natural instinct for freedom?”

  “Yes, you are right. But the boys soon lose it. The system helps them to lose it. I think perhaps that, in Germans, this instinct is never very strong.”

  “You don’t have much trouble here, then?”

  “Oh, yes. Sometimes . . . Three months ago, a terrible thing happened. One boy stole another boy’s overcoat. He asked for permission to go into the town — that is allowed — and possibly he meant to sell it. But the owner of the overcoat followed him, and they had a fight. The boy to whom the overcoat belonged took up a big stone and flung it at the other boy; and this boy, feeling himself hurt, deliberately smeared dirt into the wound, hoping to make it worse and so escape punishment. The wound did get worse. In three days the boy died of blood-poisoning. And when the other boy heard of this he killed himself with a kitchen knife . . .” Brink sighed deeply: “Sometimes I almost despair,” he added. “It seems as if there were a kind of badness, a disease, infecting the world today.”