The Hotel Years Read online

  The feuilleton remained covered. He leaves it to less manly natures than his own.

  But if it should happen that one day, quietly, out of boredom, he should read it, then he would not like it one little bit. Because what I write is not to his taste . . .

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 January 1926

  I

  Germany

  2. Of Dogs and Men

  To the many scenes of war misery in Vienna a new one was added, a few days ago.

  A man returned from the war in the form of a hinge—invalid with shattered spine—moves almost inexplicably through Kärntner Strasse, selling newspapers. A dog sits on his back.

  A clever, well-trained dog, riding on his own master, and making sure he doesn’t lose a single paper. A modern fairy-tale being, combination of man and dog, thrown up by the war and set down in the misery of Kärntner Strasse.

  A sign of the times, in which dogs ride men, to protect them from other men. A memory of those great times when men were trained like dogs and were barked at as “Schweinehunde” and so forth, by others who were themselves bloodhounds (though heaven help you if you called them that).

  An outcome of patriotism that makes the upright likenesses of the Creator dependent on four-footed creatures who lacked the spiritual distinction to become heroes or cannon-fodder, and at the most did odd jobs in the ambulance service. On the invalid’s chest dangles an Emperor Karl Troop Cross. On the neck of the dog a mere dog-tag.

  The bearer of the Troop Cross is a victim. The one with the dog-tag is active. He guards the suffering of the invalid. He keeps the man from further harm. His Fatherland and fellow-beings could only hurt him. He has them to thank for being watched over by a dog. Sign of the times! Once there were sheepdogs who watched herds of sheep, and guard-dogs that guarded houses. Today there are mandogs who watch invalids, mandogs the logical consequence of submissive men. The scene struck me with the force of a revelation: a dog seated on a man. When he remembers what happened when he relied on other men, a man is happy to put his trust in a dog. Is there anything so sad as this sight, which seems so emblematic? All around stroll the war-profiteers with their X-ray vision, and in the midst of everything a mounted dog. The human race has lost, all hail to the animal. We have been through the war that was the last hurrah of cavalry, and at the end of it dogs ride around on men.

  Der Neue Tag, 1 August 1919

  3. Millionaire for an Hour

  Every so often, I like to spend a little time in the lobby of the big hotel where visitors from hard-currency nations come to stay. The coffered ceiling consists of so many gorgeous panels, and in the middle of each one sprouts an electric light. The lamps look like glass flowers, shaded by golden leaves.

  The ceiling is low but expansive, the furniture likewise. Everything here tends to breadth and luxury. The low ceiling murmurs: Don’t get up! The broad armchairs say: Kick your shoes off!

  I kick off one of my shoes and look with a deal of satisfaction at the crease of my trouser-leg (my only pair, but let that go). I also take pride in the state of my toe caps, which have just had a good shine from the soft flannel cloth of the man on Unter den Linden.

  After just a quarter of an hour of sitting like that, and feeling flush and expansive, I start to think I am someone from a hard-­currency country, and am staying at the hotel.

  The messenger boy who is delivering a letter gives my shiny toecaps a wide berth. The messenger boy has no idea I don’t live here. When I call him, he comes to a stop outside the charmed hard-currency nimbus in whose centre I am sitting, and doffs his brown cap to me with an angular movement of his well-trained arm. He has big blue eyes and gives me his best awestruck stare. He has whole magazines of respect in his eyes. He is apple-cheeked and smells pleasantly of milk, like a clean baby. He has been studying deference to his hard-currency elders for all of two years now.

  The white napkin of the waiter starts to twitch respectfully at about ten paces. The hotel manager, striding across the tasteful ornaments of his Smyrna carpet with the dignity of a Grand Vizier, inclines his head when I look at him.

  After a while, I shift my focus to my brother millionaires. They are very well dressed. The men smell of new leather luggage and English shaving cream and coal. The women disperse gentle hints of a Russian scent across the room. The bittersweet aroma tickles my nostrils, only to disappear again.

