Every capital city has its own smell. London smells of fried fish and Player’s, Paris of coffee, onions and Caporals, Moscow of cheap eau-de-Cologne and sweat.
Berlin smells of cigars ind boiled cabbage, and B.E.A. dropped me into the middle of the smell on the kind of day I associate with this lugubrious city. The sky was asphalt-colour above the asphalt-coloured town, and the Prussian wind, as sharp as a knife, blew the rubble dust into one’s eyes and mouth.
Berlin was fifty per cent destroyed during the war as part of the great Strafe, the great corporal punishment meted out to the people who have caused more pain and grief in the world than any other nation in this century. Around eight million Germans were killed in the last war and, in West Germany alone, there survive nearly three and a half million victims, maimed, widowed and orphaned, drawing war pensions amounting to over four billion D-marks annually, and the reverberations of the tremendous thrashing Berlin received still hang on the air.
As I walked and drove through the West Sector and the East, noting the smattering of new buildings and the rather meagre and sham-looking new streets and housing projects, I was accompanied by the echo of vast and shattering explosions, and expected at any moment to see the town crumble away again in smoke and flames.
The tidying up goes on apace, but there are still acres and acres that will have to be knocked down before there can be any real impression of a new city rising from the ruins of the old.
This is very much more so, of course, in the Eastern Sector, where remembered death and chaos and, worst of all, present drabness hang most heavily on the air, and where there is no speck of colour or glitter in the cleaning up that has already, with typical Russian bad taste and skimped workmanship, been achieved. This contrast with the West is underlined by comparison between the two great Berlin streets, Kurfürstendamm in the West and Under den Linden in the East.
The former, though only a shadow of its old self, is brightly lit and thronged and busy. Its rather uninteresting shops are wide open to business and the cafés are crowded. But Unter den Linden now contains only a handful of drab, makeshift shops against a great backdrop of ruins, and the new lime trees are skimpy and stark. Few people are about and few cars and, as in all the Eastern Sector, one wonders where in heaven everybody is.
The seventy million cubic metres of rubble in Berlin are gradually being made into mountains, which then will be turfed and have trees planted on them. These mountains are known as Monte Klamotten — Rubbish Mountains — and the total operation is known as ‘Hitler’s Collected Works’.
There are also the flattened plains, from which the new buildings are gradually rising to give living-space and work-room to the two and a quarter million West Berliners, and I spent some time visiting the more publicized of these new erections, notably the Hansa Settlement and the Corbusier ‘living unit’ built more or less on his ‘Modulor’ system, and vaunted as the ‘new face’ of Berlin.
This ‘new face’ is the ‘new face’ we are all coming to know — the ‘up-ended-packet-of-fags’ design for the maximum number of people to live in the minimum amount of space.
This system treats the human being as a six-foot cube of flesh and breathing-space and fits him with exquisite economy into steel and concrete cells. He is allotted about three times the size of his cube as his ‘bed-sitter’, once his cube for his bathroom and once for his kitchen. So that he won’t hate this cellular existence too much, he is well warmed and lighted, and he is provided with a chute in the wall through which he can dispose of the muck of his life — cartons, newspapers, love-letters and gin bottles — the last chaotic remains of his architecturally undesirable ‘non-cube’ life. These untidy bits of him are consumed by some great iron stomach in the basement.
Having taken a quick and shuddering look at Corbusier’s flattened human ants’ nest in Marseilles some years ago, and having visited his recent architectural exhibition in England, I had already decided that he and I did not see eye to eye in architectural matters, and I am glad to learn that the Berliners, however anxious to clamber out of their ruins into a new home, are inclined to agree with me. When they heard of his plan and were later sharply lectured by him on the life beautiful, they christened him the ‘Devil with Thick Spectacles’, and his two-thousand-person apartment house — if it can be so called — is still ungratefully known as the ‘Living Machine’. Much to his rage, their chaotic wishes partially triumphed over the symmetrical bee-ant mathematical principles on which his mumbo-jumbological Modular system is based. This system lays down, in part, that the correct height of a room shall be a six-foot man with his arm raised straight above his head (try it!). Corbusier complained that the increase in height from 2.26 metres to 2.50 metres that the Berliners forced upon him had painfully upset what he describes as his ‘architectonic masterpiece’, and he was even more bitter when the authorities decided that his ‘living units’ were, in fact, not the ‘paradise for children and mothers’ which he claimed they were, and turned them into apartments for bachelors and childless couples. The shop centre which he wished to place in the middle of his sixteen storeys was put down on the ground floor, which spoilt ‘the grandeur of the entrance hall’.
