Филип Керр - Metropolis

Then one day, like Orpheus, I looked around expecting to see Eurydice and found she’d vanished. Brigitte had written me a letter that tried to explain why she was ending our relationship; she even offered to meet me to talk about it but I couldn’t see the point; it’s hard not to take that kind of letter personally.

My darling Bernie,

This is not an easy letter to write, my dear, but I have to stop seeing you, for the sake of my own sanity. This will sound like an exaggeration but I can assure you it is not. At first it was exciting to be around you because you’re an extraordinary man — you know that, don’t you? — and not just by virtue of your vocation. Ever since I went to the morgue and encountered the reality of what you do, day in, day out, I’ve been thinking about who and what you are, and how you make a living. You did warn me not to go into that terrible place, of course, and I wish now I’d had the good sense to listen to you. One should always listen to a policeman. But I’m afraid my spiritual independence got the better of me.

In effect the city pays you to go all the way to hell and back again, doesn’t it? But hell’s only a small word. For most people, that police morgue on Hannoversche Strasse is a gateway to a place most people couldn’t ever, shouldn’t ever possibly imagine. To another infernal world. But for you hell is so much more than just a word. And what that does to you — what it must do to your mind — it makes me shudder.

The fact is, I don’t believe you can be around all that horror without something of the grave attaching itself to you like a ghost or perhaps the angel of death. And what scares me most is that you’re not even aware of it, my love. When you started drinking heavily I’m sure you believed that it was just a legacy of the war but to me it now looks more like a simple corollary of what you do: of your being a homicide detective.

If I was telling you this in person, you’d smile a cute smile and probably make a joke about it, and then tell me I was overreacting — you’d be much too polite to tell me I was being hysterical. Well, you can fake a smile; but you can’t fake what’s in those blue eyes, Bernie; the eyes tell you things that a person’s body might not reveal. Your eyes are like the windows of a car: the transition between two worlds; there’s you looking out at one world; and there’s me from another looking in and increasingly scared of what I will see lying on your backseat. When I look at you, Bernie, I see eyes that half an hour before might have seen a woman with her throat cut, or a man with his skull bashed in like a grapefruit; either way, something terrible. What’s more, I feel this as if I had been there to see it myself. Eyes so familiar with violent death now looking at me, it makes me uncomfortable.

And the jokes — I understand now where they’re coming from; if you didn’t make a joke I think you’d scream. Maybe you don’t even realize that yourself. I would tell you to get out of the police, now, while you still have a chance of leading a normal human life, but we both know I’d be wasting ink; you’re good at what you do, I can see that. And people remain what they are even if their faces fall apart. That’s what Brecht says. Why would you give up something you’re good at because some hypersensitive woman you’d met and who was fond of you thought it could only get worse? Which it will. I am very sorry.

If you want, we can meet and talk about this but you should know that I’ve thought a great deal about this before putting pen to paper and my decision is final.

‘You know you should write a book on how to be a detective, angel,’ I said out loud to no one except the ghost of Eurydice. ‘You almost make it sound interesting. From a metaphysical point of view.’

I burned her letter. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t had one before, and I suppose that before my time is up, I’ll have others. Never forget, always replace. That’s the first rule of human relationships. Moving on: This is the important part. Which is why later on I telephoned Fritz Lang’s wife.

‘Thea, it’s Bernie Gunther. I was wondering if we might meet for dinner again. I’ve got some great ideas for your script.’

Bernhard Weissfled Berlin with his family just a few days before Hitler was made chancellor of Germany in 1933. He moved to London, where he opened a printing and stationery business and died in 1951. The forecourts at Friedrichstrasse railway station and the Alexanderplatzstrasse are named in his honour. [1] There is some confusion about his formal titles: According to his daughter Hilde Horton, née Weiss, he was both chief of the Berlin Criminal Police and vice president of the Berlin police during the Weimar Republic (Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/gb-003348-wl1768). Moreover, Philip translated the title Polizeivizepräsident as both ‘deputy police president’ and ‘deputy police commissioner’. Although the team at Putnam, Philip’s American publishers, made a valiant attempt to identify the preferred titles, in this — though nowhere else — their search was unsuccessful, and they decided to acknowledge the inconsistency, which may well be what Philip intended all along.

All the members of the Schrader-Verband described in the early part of this book achieved positions of importance under the Nazis, not least Arthur Nebe, who commanded an SS-Einsatzgruppe in Ukraine that massacred some 40,000 Jews. His post-war fate remains something of a mystery.

Ernst Gennatremained in Kripo until his death in August 1939.

Frieda Ahrendt’s death was never officially solved by the Berlin police and remains open to this day.

Albert Grzesinskifled to Switzerland in 1933. It is not known to the author if Daisy Torrenswent with him; he died in New York, in 1948. Her fate is unknown to the author.

The double-murderer Bruno Gerthremained in a Berlin mental institution for the rest of his life.

The Berlin morguewas built on the site of the Charité hospital’s old cholera cemetery. The main viewing hall was twenty-five metres long. Bodies were displayed for three weeks and then buried by the city in a coffin that Berliners called a Nasequetscher (a nose crusher). The morgue was closed to the public; since the Nazis were now responsible for most of the murders in Berlin, it may be that they wanted to keep their crimes as quiet as possible.

George Groszwas one of the Weimar Dada movement’s leading artists. To say the least, his work, not to mention his appearance — he really did walk around the city dressed as a cowboy — was challenging for conservative-minded Berliners. Here he is in his own words — and this goes a long way to explaining just why the Nazis thought his work was degenerate and banned it: ‘My drawings expressed my hate and my despair. I sketched drunks, puking men, men shaking their fists at the moon. I drew a man, his face filled with horror, washing blood from his hands... I drew a cross section of a tenement house: through one window could be seen a man beating up his wife; through another two people making love; from a third hung a man, his body covered with flies. I drew soldiers without noses, war cripples with crab-like steel arms; I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit having a medical for military duty. I also wrote poetry.’ He emigrated to the USA in 1933, returning to Berlin in 1956, where he died, in 1959.

Thea von Harbouwas a German screenwriter married to Fritz Lang, the film director. Her screenplays include the Dr Mabuse films, Metropolis and M. She and Lang divorced in April 1933, soon after Hitler came to power. She was loyal to the new regime, which may have had something to do with it. Imprisoned by the British after the war and subject to denazification, she died in 1954. M was released in May 1931; the leading detective in the story, Inspector Karl Lohmann, is based on Ernst Gennat.