And then the night porter comes along, and lights the evening. Fresh, youthful, shaved and powdered, in blue and gold livery, he rises like a second morning when the world has evening. Trains have arrived from exotic parts, and exotic visitors are wafting through the glass wings of the revolving doors into the lobby. Those who have been here for a day already and are sitting in the lobby, they are no longer strangers. No, they are long-established, the dark red carpets are their turf which they will not leave, and they cast slighting, suspicious looks at the new arrivals. The suitcases pile up in front of the reception desk, plastered with labels from hotels in foreign places, Venice, Merano, Buenos Aires and San Francisco, all trying to legitimate these new guests. The head waiter surfaces for a moment to assess who can afford to buy themselves a meal under the palms (breakfast, of course, is compris). Sceptically, in spite of himself, he turns to face again the familiar meals, his friendliness is put together from understanding of the world, his faith in humanity is lined with suspicion, his cheery optimism is his pessimism turned inside out, when he smiles he is crying somewhere about the poverty of this world.
Before long, in about two hours, he will put on his little green hat and slip into his mouse grey coat, and with grand gestures he will shut the dining room — and then, in a corner, go over the accounts with the waiters, an accountant himself now, no longer a maître d’hôtel, a plain forester from the hunting grounds of reality. He will say a hurried goodnight to the night porter, whose day is now beginning. Already fresh stars are glimmering in the lobby’s pale sky.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 23 November 1930
VII. Pleasures and Pains
47. Spring
I am woken by the sound of carpets being beaten overhead. The muffled thudding provokes my neighbour’s canary, and he cheeps and twitters and warbles like a bird song imitator. In the yard a window flies open, a second, a third: the whole building seems to be tearing off its windows.
A ray of sunshine splashes in my violet inkwell. The bronze maiden on my desk protects her bosoms from the intrusive beam and sweetly tans.
A hurdy-gurdy is playing in the yard. The streams of melody burst through, melting and freed.
From these and other signs, one notices eventually that it’s spring.
On Kurfürstendamm the cafés put out spring awnings, the ladies have new wardrobes, the gentlemen natty yellow twittering gloves. In side streets the children play with shiny buttons and marbles. The blue-bedizened sky checks its reflection in the brass shaving bowl outside the barber’s shop.
Everyone is freshly varnished and “please don’t touch”. Slips of girls wander about on the asphalt in sheer stockings and new boots looking like costumed willow trees.
In the afternoon I sit in the window and think that Sunday is on its way. To Grunewald, for instance.
After six or still later, a girl in purple rings the doorbell. Love is like that.
Freie Deutsche Bühne, 16 June 1921
48. People in Glass Cages
It is the time of year when a yen for freedom cruelly evicts bundled-up individuals from their cosy flats and into their brazen winter gardens.
In the morning a sunbeam or streak of rain strikes a coffee cup. And in the evening a traffic light bleeds to death.
Turned out and visible to all, the bosom of the family, with whatever had kept it hidden all winter. Intimate gestures are enacted in full sight of the prying neighbours.
Lips explode in kisses clattering along the streets, and forks drop from the hands of unfettered paterfamiliases with a whimpering jingle.
Walls have eyes. Man is in a glass cage, shown for what he is in helplessness, rage and shirtsleeves, barely concealed by the odd flower pot. He hangs suspended over the pavement like his own canary.
Dew anoints a nose sniffing the clouds, and a chill evening wind brushes a hairy chest, swelling the tourist’s shirt like a sail.
A sultry haze of aired bedding and other matters fights down the shy scent of a debatably flowering lilac. Oh, the struggle to lead a useful life weighed down by nappies in a rear courtyard!
Das Blaue Heft, 8 July 1922
49. People on Sunday
On Sundays the world is as bright and empty as a balloon. Girls in white dresses wander about the streets like so many church bells, all smelling of jasmine, sex and starch.
The sky is invariably freshly painted. The buildings swim in sunshine, and the towers scramble nimbly upwards. At the edge of the city Nature takes over, as one can tell by the proliferation of Do Not signs. It is mostly green, and consists of postcard views tacked together.
Nature is particularly important on Sundays. Basically, Sunday has been instituted for the sake of nature. All the communications disrupted on weekdays between nature and humanity are restored on Sunday. In fact, Sunday is the bridge to the forgotten and discarded Holies of the world: such things as woods, the Wannsee, the Luna Park and the Almighty.
People ring in Sundays with bells, the beating of carpets, and indolent coffee in bed. They throw open their windows and sniff freedom. They ransack wardrobes and chests of drawers and put on special items to celebrate the day of idleness on which their souls dangle.
On Sunday I stand by the window. The house opposite has thrown open all its windows like glass butterfly wings as though — whoosh, didn’t you see it!? — to fly away. It can’t, though, it is too weighed down by furniture, people and destinies.
Which have changed as welclass="underline" my neighbour, a double-entry bookkeeper only yesterday (at the same firm for twenty-five years “without a bonus”) — and today, not even a single entry. With God in his heart and the taste of coffee still in his mouth, he hurries over to the window in his shirtsleeves to fill his lungs with a draft of freedom.
When I see him in the week in his threadbare jacket his hands are dangling from his sleeves as though the fingers were a frayed part of the jacket; now he looks to me like the hero of a story, or several stories.* He could, I am thinking, be offered a much better-paid job, but he is unable to resign. Perhaps he even stood once or twice outside his boss’s double doors, and his courage was quelled, as the movements outside the double door are quelled, and his heart resembled a squishy cushion, one of those plump leather cushions a manager likes to sit on.