The argument was a wonderful example of the eternal struggle between the designer-planner and the awkward human being who would rather be called a ‘square’ than a ‘cube’.
One feature of this giant ‘Living Machine’ amused me. Not knowing what to do with all the entrails involved in the heating and water systems, the designer had been forced to let them pour out on the ground in a tangle of aluminium snakes. Corbusier made the best of the mess by enclosing the whole untidiness in a kind of glass house, so that the inhabitants may proudly watch the workings of their ‘Living Machine’s’ stomach.
The Hansa quarter on the edge of the Tiergarten, the big central open-air space of Berlin, was thrown open to a ‘Living Machine’ competition amongst the world’s finest architects, and it is depressing to see that the German, Israeli, French, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Swiss and American architects have all plumped for variations on the ‘packet-of-fags’ motif, with the addition of a couple of truly startling churches and a conference hall, christened the ‘Pregnant Oyster’ by the ungrateful Berliners.
That all these buildings strike me and most Berliners as quite hideous cannot alter the fact that only by these vertical means could the government of West Berlin have managed to tuck away nearly half a million inhabitants in something over ten years, and one only has to go over to the Eastern Sector and drive down the pretentious turn-of-the-century Tiflis-style Stalin Allee to accept the fact that all the ‘new world’, independent of nationality, is getting more and more hideous every day.
I was accompanied on this architectural foray by ‘Our Man in Germany’, Antony Terry, sometimes in company with his wife, Sarah Gainham, the noted thriller-writer and correspondent for the Spectator. Between them, they know most of Germany, and certainly every inch of Berlin, and in Terry’s Volkswagen we proceeded on a series of splendid zigzags between pleasures and duties which, for the sake of brevity, I will cannibalize into a rather haphazard catalogue.
Queen Nefertiti, for instance, rescued from the coal-mine at Eisenach, where she and most of the German art treasures spent the war, is now back in the Dahlem museum, her proud, smiling lips looking as kissable as ever. Hitler’s bunker in the Eastern Zone finally resisted all attempts by the Russians to blow it up, so it has now been converted into a hillock of rubble and will soon be a pretty green mound in the middle of a children’s playground. The ruins of the Gedachtnis-Kirche rise, and will apparently for ever rise, like a huge ugly thumb at the top of the Kurfürstendamm — gloomy memorial to yet another war. The church’s aesthetic shape could be greatly improved by a few more artistically sited explosions. The grim ruin will be somewhat cheered by a carillon of six new bells, for which Prince Louis Ferdinand, the last of the Hohenzollerns and grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm, has composed a melody. The Stauffenberg memorial, a naked youth in bronze, commemorating the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, stands in the gloomy, cavernous courtyard of Hitler’s Army and Navy Communications Centre, against a background of massive chunks of reinforced concrete that will for ever resist the demolition experts. The porter, Knoeller, who was there at the time of Stauffenberg’s execution, showed us the spot where he had stood facing the firing squad. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there were no bullet holes in the walls; all such executions were carried out against a background of broken rubble, so that the masonry should not show evidence of the shooting.’ This is a particularly haunted area of Berlin, hard by the Landwehr canal, into which the body of Rosa Luxemburg was thrown after she and Karl Liebknecht were captured and shot, ‘while trying to escape’, by the Brigade Ehrhard during the Spartakus rising of 1919.
