Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, according to Peter Gay

In 1961, the historian Peter Gay returned to his native Berlin after 22 years of absence. He had been forced to leave, with his Jewish family, in order to escape the Nazi persecution. He then wrote a book: My German question. Here, an excerpt, where Gay portrays the German metropolis :

"Unlike other great metropolitan centers, unlike Paris or London, Berlin had been a parvenu among capitals. A small, slowly growing garrison city, headquarters for the impoverished but assertive Hohenzollern dynasty, it had expanded exponentially in the nineteenth century and started to acquire representative cultural institutions: museums, concert halls, opera houses. Late in the nineteenth century there had been a bootless competition between Munich and Berlin as to which was more modem, more civilized; around 1900, it seemed as though Berlin was winning this culture war.

"Berlin had long been much despised, which is to say much envied, by other cities. Its humor, blunt, cynical, democratic, busy deflating the bloated and the pretentious, was proverbial. It demystified political rhetoric no less than excessive advertising claims. I remember a slogan used to sell a fire extinguisher that was prominent in my childhood years: Feuer breitet sich nicht aus, Hast Du Minimax im Haus—Fire won't spread if you have Minimax at home—which some Berlin wit had undermined with the irreverent commentary Minimax ist grosser Mist, Wenn Du nicht zuhause ist. Minimax is a lot of junk when you're not at home. Goethe, who visited Berlin only once, found the "wit and irony" of its denizens quite remarkable; with such an "audacious human type" he decided that delicacy would not get very far and that one needed "hair on one's teeth"—Haare auf den Zähnen—a rather baffling tribute that became proverbial because it seemed somehow just right.

An ad for Minimax

"Berlin's characteristic speech was quite antiauthoritarian; deflating in its harsh and terse accents, it came naturally to working-class Berliners and was affected by sophisticates who thought linguistic slumming chic. When the operetta composer Paul Lincke extolled Berlin's inimitable air, the Berliner Luft, he did not have meteorology in mind but an incontestable mental alertness. And those who agreed with Lincke sensed that he was only putting to music what everyone already knew. Berlin was the kind of city on which travel writers and visiting journalists inevitably bestowed the epithet "vibrant".

"This vitality drew heavily on its diverse population, doubtless one reason why Jews felt so much at home there. In 1933, more than 150,000 of them, some 30 percent of the Jews in Germany, lived there. It was a common saying that every Berliner is from Breslau, obviously hyperbole, though it happened to fit my mother, who was born in Breslau and moved to Berlin after her marriage in 1922. In the 1880s Theodor Fontane, poet, historian, critic, novelist, the most interesting German writer between Goethe and Mann, observed that what made Berlin great was its ethnic mix: the offspring of the Huguenots, the provincials who streamed into the city from the surrounding province of Brandenburg, and the Jews. 

/...../

"It was only to be expected that the Nazis found Berlin a hard nut to crack, even when Goebbels was put in charge of winning it over to the "movement." The city's culture had contributed impressively to what was anathema to the Nazis and their supporters: modernist experimentation with its unconventional theatres, avant-garde novelists and publishers, adventurous newspapers and critics. Their reputation to the contrary, Berlin's Jews were by no means all cultural radicals; many of them, in fact, were solid conservatives in their tastes. Nor were they conspicuous in the city's widely advertised vice. Naturally, I was far too young to partake of the city's forbidden fruit and knew virtually nothing about it. But I early had a taste of its movie palaces, its variety theatres, its sports stadiums, and its bustling streets.

"One got around Berlin via an efficient system of subways, elevated trains, and buses, to say nothing of streetcars—we called them die Elektrische. I can still hear the screeching noise the cars made, especially around curves, the bright bell the conductor rang warning pedestrians to get out of the way, and the hissing sound that came, occasionally accompanied by little sparks, as the movable rods fixed on the roof of the car made contact with the power line strung overhead. The modem buses that were the streetcars' main competitors were another source of pleasure to me, especially the double-deckers. I found it almost obligatory to climb upstairs and observe the city scene passing beneath me. And nothing could be more thrilling, even a little frightening, than to be on the bus—naturally on the upper deck—as, swaying slightly, it slowly passed through the center space of the Brandenburg Gate; it always looked as though it would scrape against the columns on either side, and it always got through unscathed.

"Thus, even though Berlin covered an immense terrain, it seemed very accessible, a fine city for walking. It had made its vastness official in 1920, three years before I was bom, by incorporating its proliferating suburbs. But this grab for territory had done no damage to the city's splendid shopping avenues, refreshing parks with comfortable benches, streets with their ever changing incidents, carts from which second-hand dealers sold books. For a walker in Berlin, the favorite west-east artery was the world-famous Kurfûrstendamm, with its marvelous wide sidewalks. More than two miles long, it started rather unpretentiously near the street where I lived, but as one walked eastward, one could browse in bookstores, window-shop for clothing, china, even fancy automobiles, and pass movie palaces like theAlhambra (another casualty of the war), to which my parents had taken me, and the Universum, a masterpiece by the brilliant romantic modemist architect Erich Mendelsohn—another emigrant after 1933. Perhaps best of all were the outdoor cafes, where one could sit at leisure, spooning up cake with whipped cream and watching the parade of Berliners on their way. Even before I was ten, I could recognize Berlin's special ambience.

Cinema Universum by Erich Mendelsohn

The Shell House by Emil Fahrenkamp, by the Landwehrkanal

"One reason for Berlin's size was that it had been built on a swamp. This meant, until more advanced building techniques unfortunately made skyscrapers practicable, that its profile was low, permitting an expansive canopy of sky over-head. True, it was often gray, but one got used to that. There were a handful of startling exceptions that only underscored the horizontality of Berlin: the skeletal Funkturm, a poor cousin to Paris's Eiffel Tower, dating from the mid-1920s; an office tower for the Borsig locomotive works; and the most dramatic, most uncompromisingly modern building, the ten-story Shell House facing one of the city’s canals. With its curved facade and emphatic bands of windows, it was something of a sensation in my childhood. When I saw it again in 1961, it was dilapidated but still standing, a mocking comment on past glories.