For weeks at a time he would seem to be everywhere, and never at a loss for something to say. At the Paul Klee show where Klee’s latest, “The Twittering Machine,” had been on exhibition, Karl had overheard his sarcastic comment that Klee had joined the Bauhaus not a moment too soon. Ernst was always at the right places: at the opening of Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, at the cast party for that Czech play R.U.R., and at the secret screenings of Murnau’s Nosferatu, to name just a few.
And then he’d be nowhere. He’d disappear for weeks or a month without a word to anyone. When he returned he would pick up just where he’d left off, as if there’d been no hiatus. And when he was in town he all but lived at the Romanisches Cafe where nightly he would wander among the tables, glass in hand, a meandering focus of raillery and bavardage, dropping dry, witty, acerbic comments on art and literature like ripe fruit. No one seemed to remember who first introduced him to the cafe. He more or less insinuated himself into the regulars on his own. After a while it seemed he had always been there. Everyone knew Ernst but no one knew him well. His persona was a strange mixture of accessibility and aloofness that Karl found intriguing.
They began their friendship on a cool Saturday evening in the spring. Karl had closed his bookshop early and wandered down Budapesterstrasse to the Romanisches. It occupied the corner at Tauentzien across from the Gedachtniskirche: large for a cafe, with a roomy sidewalk area and a spacious interior for use on inclement days and during the colder seasons.
Karl had situated himself under the awning, his knickered legs resting on the empty chair next to him; he sipped an aperitif among the blossoming flower boxes as he reread Siddhartha. At the sound of clacking high heels he’d glance up and watch the “new look” women as they trooped past in pairs and trios with their clinging dresses fluttering about their knees and their smooth tight caps pulled down over their bobbed hair, their red lips, mascaraed eyes, and coats trimmed in fluffy fur snuggled around their necks.
Karl loved Berlin. He’d been infatuated with the city since his first sight of it when his father had brought him here before the war; two years ago, on his twentieth birthday, he’d dropped out of the university to carry on an extended affair with her. His lover was the center of the art world, of the new freedoms. You could be what you wanted here: a free thinker, a free lover, a communist, even a fascist; men could dress like women and women could dress like men. No limits. All the new movements in music, the arts, the cinema, and the theater had their roots here. Every time he turned around he found a new marvel.
Night was upon Karl’s mistress when Ernst Drexler stopped by the table and introduced himself.
“We’ve not formally met,” he said, thrusting out his hand. “Your name is Stehr, I believe. Come join me at my table. There are a number of things I wish to discuss with you.”
Karl wondered what things this man more than ten years his senior could wish to discuss, but since he had no other plans for the evening, he went along.
The usual crowd was in attendance at the Romanisches that night. Lately it had become the purlieu of Berlin bohemia—all the artists, writers, journalists, critics, composers, editors, directors, scripters, and anyone else who had anything to do with the avant garde of German arts, plus the girlfriends, the boyfriends, the mere hangers-on. Some sat rooted in place, others roved ceaselessly from table to table. Smoke undulated in a muslin layer above a gallimaufry of scraggly beards, stringy manes, bobbed hair framing black-rimmed eyes, homburgs, berets, monocles, pince-nez, foot-long cigarette holders, baggy sweaters, dark stockings, period attire ranging from the Hellenic to the pre-Raphaelite.
“I saw you at Siegfried the other night,” Ernst said as they reached his table in a dim rear corner, out of the peristaltic flow. Ernst took the seat against the wall where he could watch the room; he left the other for Karl. “What do you think of Lang’s latest?”
“Very Germanic,” Karl said as he took his seat and reluctantly turned his back to the room. He was a people watcher.
Ernst laughed. “How diplomatic! But how true. Deceit, betrayal, and backstabbing—in both the figurative and literal sense. Germanic indeed. Hardly Neue Sachlichkeit, though.”
