Talisman Sheherezade: The Trying Twenties

By Max Furst

Max Fuerst, the German language author of this book, has in its pages brought together the stories of the imperiled lives and all-too-often untimely deaths of his many friends. He and his friends were Jewish, and that particularly singled out for persecution at the hands of the totalitarian regime called the third Reich and its notorious and virulently anti-Semitic leader, Adolf Hitler.

The Trying Twenties were the years from the end of WWI in 1918 until 1932, the year the National Socialist Party (the Nazis) gained the majority in the Parliament (called Reichstag) and with it, the power to build up the so-called Third Reich. During these trying twenties, Germany was known as the Weimar Republic because during this time, the seat of Germanys government was moved from Berlin to Weimar. During the time of the Weimar Republic, there existed and grew a youth movement.

Young people formed groups, collectively known as Der Wandervogel (the Rambling Bird). The movement was popular in that it promoted healthy outdoor activities for the young, and it furthered a foot-to-the-ground acquaintance of the young people with their German homeland. But the individual groups each had their own ideas and ideals. Max and Margot Fuerst and their friends founded a Jewish wander group and called it the Black Band. The name was derived from a band of militant peasants during the Peasants War of the 1520s, the years of the Lutheran reformation. While Max tells the stories of his friendsstories with worrisome echoes in what we, in our time and country, the United States, presently experienceit can be said that both the similarities as well as the dissimilarities are worth observing and to be taken into account.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532023835

Max Furst

Fritz Jaensch (translator) has had the amazing experience to be born, grow up, and come to young adulthood during the pre- and post-World War II period in Germany. Fritz was an eye witness to one of the most confounding, troubling, and confusing period in all of human history. Fritz can recall, through the eyes of a child, watching soldiers herd concentration camp victims through the streets of his town. His own mother spent three and one half years of the war in prison, because she had helped a Jewish friend.

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Copyright © 2017 By: Max Furst.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-2382-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2383-5 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 06/08/2017

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

About The Author

Endnotes

Max Fürst

Talisman Scheherezade: The Trying Twenties

English translation by Fritz Jaensch,

Translator’s biographic sketch:

I was born August 2, 1934 in Frankfurt/Main, in Germany. In 1936 my father Wilhelm, (designer, photographer, Bauhaus student); and my Mother Hella, (a learned librarian) – both unemployed—took me their son back to their home city Koenigsberg in Germany’s East Prussia. Here my father found work as a police man, while his widowed mother Helene welcomed us to her home. It was only one block from mother’s childhood home, and no more than three blocks distant from Mrs. Berwaldt’s home; whose daughter, Hannah Arendt, had just fled Nazi

Germany. But Hannah’s mother was unable to follow. Until she, too, managed to escape, her daughter’s friend Hella, my mother, visited her as often as she could.

In 1939 she managed to leave behind the land of deadly persecution Germany had become especially for Jewish and Roma people and for the handicapped, and their friends. The United States took her and her daughter Hannah in as refugees.

In May of 1939 my sister Johanna was born. Five moths thereafter the GESTAPO came to the door and took our mother away . Mother’s cousin Hedel took us in. Now I had two mothers—all that love. But now came the great war that set loose all of the horrors of the merciless grasp for power.

Through all of this time my life proceeded as if charmed with lines from Psalm 91:

A thousand may fall at your side/ and ten thousand at your right hand;/ but it shall not come near you.

The war came and went. And now we got acquainted with starvation. That experience, verified in Holy Writ, prompted me to choose farming as my vocation. With no farm to inherit, I hoped to be able to earn a farm in the United States. Hannah Arendt sponsored my immigration in the spring of 1956. I went to work on a dairy in California.

My mother, on one of her visits, brought me a book that told of the life of her friends Max and Margot Fuerst. Its title: Talisman Scheherezade, I set to work to translate the text into English. In its pages there is much worthy to be learned, for the benefit of present readers of the text.