The Hotel Adlon, where I had revelled before the war, is in the Eastern Sector and is now only Number 70A, Wilhelmstrasse. Nothing remains of the former glory, about which a whole book has been written, and you enter the surviving bullet-marked three storeys through the old servants’ entrance. We had cups of thickly-grained coffee in the ‘restaurant’, a kind of tatty ‘good-pull-up-for-carmen’ with the beige wallpaper and dusty potted cacti that are the hallmark of Russian restaurant decor. The only other guests were a peaky, taut-skinned little man with a compulsive, hysterical face, obviously an informer or a black-marketeer, whispering to a prosperous-looking businessman while his tow-haired mistress (we assumed) sipped her Caucasian Burgundy.
The Pergamon Museum is perhaps the only real ‘must’ in the Russian Sector. Here, in great majesty, have been reassembled the famed classical treasures of Germany, recently handed back by Russia. Here, in particular, is the Pergamon Altar Frieze, assembled in one vast hall against an architectural background of great splendour. As the Michelin guide would say, it is definitely ‘worth the detour’.
Incidentally, this splendid museum is noteworthy for one particular piece of Communist nonsense. Throughout, the exhibits are not dated ‘B.C.’ but ‘v.u.Z.’ (before our times), and ‘A.D.’ is not given at all.
From these grandeurs to the Alexanderplatz for a nervous glance at the East German Secret Police Headquarters, hard by Günther Podola’s old private school and the grimy house where he spent much of his youth. On the other side of the square are the remains of Hitler’s notorious Secret Police Headquarters. The whole area, for me, was full of past and present screams, and we scurried off across the frontier to the friendly lights and busy turmoil of West Berlin and a Molle und Korn (boilermaker and his assistant) of beer and schnapps.
Over this ‘traveller’s joy’, beneath the infra-red heaters of the Café Marquardt, we watched our neighbours consuming the economic ‘one cup of coffee and seven glasses of water’ of the old-time café squatters, and, outside, the dangerous traffic hurtling up and down the Kurfürstendamm. Antony Terry said that Germany has the highest traffic-accident rate in the world — more than double the English figures. The Germans, anyway a hysterical race, are now almost maddened by overwork — particularly in the management class. They spend their days in their offices and then roar off down the autobahns. They fall asleep at eighty miles an hour, and their cars tear across the middle section, head-on into cars in the opposite lane, or dive off the shoulders of the roads into the trees. To prevent this, the drivers munch Pervitin or Preludin to keep themselves awake, thus submerging their exhaustion and heightening their tension. Heart disease, accelerated by over-eating food cooked in the universal cheap frying-fat, carries them off in their early fifties, and the newspapers are every day full of those black-bordered memorial notices saying that Herr Direktor So-and-so has passed away ‘at the height of his powers’.
Antony Terry drives ten thousand miles a year on the autobahns and, referring to our M1 and our hunger for more super highways, he doubted whether such panaceas would reduce our accident rate. These huge roads, he said, create their own type of accident and, by building them, you only replace one kind of accident with another kind. People get semi-hypnotized and doze off at the wheel.
After a couple more ‘boiler-makers’ we went on to the Ritz, one of the half-dozen first-class restaurants in Berlin, with a menu in eight languages. There, over a wonderful dinner, Terry passed on the gossip of the day — how the famous publishing house of Ullstein had just been bought by Springers, the great post-war publishing phenomenon; of the Reptilienfonds, the reptile or slush fund of the West German ministries for what is comprehensively known as ‘Middle Eastern good relations’ — the providing of suitable feminine entertainment for visiting heads of minor states; of the fact that there was no beatnik movement in Germany because there were now no traditions to revolt against; of the small importance of the Halbstarke, Zazous, or teddy boys in Germany; of the complete standstill in all literary and artistic progress of any kind since Hitler because of the absence of Jews, the former leaven in the heavy German bread, and of the greatly exaggerated hullabaloo recently created, largely by newspapers wanting ‘a story’, about the resurgence of Nazism and anti-Semitism.
And so for a brief tour, which ended at four o’clock in the morning, of Berlin night life.
