The Berlin Stories (52 page)

Then we went up to the workshop, where older boys in blue overalls—all convicted criminals—were making boots. Most of the boys looked up and grinned when Brink came in, only a few were sullen. But I couldn’t look them in the eyes. I felt horribly guilty and ashamed: I seemed, at that moment, to have become the sole representative of their gaolers, of Capitalist Society. I wondered if any of them had actually been arrested in the Alexander Casino, and, if so, whether they recognised me.

We had lunch in the matron’s room. Herr Brink apologised for giving me the same food as the boys themselves ate—potato soup with two sausages, and a dish of apples and stewed prunes. I protested—as, no doubt, I was intended to protest—that it was very good. And yet the thought of the boys having to eat it, or any other kind of meal, in that building, made each spoonful stick in my throat. Institution food has an indescribable, perhaps purely imaginary, taste. ( One of the most vivid and sickening memories of my own school life is the smell of ordinary white bread.)

“You don’t have any bars or locked gates here,” I said. “I thought all reformatories had them… Don’t your boys often run away?”

“Hardly ever,” said Brink, and the admission seemed to make him positively unhappy; he sank his head wearily in his hands. “Where shall they run to? Here it is bad. At home it is worse. The majority of them know that.”

“But isn’t there a kind of natural instinct for freedom?”

“Yes, you are right. But the boys soon lose it. The system helps them to lose it. I think perhaps that, in Germans, this instinct is never very strong.”

“You don’t have much trouble here, then?”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes… Three months ago, a terrible thing happened. One boy stole another boy’s overcoat. He asked for permission to go into the town—that is allowed—and possibly he meant to sell it. But the owner of the overcoat followed him, and they had a fight. The boy to whom the overcoat belonged took up a big stone and flung it at the other boy; and this boy, feeling himself hurt, deliberately smeared dirt into the wound, hoping to make it worse and so escape punishment. The wound did get worse. In three days the boy died of blood-poisoning. And when the other boy heard of this he killed himself with a kitchen knife….” Brink sighed deeply: “Sometimes I almost despair,” he added. “It seems as if there were a kind of badness, a disease, infecting the world to-day.”

“But what can you really do for these boys?” I asked.

“Very little. We teach them a trade. Later, we try to find them work—which is almost impossible. If they have work in the neighbourhood, they can still sleep here at nights… The Principal believes that their lives can be changed through the teachings of the Christian religion. I’m afraid I cannot feel this. The problem is not so simple. I’m afraid that most of them, if they cannot get work, will take to crime. After all, people cannot be ordered to starve.”

“Isn’t there any alternative?”

Brink rose and led me to the window.

“You see those two buildings? One is the engineering-works, the other is the prison. For the boys of this district there used to be two alternatives… But now the works are bankrupt. Next week they will close down.”

This morning Ď went to see Rudi’s club-house, which is also the office of a pathfinders’ magazine. The editor and scoutmaster, Uncle Peter, is a haggard, youngish man, with a parchment-coloured face and deeply sunken eyes, dressed in corduroy jacket and shorts. He is evidently Rudi’s idol. The only time Rudi will stop talking is when Uncle Peter has something to say. They showed me dozens of photographs of boys, all taken with the camera tilted upwards, from beneath, so that they look like epic giants, in profile against enormous clouds. The magazine itself has articles on hunting, tracking, and preparing food—all written in super-enthusiastic style, with a curious underlying note of hysteria, as though the actions described were part of a religious or erotic ritual. There were half-a-dozen other boys in the room with us: all of them in a state of heroic semi-nudity, wearing the shortest of shorts and the thinnest of shirts or singlets, although the weather is so cold.

When I had finished looking at the photographs, Rudi took me into the club meeting-room. Long coloured banners hung down the walls, embroidered with initials and mysterious totem devices. At one end of the room was a low table covered with a crimson embroidered cloth—a kind of altar. On the table were candles in brass candlesticks.

“We light them on Thursdays,” Rudi explained, “when we have our camp-fire palaver. Then we sit round in a ring on the floor, and sing songs and tell stories.”

