The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

  “But what can you really do for these boys?” I asked.

  “Very little. We teach them a trade. Later, we try to find them work — which is almost impossible. If they have work in the neighbourhood, they can still sleep here at nights . . . The Principal believes that their lives can be changed through the teachings of the Christian religion. I’m afraid I cannot feel this. The problem is not so simple. I’m afraid that most of them, if they cannot get work, will take to crime. After all, people cannot be ordered to starve.”

  “Isn’t there any alternative?”

  Brink rose and led me to the window.

  “You see those two buildings? One is the engineering-works, the other is the prison. For the boys of this district there used to be two alternatives . . . But now the works are bankrupt. Next week they will close down.”

  This morning I went to see Rudi’s clubhouse, which is also the office of a pathfinder’s magazine. The editor and scoutmaster, Uncle Peter, is a haggard, youngish man, with a parchment-coloured face and deeply sunken eyes, dressed in corduroy jacket and shorts. He is evidently Rudi’s idol. The only time Rudi will stop talking is when Uncle Peter has something to say. They showed me dozens of photographs of boys, all taken with the camera tilted upwards, from beneath, so that they look like epic giants, in profile against enormous clouds. The magazine itself has articles on hunting, tracking, and preparing food — all written in super-enthusiastic style, with a curious underlying note of hysteria, as though the actions described were part of a religious or erotic ritual. There were half-a-dozen boys in the room with us: all of them in a state of heroic semi-nudity, wearing the shortest of shorts and the thinnest of shirts or singlets, although the weather is so cold.

  When I had finished looking at the photographs, Rudi took me into the club-meeting room. Long coloured banners hung down the walls, embroidered with initials and mysterious totem devices. At one end of the room was a low table covered with a crimson embroidered cloth — a kind of altar. On the table were candles in brass candlesticks.

  “We light them on Thursdays,” Rudi explained, “when we have our camp-fire palaver. Then we sit round in a ring on the floor, and sing songs and tell stories.”

  Above the table with the candlesticks was a sort of icon — the framed drawing of a young pathfinder of unearthly beauty, gazing sternly into the far distance, a banner in his hand. The whole place made me feel profoundly uncomfortable. I excused myself and got away as soon as I could.

  Overheard in a café: a young Nazi is sitting with his girl; they are discussing the future of the Party. The Nazi is drunk.

  “Oh, I know we shall win, all right,” he exclaims impatiently, “but that’s not enough!” He thumps the table with his fist: “Blood must flow!”

  The girl strokes his arm reassuringly. She is trying to get him to come home. “But, of course, it’s going to flow, darling,” she coos soothingly, “the Leader’s promised that in our programme.”

  Today is “Silver Sunday.” The streets are crowded with shoppers. All along the Tauentzienstrasse, men, women, and boys are hawking postcards, flowers, song-books, hair-oil, bracelets. Christmas-trees are stacked for sale along the central path between the tram-lines. Uniformed S.A. men rattle their collecting-boxes. In the side-streets, lorry-loads of police are waiting; for any large crowd, nowadays, is capable of turning into a political riot. The Salvation Army have a big illuminated tree on the Wittenbergplatz, with a blue electric star. A group of students were standing round it, making sarcastic remarks. Among them I recognized Werner, from the “communist” café.

  “This time next year,” said Werner, “that star will have changed its colour!” He laughed violently — he was in an excited, slightly hysterical mood. Yesterday, he told me, he’d had a great adventure: “You see, three other comrades and myself decided to make a demonstration at the Labour Exchange in Neukölln. I had to speak, and the others were to see I wasn’t interrupted. We went round there at about half past ten, when the bureau’s most crowded. Of course, we’d planned it all beforehand — each of the comrades had to hold one of the doors, so that none of the clerks in the office could get out. There they were, cooped up like rabbits . . . Of course, we couldn’t prevent their telephoning for the Police, we knew that. We reckoned we’d got about six or seven minutes . . . Well, as soon as the doors were fixed, I jumped onto a table. I just yelled out whatever came into my head — I don’t know what I said. They liked it, anyhow . . . In half a minute I had them so excited I got quite scared. I was afraid they’d break into the office and lynch somebody. There was a fine old shindy, I can tell you! But just when things were beginning to look properly lively, a comrade came up from below to tell us the Police were there already — just getting out of their car. So we had to make a dash for it . . . I think they’d have got us, only the crowd was on our side, and wouldn’t let them through until we were out by the other door, into the street . . .” Werner finished breathlessly. “I tell you, Christopher,” he added, “the capitalist system can’t possibly last much longer now. The workers are on the move.”

  Early this evening I was in the Bülowstrasse. There had been a big Nazi meeting at the Sportpalast, and groups of men and boys were just coming away from it, in their brown or black uniforms. Walking along the pavement ahead of me were three S.A. men. They all carried Nazi banners on their shoulders, like rifles, rolled tight around the staves — the banner-staves had sharp metal points, shaped into arrow-heads.

