Joseph Roth - What I Saw - Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

Annie from Silesia is counting her money. When I look across at her, she stops. I don’t know why — I’m not going to tell anyone.

Someone’s set down his cigar box and orders a couple of kümmels. The order and the setting down of the box have made a big hole in the general conversation: There’s silence for a moment. A man wearing a hotel porter’s visored cap is racking his brain: Now, what was he in for?

Max says to the man in the cap: “I need a woman and a claw-jimmy.” The claw-jimmy won’t be a problem. As early as tomorrow. But a woman — apparently that’s not so easy.

In case of any misunderstanding, Erna screeches: “I’m spoken for!” Erna loves Franz. Erna got a gold filling a week ago, and she hasn’t stopped laughing since. She can’t just let her mouth hang open like a hungry crocodile’s! Oh, no! So if the world is to see her gold filling, Erna will just have to laugh. Erna laughs at the saddest things.

Franz is big and wide and has just walked in. For a moment or two, he completely fills the little bar with his personality. He radiates authority. All the pimps shrivel up and dwindle away like rubber balloons.

Erna gets a poke in the ribs that sends her sprawling along the bench. But Erna laughs. .

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, February 23/28, 1921

The Declaration

Case No. . P. B.

Was heard by the court in Berlin, on. . 1920.

Mr. [No Name] was instructed to find himself alternative accommodation within five days, failing which, notwithstanding the most strenuous efforts on his behalf to do so, he would be punished for making himself homeless. The appellant was further warned that in accordance with #361, subsection 8, of the Criminal Law of the German Empire, such punishment will consist of up to six weeks in prison, and, in accordance with #362 ibid., transferral to the police authorities, for placement in a workhouse.

approved and signed.

Signature of the homeless man in question.

Signature of the police case worker.

Here is to be found the true cause of the Homeless Revolt of two days ago in Fröbelstrasse. The rioters were for the most part young people, egged on by a somewhat colorful individual from East Prussia. The young homeless held a meeting in Weissensee, and decided to storm the shelter. An official who tried to placate them was so badly beaten that he ended up in hospital. The police were called. A few of the miscreants have already been taken into custody. It is unlikely that they will all be caught.

The document quoted above is the so-called declaration, which has to be signed by anyone entering the homeless shelter on Fröbelstrasse. The German in which this philanthropical document is couched corresponds to the philanthropy it expresses. The youthful quasi revolutionaries certainly did not rise up because they were critical of deficiencies in its style or its humanitarian mission. They just wanted to let off steam — to prove they were people “to be reckoned with,” and, broadly, to remind themselves (and others) of the existence of the republic. But the physical expression of their indignation would be understandable (though not condoned), if it were just that, honest indignation and not a result of the unscrupulous conduct of an unethical individual. “Failing which”—and if someone were unable to prove that despite all his endeavors he had not found himself an abode — is six weeks in prison really appropriate punishment for that? Is punishment appropriate at all? Isn’t it rather the case that finding accommodation within five days in Berlin these days should be taken as proof of criminality? This is an old and musty decree, and it is finally on its way out. Though only after a conscientious and humane official has found himself the victim of violence unleashed in those whom the law has left with no other option.

The Building

Red brick. The chill uniform of stern durability in which our state institutions, hospitals, prisons, schools, post offices, and churches show their character. A garden’s autumnal colors are a vain effort to lend a pleasant or stirring aspect to what remains, all too evidently, a state enterprise. The building remains brick red, and looks as though it’s been plonked down in the middle of nature. Fröbelstrasse, by the way, is in a part of Berlin where that brick-red atmosphere tends to dominate. On the right a board fence rings a bit of — hardly — open ground, and further on, a caravan, evidently the property of tinkers. Prenzlauer Allee owes its alluring name to the presence of a few scrawny trees, sprung from the stones of a city precinct, trees not by nature but by municipal decree. Then the hospital at the front, the shelter for the homeless at the back. At the entrance the police have a pleasant greeting for all those merely going by. The corridors are bare, their faces pancaked over with official white. The chief inspector, a large, kind, fair-haired man, is full of understanding because he has seen so much already. All the officials wear humanity under their uniforms. Anyone called upon to supervise misery will view criminality differently. All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love.

The Dormitory and the People in It

The dormitory is vastly long and relatively narrow. You could easily take a walk in it, if it weren’t for the two rows of beds jutting out, barracks-style, from either side. A line of beds runs down the middle too. Naked iron bedsteads, wire-mesh beds for penance. Every homeless person is given a thin blanket of papery stuff, which, admittedly, is clean and disinfected. And on these beds they sit and sleep and lie, the homeless people. Grotesque-looking figures, as though hauled from the lower depths of world literature. People you wouldn’t believe. Old graybeards in rags, tramps hauling a motley collection of the past bundled up on their crooked backs. Their boots are powdered with the dust of decades. Middle-aged men, with sunburned faces chiseled by hunger and toughness. Young fellows in baggy pants, with eyes that look at you with a mixture of fear and confrontation. Women in brown rags, shameless and shy, curious and apathetic, quivering and resigned. A hundred of them to a room. Women, grown men, and youths kept apart. It takes about two hours to fill an intake. Admission is between four in the afternoon and nine at night. Everyone is given a steaming bowl of soup. Anyone who looks particularly wretched, a little more. Every morning there’s a sick call. There are always plenty of applicants. Many are footsore. Some of these people have walked all their lives. Roughly half have sexually transmitted diseases. The majority have lice. It’s difficult to persuade them to get cleaned up. Their clothes don’t survive disinfection. They’d rather go around with their lice intact than look still more ragged than they do already.

The Families

Families are accommodated in separate wooden cubicles that are set up in the halls. A few look almost cosy. Every corner of the hall has a gas burner and a little range at which the women can do their cooking. Washing is hung up to dry in the miasma of cooking smells, digestion, and communal living. Every little room has a gaslight. The people here are refugees. From Prussia, from the Rhineland, from Holstein. They know one another. They pay calls on one another. Some may have brought along a few sticks of furniture they’ve salvaged from somewhere, others have managed to acquire this or that. I can picture the women arguing among themselves, over a child or a cooking pot, say. Poor people come to blows over such little things. The children are fair-haired and slightly dirty. They don’t have any nice toys. Their world consists of a courtyard, a dozen bits of gravel, a tree, and one another. The one another is the best of it.