Филип Керр: Metropolis

An unnamed and supposedly independent commissioner in the Berlin political police made a speech last night to a private meeting of the Schrader-Verband at the Eden Hotel during which the following remarks were made by him: ‘This is no longer a healthy nation. We’ve stopped striving for something higher. We seem quite happy to wallow in the mire, to sink to new depths. Frankly, this is a republic that makes me think of South America, or Africa, not a country at the heart of Europe. And Berlin makes me almost ashamed to be German. It’s hard to believe that just fourteen years ago we were a force for moral good and one of the most powerful countries in the world. People feared us; now they hold us up to scorn and ridicule. Foreigners flock here with their dollars and pounds to take advantage not just of our weakened reichsmark, but also of our women and our liberal laws regarding sex. Berlin especially has become the new Sodom and Gomorrah. All right-thinking Germans should feel the same way as I and yet this government of Jews and apologists for Bolshevism does nothing but sit on its gold-ringed fingers and feed the people lies about how wonderful things really are. These are terrible people. They really are. They lie all the time. But there is, thank God, one man who promises to tell the truth and to clean up this city, to wash the filth off Berlin’s streets, the scum you see every night: the drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, transvestites, queers, Jews and communists. That man is Adolf Hitler. There’s something sick about this city and only a strongman like Hitler, with his Nazi Party, has the cure. I’m not a Nazi myself, just a conservative nationalist who can see what’s happening to this country, who can see the sinister hand of the communists behind the erosion of our nation’s values. They aim to undermine the moral heart of our society in the hope that there will be another revolution like the one that’s destroyed Russia. They’re behind it all. You know I’m right. Every cop in Berlin knows I’m right. Every cop in Berlin knows that the current government intends to do nothing about any of this. If I weren’t right, then maybe I could point to some judicial sentences that might make you think the law is respected in Berlin. But I can’t because our judiciary is full of Jews. Answer me this. What kind of deterrent is it when only a fifth of all death sentences are ever carried out? You mark my words, gentlemen, a storm is coming — a real storm, and all these degenerates are going to get washed away. That’s what I said: degenerates . I don’t know what else to call it when you have abortion on demand, mothers selling their daughters, pregnant women selling the mouse, and young boys performing unspeakable acts on men in back alleys. I went to the morgue the other day and saw an artist drawing the corpse of a woman who’d been murdered by her husband. Yes, that’s what passes as art these days. If you ask me, this killer the press has dubbed Winnetou is just another citizen who’s had enough of all the prostitution that’s ruining this city. It’s high time the Prussian police recognized that crimes like Winnetou’s are perhaps the inevitable result of a supine, spineless government that threatens the very fabric of German society.

Gennat must have guessed it was probably me who’d fingered Arthur Nebe for the Tageblatt and while he didn’t say anything at the time, later on he reminded me that it wasn’t just cops from Department 1A who were supposed to leave their politics at home, it was Praesidium detectives, too. Especially detectives who disliked Arthur Nebe as much as he and I did. A higher standard was expected of people like us, said Gennat; there was, he said, enough division in the Prussian police without adding to it ourselves. I figured he was right and after that I stopped calling Olden.

Alone in my room I rolled and lit a cigarette, moistened the end with a little rum, and opened the window to clear the smoke. Then I unloaded my briefcase and settled down to read the Silesian Station files. Even for me they made uncomfortable reading, especially the black-and-white pictures taken by Hans Gross, the Alex police photographer.

There was something about his work on crime scenes that really got under your skin. They say every picture tells a story, but Hans Gross was the kind of photographer whose work made him the Scheherazade of modern criminalistics. This was only partly down to the fact he favoured a big Folmer & Schwing Banquet camera on a rolling platform and a mobile version of the same carbon arc lamps they used at Tempelhof airport, both of which took up at least half the space in the murder wagon. More important than the camera equipment, it seemed to me, Hans had a feel for a crime scene that was nothing short of cinematic; Fritz Lang couldn’t have framed his pictures better, and, sometimes, Gross’s Murder Commission photographs were so sharp it seemed that the poor victim might not be dead at all, might in fact be faking it. It wasn’t just the framing and sharp focus that made the photographs effective, it was the way all the background details helped to bring them alive. Detectives often saw things in his photographs they’d failed to spot at the actual crime scene. Which was why detectives at the Alex had nicknamed him Cecil B. DeMorgue.

The picture in the first case file, that of Mathilde Luz, found murdered in Andreasplatz, was so clear you could see every line of Red Front graffiti on the dilapidated brick wall her body lay next to. A pair of thick-framed glasses lay to the right of her head as if she’d just taken them off for a second; you could even see the label in one of the Hellstern shoes she’d been wearing and which had come off during her murder. But for the fact that a strip of her scalp was missing, Mathilde Luz looked as if she’d just lain down for a moment to take a nap.

I read the notes and various statements and then tried to imagine the conversation I might have had with her if she herself had been able to tell me what had happened. This was a new technique Weiss was encouraging us to try, as a result of a paper he’d read by a criminalist called Robert Heindl. ‘Let the victim talk to you,’ was what Heindl had said. ‘Try to imagine what she might tell you if you were able to spend some time with her.’ So I did.

Mathilde Luz was a good-looking girl all right and still wearing the clothes she’d been murdered in: the hat, the coat and the dress all from C&A, but no less becoming for that. There are some girls who manage to wear cheap fashion and make it look good and Mathilde Luz was one of those. The police report noted her perfume was 4711, worn in the kind of quantity that made you think it served to disguise rather than allure. The report also stated she was dark, with large brown eyes and lips the same red as her nail varnish. Her face was powdered dead white; at least I thought it was powder. It might have been that way just because she was dead.

‘I made incandescent mantles at the German Incandescent Light Company for two years,’ I heard her saying. ‘Liked it, too. I had some good friends there. The wages weren’t much, but with my husband Franz’s wage — he works at the Julius Pintsch factory, making gas metres for a living — we had just about enough to keep a roof over our heads. It wasn’t much of a roof, it’s fair to say. We lived on Koppenstrasse in a one-room apartment, if you can call it that — slum more like. It’s a poor area, as you probably know. There were two butter riots there in 1915. Can you imagine Berlin without any butter? Unthinkable. I remember them well. I guess at the time I must have been about fourteen.’

‘Which made you twenty-seven at the time of your unfortunate death.’

‘That’s right. Anyway, the landlord, Lansky, was a Jew like us, but he was never the kind to put his own tribe ahead of profit; if we hadn’t paid the rent on time the bailiff would have had us out double-quick. He always told us how lucky we were to have the place at all, but then he never had to live there himself. I know for a fact he lives in a nice apartment off Tauentzienstrasse. A real gonif , you know? Anyway, I got laid off just after Christmas last year. I looked for another, of course, but half the women in Berlin are looking for jobs now, so I knew that wasn’t ever going to happen. If I hadn’t been laid off, I wouldn’t ever have had to go on the sledge. With the rent due, it was Franz’s idea and I went along with it because it was better than taking a beating.’