  All at once, the three S.A. men came face to face with a youth of seventeen or eighteen, dressed in civilian clothes, who was hurrying along in the opposite direction. I heard one of the Nazis shout: “That’s him!” and immediately all three of them flung themselves upon the young man. He uttered a scream, and tried to dodge, but they were too quick for him. In a moment they had jostled him into the shadow of a house entrance, and were standing over him, kicking him and stabbing at him with the sharp metal points of their banners. All this happened with such incredible speed that I could hardly believe my eyes — already, the three S.A. men had left their victim, and were barging their way through the crowd; they made for the stairs which led up to the station of the Overhead Railway.

  Another passer-by and myself were the first to reach the doorway where the young man was lying. He lay huddled crookedly in the corner, like an abandoned sack. As they picked him up, I got a sickening glimpse of his face — his left eye was poked half out, and blood poured from the wound. He wasn’t dead. Somebody volunteered to take him to the hospital in a taxi.

  By this time, dozens of people were looking on. They seemed surprised, but not particularly shocked — this sort of thing happened too often, nowadays. “Allerhand. . .” they murmured. Twenty yards away, at the Potsdamerstrasse corner, stood a group of heavily armed policemen. With their chests out, and their hands on their revolver belts, they magnificently disregarded the whole affair.

  Werner has become a hero. His photograph was in the Rote Fahne a few days ago, captioned: “Another victim of the Police blood-bath.” Yesterday, which was New Year’s Day, I went to visit him in hospital.

  Just after Christmas, it seems, there was a street-fight near the Stettiner Bahnhof. Werner was on the edge of the crowd, not knowing what the fight was about. On the off-chance that it might be something political, he began yelling: “Red Front!” A policeman tried to arrest him. Werner kicked the policeman in the stomach. The policeman drew his revolver and shot Werner three times through the leg. When he had finished shooting, he called another policeman, and together they carried Werner into a taxi. On the way to the police-station, the policemen hit him on the head with their truncheons, until he fainted. When he has sufficiently recovered, he will, most probably, be prosecuted.

  He told me all this with the greatest satisfaction, sitting up in bed surrounded by his admiring friends, including Rudi and Inge, in her Henry the Eighth hat. Around him, on the blanket, lay his press-cuttings. Somebody had carefully underlined each menti
on of Werner’s name with a red pencil.

  Today, January 22nd, the Nazis held a demonstration on the Bülowplatz, in front of the Karl Liebknecht House. For the last week the communists have been trying to get the demonstration forbidden: they say it is simply intended as a provocation — as, of course, it was. I went along to watch it with Frank, the newspaper correspondent.

  As Frank himself said afterwards, this wasn’t really a Nazi demonstration at all, but a Police demonstration — there were at least two policemen to every Nazi present. Perhaps General Schleicher only allowed the march to take place in order to show who are the real masters of Berlin. Everybody says he’s going to proclaim a military dictatorship.

  But the real masters of Berlin are not the Police, or the Army, and certainly not the Nazis. The masters of Berlin are the workers — despite all the propaganda I’ve heard and read, all the demonstrations I’ve attended, I only realized this for the first time today. Comparatively few of the hundreds of people in the streets round the Bülowplatz can have been organized communists, yet you had the feeling that every single one of them was united against this march. Somebody began to sing the “International,” and, in a moment, everyone had joined in — even the women with their babies, watching from top-storey windows. The Nazis slunk past, marching as fast as they knew how, between their double rows of protectors. Most of them kept their eyes on the ground, or glared glassily ahead: a few attempted sickly, furtive grins. When the procession had passed, an elderly fat little S.A. man, who had somehow got left behind, came panting along at the double, desperately scared of finding himself alone, and trying vainly to catch up with the rest. The whole crowd roared with laughter.

  During the demonstration nobody was allowed on the Bülowplatz itself. So the crowd surged uneasily about, and things began to look nasty. The police, brandishing their rifles, ordered us back; some of the less experienced ones, getting rattled, made as if to shoot. Then an armoured car appeared, and started to turn its machine-gun slowly in our direction. There was a stampede into house doorways and cafés; but no sooner had the car moved on, than everybody rushed out into the street again, shouting and singing. It was too much like a naughty schoolboy’s game to be seriously alarming. Frank enjoyed himself enormously, grinning from ear to ear, and hopping about, in his flapping overcoat and huge owlish spectacles, like a mocking, ungainly bird.

  •

  Only a week since I wrote the above. Schleicher has resigned. The monocles did their stuff. Hitler has formed a cabinet with Hugenberg. Nobody thinks it can last till the spring.

  The newspapers are becoming more and more like copies of a school magazine. There is nothing in them but new rules, new punishments, and lists of people who have been “kept in.” This morning, Göring has invented three fresh varieties of high treason.

  Every evening, I sit in the big half-empty artists’ café by the Memorial Church, where the Jews and left-wing intellectuals bend their heads together over the marble tables, speaking in low, scared voices. Many of them know that they will certainly be arrested — if not today, then tomorrow or next week. So they are polite and mild with each other, and raise their hats and inquire after their colleagues’ families. Notorious literary tiffs of several years’ standing are forgotten.

