Can't they be forced into that? In any case, they are more handsome and walk more erectly than ghetto Jews.
5 February, 1911
At [SDP leader Paul] Singer's funeral, the entire fourth borough walked in front of the coffin. The procession lasted more than an hour before the hearses passed. After a while, the appearance of the crowd made me sad. So many undereducated people. So many mean, stupid faces. So many ill and malformed. Yet still, as social democrats, they represented a favourable cross section of the population.
16 April, 1912
The British steamer
Titantic
has sunk, with more than a thousand people on board. Soost, the workman, earns twenty-eight marks a week, six of which go to pay the rent, twenty-two he hands overto his wife. She has to pay for beds and sleeping space, leaving fourteen or fifteen marks for Soost, his wife and their six children to live on.
Their youngest is one month old … One of the older children is mentally retarded. Soost's wife is thirty-five, and she's already borne nine children, three of whom died. But all of them, she says, were as sturdy as this little boy at birth, they only weakened and died because she couldn't breastfeed them; she had no milk because she had to perform hard labour and couldn't care for herself.
October 1912
A Polygamy Bond has been set up in Jena. A hundred superior specimens of manhood desire intercourse with 1,000 superior specimens of womanhood, for the purposes of propagation. As soon as the woman becomes pregnant, the conjugal bonds are dissolved. All this with a view to racial advancement.
New Year's Eve, 1913
Last New Year's Eve, with all the rumours of war, was a hard one for me to bear. Now the year is over and nothing much in particular has happened … Mother is still alive. I asked her whether she wouldn't like to start all over again. She shook her head slowly and said: ‘It's enough.’ So she slowly fades, a languid, dusky sinking.
The name of the hotel where I am staying is the Imperator. It's actually more like a boarding house, an enormous apartment building built around two courtyards, with high-ceilinged hallways and rooms en suite. In imperial times it housed the families of citizens of substance, but since the 1920s it has served as a boarding house. Miraculously enough, the building survived the war. Here is Berlin at its best: cozy, the walls covered in art, the sheets and napkins snowy white, the crispiest
Brötchen
in town. The entrance to all this solid living, a lovely oak staircase, always smells of beeswax. The hall is covered in golden curlicues, forms in stucco and plaster. The balcony is held on high by two nymphs. The portico to the neighbour's house, with its profusion of marble, borders on the royal. Above the landing are two blank coats of arms. The façade is punctuatedby half-pillars. The copper nameplates beside the massive front door blare the message; this is a house for dentists, doctors, insurance agents and a respectable widow, who takes in boarders.
This street is one great cultural derivation: Berlin's nouveau riche copied their emperor's style in the same way that their emperor copied his from the capitals of a more ancient Europe. They were built this way everywhere in the better neighbourhoods, the apartment buildings with a gateway for carriages – used, in actual fact, only by the coal merchant or milkman – the impressive vestibules and palatial stairways, the divided stateliness of a façade, the cut-rate grandeur.
In this campaign for glory, Kaiser Wilhelm himself set the tone. The whole city was permeated with his romanticised view of history. Wilhelm's hand could be seen everywhere: in the countless statues of winged deities, in the many museums, in the thirty-five neo-Gothic churches – one of the empress’ hobbies – in the thousands of oak leaves, laurel wreaths and other ‘national’ symbols, in the copper statue of the city's pudgy pseudo-goddess, Berolina, at Alexanderplatz, in the
5 February, 1911
At [SDP leader Paul] Singer's funeral, the entire fourth borough walked in front of the coffin. The procession lasted more than an hour before the hearses passed. After a while, the appearance of the crowd made me sad. So many undereducated people. So many mean, stupid faces. So many ill and malformed. Yet still, as social democrats, they represented a favourable cross section of the population.
16 April, 1912
The British steamer
Titantic
has sunk, with more than a thousand people on board. Soost, the workman, earns twenty-eight marks a week, six of which go to pay the rent, twenty-two he hands overto his wife. She has to pay for beds and sleeping space, leaving fourteen or fifteen marks for Soost, his wife and their six children to live on.
Their youngest is one month old … One of the older children is mentally retarded. Soost's wife is thirty-five, and she's already borne nine children, three of whom died. But all of them, she says, were as sturdy as this little boy at birth, they only weakened and died because she couldn't breastfeed them; she had no milk because she had to perform hard labour and couldn't care for herself.
October 1912
A Polygamy Bond has been set up in Jena. A hundred superior specimens of manhood desire intercourse with 1,000 superior specimens of womanhood, for the purposes of propagation. As soon as the woman becomes pregnant, the conjugal bonds are dissolved. All this with a view to racial advancement.
New Year's Eve, 1913
Last New Year's Eve, with all the rumours of war, was a hard one for me to bear. Now the year is over and nothing much in particular has happened … Mother is still alive. I asked her whether she wouldn't like to start all over again. She shook her head slowly and said: ‘It's enough.’ So she slowly fades, a languid, dusky sinking.
The name of the hotel where I am staying is the Imperator. It's actually more like a boarding house, an enormous apartment building built around two courtyards, with high-ceilinged hallways and rooms en suite. In imperial times it housed the families of citizens of substance, but since the 1920s it has served as a boarding house. Miraculously enough, the building survived the war. Here is Berlin at its best: cozy, the walls covered in art, the sheets and napkins snowy white, the crispiest
Brötchen
in town. The entrance to all this solid living, a lovely oak staircase, always smells of beeswax. The hall is covered in golden curlicues, forms in stucco and plaster. The balcony is held on high by two nymphs. The portico to the neighbour's house, with its profusion of marble, borders on the royal. Above the landing are two blank coats of arms. The façade is punctuatedby half-pillars. The copper nameplates beside the massive front door blare the message; this is a house for dentists, doctors, insurance agents and a respectable widow, who takes in boarders.
This street is one great cultural derivation: Berlin's nouveau riche copied their emperor's style in the same way that their emperor copied his from the capitals of a more ancient Europe. They were built this way everywhere in the better neighbourhoods, the apartment buildings with a gateway for carriages – used, in actual fact, only by the coal merchant or milkman – the impressive vestibules and palatial stairways, the divided stateliness of a façade, the cut-rate grandeur.
In this campaign for glory, Kaiser Wilhelm himself set the tone. The whole city was permeated with his romanticised view of history. Wilhelm's hand could be seen everywhere: in the countless statues of winged deities, in the many museums, in the thirty-five neo-Gothic churches – one of the empress’ hobbies – in the thousands of oak leaves, laurel wreaths and other ‘national’ symbols, in the copper statue of the city's pudgy pseudo-goddess, Berolina, at Alexanderplatz, in the
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