It is certainly not what it used to be in Berlin, though there is still the emphasis on transvestism — men dressing up as women, and vice versa — which used to be such a feature of prewar Berlin. Now, at the Eldorado, for instance, and the Eden (where a home-made bomb went off, wounding three guests, ten minutes after we had left) some of the ‘women’ are most bizarre. The one I particularly took to, a middle-aged flower-seller such as you might see sitting beside her basket of roses in Piccadilly Circus, is known as the ‘Blumenfeldwebel’. ‘She’ had been a corporal in a Panzer division and has an astonishing range of Berlin/Cockney repartee. Some time ago, when a famous English film producer was working in Berlin, she attached herself so closely to him that she was finally given a walk-on part in the film, and all she was interested in now was to try and get over to England to get another job from him. Another startlingly beautiful ‘woman’ had been an under-officer in charge of a military clothing store; but the most startling was ‘Ricky Renee’, an American aged twenty-five who was born in Miami, had only a modest success as a male tap-dancer and decided to turn ‘woman’. He has been so sensational in his new role that he even appeared as a woman in a strip-tease act in the Italian film Il Mondo di Notte.
The ‘waitresses’ were most ingenious at serving one while somehow keeping their huge hands and feet out of sight and modulating the deep tones of their voices when they took your order, but otherwise they were buttressed, bewigged and made-up as extremely handsome and decorous ‘ladies’.
Two of the other night-clubs were also splendidly Germanic — the famous Resi, a vast hall where nothing happens except that there are dial telephones on the tables so that you can communicate with any girl who takes your fancy round the room, and a ‘cabaret’ which consists, uniquely, of a giant waterworks which shoots dancing jets of coloured water into the air to the accompaniment of the ‘Dance of the Bumblebee’.
The other night-club, even less inspiring, consisted of a smallish area with a sawdust ring in the centre containing two plump and docile horses. In between drinks, one was permitted to mount a horse and trot it a dozen times round the ring — a remarkable way to pass an evening.
Espionage is one of the main industries of Berlin — East and West — and I spent most of one day exploring the fringes — the centre is far too well protected — of the great spy battle of which Berlin has been the battlefield since the end of the war. I concentrated on one great independent operator — a notorious middleman who sells his ‘informations’ for whatever sum whichever of the Western secret services will pay. I will call him O. He lives in the leafy suburbs in a monstrous Hansel and Gretel villa whose innocence is only belied by the spy-hole in the front door. He is a small, plump, amused man (all such agents have a humorous, ironical attitude towards what they describe as ‘the game’) with the perfect command of languages that comes probably from a Slav origin. He chain-smoked Muratti filter cigarettes with the first gold tips I have seen for years. He was as apparently open-handed and ready to gossip as any civilized man who has plenty of small ‘informations’ which sound secret but are not, and he correctly assumed that I would be tactful and not probe too deeply behind the gossip.
‘You must understand that it is all getting so much more difficult, Mr Fleming. My friends [spy-talk for his Western employers] are more selective and the opposition’s security is now very good. There have been fifteen years to indoctrinate the Eastern Sector in security and now anything which is important, any secret, is cut up into slices — the tactics, location, technique, finance, personnel behind, let us say, a chain of missile bases — and possession of one slice of knowledge in each of those departments of knowledge is confined to a small cell of people — only those who have to be in the know. This makes for confusion and bad liaison on the project, since there is bound to be overlapping between these realms of knowledge, but it also makes for very tight security. Then if there is a leak, that leak can be traced to one cell of about five people. After that there are the investigations — background, friends, bank account, the usual things, and then there is the execution. So penetration is most difficult and dangerous. And then there is the question of the payment for informations. In the good old days one could offer refuge in the West and money and good living and the “democratic way of life” — freedom and all that. Today it is not so easy, and everyone is surprised that Soviet and East German officials and officers and so on are not bringing over informations in exchange for these things. Such a misunderstanding is foolish. The answer is that in the East people no longer want these things. Life is very much better now in the Soviet bloc. To the intelligent people, the people we would like to come over, the future with Communism looks just as good, if not better, than life in Europe and America. Such people are not attracted to democratic chaos. They think we over here are making a hash of things in the name of Democracy. They greatly prefer the symmetry of Communism and the planned economy — particularly when the plans seem to be successful. And — the sputnik and so on have helped here — they are quite sure they are on the winning side, that Russia is stronger than the West. These people are realistic. Why should they exchange these solid things for the trashy “comforts” of the West where they would have to start all over again, suffer from the homesickness which they have so strongly, and perhaps be traced and shot for treachery into the bargain? No, Mr Fleming, we must admit that the millions of dollars spent on propaganda — the huge transmitters, those ridiculous leaflet balloons and so on — are wasted money and effort at this moment. Successful propaganda only comes from strength. To offer people better shoes and clothes, and jazz, is not enough. And, of course, you must remember that the youth in the East, the German youth, is now almost fully educated in Communism. He is sixteen years old and Communism is all he knows. If his parents tell him otherwise, they are being as old-fashioned as children all over the world consider their parents.’