Above the table with the candlesticks was a sort of icon—the framed drawing of a young pathfinder of unearthly beauty, gazing sternly into the far distance, a banner in his hand. The whole place made me feel profoundly uncomfortable. I excused myself and got away as soon as I could.

• • • Overheard in a café: a young Nazi is sitting with his girl; they are discussing the future of the Party. The Nazi is drunk.

“Oh, I know we shall win, all right,” he exclaims impatiently, “but that’s not enough!” He thumps the table with his fist: “Blood must flow!”

The girl strokes his arm reassuringly. She is trying to get him to come home. “But, of course, it’s going to flow, darling,” she coos soothingly, “the Leader’s promised that in our programme.”

To-day is “Silver Sunday. ” The streets are crowded with shoppers. All along the Tauentzienstrasse, men, women and boys are hawking postcards, flowers, song-books, hair-oil, bracelets. Christmas-trees are stacked for sale along the central path between the tramlines. Uniformed S. A. men rattle their collecting-boxes. In the side-streets, lorry-loads of police are waiting; for any large crowd, nowadays, is capable of turning into a political riot. The Salvation Army have a big illuminated tree on the Wittenbergplatz, with a blue electric star. A group of students were standing round it, making sarcastic remarks. Among them I recognised Werner, from the “communist” café.

“This time next year,” said Werner, “that star will have changed its colour!” He laughed violently—he was in an excited, slightly hysterical mood. Yesterday, he told me, he’d had a great adventure: “You see, three other comrades and myself decided to make a demonstration at the Labour Exchange in Neukölln. I had to speak, and the others were to see I wasn’t interrupted. We went round there at about half-past ten, when the bureau’s most crowded. Of course, we’d planned it all beforehand—each of the comrades had to hold one of the doors, so that none of the clerks in the office could get out. There they were, cooped up like rabbits… Of course, we couldn’t prevent their telephoning for the Police, we knew that. We reckoned we’d got six or seven minutes… Well, as soon as the doors were fixed, I jumped on to a table. I just yelled out whatever came into my head—I don’t know what I said. They liked it, anyhow… In half a minute I had them so excited I got quite scared. I was afraid they’d break into the office and lynch somebody. There was a fine old shindy, I can tell you! But just when things were beginning to look properly lively, a comrade came up from below to tell us the Police were there already—just getting out of their car. So we had to make a dash for it… I think they’d have got us, only the crowd was on our side, and wouldn’t let them through until we were out by the other door, into the street….” Werner finished breathlessly. “I tell you, Christopher,” he added, “the capitalist system can’t possibly last much longer now. The workers are on the move!”

Early this evening I was in the Biilowstrasse. There had been a big Nazi meeting at the Sportpalast, and groups of men and boys were just coming away from it, in their brown or black uniforms. Walking along the pavement ahead of me were three S. A. men. They all carried Nazi banners on their shoulders, like rifles, rolled tight round the staves—the banner-staves had sharp metal points, shaped into arrowheads.

All at once, the three S. A. men came face to face with a youth of seventeen or eighteen, dressed in civilian clothes, who was hurrying along in the opposite direction. I heard one of the Nazis shout: “That’s him!” and immediately all three of them flung themselves upon the young man. He uttered a scream, and tried to dodge, but they were too quick for him. In a moment they had jostled him into the shadow of a house entrance, and were standing over him, kicking him and stabbing at him with the sharp metal points of their banners. All this happened with such incredible speed that I could hardly believe my eyes—already, the three S. A. men had left their victim, and were barging their way through the crowd; they made for the stairs which led up to the station of the Overhead Railway.

Another passer-by and myself were the first to reach the doorway where the young man was lying. He lay huddled crookedly in the corner, like an abandoned sack. As they picked him up, I got a sickening glimpse of his face—his left eye was poked half out, and blood poured from the wound. He wasn’t dead. Somebody volunteered to take him to the hospital in a taxi.

By this time, dozens of people were looking on. They seemed surprised, but not particularly shocked—this sort of thing happens too often, nowadays. “Allerhand….” they murmured. Twenty yards away, at the Potsdamerstrasse corner, stood a group of heavily armed policemen. With their chests out, and their hands on their revolver belts, they magnificently disregarded the whole affair.

