Edited and with an Introduction by Peter Demetz Essays, Apborisms, Autobiograpbical Writings Translated by Edmund Jephcott Hal A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ‘New York and LondonA Berlin Chronicle For my dea Scan fow let me call back those who introduced me to the city. For though the child, in his solitary games, grows up at closest ers to the city, he needs and seeks guides to its wider ex: es, and the frst of these—for a son of wealthy middleclass slike me—are sure to have been nursemaids. With them ‘vent to the Zoo—although T recall it only from much later, ith blaring military bands and "Seandal Avenue” (as the ad- nts of art nowveaw dubbed this promenade)—or, if mot to Zoo, to the Tiergarten, I believe the frst “street” that 1 iscovered in this way that no longer had anything habitable hospitable about it, emanating forlornness between the fronts and even danger at the crossings, was Schillsrasse; like to imagine that it has altered less than others in the ‘West End and could even now accommodate a i sisibly from the mist the saving of the life of way to the TTiergarten led over the Herkules Bridge, the ly sloping embankment of which must have been the fst side the child encountered—accentuated by the fine stone ‘flanks of the lion rising above. At the end of Bendlerstrasse, ever, began the labyrinth, not without its Ariadne: the ‘maze surrounding Frederick William III and Queen Louise, tho, rising sheer from the flower beds on their illustrated, “Empiestyle plinths, seemed as if petrified by the signs that a tle rivulet inscribed in the sand. Rather than the figures, my es sought the plinth, since the events taking place on them, ifless clear in their ramifications, were closer in space. But that particular significance attaches to this Hohenzollern laby-4 Reflections 4 Berlin Chronicle 5 rinth I find confirmed even now by the utterly unconcer ‘banal appearance of the forecourt on Tiergartenstrasse, whey nothing suggests that you stand but a few yards from, strangest place in the city. At that time i is tue, it must ha ‘corresponded more than closely to what was waiting behing for here, or not far away, were the haunts of that Ariadne ‘whose proximity I learned for the first time (and was never en, tirely t forget) something that was to make instantly comp Ihensible a word that at scarcely three T eannot have knowns love, Here the nursemaid supervenes, a cold shadow drivin away what I loved. It is likely that no one ever masters a supid than T am, had its origin in such walks, and has attendant danger of making me think myself quicker, ‘dexterous, and shrewder than Yam, mpave Tong. indeed for years, played with the idea of setting tthe sphere of life—bios—graphically on @ map. First I en- an ordinary map, but now I would incline toa general ‘map of a city center, if such a thing existed. Doubules not, because of ignorance of the theater of future wars. T have evolved a system of signs, and on the gray background such maps they would make a colorful show if I clearly ed in the houses of my friends and girl friends, the ae and if you agres, ily halls of various collectives, from the “debating cham- ‘you will also see that this impotence comes not at the begin, fof the Youth Movement to the gathering places of the ning of or before the struggle with the subject, but in the hear | Gommunist youth, the hotel and brothel rooms that I knew for of it, Which brings me to the middle period of my life in Te, in, extending from the whole of my later entrance to the university: a period of impotence before the city, This had two sources. First was a very poor sense of rection; but if it was thirty years before the distinction tween left and right had become visceral to me, and before Inad acquired the art of reading a street map, T was far from appreciating the extent of my ineptitude; and if anything capable of increasing my disinclination to perceive this f i was the insisence with which my mother thrust it under | nose. On her T lay the blame for my inability even today to | make a cup of coffer; to her propensity for tuming the mos “insignificant items of conduct into tests of my aptitude fo practical life T owe the dreamy recaletrance with which I a ‘companied her as we walked through the streets, rarely fre aquented by me, of the city center. But to this resistance in tum is due who knows how much that underlies my present intercourse with the city's sureets. Above all, a gaze that ap pears to see not a third of what it takes in. I remember, £0, hhow nothing was more intolerable to may mother than the pe antic care with which, on these walks, [always kept half step behind her. My habit of seeming slower, more maladroit, ‘pestgious cafés whose Tong forgotten names daily crosted our the tennis courts where empty apartment blocks stand ‘of dancing classes made almost the equal of gymna- slums. And even without this map, I stil have the encourage- ‘Léon Daudet, exemplary at least in the title of his work, which tly encompasses the best that I might achieve here: Paris eu. “Lived Berlin” does not sound so good but is as real. nit is not just this ticle that concerns me here; Paris itself isthe fourth in the series of voluntary or involuntary guides ‘at began with my nursemaids. If I hed to put in one word hat Towe to Pars for these reflections it would be “caution”; should scarcely be able to abandon myself to the shifting eur sents of these memories of my earliest city life, had not Paris ly circumscribed, the two forms in which lone this can legitimately—that is, with a guarantee of per- manence—be done; and had I not forsworn the attempt to equal the first as firmly as 1 hope one day to realize the second. fist form was created in the work of Marcel Proust, and6 Reflections the renunciation of any dalliance wih related posit could scarcely be more bindingly embodied than inthe tang Iation of it that T have produced. Related posit they realy exist? They would certainly permit no dalliance What Proust began so playfully became awesomely serous, | who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes tg the end ofits egments; no image satis hi, for he has | that it ean be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that tte, that toch for whose sake all | has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance ad | ances from small to smallest details, from the smallest 10 the nitesima, while that which it encounters in these mice coums grows ever mightier Such isthe deadly game that Prouy ‘began so dietantsy, in which he wil hardly fd moe su. cesors than he needed companions. How