  The millionaires are gifted poseurs. The younger ones wear belted lemon-lime raincoats with discreet matte buckles. Their hats are for the most part dove-grey and have a hint of a dent at the top (that might almost be an accident). Their gloves are white, their shoes are brown or tan, and when the young millionaires sit down, they give their trousers a little tweak at the knees to show off their silk socks.

  The old millionaires seem generally unaware of the season. It’s not the state of the mercury but the state of the market that matters. The old millionaires sit there in their winter wool coats and padded gloves, and they keep a freshly guillotined cigar clenched so expectantly between their teeth that a waiter leaps by with tails aflutter, in mid-air striking a match on the emery board so as to have it ready when he alights.

  I get to know people here: a man with whiskers who looks like a Hamburg senator (and he has the thick ‘s’ to match). Protracted negotiations with a belted youth. The subject is petroleum. The youth seems to be from Poland. He has a piece of paper in his top pocket. Every so often he gives it a meaningful tap. Each time the bewhiskered oldster falls silent and looks wistfully at the youth.

  Behind a column, a mulatto leans back in a rattan chair. He is smoking a dense Turkish cigarette and is negotiating with a spiv of an uncertain age who fancies himself a matinee idol. He has a pair of canary-yellow gloves. You can practically hear them cheeping away. He is wearing the right one, the left is lying casually and emptily on the marble table top. Abruptly the spiv bestirs himself, gets to his feet, and gives the mulatto a friendly wave with his empty glove, as though his train were just pulling out. It’s my sense that he’s got one over on the mulatto. Men in canary-yellow gloves should be treated with suspicion.

  In the lobby cocaine, sugar, political systems, revolutions and women are on offer. A Russian count ponders the advisability of a move for the naval base of Kronstadt. A carpet dealer discusses terms with an only recently “made” man. A lawyer takes receipt of half a dozen passports from a Russian family. “We’ll get it done,” his eyes seem to blink. He jabs his pince-nez against the bridge of his nose, and with sudden resolve clacks his briefcase shut. As he reverses out of the door he bows three times to the Russian head of household, who waves avuncularly.

  At five the band launch into the Peer Gynt Suite. The millionaires turn away from their business and towards their womenfolk. The millionairesses drink mocha and eat ice cream and nibble little cakes and make sure their right pinkie is always extended, as though it were an especially holy thing that mustn’t ever touch the side of a cup.

  When I leave the hotel the porter stands beside the revolving door, primed to greet me, like a talking fork. His owner’s monogram decorates him heart and head. A chauffeur asks me whether I would like a ride somewhere.

  I would not. I am no longer a millionaire.

  Neue Berliner Zeitung—12 Uhr-Blatt, 1 April 1921

  4. The Umbrella

  It was raining the day before yesterday. The asphalt of the Kurfürstendamm was slippery, and a woman with an open umbrella ran into a moving car, slipped, and was run over. Her umbrella was lying on the pavement. People rushed over, the woman was picked up; she was badly shaken, nothing more—all this had to be established in a nearby café. But before it could be established, and while she was still lying in the road, covered with blood in the imagination of all the passers-by who had witnessed the accident, and possibly with severed limbs, a man had the presence of mind to pick up the lady’s umbrella and walk off with it.

  I had
never supposed that people’s decency was a match for their self-interest. But that their meanness was even greater than their curiosity, that was brought home to me by this incident, which shows that it isn’t difficult to strip the pillow off someone’s death­bed, and sell the feathers at the next street corner.

  The woman who had escaped with her life now wept for the loss of her umbrella and was not at all grateful that her limbs were intact. As evidenced here, people come in two sorts: unscrupulous and plain dim.