All this suggested to me that O. would soon be out of a job, but he explained that in espionage Parkinson’s Law operates with particular zest. There were some ten thousand Communist agents now in Western Germany, he said. They were concentrated in many hundred organizations, divided again into cells. Against this army, a huge counter-intelligence army had to be arrayed. Then, with the increased difficulty in penetrating the East, a larger force of specialists had to be employed by the West. Thus, to gain a smaller bulk of Eastern ‘informations’, many more Western spies were required. But on both sides the whole business had become far more professional. There was not the old free-for-all of the happy ten years after the war, when a huge game of grown-up cops and robbers was being played across the frontiers, and kidnappings, murders and ‘traitors’ were the order of the day. Had I, for instance, ever heard the true story of the ‘Great Tunnel’? That had been a lark, all right.
I said I had read some scraps about it in the papers at the time — in 1956 — but the story had been played down, I had supposed, for security reasons.
O. laughed. ‘More probably embarrassment,’ he said. ‘You can’t be insecure about a story the Russians published in all their papers, with pictures of the tunnel and the English equipment. The Russians even took all the Western correspondents out in buses and took them down the damned thing to see for themselves. It was really a marvellous affair. This is how it all happened.
‘Some time in 1955 your intelligence people were looking at the town plan map for Greater Berlin when some bright communications man spotted that the main trunk telephone cables between East Berlin and Leipzig at one point passed underground only about three hundred yards from a bulge in the American sector. Others of your people worked out that these cables would be carrying the traffic between the headquarters of the East German Army at Aldershorst and Zossen, East Germany’s Aldershot, so to speak. There was even more excitement when it was proved that a Russian official teleprinter cable was another of the lines. So your people got together with the Americans and plans were made to tap these cables by digging a tunnel under the fields from a near-by American radar station as far as the Schönefelder Chaussee, under which the cables ran. Obviously it was a terrific technical job, and a very tricky one because all the time Russian patrols were passing along the road, and the security aspect in the American sector was another problem. I believe there was a bad moment when the peasant who owned the field began cutting his corn and the watchers in the American sector saw that the roof of their tunnel had made a ramp right across his field that was even more obvious when he put the land under the plough again. However, he didn’t seem to mind then, although it’s amusing that after the whole thing blew up, so to speak, the peasant sued the Americans and the innocent Russians for ruining the subsoil of his field, and trespass and Heaven knows what all. Anyway, the tunnel was finished and the line tapped and hundreds of batteries of tape-recorders were plugged in to the lines and operated for months all through the twenty-four hours, and hundreds of British and Americans were employed translating all the wonderful stuff they must have got out of the tunnel.