— Fritz Jaensch, Translator --

… Every friend has taken with him a part of me, and he has given me a part of himself. According to Jewish law, a person who has died must not be dismembered. Such a person must be handed to God whole at the last judgment I therefore am writing this book to collect the parts of me that I have given away; and to give back what I have taken.

Max Fürst          Talisman Sheherezade, p.85

The translator wants to dedicate his work to the memory of Hannah Arendt, his honored, and critical, friend, and bright example.

Alameda, California, August 16, 1991

S.D.G.

September 29, 1991

Max Fürst: Talisman Sheherezade: The Trying Twenties.

From the translator’s perspective:

This book was written by the carpenter Max Fuerst and published in Germany in 1976. In its pages Max tells us what happened in Germany, in Europe, and beyond in The Trying Twenties, and how those events influenced his thinking and acting, as well as that of his friends, whose life stories he tells.

These thought provoking episodes Max, his wife Margot, and their children and friends lived through are today eighty years in the past. But what makes the reading of these pages especially worthwhile is the fact that the transition from democracy to a brutal totalitarian dictatorship the German people experienced, and allowed to happen , disturbingly resembles developments we experience today, in these 2017's in the United States of America.

Your thoughts, dear readers, are yours, and they are free. I, the translator, seek no influence over your thoughts. I only hope that what you read here will make you think.

The book is an aggregate of biographical sketches, portraits of young people in their teens, some a little older, who were bound together in a youth association called Der Wandervogel, The Wander Bird. The movement was rooted in romanticism, where individual chapters or groups emphasized their particular preferences within the overall direction. Athletic associations (Turn Vereine), for instance, were founded during Napoleon's rule in Prussia when their primary function was to augment the training of military recruits whose number were restricted to 100000. Patriotism was the main motor for the movement.

Patriotism continued to grow and inspire young people . But over time the emphasis of youthful ideals changed with the realities on the ground. The era of steam and steel emptied the village workshops of the craftsmen and at the same time filled the often unprepared cities with people seeking work in the factories. This process was still ongoing during The Trying Twenties, when, in the wake of WWI, Max and his friends tried strenuously to change the world around them for the better, to make it more just and more peaceful. When formerly the emphasis was on marching as to war, the generation of Max, Margot and their wander bird friends was on rambling through the flora and fauna of their home land in order to stay in touch with the very earth and air. That emphasis, in turn, gave rise to earnest engagement in peoples' welfare and health, both mental and physical. Strong was also the young people's curiosity and their desire to learn and to get acquainted with the treasures, art, music and culture they could accept as real and therefore their own.

For Max and his friends this latter endeavor had become perilous in the 1920's. The name they had chosen for their wander bird chapter was The Black Band. That was the name of a band of peasant fighters in the sixteenth - century peasant war. Those peasants fought bravely. Most of them perished

Max and his friends were Jewish at a time when Antisemitism ran rampant throughout Europe. Then as The Trying Twenties drifted rapidly toward Hitler's grasp for power, Antisemitism became deadly.

Max and his loved ones survived. He lived to write about it. I am humbly grateful that I am alive today to see Max Fuerst's book come out in English as a timely lesson for us to heed in 2017.

Alameda, California, USA

Fritz Jaensch, translator

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My special thanks and appreciation to Ms. Helen M. Sayer in Mill Valley for reading and correcting the translated manuscript; also to Don Emblen at the Clamshell Press in Santa Rosa, and to Dr. Martin Jay at the University of California in Berkeley for taking an interest in this book.

Last not least my heartfelt thanks to Dr. Allen Sweet, whom the content of this book reminded of his student years—the 1960’s—in the United States. He insisted that I try yet once more to have the book appear in English, and he prevailed.