totally unlike this (the masie a the Zoo) was some ‘other park muse that had begun to reach my eas at an exer time, Tt came fom Rousse Island and drove the skaters oop. ing and whirling on New Lake Twas among them long before Thad any conception of the source ofthe island's name, not ‘mention the dificalty of his tle. Through its post rink was comparable to no ote, and stil more by life through the seats: for what did summer make of the rest? Tennis courts But here, under the overhanging branches (ofthe trees along the bank, stretched lake connected to labp rinthne waterways, and now one skated under the litle arched bridges where in summer one had leaned on balustades or on chains held by lion mouths, watching the boss gliding inthe dark water. There were serpentine paths near the lake and, ahove all, the tender retreats of lonely old men, benches for “adults only” at the edge ofthe snd pit with ts ditches, where toddlers dig or stand sunk in thought until bumped by play rate or owed by the voice ofa mursemaid from the hench of ‘command; there shes, stern and studious, reading her novel and keeping the child in check while hardly rising an eli “uti, her labor done, she ehanges places with the mare atthe Berlin Chronicle 7 ces nove wang ang van BF eas ng: Ce etry net vt ee orn Se eee 7 ie cite he eae ote etuvci begins es crag hg sa Fagan dene ls, cea oot Ud Bee a ce be consi boc oe irre teeter te eaten ght Sige dr tots Asia fies Lie perce rae Seis eens veceaeen Ee aie a ere eee Be slags rca Sepa Bip ttedipendag etaeclans tod porcn ee ecsere wine Las cnc rg Boorse sales sal picet betstostunoweice ee ees | ER Gree eae Bee iad waren den- trys ton doe on | Seer Ree cnc oraegtva paca i tench acrases pst ‘And then my fifth guide: Franz Hessel. I do not mean his ‘book On Foot in Berlin, which was written later, but the Cele- bration that our walks together in Paris received in our native uy, asf we were returning to harbor, the jetty still rising and falling as on waves under the feet of strolling seamen. The ‘centerpiece of this Celebration, however, was the “Green Mea- ‘ow'—a bed that still stands high above the couches spreading all around, on which we composed a small, complaisint, or cntally pallid epilogue to those great, sleeping feasts with which, a few years earlier in Paris, the Surrealists had unwittingly Inaugurated theit reactionary eaeer, thus fulfilling the text that the Lord giveth unto his oven in sleep. On this meadow wwe spread out such women as still amused us at home, but8 Reflections 4 Berlin Chronicle 9 they were few. From beneath lowered lids our gaze often mg better than on drafty stairways the palms, earyatids, window: and niches from which the “Tiergarten mythology” was evoly ing as the firs chapter of science of this city. It prospered, wwe had been astute enough to gather to us girls from the latinate quarter an Of residing in the quarter. True, the quarter in Beslin is up forunatcly an affair of the welltodo, and neither Wedd nor Reinickendorf nor Tegel bears comparison on this with Ménilmontant, Auteuil, or Neuily. All the more gratifying, therefore, were marauding Sunday, afternoon excursions on which we discovered an arcade in the Moabit quarter, the Stettin tunnel, or liberty in front of th Wallner Theater. A gitl photographer was with us. And i seems to me, as I think of Berlin, that only the side of the city, that we explored a that time is truly receptive to photography, For the closer we come to its preventday, fluid, funetiona) ‘existence, the narrower draws the circle of what can be photo. ‘graphed; it has been tightly observed that photography record, practically nothing of the essence of, for example, a modern factory. Such pictures can perhaps be compared to railway stations, whieh, in this age when railways are beginning to be ‘out of date, are no longer, generally speaking, the true “gate through which the city unrols its outskirts as it doe, ‘along the approach roads for motorists. A station gives the order, as it were, for a surprise attack, but it is an outdated maneuver that confronts us with the archaic, and the same is ‘rue of photography, even the snapshot. Only film commands ‘optical approaches fo the essence of the city, such as conduct ing the motorist into the new center. “The fourth guide.* Not to find one’s way in a eity may well ‘be uninteresting and banal. Tt requires ignorance—nothing ‘more, But to lose oneself in a cityas one loves oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling. Then, sign: as and street names, pasiersby, roof, kiosks, or bars must xo the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in ores like the starting call ofa bittern in the distance, he fhe sudden stillness ofa clearing witha lly standing erect ig center, Paris taught me this at of straying; it fuliled a lim that had shown its first traces in the labyrinths on the rotting pages of my school exercise books. Nor is it to be de- eg that 1 penetrated to its innermost place, the Minotaur's ber, with the only difference being that ¢his mythological mater had three heads: those of the occupants of the small hel on rue de Ia Hlarpe, in which, summoning my last 1 ‘of strength (and not entirely without an Ariadne’s reid), I set my foot. Bur if Paris thus answered my most un eny expectations, from another side it surpassed my graphic Tantasies The city, as it disclosed itself to me in the footsteps ofa hermetic tradition that I can trace back at least as far as “Rilke and whose guardian at that time was Franz Hessel, was a maze not only of paths but also of tunnels. T cannot think of the underworld of the Métro and the North-South line open- their hundreds of shafts all over the city, without recall Sing my endless flneres. "The most remarkable of all the street images from my early ‘childhood, however—more so even than the artival of the “pears, which T witnessed at the side of a nursemaid, or it may have been my French governess—more remarkable than the racecourse that passed Schillstrasse or ended there, s—it must ‘been about 1goo—a completely deserted stretch of road whieh ponderous torrents of water continuously thun- ‘dered down. !had been caught up in a local flood disaster, but ‘nother ways, too, the idea of extraordinary events is insepara ‘ble from that day; possibly we had been sent home from giool. In any case, this situation left behind an alarm signal; ‘iy strength must have been failing, and in the midst of the shalt strets of the city I felt exposed to the powers of na- primeval forest I should not have heen more aban + enjumin i reterring to Pasian.10 Reflections