Werner has become a hero. His photograph was in the Rote Fahne a few days ago, captioned: “Another victim of the Police blood-bath.” Yesterday, which was New Year’s day, I went to visit him in hospital.

Just after Christmas, it seems, there was a streetfight near the Stettiner Bahnhof. Werner was on the edge of the crowd, not knowing what the fight was about. On the off-chance that it might be something political, he began yelling: “Red Front!” A policeman tried to arrest him. Werner kicked the policeman in the stomach. The policeman drew his revolver and shot Werner three times through the leg. When he had finished shooting, he called another policeman, and together they carried Werner into a taxi. On the way to the police-station, the policemen hit him on the head with their truncheons, until he fainted. When he has sufficiently recovered, he will, most probably, be prosecuted.

He told me all this with the greatest satisfaction, sitting up in bed surrounded by his admiring friends, including Rudi and Inge, in her Henry the Eighth hat. Around him, on the blanket, lay his press-cuttings. Somebody had carefully underlined each mention of Werner’s name with a red pencil.

To-day, January 22nd, the Nazis held a demonstration on the Biilowplatz, in front of the Karl Liebknecht House. For the last week the communists have been trying to get the demonstration forbidden: they say it is simply intended as a provocation—as, of course, it was. I went along to watch it with Frank, the newspaper correspondent.

As Frank himself said afterwards, this wasn’t really a Nazi demonstration at all, but a Police demonstration—there were at least two policemen to every Nazi present. Perhaps General Schleicher only allowed the march to take place in order to show who are the real masters of Berlin. Everybody says he’s going to proclaim a military dictatorship.

But the real masters of Berlin are not the Police, or the Army, and certainly not the Nazis. The masters of Berlin are the workers—despite all the propaganda I’ve heard and read, all the demonstrations I’ve attended, I only realised this, for the first time to-day. Comparatively few of the hundreds of people in the streets round the Biilowplatz can have been organised communists, yet you had the feeling that every single one of them was united against this march. Somebody began to sing the “International,” and, in a moment, everyone had joined in—even the women with their babies, watching from top-storey windows. The Nazis slunk past, marching as fast as they knew how, between their double rows of protectors. Most of them kept their eyes on the ground, or glared glassily ahead: a few attempted sickly, furtive grins. When the procession had passed, an elderly fat little S. A. man, who had somehow got left behind, came panting along at the double, desperately scared at finding himself alone, and trying vainly to catch up with the rest. The whole crowd roared with laughter.

During the demonstration nobody was allowed on the Bülowplatz itself. So the crowd surged uneasily about, and things began to look nasty. The police, brandishing their rifles, ordered us back; some of the less experienced ones, getting rattled, made as if to shoot. Then an armoured car appeared, and started to turn its machine-gun slowly in our direction. There was a stampede into house doorways and cafés; but no sooner had the car moved on, than everybody rushed out into the street again, shouting and singing. It was too much like a naughty schoolboy’s game to be seriously alarming. Frank enjoyed himself enormously, grinning from ear to ear, and hopping about, in his flapping overcoat and huge owlish spectacles, like a mocking, ungainly bird.

Only a week since I wrote the above. Schleicher has resigned. The monocles did their stuff. Hitler has formed a cabinet with Hugenberg. Nobody thinks it can last till the spring.

The newspapers are becoming more and more like copies of a school magazine. There is nothing in them but new rules, new punishments, and lists of people who have been “kept in.” This morning, Goring has invented three fresh varieties of high treason.

Every evening, I sit in the big half-empty artists’ café by the Memorial Church, where the Jews and left-wing intellectuals bend their heads together over the marble tables, speaking in low, scared voices. Many of them know that they will certainly be arrested—if not to-day, then tomorrow or next week. So they are polite and mild with each other, and raise their hats and enquire after their colleagues’ families. Notorious literary tiffs of several years’ standing are forgotten.

Almost every evening, the S. A. men come into the café. Sometimes they are only collecting money; everybody is compelled to give something. Sometimes they have come to make an arrest. One evening a Jewish writer, who was present, ran into the telephone-box to ring up the Police. The Nazis dragged him out, and he was taken away. Nobody moved a finger. You could have heard a pin drop, till they were gone.