Nabokov’s fifteen-year stay in Berlin was blighted at the outset by the accidental death of his father in a botched political assassination. On March 28, 1922, Pavel Miliukov, formerly a minister in the Kerensky government that had briefly ruled Russia between the collapse of the Romanov empire and the Bolshevik revolution, delivered a speech at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall. He had been invited by Nabokov senior, who had also introduced him. Just as he was finishing his speech, a man approached the stage and started firing at the speaker with a pistol. Nabokov threw himself in front of Miliukov and took a bullet to the chest. A second gunman, mistaking him for the former minister, pumped two more rounds into his prostrate body (Miliukov himself remained unscathed). It turned out that the would-be assassins were fanatical czarists then living in Munich. They were captured, tried, and sent to jail, but this was no solace to Nabokov fils, who wanted to challenge both the gunmen to duels.
Nabokov wrote his first eight novels in Berlin, and all were set entirely or partly in the German capital. Because of their author’s self-imposed ghettoization, however, these works focus almost exclusively on the émigré community, leaving the rest of the city untouched. They deal with people trying to hold on to their former homeland through memory, preferring to live in the past rather than in the present. Berlin, as such, figures mainly as a backdrop of dreary apartment houses, shoddy rented rooms, and parks where one might catch the occasional butterfly. Nabokov later claimed that his Berlin novels could just as well have been written in Naples, Rumania, or Holland. But could they have? Only in a large émigré community such as Berlin’s could individual exiles retain so much of their former lives; only in a metropolis so internally fragmented and unsure of itself could they escape the usual pressures to adopt native manners, language, and customs. Nabokov’s Berlin oeuvre was the product not of a “melting pot,” but of an urban bouillabaisse (or borscht) full of very discrete chunks.
Nabokov believed that during his early years in Berlin he must have ridden the elevated railway with another literary émigré—Franz Kafka. He might indeed have done so, for Kafka, who had moved to the city in September 1923, occasionally took the train from his lodging house in Steglitz to the city center. He had visited Berlin often before the war, and, like so many transplants from the Austrian empire, found the place invigorating compared to Vienna, where he had also lived. “As a city Berlin is so much better than Vienna, that decaying mammoth village,” he wrote in 1914. Unlike Nabokov, who could support himself in Berlin by giving tennis and English lessons to wealthy Russians, Kafka was obliged to get by on a tiny pension from the insurance company for which he had toiled in Prague. (Had he not been paid in Czech kronen, he would not have been able to survive at all.) He lived in squalid rooms which he could not afford to heat in the winter. Already seriously sick with the tuberculosis that would soon kill him, he compared his move to Berlin to Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812. Yet he also saw the big anonymous city as a refuge from the noisy relatives and dreary professional duties that had burdened his days in Prague. Here he wrote his last stories—“The Hunger Artist” and “Josephine, the Singer”—which deal with the eternal opposition between the painstaking artistic craftsman and a public that wants only entertainment and diversion. It is perhaps not accidental that Kafka wrote these stories in Berlin, whose cultural marketplace was as merciless as any in the world.
Unlike Kafka, the Czech journalist Egon Erwin Kisch was drawn to Berlin for its hectic pace, bright lights, busy streets, and technological innovations. “A lot of work and even more amusement, the telephone always ringing, people constantly around, and just enough money”—such was Kisch’s Berlin. As an émigré from Prague, Kisch was particularly interested in Berlin’s Czech community, whose influence over the local theatrical scene was one of his pet subjects. His only regret in coming to Berlin was the dearth of good Czech food—no decent dumplings, Prague Selchfleisch, or genuine Mehlspeise.
While residing in the German capital Kisch invented the modern concept of the reporter as part entertainer, part crusader. Although he claimed that “in a world flooded with lies . . . nothing is more amazing than the simple truth . . . nothing is more imaginative than objectivity,” he slanted his reportage to fit his own political bias, which was leftist. After the Nazis came to power he was lucky to be deported rather than murdered. His books were among those burned in Berlin in May 1933.
Kisch was friends with Joseph Roth, another refuge from “Kakania”—Robert Musil’s term for the Austro-Hungarian empire. Roth was best known as a novelist, but he too worked as a reporter, and his reportage on Weimar Berlin constitutes a perceptive portrait of the republican capital. Like so many outsiders, Roth moved to Berlin with the hopes of making money and building a career. He managed to do both, and in the process to illuminate parts of the city, such as the above-mentioned Scheunenviertel, where few reporters ventured. For him the metropolitan streets were a living stage whose daily dramas were as significant as world events. In a piece entitled “Spaziergang” (A Walk), he wrote of a café terrace “planted with pretty women waiting to be picked,” a beggar whose story was notable “precisely because no one notices it,” a cripple cleaning his nails with a file dropped by a society lady, “and thereby symbolically leapfrogging a thousand social steps.” Roth did not confine himself to such tiny dramas, and his leftist-oriented stories about German politics, like Kisch’s, earned him the enmity of the right. In 1932 he decided that it was time for him to escape to Paris. Before leaving Berlin he predicted that the Nazis “will burn our books and mean us.”
Like Kisch and Roth, the essayist Franz Hessel was fascinated by Berlin’s vibrant street life, which for him constituted a mutable theater of modernity. A native of Stettin, he had spent his childhood in Berlin before moving on to Munich and Paris, where he fell in with Gertrude Stein and her circle. Believing that Berlin, not Paris, harbored the most exciting metropolitan scene, he moved back to the German city after World War I and took a job as an editor at Rowohlt. He considered his real job, however, to be that of observing and recording the urban scene around him, a task he undertook by walking the streets with the “aimlessness” of the flaneur. Hessel fully understood that in a city like Berlin, where everyone was always in a hurry to get someplace fast, the flaneur was regarded as a “suspicious” character: “In this city, you have to ‘have to,’ otherwise you can’t. Here you don’t simply go, but go someplace. It isn’t easy for someone of our kind.” Nonetheless, Hessel persisted in his quiet, slow-paced flanerie, convinced that the city streets could be read like a book. As he wrote in his Ein Flaneur in Berlin (1929): “Flanerie is a way of reading the street, in which people’s faces, displays, shop windows, café terraces, cars, tracks, trees turn into an entire series of equivalent letters, which together form words, sentences, and pages of a book that is always news. In order to really stroll, one should not have anything too specific on one’s mind.”
As an urban “reader,” Hessel was attracted to those icons of modernity—electric lights, commercial signs and posters, shop windows, train stations. But he also cherished artifacts of the past, and he was profoundly aware that such objects would probably not be around for long in a city that had little tolerance for anachronism. Moreover, if Berlin’s streets in the 1920s were not always friendly to the aimless peregrinations of the flaneur, they would become even less so in the 1930s, when so many public spaces were taken over by the state. Hessel became “suspect” to the new rulers not only as an intensely private observer, but also as a Jew. He chose to stay on in Berlin as long as he could, in order, as he said, “to be close to the fate of the Jews.” Finally, in late 1938, he fled the city for Paris, where he joined his friend and fellow flaneur, Walter Benjamin.