‘Then, of course, the inevitable happened. The stretch of road where the tunnel met the cables was always kept under watch, and one day the watchers saw one of those usual telephone repair gangs arrive in a lorry and start lazily digging up the vital few yards of road. There was nothing to do but evacuate as quickly as possible, and no time to dismantle the rooms full of machinery underground. Two or three of the personnel were left to listen behind the door of a compartment and they heard the amazed comments of the workmen, who had apparently just chosen that particular spot to look for a fault in one of the cables caused by a rain-water leak. Then the game was up, and lorry loads of Russian experts and troops with tommy-guns arrived and blocked off the area and started their investigations. The whole story was given to the press and worked up into a big scandal, involving the Americans, of course, and also the British, because all the technical machinery was marked “Property of the G.P.O.”! All the Americans could do to save their faces was to put up a notice in the tunnel directly under the frontier line saying, “Beware. You are now entering the American Sector.” They even forgot to turn off the electric light in the tunnel!
‘Anyway,’ concluded O., ‘those were the great days. Now, both sides are more “korrekt” — and of course no one wants any untidy scandals in the spy war while Summits are the order of the day. But that doesn’t mean,’ he laughed, ‘that in Greater Berlin today there isn’t one whole division of Allied spies on one side of the frontier and one whole division of Communist spies on the other. It is still a very big and important business.’
O. then handed me a copy of a hush-hush East German intelligence document giving the complete ‘family tree’ of the secret service organization in the Ministry for State Security in East Berlin, from which I note the existence of two interesting departments, Abteilung 4, ‘For military espionage and deception in the NATO forces in West Germany and in NATO headquarters in Paris’, and Abteilung 8, ‘Diversion and sabotage, preparations for “X” Day’, and over this parting gift we said goodbye.
I left Berlin without regret. From this grim capital went forth the orders that in 1917 killed my father and in 1940 my youngest brother. In contra-distinction to Hamburg and to so many other German towns, it is only in Berlin and in the smoking cities of the Ruhr that I think I see, against my will, the sinister side of the German nation. In these two regions I smell the tension and hysteria that breed the things we have suffered from Germany in two great wars and that, twice in my lifetime, have got my country to her knees. In these places I have a recurrent waking nightmare: it is ten, twenty, fifty years later in the Harz Mountains, or in the depths of the Black Forest. The whole of a green and smiling field slides silently back to reveal the dark mouth of a great subterranean redoubt. With a whine of thousands of horsepower, behind a mass of brilliant machinery (brain-children of Krupp, Siemens, Zeiss and all the others) the tip of a gigantic rocket emerges above the surrounding young green trees. England has rejected the ultimatum. First there is a thin trickle of steam from the rocket exhausts and then a great belch of flame, and slowly, very slowly, the rocket climbs off its underground launching pad. And then it is on its way.
Yes, it was obviously time for me to leave Berlin.
* * *
INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE
Hotels
Five-star: For comfort and a bit of the solid, efficient, old-style atmosphere and service one remembers from pre-war, though in modern streamlined form: Kempinski, Kurfürstendamm (West Berlin’s Piccadilly), corner of Fasanenstrasse and the centre of what night life there still is in the Western sectors. Plushier, even more five-star, ultra-modern and with square beds (you can sleep any way round you like) is the Hilton. Its rooms look out over a wonderful all-round view of the grey bomb-battered city. Those sleeping on the lower floors are awakened early by strange birds squawking in the city’s zoo just below.
One-star: For those seeking to recapture the Berlin atmosphere of 1945 amid the ruins I suggest one of the small, reasonably priced one-star hotels just by the former Anhalter Station. This is in the waste-land of rubble that was once Berlin’s business centre and was flattened in the final battle for the city. It is a few yards from the Russian sector — though still firmly in the West and a quarter of a mile from the Potsdamer Platz, the East-West sector border trouble spot. One of these ‘atmosphere’ hotels on the Soviet sector border is the Alemannia. The Volkspolizei here is within shooting distance but doesn’t. One-star but clean. One can eat there too, simple Berlin kitchen. Less exciting: the Astoria Hotel near the Zoo in the British Sector (Fasanenstrasse) is small but efficient.