  Neue Berliner Zeitung—12 Uhr-Blatt, 29 May 1921

  5. The Emigrants’ Ship

  ON BOARD THE PITTSBURGH

  The emigrants’ ship is called the Pittsburgh, and it is due to leave Bremerhaven at exactly 2 minutes past 11. The emigrants are people from the East, mainly Jews, lucky to have escaped the Europe of pogroms; also Russian peasants and young Ukrainian women, with colourful headscarves like summer meadows, sprinkled with cheery red and blue flowers. The White Star Line, which owns the Pittsburgh, has finally ended its rather anachronistic policy of “steerage passengers”, by abolishing the ’tween decks, and introducing third-class cabins. The proletarian romance of a chaos of people and suitcases is over. All are tucked away in tight cabins like lockable pigeonholes set in the walls. The Jews, children or bearded, the Russian peasants, their faces furrowed like their fields, and the shining Ukrainian peasant women are all boxed up. Their emigrant poverty hidden, no longer open to the shameless prying eye. Still, there is a good deal of misery on show before it is all packed away. The luggage—strange, eccentric-looking items, down pillows bagged up in hessian, coverlets, red and white striped privities, tied and endlessly retied bundles and baskets with antediluvian padlocks. Everything is loaded onto small wagons running on electric motors and taken to port. Even so, the emigrants are still carrying a lot. There are things a person doesn’t like to lose from sight, not even for half an hour. And so the Jews are left to sweat under their cherished loads which they lug on their crooked backs and in their frozen hands as far as the plump, helmeted policeman. This policeman is a splendid instance of a half-terrestrial, half-marine authority. His round cheeks are of a red that seems to glow from within, as if he had a lit candle in his mouth like a paper lantern at a summer fete. Ships’ cooks all look like that. The helmet, the dark cloak, and the sabre, none of them go with the salt water face. A great calm radiates from that broad, improbably luminous face, and a benevolence that denies the severity of the blinking badge on the helmet, and quite disavows the sabre. The policeman stands at the far end of the narrow bridge that connects terra firma to the great sea. The emigrants need to go past him with their heavy loads. Clumsily as can be, they set their loads down, looking for a clean spot; ideally they would spread one of their red and blue check handkerchiefs on the ground before setting their bundle down on top of it. All that takes a good five minutes, and already a gong is being sounded on board: in ten minutes the Washington is due, and so the Pittsburgh will have to leave its berth. But the policeman radiates the calm and ease of a traffic light; they look at him, and think they have all the time in the world, whatever the urgency of the ship. They produce passports and tickets sewn into undershirts or variously secreted about their bodies. The policeman, by the light of his own countenance, studies them assiduously.

  The ship (it has a tonnage of 16,000) carries 1,800 passengers. About a third of these are emigrants. They come from Russia and the Successor states, Poland and Lithuania. The East of Europe pours them out. These Eastern Jews and peasants have been emigrating westwards for hundreds of years, leaving their old homes behind, looking for a new one. A great sadness emanates from them, their grey beards, their wrinkled faces, their adorable, helpless bundles. A family from Kowel is here, an old matron swaddled in black, two young daughters with cropped curls, and a twenty-year-old son, with broad shoulders and red hands dangling from his sleeves like giant appliances. He laughs and shrugs his strong shoulders. For two years now he and his family have been wandering through the sorry, moribund West of Europe, in search of his father, who left Kovel ten years before—God only knows where he is. They were in Budapest, six months in constant dread of the expatriation that might come at any hour of day or night; finally it came and they were chased to Vienna, where they hung on for a year in a basement hole on Kleine Schiffergasse. Here too they were viewed as a burden on the state—the son engaged in unauthorized selling of clothes—and they drifted on to the wretched east of Berlin, to Hirtenstrasse, where the black market promises undreamed-of riches and doesn’t deliver. Finally a cousin got in touch from New York, a street vendor of oranges and lemons and he sent them steamer tickets and ten dollars apiece—God helps those who are abandoned. Now they are on their way to America and a vast, beautiful freedom beckons to the children, a grave to their old mother, but they will have got away from Europe, the continent of pogroms, of the police, the black market and unauthorized dealing in second-hand clothes. The Ukrainian peasants are fleeing hunger, the plague, and a creeping charity. One has a brother-in-law there—Nikita is his name—another has a nephew, Timofei. The barely legible addresses are scribbled on old crumpled envelopes. For many weeks the peasants have been carrying them tucked into waistcoat pockets, in snuff boxes, and in carved pipe bowls of cherry wood. The peasants’ wives have the timid, flickering eyes of frightened animals as they watch the bustle, great ships’ cranes taking up huge quantities of coals, slowly swiveling in mid-air, the scoops opening like giant hands, and spilling their load into the hold. They hear the unfamiliar clang of the heavy ship’s bell, the warning cries of the dockers, the thunder or clatter of the rolling trucks. They see how the harbour goes on and on, offering the illimitable ocean to the eye, a never-before-seen endlessness of blue.

