From time to time I would spot a graceful ribbon that the silver-tipped conductor’s baton of black lacquer had set spinning into the air. It hung there in my sight, a billowing memory. Sometimes, when I happened to be standing beside the exit, the seductive and supercilious look of a lady would brush me. She would get in a carriage, followed by a suite of gentlemen. But on the brief way from the threshold of the garden to the running board of the carriage, she demanded from my worshipful eye confirmation that she was beautiful. I fell in love instantly — meanwhile the carriage trundled off, and the dapper clopping of the horses mimicked my heart. I was still bewailing her disappearance, but already melancholy began to give way to the hope that the lady might leave the restaurant at the same time tomorrow, and I, a chance passer-by, would be on hand to see it and be noticed. And even though the music had recalled me to the avenue and the vulgar chancers, I was perfectly convinced that I was standing on the threshold of a magnificent existence that would begin tomorrow.
Already night had fallen, lamps came on among the leaves, and you couldn’t see the young ladies any more, only hear them. In the dimness they seemed to have become more numerous. Giggling became their principal communication. Since I could no longer see their cheap blue dresses, the young ladies could almost compete with those within the enclosure. The public part of the garden was closing, and the band was getting ready to finish for the evening. One of the players went from desk to desk, gathering in the sheet music like so many school exercise books. The last piece — it was almost always the Radetzky March — wasn’t played from the score, but from empty desks. The march seemed not to exist on paper. It had passed into the players’ flesh and blood, and they were playing it from memory, as you breathe from memory. Now the march rang out — the Marseillaise of reaction — and while the drummers and trumpeters still stood at their places, you thought you could see the drums and trumpets march off by themselves, drawn along by the melody that poured from them. Yes, the entire Volksgarten was marching. People wanted to stroll and to dawdle, but the rolling drums got their limbs moving. They echoed long after in the street beyond, and suffused the noise of the evening city like a smiling and rapid thunder.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 8 April 1928
53. The Strange City
For the past week, I’ve been living on a new street, and it feels like a different city. As yet I know little about the customs, population and dimensions of this city, but at least I have established its chief quality: it has balconies.
The man who built it was an architect with an obsession with the south. For twenty years his soul went about pregnant with gables and oriels and turrets and weathervanes, his soul was a sort of compressed version of Nuremberg, and then in the twenty-first it was let loose on some open space. And the architect gave expression to his dream of the south. Because this town was supposed to give a home to as many people as possible, he had to build large buildings, which meant setting one apartment over another and then another, till there were four or five squatting on top of each other. And then he dropped a pert Nuremberg gabled roof on top of the ensemble, and carved little balconies out of the bellies of the individual flats, and teased round and square bay-fronts out of the forms of the rooms. So that his yearning was satisfied, but only up at the top. The lower parts of the buildings have the usual facades, wide gateways, glass doors, tarnished door handles and zoological doorbells, for instance lions’ heads with panting tongues you have to tickle to get the bell to ring. Along the corridors he set unframed mirrors. So that the people liked to go up — in the lift if they were well-off, taking the stairs if they weren’t — and inspect themselves, though without getting to know themselves at all.
These buildings, which are still haunted by the architect’s soul, make me indescribably sad, because they are so compromised. They were built for a purpose, which was to be habitable and durable, and full of light and air. But they aspired to be beautiful, and as impractical as beauty always is. They were forced to yield to the ridiculous duress of their physical being, and only in their upper reaches was it permitted to them to be luxurious, and even then under conditions of strict practicality. They symbolize the lives of thousands of architects, and the gulf between what they intended and what they actually built.
Some people like to say veran-dah. That sounds as though they had already fallen off them, with a flowerpot and half a window to follow. Because here everyone loves their veran-dah, and tricks it out with geraniums and begonias and pelargoniums, and other blooms that sounds like faraway countries. That comes from the longing of people who spend half their lives trying to set themselves apart from the rest of us, and the other half (in accordance with the proverb) to create order.* They may never get to anywhere with a name like one of their flowers. They plant these exotic things outside their houses and in their hearts, and so make the symbol of the thing-attained-with-difficulty domestic. In the same way their love of outdoors is best seen in brick promontories where they spend a great part of their lives, either with a watering can, or with love, appetite and illumination.
The light is dimmed to pink, and looks like a small-scale forest fire on the horizon, or a Light Everlasting in a wayside chapel somewhere. Now God has given me sufficient desire for beauty on the one hand to multiply the forest fires, and to quench them, and also a devoutness that is susceptible to the occasional wayside chapel. But a whole parade of these wayside chapels, plastered on a row of trees, and animated by the earthly rattle of dinner-plates and clink of cutlery, is able to knock a sizeable hole in my spirit of reverence. So I sometimes direct an impious eye at the inner life of my neighbours, which they have turned inside out, to give it some air on their veran-dahs. On occasion I am ashamed of my overweening mind and my secret shame, which prevents me from doing as my neighbours. I see isolated lights and I think of the wayside chapels. Maybe, I think, people would be more discreet and pious, if the essence of the veran-dah didn’t consist in giving the illusion of being cast away on a desert island of swinging baskets. And the pinkish light — as I’ve discovered — is only another illusion. The one who sees it thinks he is not seen. And is seen, in the pink… Perhaps people actually want to be seen.
One thing is certain: that I am all alone in this strange city, and that as I make my way through its streets, a shudder of homelessness will befall me one morning in the midst of so much homely activity. The energetic sound of a matutinal piano; the white net curtains behind a window; a man in shirtsleeves; a woman in her nightcap; a Litfass column dripping with fresh glue; a porter gone out to Brasso the doorknob; a spit-and-shined shoe-polish boy; a crisp lady baker; a hairdresser standing outside his premises like a white atomizer — they all are strange to me, because they don’t know me, even though they tell me everything. They greet each other with familiar expressions, and every eye reflects the other’s experiences.