The Reader Berlin - Streets of Berlin

The nine finalists’ stories are also impressive, and we’re glad you’ve sought them out. These are writers whose work will create ripples.

FlorianDuijsens, Laura Hassan and Brittani Sonnenberg

The wee small hours of Saturday, 9 December, 1939 (I cannot see the clock)

Old Man Winter finally dug his blasted heels in tonight & yet fool that I am I smoke at my leisure & wander the Milky Way from my little balcony here in Horst-Wessel-Stadt. The blackout is a grand thing for us amateur astronomers & the firmament is positively aflame. It is worth braving the cold for this marvel. I do hope you can decipher my hand wherever & whenever you are, dear Snooper – no man is a calligrapher in the midst of a blooming blackout & shivering does not help. Surely even you must grant me that.

Rather sloshed, to be perfectly honest with you. Yes, I am here at the arse-end of a night on the razzle-dazzle, chiefly with the Brit. & the Yankee orphans this time. A motley crew of chancers & expats & political refugees who wound up stranded in Berlin at the Radio in some way, shape, or form & we have been so busy of late pushing the kraut line over the wireless to our respective homelands & had little reason to meet outside our stuffy offices at the Funkhaus before. The happy occasion of our all meeting at once like this was a last-minute invite to an afternoon screening at Goebbels’s private cinema out by the lakes somewhere. (Babelsberg? My geog. here is wretched.) A little treat for us propagandists. Back-to-back Chaplin flicks, of all things! Comfortable upholstered seats & Armenian brandy & Swabian cake, both pictures good as ever (I am fond of CC) & I could judge from the silhouetted elfin ears & the greasy head periodically tipping back in mirth five rows ahead of us that old Joe shares my guilty pleasure. No interval, then led out to the courtyard for starchy official greetings amid potted winter shrubs & gravel & statues (near the gate I spied the arrogant nose of der alte Fritz – or Frederick the Large, as my secretary called him just the other day). A bevy of awkward salutes & then we were whisked away back into the city in a convoy of Mercedes-Benz 770s with tinted (I think bulletproof) windows.

It is a jolly crowd, the Radio lot. Muddling thru in adversity, stranded together in foreign fields, that sort of thing, tho I must confess the handsome Ministry salary does improve a man’s disposition & serve as admirable recompense for the discomforts of exile. I shared my seat with a sly-looking fellow named Jenkins, all Oxford tweed & insinuation. Made conversation as the blackening lakes rattled past beyond the inky panes. Jenkins works on the Reich’s religious programming to Blighty, appeals to C of E pacifism & Home Counties housewives & all that. Talks every Tuesday & Thursday for 25 minutes at 6:30 p.m. on the 20-metre band & even if he really is a Christian, I daresay he’s as damned as the lot of us. Swears like a cabby & his vowels spiced with badly suppressed cockney. Girls this & girls that. He explained to me that the petite & somewhat equine archivist named Mary riding in the car behind married a blackshirt in Lewisham & they had to leave Blighty at the double when the round-ups started last summer in order to avoid a holiday at His Majesty’s Pleasure. & to top it all off he (the blackshirt) has now gone AWOL & Jenkins fancies she barely seems to care, a strange one is Mary (says Jenkins). Keeping herself above water with some paper-pushing for the Radio, she speaks risible German & laughs quickly & nasally. There you have Jenkins & Mary, dear Snooper. In the third car was riding a New York newspaperman named Koerner, worked on a Hearst paper back in the day, you see, but has Jerry blood somewhere back down the line & went quite mad for Hitler, which sold badly to the East Coast.

As our colourful convoy rolled into town past a smattering of blacked-out pubs & moribund cafés with the awnings still up, Jenkins said there’s an idea, how about a beano. I said why the heck not, Berlin is (still) a fine town for carousing. Jenkins asked why I choose to live in wretched Horst-Wessel-Stadt, a worker’s district (& they say that back in the Weimar days when it was still called Friedrichshain, it was firmly in the hands of the Reds), rather than out west where all the other Radio people live. I said it was a girl (it is always a girl), but I left it at that. I’ve no interest in ever discussing the Maria debacle or how I happened to end up here in Germany in the first place, let alone discussing it with bloody Jenkins. He said OK George, why don’t you show us your side of town, girl or no girl. So I said OK Jenkins & he smiled a curious smile.

& there was really only one thing for it: Café Atlantis, just over the river. I forgot to describe the Atlantis to you last week & so here you are, dear Snooper. It is a ghastly dive entrenched in a neat three-storey corner building, conveniently at my end of Horst-Wessel-Stadt with a view to the cream- & maroon-coloured trams which rattle gaily down Warschauer Straße to the bridge & back. Now they cease at blackout, of course, so that Tommy planes can’t do us all a mischief from their stupid glow. So if you read this without my permission (& how else can one read a private diary, dear Snooper?) & should want to come looking for me, keep a watch out for the curious neon sign, unilluminated these days amidst the crumbled façades & dead-eyed stucco cherubs. It is wretched but it is cheap enough & the jazz is the best you will find this side of Kantstraße. Heavy wooden door (no. 33) & no real doorman but a tall beast in a cloth cap with a Desperate Dan jaw who mills on the pavement smoking & pretending not to look. He knows me from sight & frowned the lot of us on thru, unfriendly as you like. Of course the beast will let any old riffraff in & is really only there to keep out government spies who will snitch on the hot music & are so square & badly dressed you can spot them a bloody mile off.

Inside – dark wooden panels & gloomy bare tables & tea lights asphyxiating in scrubbed-out jam jars. Said tables were full & girl-boy ratio was more than acceptable for obvious reasons. We took up with two Italian dance musicians from the house band & a dark slick Bavarian percussionist named Eddie something. Gin & introductions. Above the chunky door is a bell which tinkles pronouncedly when it (the door) is opened. We drew some queer looks at first with our mob all chattering loud Englisch. But I know the proprietor thru the Schwarzmarkt & smoothed it over a dream with a handshake & a pat on the (unshaven) cheek. Propaganda Ministry is one heck of a calling card, after all.

I admired the painted winter girls in imitation fox furs who wink & sip & subtly conduct the raucous proceedings, which are only contained from bursting & spilling into the streets by the heavy blackout curtains. A matronly sourpuss ferociously tended the Garderobe in the corner as usual, snatching tickets & coats from a peculiar assortment of youngish blondish chaps in off-the-rack evening suits. Hadn’t seen them before & couldn’t tell who or what the fellows were, for the Atlantis is egalitarian & no khaki or Party insignia is allowed. The beast will not have it & neither will the winter girls, nor even the sourpuss.

Wartime 1 o’clock city curfew came & went & the band was fine & we were all still swinging regardless of everything. Room was revolving on its axis & I seized a small toothsome thing & fox-trotted her into oblivion. She danced rigid as a pulled wire – Antje or Anke or somesuch. Asked me in the din what I am doing & I said I talk on the Radio to Britain for the Ministry & she was impressed & told me I must drop by the women’s hats section of Webers on Große Frankfurter Straße sometime when I have a moment & we shall have champagne & oysters at the bar. Well, I should like to know how they find fresh oysters these days, short of dredging the wretched things up from the bed of the Spree. But it seems the ladies have me marked for an international playboy. After three mad sets, the laughing band was spent or the audience was spent or perhaps we were all just bleeding drunk & the air was so thick & dank you could peel your clothes right off the skin & it was time to sit down.