Free In Europe by Geert Mak Page B

wooden chocks, ready to be hoisted away. This, too, has passed.
    Meanwhile, on the Kurfürstendamm, just around the corner from my lodgings, the matchbox game provides a glimmer of hope. Around noon each day the partners in the little gambling operation report for work. It is always a telling moment. The team consists of five men. There is one ‘pitcher’, a skinny man who skilfully conceals a little ball under one of three matchboxes, and four ‘players’. The men wear leather coats of clearly Eastern European origin; all but one, that is, a grey-haired fellow in a long camel-hair overcoat, clearly a man of substance. The pitcher rolls out his rug, squats down and starts performing his prestidigitation with the matchboxes. The players begin drawing in the guileless. One of them ‘wins’, ups the ante and does a stiff little dance of joy. The ‘man of substance’ nods approvingly, and places the occasional bet as well. The most fascinating element is the laughter: every three minutes, the black-leather group begins laughing wildly and pounding each other on the back in affected joy and comradeship. Berlin, as Oswald Spengler once wrote, is Europe's ‘whore of Babylon’. This is where it's all happening, the guileless think, this is the place for me to be.
    The Berlin phone book is still rife with Polish, Czech and Russian names. Around 1900, more than sixty per cent of the city's population consisted of immigrants or the children of immigrants. To many visitors, Berlin seemed to have something American about it, something reminiscent of Chicago. The bare squares and noisy houses reminded the artist/author Karl Scheffler of ‘American or Australian towns that springup deep in the wilderness’. He gave his 1910 depiction of the city the significant title
Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal
, and felt that ‘no trace of the born gentleman is to be found in the modern citizen of Berlin’. The dense colonial hordes, he said, had ‘come pouring into the city from the Eastern plains, lured by the promise of Americanism’.
    This is, of course, pure nonsense: it was not the promise of urban culture that attracted these penniless farmers; it was desperation, by and large, that drove them from their villages. But the sense of momentum and alienation did elicit a certain reaction within the city, a kind of pessimism of progress, a nostalgia for the traditional German community – whatever that may have been. Around 1910, large groups of young people marched out of town into the countryside each weekend under the rubric ‘
Los von Berlin
’. The leader of these
Wandervögel
had his followers greet him with a raised arm and a shout of ‘
Heil!
’ Käthe Kollwitz complained in her diary that her younger son, Peter, was such a great fan that he wore the regulation ‘natural’ clothing and imitated the movement's leaders right down to the smallest gesture.
    Of what were the people of Berlin afraid? Not of war, in any case. War in their eyes was almost a ritual, a courageous and glorious thing. Were they afraid of socialism, and the rise of the lower class? A bit. Of losing their hard-won, middle-class prosperity? Probably. Of their own decline, of the new, of the unknown? Certainly. And what about the ‘Jewish syndicate’? Not everyone feared that, but some parts of the population assuredly did.
    The roots of that anti-Semitism ran deep, even back into the Middle Ages. On 28 October, 1873, after a boom that lasted several years, the Berlin stock market collapsed. That crash was followed by a chain of bankruptcies – large factories, railway companies, brokerage firms – and within the space of a few days many citizens lost everything they possessed. The economy recovered quite quickly, but the psychological effect of the crash echoed on for a generation or more. In the first decade of the twentieth century, many of Berlin's fearful petits bourgeois felt envy and hatred when they saw wealthy Jews driving around the city. At