“I think New Realism was the furthest thing from Lang’s mind. Now, Die Strasse, on the other hand—”
“Neue Sachlichkeit will soon join Expressionism in the mausoleum of movements. And good riddance. It is shit.”
“Kunst ist Scheisse?” Karl said, smiling. “Dada is the deadest of them all.”
Ernst laughed again. “My, you are sharp, Karl. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You’re very bright. You’re one of the few people in this room who will be able to appreciate my new entertainment.”
“Really? And what is that?”
“Inflation.”
Before Karl could ask what he meant, Ernst flagged down a passing waiter.
“The usual for me, Freddy, and—?” He pointed to Karl, who ordered a schnapps.
“Inflation? Never heard of it. A new card game?”
Ernst smiled. “No, no. It’s played with money.”
“Of course. But how—”
“It’s played with real money in the real world. It’s quite entertaining. I’ve been playing it since the New Year.”
Freddy soon delivered Karl’s schnapps. For Ernst he brought an empty stemmed glass, a sweaty carafe of chilled water, and a small bowl of sugar cubes. Karl watched fascinated as Ernst pulled a silver flask from his breast pocket and unscrewed the top. He poured three fingers of clear green liquid into the glass, then returned the flask to his coat. Next he produced a slotted spoon, placed a sugar cube in its bowl, and held it over the glass. Then he dribbled water from the carafe, letting it flow over the cube and into the glass to mix with the green liquid…which began to turn a pale yellow.
“Absinthe!” Karl whispered.
“Quite. I developed a taste for it before the war. Too bad it’s illegal now—although it’s still easily come by.”
Now Karl knew why Ernst frequently reserved this out-of-the-way table. Instinctively he glanced around, but no one was watching.
Ernst sipped and smacked his lips. “Ever tried any?”
“No.”
Karl had never had the opportunity. And besides, he’d heard that it drove you mad.
Ernst slid his glass across the table. “Take a sip.”
Part of Karl urged him to say no, while another pushed his hand forward and wound his fingers around the stem of the glass. He lifted it to his lips and took a tiny sip.
The bitterness rocked his head back and puckered his cheeks.
“That’s the wormwood,” Ernst said, retrieving his glass. “Takes some getting used to.”
Karl shuddered as he swallowed. “How did that ever become a craze?”
“For half a century, all across the continent, the cocktail hour was known as l’heure verte after this little concoction.” He sipped again, closed his eyes, savoring. “At the proper time, in the proper place, it can be…revelatory.”
After a moment, he opened his eyes and motioned Karl closer.
“Here. Move over this way and sit by me. I wish to show you something.”
Karl slid his chair around to where they both sat facing the crowded main room of the Romanisches.
Ernst waved his arm. “Look at them, Karl. The cream of the city’s artists attended by their cachinating claques and coteries of epigones and acolytes, mixing with the city’s lowlifes and lunatics. Morphine addicts and vegetarians cheek by jowl with Bolsheviks and boulevardiers, arrivistes and anarchists, abortionists and antivivisectionists, directors and dilettantes, doyennes and demimondaines.”
Karl wondered how much time Ernst spent here sipping his absinthe and observing the scene. And why. He sounded like an entomologist studying a particularly interesting anthill.
“Everyone wants to join the parade. They operate under the self-induced delusion that they’re in control: ‘What happens in the Berlin arts today, the rest o
f the world copies next week.’ True enough, perhaps. But this is the Masque of the Red Death, Karl. Huge forces are at play around them, and they are certain to get crushed as the game unfolds. Germany is falling apart—the impossible war reparations are suffocating us, the French and Belgians have been camped in the Ruhr Valley since January, the communists are trying to take over the north, the right-wingers and monarchists practically own Bavaria, and the Reichsbank’s answer to the economic problems is to print more money.”
“Is that bad?”
“Of course. It’s only paper. It’s been sending prices through the roof.”
He withdrew his wallet from his breast pocket, pulled a bill from it, and passed it to Karl.
Karl recognized it. “An American dollar.”
