A guidebook to Berlin

The original cover from 1931

Suppose you, by some miracle allowing you to cross time barriers, find yourself on the Kurfürstendamm, in the heart of Berlin, not today’s Berlin, but the Berlin of 1931. What would be the first thing you’d do ?

I don’t think it would be to rush to the nearest bookshop to buy a guide. I think I would start immediately to explore the city, to look for all those streets blown up by the war, those places we can only find in vintage postcards, old black and white films or watching a TV-series like Babylon Berlin. 

But I would probably be better advised to buy a guidebook. A copy of Curt Moreck’s book for instance. Its title : « A guide to disreputable Berlin ».

"Curiosity and a hunger for new experiences drive the people of our time from city to city, country to country, and continent to continent. For most, daily life is tiresome. So they get into a car, board a train, or take a seat on an airplane and put many kilometers between themselves and their everyday lives.

Big cities have created visitors' bureaus and provincial governments are already beginning to entrust tourism ministries with the organization of this profitable trade.

One day the visitors‘ bureau in Berlin issued the slogan : “Jeder einmal in Berlin !” « Everyone to Berlin ! » Modern advertising sounds like a categorical imperative. It has adopted a dictatorial tone. These days one receives orders as to which toothpaste, razor blades, fountain pen, beer or holiday resort to choose. "Everyone to Berlin!” The phrase has something irresistible about it. Something enticing, promising, and fascinating hovers around the word Berlin.

The big questions arise once one has left the train station. Then things become problematic. Big cities are indefinite promises. They are labyrinths in which the most beautiful streets betray no hint of where they might lead.

Every city has an official and an unofficial side. The face that appears so clearly in the light of the arc lamps is more like a mask. lt wears the makeup of the coquette, applied too thickly to permit the true features underneath to be recognized. Those who are looking for experiences, who long for adventure, who hope for sensations— they must go into the dark side, venture into the depths. The depths are the more amusing side of life.

City officials offer travelers a guide that refers them to a tiring succession of representative sites and monuments with some kind of historical significance. But intensity is to be experienced only at the vital sites of life, where polar opposites touch, where contradictions become one, where humanity is blended together like a piquant ragout, where the big world lives and the demimonde visits, or where the demimonde lives and the big world visits, and ultimately where the underworld is at home.

Everyone to Berlin ! Nighttime Berlin too. But nighttime one does need a guide. Theseus would never have ventured into the labyrinth without Ariadne‘s thread. And what was the labyrinth compared to Berlin at night, the metropolis of pleasure equally dazzling whether by light or dark? "

(my excerpt and my translation)

Curt Moreck’s right name was Konrad Haemmerling (1888-1957), a journalist and writer. His guidebook (Ein Führer durch das lasterhafte Berlin) is available in a new edition for about 20 euros, but only in German.