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Max and Margot Fuerst, Haifa 1974

CHAPTER 1

A Walk through Berlin. It is Springtime, just before Pentecost. The morning air tastes like smoke, as it always did then. Not fouled was the air, just fragrant. I walk through Berlin, West as well as East. Everywhere I have friends. Every street, every corner is full of memories. And among all of the new buildings I discover now and then a house that I still remember. In the Tiergarten (the Zoo) the trees have grown back again. How miserable the zoo looked, how small, when I saw it upon my return in 1950. Meanwhile a new generation has grown up. I walked through a city in ruins with old friends, with new friends, and children with eager faces, who asked me what it is like to be Jewish, how things were in 1933, and how things are in Palestine? I had to give so many answers that I could hardly ask any questions, like: How did it feel when it was hailing bombs? or how was it when the Russians came? Those were exciting days and nights. Was I the returned son of this city? A first dove with an olive branch in its beak, after the flood? Twenty years later I once again walk through this city, steeped in thought. The foliage of the trees is still bright green. Among grand new buildings I sometimes still detect the old street names, which startle me. Wasn’t there…? didn’t here live someone I knew?

Dr. Buchtal, for instance, the young ophthalmologist, whose apartment we had furnished. It must have been in 1931; and he didn’t live there long either. In 1933 he had gone to Copenhagen; the correspondence had broken off, as happened with so many others. I would have forgotten him had not Adam turned up, the deserter from Yugoslavia. I had met him in 1929 on a bench in a park, an unemployed cabinetmaker without work permit. I made him a partner in my shop for a short time. These are all stories I have yet to tell. He had come from Oslo in the sixties, when we met again in Stuttgart. We were together but a minute, when he told me of Dr. Buchtal, that he was a professor in Copenhagen; and that he still had my furniture in the house where he lived. You always said that he would become a professor. Did I say that? I lose people and find them again. A few at least; and from them I get much information -- including information about myself. You have said and done this at that time…. I live much too fast to remember everything I have said and done.

Above Buchtal in an attic room there lived at that time the artist, Malipiero. He was so poor that he sometimes stole the milk the milkman had placed in front of apartment doors in the morning. I made him a cabinet, for which he paid me with a picture. The picture portrayed him in the guise of a witch. I carried it around with me when I left the country, and the many times we moved. But at some time or other it finally got lost.

I often wonder how teachers might feel to get to know generation after generation of the people in their city. Are children developing into friends for them? Probably not often. Those children whom I had in my youth group in 1920 were only two to four years younger than I. that is surprising to me whenever I think of it. And those children whom I got to know in Berlin after 1925 were my own age. Now their children are already adult friends who themselves have children. Those who were born in Israel when I landed there were already soldiers and were fighting in the wars there. They are less frightened than their parents; and many of them have already overcome the attachment to nationalism. Like myself, they see the state as evil, albeit necessary—a people eating evil, from which it is difficult to withdraw. And those children whom I met in 1950 in Berlin have also had long since children of their own. Having friends in every generation is perhaps the greatest fortune I can have. Man has but two eyes and he sees only part of the world. Sometimes I indulge in partial thought as well, to console myself about the passing of time. And man is a phoenix, too: he gets burnt up and defiled. But then all of a sudden a child confronts me, who resembles another child who loved me when I was young. It is difficult for me not to address the child with his real name— the name of one long since extinguished,— whose features this child has inherited. Now in my old age my hands are unsteady when I embrace the child; and occasionally I tell him the story of his forebears -- not too much of it, in order not to obligate him. But is it not so? A child ought to know that he has more parents than those he knows. Let us hope that our bones do not bring forth our avengers, as people used to say; but that, instead, from our thoughts and souls might come the perfectors of our endeavors.