Ernst nodded. “‘Good as gold,’ as they say. I bought it for ten thousand marks in January. Care to guess what the local bank was paying for it today?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps…”
“Forty thousand. Forty thousand marks.”
Karl was impressed. “You quadrupled your money in four months.”
“No, Karl,” Ernst said with a wry smile. “I’ve merely quadrupled the number of marks I control. My buying power is exactly what it was in January. But I’m one of the very few people in this storm-tossed land who can say so.”
“Maybe I should try that,” Karl said softly, admiring the elegant simplicity of the plan. “Take my savings and convert it to American dollars.”
“By all means do. Clean out your bank account, pull every mark you own out from under your mattress and put them into dollars. But that’s mere survival—hardly entertainment.”
“Survival sounds good enough.”
“No, my friend. Survival is never enough. Animals limit their concerns to mere survival; humans seek entertainment. That is why we must find a way to make inflation entertaining. Inflation is here. There’s nothing we can do about it. So let’s have some fun with it.”
“I don’t know…”
“Do you own a house?”
“Yes,” Karl said slowly, cautiously. He didn’t know where this was leading. “And no.”
“Really. You mean it’s mortgaged to the hilt?”
“No. Actually it’s my mother’s. A small estate north of the city near Bernau. But I manage it for her.”
Father had died a colonel in the Argonne and he’d left it to her. But Mother had no head for money, and she hadn’t been quite herself in the five years since Father’s death. So Karl took care of the lands and the accounts, but spent most of his time in Berlin. His bookstore barely broke even, but he hadn’t opened it for profit. He’d made it a place where local writers and artists were welcome to stop and browse and meet; he reserved a small area in the rear of the store where they could sit and talk and sip the coffee he kept hot for them. His dream was that someday one of the poor unknowns who partook of his hospitality would become famous and perhaps remember the place kindly—and perhaps someday stop by to say hello with Thomas Mann or the reclusive Herman Hesse in tow. Until then Karl would be quite satisfied with providing coffee and rolls to starving scribblers.
But even from the beginning, the shop had paid nonpecuniary dividends. It was his entrée to the literati, and from there to the entire artistic caravan that swirled through Berlin.
“Any danger of losing it?”
“No.” The estate produced enough so that, along with Father’s army pension, his mother could live comfortably.
“Good. Then mortgage it. Borrow to the hilt on it, and then borrow some more. Then turn all those marks into US dollars.”
Karl was struck dumb by the idea. The family home had never had a lien on it. Never. The idea was unthinkable.
“No. I—I couldn’t.”
Ernst put his arm around Karl’s shoulder and leaned closer. Karl could smell the absinthe on his breath.
“Do it, Karl. Trust me in this. It’s an entertainment, but you’ll see some practical benefits as well. Mark my words, six months from now you’ll be able to pay off your entire mortgage with a single US dollar. A single coin.”
“I don’t know…”
“You must. I need someone who’ll play the game with me. It’s much more entertaining when you have someone to share the fun with.”
Ernst straightened up and lifted his glass.
“A toast!” He clinked his glass against Karl’s. “By the way, do you know where glass clinking originated? Back in the old days, when poisoning a rival was a fad among the upper classes, it became the practice to allow your companion to pour some of his drink into your cup, and vice versa. That way, if one of the drinks were poisoned, you’d both suffer.”
“How charming.”
“Quite. Inevitably the pouring would be accompanied by the clink of one container against another. Hence, the modern custom.” Once again he clinked his absinthe against Karl’s schnapps. “Trust me, Karl. Inflation can be very entertaining—and profitable as well. I expect the mark to lose fully half its value in the next six weeks. So don’t delay.”
He raised his glass. “To inflation!” he cried and drained the absinthe.
Karl sipped his schnapps in silence.
Ernst rose from his seat. “I expect to see you dollar rich and mark poor when I return.”
“Where are you going?”
