The Six Days of Berlin

The Six Days of Berlin is a six-day track cycling race held annually in Berlin. 

The event was first held in 1909 and it became especially popular in the "Golden Twenties", when its scene was the legendary Sportpalast. It was not only a sporting, but also a social event. Well-known artists and sports celebrities - successful boxers like Max Schmeling, Karl Mildenberger, Bubi Scholz or Wladimir Klitschko - did not miss this opportunity to appear in public and even give the start signal.

Egon Erwin Kisch, wrote a famous article about the course and the fascination it exerced on Berliners of all ages and social classes. Here, an English translation which could be better, much better, but which hopefully gives an idea of the original piece, as well of the style of the renowned journalist.

« For the tenth time, the six-day race is raging at the Sportpalast on Potsdamer Straße. Thirteen cyclists, each belonging to a pair, began pedaling on Friday at nine o'clock in the evening, seven thousand people were taking their expensive seats, and since then, day and night, night and day they have been raging around in the crazy carousel.       /.../

For six days and six nights, the thirteen drivers do not look neither right or left, but only to the front, striving forward, but still always in the same spot, always in the oval of the racetrack, on the long sides or on the almost vertical ascending curves, eerie over each other, sometimes at the top of the swarm, sometimes at the cue and sometimes - and then the audience roars: "Hipp, hipp!" - a few meters further; but after one or two more laps the rider comes back to where he was and returns to the herd of the thirteen.

A deadly, murderous merry-go-round.

So they all stay in the same place as they rush forward, as they travel at breakneck speeds along the diagonals of Europe, from Constantinople to London and from Madrid to Moscow. But they can not see the Bosphorus, Lloyd George, Escorial or Lenin, nothing of a harem and nothing of a lady riding in Hyde Park, and no Carmen seducing Don José, and no Socialist with short black hair and Marx's "Doctrine of Plus Value" in his pocket.

They stay in the same place, in the same round, with the same people - a deadly, murderous carroussel. And when it is finished, at the one hundred and forty-fourth hour, then the first one, falling from his bycycle close to delirium tremens, wins the victory, an example of endurance.

Six days and six nights thirteen pairs of legs press on the pedals, the right leg on the right pedal, the left leg on the left pedal, thirteen backs bent down, while the head nods continuously, once to the right, once to the left, and thirteen pairs of hands do nothing but hold the handlebar.

His thirteen partners lie now exhausted in the underground boxes and get massage. Six days and six nights. Outside, delivery women carry the morning papers from the printing house, drive the first cars of the trams out of the station, workers go to the factories, a husband gives his wife the morning kiss, a policeman replaces the other on the street corner, guests go to the café, somebody wonders if he should put the gray-and-black striped tie today, or the brown one, the dollar goes up, a criminal finally decides to confess, a mother beats her boy, typewriters rattle, factory sirens take their lunch break, a play by Georg Kaiser is given in the Deutsches Theater, a play in which the six-day race plays a role,  (Kisch means the expressionist play « Von morgens bis mitternachts », From morning to midnight)  the waiter does not bring the beefsteak, a boss dismisses an employee, who has four children, in front of a cinema’s box office a hundred people queue up, a roué seduces a girl, a lady has her hair dyed, a schoolboy does his arithmetic tasks, in the Reichstag there are stormy scenes, in the halls of the Philharmonie an Indian festival, in the houses people sit on the toilet and read the newspaper, someone dreams of finding himself in a ballroom in only his shirt and pants, a high school student cannot sleep, because tomorrow he will not be able to prove the Pythagorean theorem, a doctor amputates a leg, people are born and people die, a bud blossoms and a flower withers, a star falls and a facade climber climbs up a wall, the sun lights and recruits take shooting lessons, it thunders and bank directors hold a meeting, in the Zoological Garden predators are fed and a wedding takes place, the moon shines and the conference of ambassadors makes decisions,  man is good and man is bad - while the thirteen, with their butts pressed on a triangle of leather, drive incessantly all around, incessantly all around, constantly with bald head and hairy legs nodding, right, left, right, left.

Even the earth turns around,  to receive light from the sun, the moon does it too, to give moonlight to the earth, the wheels spin to produce wealth - only man turns senselessly in his arbitrary ellipse for nothing, six days and six nights long.

/…/

An inquisitor who would have concocted such torture, such an "elliptical treadmill," would have been braided himself on the wheel in the darkest Middle Ages. But in the twentieth century there have to be six-day races. They must be ! The people demand it. The racetrack with the thirteen jersey jerseys is the manometer scale of a humanity heated with desires for sensation, with the ecstatic will to protest against convenience and mechanization.

/.../

 

From morning until the middle of the night the place is full, and from the middle of the night until the morning the occasion is even better. A bridge soars high over the track and leads to the central area; to cross will cost you two hundred marks per person. Inside the track are two bars with jazz bands, where a glass of champagne will set you back three thousand paper marks and a bottle twenty thousand. Underdressed ladies in evening gowns sit there, criminals in their work attire (tails and ballroom shoes), chauffeurs, blacks, foreigners, officers and Jews. They donate prizes.  When the spurt is over, their attention turns from the curves of the banking to the curves of the lovely neighbour. She leans in attractive pose on the barrier, her knights stare at her neckline, right, left, right, left. It is the Six Day Race of nightlife.

In the stalls and on the stands, the working people of Berlin, Nationalists, Social Democrats, right, left, right, left, all seats of the sports palace have been sold out for fourteen days, right, left, right, left, districts in the north and south have been depopulated, houses are empty, up and down, right and left.

And more than half of the seats are owned by the obsessed who persevere from the start to the finish of the hundred and forty-four hours. In sports circles in Berlin it is well known that even unfortunate marriages are tempered by the institution of the Six Days. The henpecked husband can stay away from home for six days and six nights, uncontrolled and without fear of a sermon. Even the most jealous husband leaves his wife unarmed and unguarded half a dozen days and nights; she can go wherever she wants, right, left, right, left, to eat quietly with her friend, to drink and to sleep, for the husband is, body and soul, at the Six Days.

From there, the spectators do not move away, whether they are on holiday from the boss or in sick-leave from their job, whether they have locked their shop or left the business to the employees, whether they fail to visit the customers, whether they strike or are unemployed. Only exceptionally is their pleasure prematurely interrupted, as it happened to Mr. Wilhelm Hahnke, from the 139^th house of the Schönhauser Straße; on the third day of the race, the speaker announced through the megaphone to the seven thousand spectators: "Herr Wilhelm Hahnke, Schönhauser Strasse 139, please go home, as your wife is dead !"

Another, and surely better English translation of the article by Graham Davis can be purchased here :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elliptical-Treadmill-Egon-Erwin-Kisch-ebook/dp/B00PEEEJOA/

Hemingway

After having read this text by Kisch, I remember that Hemingway also wrote about the Six Days, not of Berlin but of Paris. It's in his "A moveable feast":
 
"But I will evoke the Winter Velodrome, in the smoky light of the afternoon, and the very steep wooden tracks and the screeching of the tires on the wood...”