Restaurants
Five-star: Renowned for Oriental chi-chi of every kind and for its famous customers, the Ritz in the Rankestrasse (centre of town). For good, clean, appetizing, reasonably-priced food of the Berlin type: the Aben, at the Halensee end of the Kurfürstendamm, much patronized by the gourmets among the British regiments stationed in Berlin, or the Berliner Kindl, where Berliners of all classes go for a good meal in the evening, with beer. Chinese food, for those who like it, in at least five excellent restaurants of this type, the best undoubtedly the Lingnan, Kurfürstendamm, the Canton, Stuttgarter Platz, and the Hongkong, next to the Maison de France, Kurfürstendamm. For Swabian cooking (richer and more seasoned than Berlin food) in an old-fashioned, restful background with a zither-player who specializes in the Third Man theme and Viennese ‘Schrammel’, there is Kottler’s in the Motzstrasse, and Berlin gourmets swear by Schlichte in the Martin Luther Strasse. Despite its austere furnishings and rather-too-bright lights, Schlichte undoubtedly has wonderful cuisine.
For ‘British, Americans and French only’ (still respectfully ‘messieurs les allies’ in four-power Berlin), the Maison de France, a reasonably priced official French restaurant where the food is not over-good but there is dancing and a pleasant enough atmosphere, and a good bar with an excellent barman who knows his stuff. Anything from Amer Picon (‘pour les fièvres névralgeuses des colonisateurs’) to Scotch. Cheapest possible French-owned student-type restaurant with excellent freshly cooked food, though atmosphere ever so slightly Frenchily grubby: the Paris in the Kantstrasse, across the road from the West Berlin opera house and near the university and zoo.
Night-clubs
West Berlin’s night spots are not what they were in the gay, spendthrift post-war years, but they do offer some interesting sidelines such as transvestism. One of the two main night-clubs of this type is the Eldorado, Martin Luther Strasse (U.S. sector), which presents transvestism as a sort of joke, with the floor show taking the mickey out of itself. The Eldorado is definitely one- or two-star in its prices, but fairly respectable; one could almost take the family there and not know the ‘girls’ are not what they seem unless one knew it beforehand. Prices: entrance charge 1s. 8d., Scotch (nip) 5s. 10d., French brandy 4s. 2d., beer 3s. 4d. Turkish coffee (pot) 3s. 4d., wine about £1 a bottle.
Five-star (but not expensive): the Old-Fashioned, admission only after knocking three times and asking for Franz Schubert (the owner, no relation of the other Franz Schubert); dancing, excellent Italian band, quite a lot of pretty girls among the customers. Patronized by whatever society is left in the Four-Power City. The Cherchez la Femme: little boîte in the Fasanenstrasse, semi-nude dancing of a strictly respectable type and occasionally neo-strip-tease act. Charly’s, Wittenbergplatz, plushy boîte for dancing only, to juke-box (latest Berlin craze); fashionable with Berlin’s moneyed jeunesse dorée at the moment, but not expensive. Badewanne (the Bath Tub), Nürnberger Strasse, jive cellar, good to look at for a few moments, popular with visiting theatrical personalities, cheap and loud but bursting with Berlin vitality. Resi, in the Hasenheide in one of West Berlin’s toughest, most working-class districts; recent statistics show that seventy per cent of its customers are foreigners. Most popular of all Berlin mass entertainments. A vast palais de danse with telephones and pneumatic-tube postal service connecting the hundreds of tables, so that strangers can make dates or pass anonymous compliments. Remde St Pauli, near the zoo, centre of town in British sector; noisy, raucous, slap-and-tickle sort of show, based on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, with ‘underwear displays’ (ladies and gents), and girls, girls, girls (on the stage, no hostesses). Like the Resi, it has reasonable prices.
Out-of-the-way
Rififi, open twenty-four hours a day for the younger generation of Berliners to spend their spare time with juke-box and jive. The dancing is not for visitors unless they are expert too, but it is worth seeing once, on a visit. The customers (and the busty proprietress) could have come out of the film Rififi, but visitors are treated kindly and otherwise ignored.