“A little trip I take every so often. I like to swing up through Saxony and Thuringia to see what the local Bolsheviks are up to—I have a membership in the German Communist Party, you know. I subscribe to Rote Fahne, listen to speeches by the Zentrale, and go to rallies. It’s very entertaining. But after I tire of that—Marxist rhetoric can be so boring—I head south to Munich to see what the other end of the political spectrum is doing. I’m also a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party down there and subscribe to their Volkischer Beobachter.”
“Never heard of them. How can they call themselves ‘National’ if they’re not nationally known?”
“Just as they can call themselves Socialists when they are stridently fascist. Although frankly I, for one, have difficulty discerning much difference between either end of the spectrum—they are distinguishable only by their paraphernalia and their rhetoric. The National Socialists—they call themselves Nazis—are a power in Munich and other parts of Bavaria, but no one pays too much attention to them up here. I must take you down there sometime to listen to one of their leaders. Herr Hitler is quite a personality. I’m sure our friend Freud would love to get him on the couch.”
“Hitler? Never heard of him, either.”
“You really should hear him speak sometime. Very entertaining.”
Today it takes 51,000 marks to buy a single US dollar.
—Volkischer Beobachter, May 21, 1923
A few weeks later, when Karl returned from the bank with the mortgage papers for his mother to sign, he spied something on the door post. He stopped and looked closer.
A mezuzah.
He took out his pocket knife and pried it off the wood, then went inside.
“Mother, what is this?” he said, dropping the object on the kitchen table.
She looked up at him with her large, brown, intelligent eyes. Her brunette hair was streaked with gray. She’d lost considerable weight immediately after Father’s death and had never regained it. She used to be lively and happy, with an easy smile that dimpled her high-colored cheeks. Now she was quiet and pale. She seemed to have shrunken, in body and spirit.
“You know very well what it is, Karl.”
“Yes, but haven’t I warned you about putting it outside?”
“It belongs outside.”
“Not in these times. Please, Mother. It’s not healthy.”
“You should be proud of being Jewish.”
“I’m not Jewish.”
They’d had this discussion hundreds of times lately, it seemed, but Mother just didn’t want to understand. His father, the colonel, had been Christian, his mother Jewish. Karl had decided to be n
either. He was an atheist, a skeptic, a free-thinker, an intellectual. He was German by language and by place of birth, but he preferred to think of himself as an international man. Countries and national boundaries should be abolished, and someday soon would be.
“If your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish. You can’t escape that. I’m not afraid to tell the world I’m Jewish. I wasn’t so observant when your father was alive, but now that he’s gone…”
Her eyes filled with tears.
Karl sat down next to her and took her hands in his.
“Mother, listen. There’s a lot of anti-Jewish feeling out there these days. It will die down, I’m sure, but right now we live in an inordinately proud country that lost a war and wants to blame someone. Some of the most bitter people have chosen Jews as their scapegoats. So until the country gets back on an even keel, I think it’s prudent to keep a low profile.”
Her smile was wan. “You know best, dear.”
“Good.” He opened the folder he’d brought from the bank. “And now for some paperwork. These are the final mortgage papers, ready for signing.”
Mother squeezed his hands. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?”
“Absolutely sure.”
Actually, now that the final papers were ready, he was having second thoughts.
Karl had arranged to borrow every last pfennig the bank would lend him against his mother’s estate. He remembered how uneasy he’d been at the covetous gleam in the bank officers’ eyes when he’d signed the papers. They sensed financial reverses, gambling debts, perhaps, a desperate need for cash that would inevitably lead to default and subsequent foreclosure on a prime piece of property. The bank president’s eyes had twinkled over his reading glasses; he’d all but rubbed his hands in anticipation.
Doubt and fear gripped Karl now as his mother’s pen hovered over the signature line. Was he being a fool? He was a bookseller and they were financiers. Who was he to presume to know more than men who spent every day dealing with money? He was acting on a whim, spurred on by a man he hardly knew.
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