  Way up in the air the Stars and Stripes flutter over the international shipping banner, which is as blue as the sky and the sea, and with a white circle in the middle, like a perfectly regular cloud. On the bridge stands a man with his cap strapped over chin and ears, giving out orders in incomprehensible terms. His commands are as mysterious as the great sea itself. A little tug tows the ship with thick hawsers; like a willing triumphal gate the harbour locks slowly and ceremonially open. The emigrants are on board; they call out to the disappearing land. No one has come to see them off, so they wave to strangers, to the luminous policeman, to the dockers and porters. Up at the rim of a huge chimney appears a black figure, a chimneysweep, a toy figure compared to the enormous liner, so tiny is his silhouette against the endless blue background. Out of the perfectly round windows of their cabins the emigrants’ faces catch their last sight of Europe.

  Prager Tagblatt, 18 February 1923

  6. The Currency-Reformed City

  The only affordable currency-reformed city in Germany is Hamburg. It has introduced its own currency, the much-praised, much-sought-after Hamburg Gold Mark, which sells at a premium on the black market. I have seen one for myself, a Hamburg Gold Mark, it’s a little scrap of paper that proclaims that the Hamburg banks will vouch for its full convertibility. And as people know the world over, Hamburg banks are solid and reliable, and so Hamburg has become the cheapest, most affordable city in Germany.

  A hotel room costs half a dollar, lunch costs a quarter of a dollar, a taxi ride costs half a dollar, a pound of meat costs a dollar. There is unemployment. Unemployed dockworkers, laid-off sailors and factory workers. A month ago there was a risk that this great mass of unemployed, cultivated assiduously by communist and nationalist propaganda, might spark a revolution, or at the very least a series of disturbances. And lo! The Hamburg Gold Mark came along, and everything went quiet. It’s one of the mysteries of economics why a great mass of hungry people, none of whom have so much as a Hamburg gold pfennig to their name, are pacified by the existence of the Hamburg Gold Mark. Greybeard economists scratch their heads at this wonder. Although no one knows how long it will last.

  No one knows, because in waterside dives, in shady bars haunt
ed by desperate people, sailors who have missed their ships, criminals hunted by the police forces of various cities and countries—in these sinister breeding-grounds of international crime, what has been on the agenda for the last few months is politics. A curious kind of politics. People who were left cold by the European economy or the constitutional arrangements of the German Reich, for whom swastika and red star are emblems of foreign worlds, not for outsiders, for people outside of society, these same people now spend all their evenings in smoke-filled rooms—not because they’re interested in the speeches, but because they are given food there, and schnapps and—money. The Hamburg Gold Mark, as they say, rolls almost as well as the Soviet rouble, and a lot better than the old Czarist one. It appears that forces unknown are competing over the lumpenproletariat of port cities. Nowhere is the propaganda of left and right more virulent than in Hamburg and Bremen. Odd that these are two cities with a particularly conservative middle class. One might have supposed that looking out every day at so much water would have broadened their intellectual horizons and their sense of the political necessities of the fatherland. But it is in these places that social progress encounters the toughest resistance. The contradictions are unbridgeable. Nationalist propaganda appeals to the irate middle class, which one wouldn’t have thought so absurdly susceptible. Communist propaganda is favoured by the stiff necks of the merely rich middle class. In no German city is there such fierce hatred of the poor. Nowhere is the obstinacy of the propertied classes stronger.

  For the time being, the Hamburg Gold Mark has calmed people down. In the long run, though, no unemployed man can take comfort from the fact that his fellow in work can now afford to buy butter. Without the free food he gets in assembly halls he would starve to death. And in these assembly halls, where people used to go to smooch and drink, they are now daubing swastikas and Soviet stars on the grimy walls.