  Almost every evening, the S.A. men come into the café. Sometimes they are only collecting money; everybody is compelled to give something. Sometimes they have come to make an arrest. One evening a Jewish writer, who was present, ran into the telephone-box to ring up the Police. The Nazis dragged him out, and he was taken away. Nobody moved a finger. You could have heard a pin drop, till they were gone.

  The foreign newspaper correspondents dine every night at the same little Italian restaurant, at a big round table, in the corner. Everybody else in the restaurant is watching them and trying to overhear what they are saying. If you have a piece of news to bring them — the details of an arrest, or the address of a victim whose relatives might be interviewed — then one of the journalists leaves the table and walks up and down with you outside, in the street.

  A young communist I know was arrested by the S.A. men, taken to a Nazi barracks, and badly knocked about. After three or four days, he was released and went home. Next morning there was a knock at the door. The communist hobbled over to open it, his arm in a sling — and there stood a Nazi with a collecting-box. At the sight of him the communist completely lost his temper. “Isn’t it enough,” he yelled, “that you beat me up? And you dare to come and ask me for money?”

  But the Nazi only grinned. “Now, now, comrade! No political squabbling! Remember, we’re living in the Third Reich! We’re all brothers! You must try and drive that silly political hatred from your heart!”

  This evening I went into the Russian tea-shop in the Kleiststrasse, and there was D. For a moment I really thought I must be dreaming. He greeted me quite as usual, beaming all over his face.

  “Good God!” I whispered. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  D. beamed. “You thought I might have gone abroad?”

  “Well, naturally . . .”

  “But the situation nowadays is so interesting . . .”

  I laughed. “That’s one way of looking at it, certainly . . . But isn’t it awfully dangerous for you?”

  D. merely smiled. Then he turned to the girl he was sitting with and said, “This is Mr Isherwood . . . You can speak quite openly to him. He hates the Nazis as much as we do. Oh, yes! Mr Isherwood is a confirmed anti-fascist!”

  He laughed very heartily and slapped me on the back. Several people who were sitting near us overheard him. Their reactions were curious. Either they simply couldn’t believe their ears, or they were so scared that they pretended to hear nothing, and went on sipping their tea in a state of deaf horror. I have seldom felt so uncomfortable in my whole life.

  (D.’s technique appears to have had its points, all the same. He was never arrested. Two months later, he successfully crossed the frontier into Holland.)

  This morning, as I was walking down the Bülowstrasse, the Nazis were raiding the house of a small liberal pacifist

  publisher. They had brought a lorry and were piling it with the publisher’s books. The driver of the lorry mockingly read out the titles of the books to the crowd:

  “Nie Wieder Krieg!” he shouted, holding up one of them by the corner of the cover, disgustedly, as though it were a nasty kind of reptile. Everybody roared with laughter.

  “ ‘No More War!’ ” echoed a fat, well-dressed woman, with a scornful, savage laugh. “What an idea!”

  At present, one of my regular pupils is Herr N., a police chief under the Weimar régime. He comes to me every day. He wants to brush up his English, for he is leaving very soon to take up a job in the United States. The curious thing about these lessons is that they are all given while we are driving about the streets in Herr N.’s enormous closed car. Herr N. himself never comes into our house: he sends up his chauffeur to fetch me, and the car moves off at once. Sometimes we stop for a few minutes at the edge of the Tiergarten, and stroll up and down the paths — the chauffeur always following us at a respectful distance.

  Herr N. talks to me chiefly about his family. He is worried about his son, who is very delicate, and whom he is obliged to leave behind, to undergo an operation. His wife is delicate, too. He hopes the journey won’t tire her. He describes her symptoms, and the kind of medicine she is taking. He tells me stories about his son as a little boy. In a tactful, impersonal way we have become quite intimate. Herr N. is always charmingly polite, and listens gravely and carefully to my explanations of grammatical points. Behind everything he says I am aware of an immense sadness.

  We never discuss politics; but I know that Herr N. must be an enemy of the Nazis, and, perhaps, even in hourly danger of arrest. One morning, when we were driving along the Unter den Linden, we passed a group of self-important S.A. men, chatting to each other and blocking the whole pavement. Passers-by were obliged to walk in the gutt
er. Herr N. smiled faintly and sadly: “One sees some queer sights in the streets nowadays.” That was his only comment.

  Sometimes he will bend forward to the window and regard a building or a square with a mournful fixity, as if to impress its image upon his memory and to bid it goodbye.

  Tomorrow I am going to England. In a few weeks I shall return, but only to pick up my things, before leaving Berlin altogether.

  Poor Frl. Schroeder is inconsolable: “I shall never find another gentleman like you, Herr Issyvoo — always so punctual with the rent . . . I’m sure I don’t know what makes you want to leave Berlin, all of a sudden, like this . . .”

  It’s no use trying to explain to her, or talking politics. Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new régime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about “Der Führer” to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.