Free Kino by Jürgen Fauth

the bottle to the little girl, who sat down next to me and lifted it to her lips, drinking until it was gone. “Nice bubbly for a lowly student,” she said. She let go of a monstrous burp and handed the empty bottle back to me.
    My embarrassment gave way to something else–the sense that in this city, not even the school children could be counted on to do what they were supposed to. I was broke and wasted, and I wouldn't be able to pay the rent. I'd given my inheritance away but it was just as well; by November, all of it would have been barely enough to afford a turnip, anyway.
    Susi said, “You should probably go to bed now,” and I was grateful for her small gesture of kindness. For the first time in my life, I felt that the travails of the time were also mine. I was a true Berliner.
    â€œThey call me Kino,” I said, and Susi Oberlin burped again.

    The government ordered the newspaper presses to print more money in ever higher denominations. Workers got paid at noon and ran out to spend it before it became worthless. Though I had nothing left, I never went hungry–I was Steffen's friend, and Steffen knew people with dollars, first among them his latest benefactor, Ray, an American art dealer who hosted a never-ending party at the Belvedere, a fantasy castle on the western shore of the Grosse Wannsee looking out across the sailboat-studded bay to the Lido. Ray proclaimed that he'd fallen madly in love with Steffen. Magnus Hirschfeld and some of his students were hanging out naked by the pier, there was dancing on the terrace, and in the west wing, somebody read aloud from a dirty novel they had smuggled in from France, “the most modern book ever written!” There was always enough to eat and drink and snort at the Belvedere.
    Demand for drugs was on the rise, and there was more pussy to be had than ever. Can you blame me, Herr Dokter, for helping to move a little bit of both? A few deliveries here and there, the exchange of a package at Zoo station, selecting a few Tauentziengirls and boys to join us out at the Belvedere? Jawoll , I did my share of drug dealing and whore mongering, but I had dollars, and if you had dollars, you could live like a king. When the French invaded the Ruhr, prices went up further, but the parties at the Belvedere never slowed down: there was an insane edge to everything, absurd desperation in the air. When winter came, the Oberlins, my landlords, began heating the building with buckets of last week's money like everybody else. Germany's undernourished children died of tuberculosis and war veterans dragged themselves through the streets begging for a bite of stale bread or a ladle of cabbage soup. You could have an entire Kneipe dancing naked for a few coins but a billion marks bought you a cigarette. People were sniping from the rooftops out of hunger and desperation. Misery stared us in the face but we danced at the Kleist Casino.
    In my sheltered, privileged life in Königstein, we had profited from pain. My new family just happened to survive very well.

    In Neubabelsberg, the studio was stockpiling food for the cast and crew. Inside the Grosse Halle, there was only one law, one rule, one thing that had to be done: whatever Fritz Lang wanted.
    Fritz Lang. Even before I ever met the miserable son of a bitch, with his monocle and superior airs, I hated him. Hot off Dr. Mabuse , Lang had been all over the papers with his marriage to his screenwriter bride, Thea von Harbou. In bad times, a little bit of celebrity goes a long way, and the public was eating up every idiotic rumor about the master and his muse. I had heard things, too: that the suicide of Lang's first wife had been anything but, that he couldn't climax unless he had the taste of blood on his tongue. On set, Fritz and Thea were aloof and unapproachable, like King Gunther and his Queen in the German legend we were filming, a turgid saga without hope or love.
    I detested Lang's histrionic style,