I am getting off the brand new subway. This line was not yet in existence during that time of which I want to tell. And the name Bundesallee (Federal Avenue) did not exist either, nor those enormous department stores -- although this street with its buildings in the style of the founders’ years always has had something presumptuous about it. In those years it was called Kaiser Allee, a name it retained throughout the Kaiser-minded Weimar Republic. They ought to have been re-named, all those streets with their Kaiser-loving names; and the bureaucrats, they too, should have been turned out. Today a Kaiser Allee or a Kaiser Damm is no longer an object for dispute; only sterile, traditional names with no political effect at all. Re-naming of streets seems, after all, to change consciousness but little. At the FriedrichStrasse train station in East Berlin I look for Ernst Thälmann Platz. I ask six people who pass by, but no one knows where it is. A streetcar conductor suggests that I take the subway. So after driving about for a while, I landed again close to Friedrich Strasse. Thälmann Platz is now what formerly had been the Wilhelm Strasse. And the house I was looking for had once been Goebbels’ headquarters. In 1926 we were aggravated because of the imperial nomenclature of Berlin; today I walk through the city with thoughts filled with love.

I walk through the Günzel Strasse, and somehow I end up at Nikolsburg Square (Nikolsburger Platz). I am amazed! There it still stands, the old school, where often I waited for Margot. I am stirring a very young couple of lovers out of their dreams as they are walking past me, holding each other closely. Now that school is no longer a high school for girls, but, rather, a unified school. Somewhere hereabout I used to stand and wait for her. And I see her once more before the backdrop of that brick building, alone among so many girls, thin and unassuming, with a head rather too big for her thin body, with her medium-long hair and her dark eyes that always seemed sad. She walks toward me; we walk side by side until we are a safe distance away from the other pupils; then I could put my arm around her shoulder. The tenderness I felt for her was still mingled with the responsibility I had taken on for her and for the other children whom I had intended to lead onto a different way than the one their parents had in mind for them. It would have been easier for me had I known what was going on in this girl’s mind. The silent ones are the difficult ones, and she was very reticent. Language hides thoughts; but one can try to believe what it speaks. Margot was in many ways as grown up as a twenty-year-old; in others she was still a child. Twenty-year-old means that I regarded her as of equal age. But that is of little consequence because all my life age differences have not meant much to me. I always speak of children; but when I talk with these children, then my present advanced age is of little help to me. The experience of my years is matched by new impressions young people are telling me about. In the understanding of the present time they are ahead of me; and I know that I always learn more than I can give to them.

Margot was fourteen years old then. But I had never felt this youthfulness. Her judgment was independent and always worthy of consideration. What was challenging for me was precisely that discrepancy between the fourteen-year-old and the twenty-year-old, who were united in one body, and sometimes rendered each other helpless. I tried to understand her; and I did not yet know that I would have much time to do that.

Today, when I think back of Margot at age 14, then I think of her as of somebody special. But when I look at my own daughter, and at my grandchildren, who are now about fourteen, then I can empathize with the horror Margot’s parents had then felt. But at that time I perceived their educational attempts as an uncalled-for interference in the development of a free and complete human being. In our youth group in Berlin we had many girls -- boys, too, of course -- aged 14 to 17. Parents of many of those girls feared I might have relations with them. We were surprised, rather than offended, about that insinuation: our youth group was preoccupied with current events and problems within the group more than with the sexual question. But how can that be made clear to parents? They heard their children tell of the youth group and its leaders. They knew that boys and girls went on hikes together, on overnight camp-outs, and that they swam in the nude. Not until I was called into their presence and asked to justify myself did it enter my mind that girls were to be regarded as more than mere comrades. We for our part felt that our dependency (on our parents) was demeaning. In retrospect I can see both sides, but have by no means become any wiser. Now I can understand the fears of the parents, as they did not know the outcome of the things we were involved with. They were anxious, but called it responsibility. Family problems have, after all, remained much the same over the years. A child begins to dissolve the family bonds, he or she sets out to become an independent human being, and begins to pit his own times and ideals against those of his parents. We indeed felt rather uncomfortable whenever there were parents who did not struggle to resist the trend. That made it more difficult for the young people to develop their own personality. But there has not been, and there is not now, a set rule for this problem.

I remember clearly some of the situations and statements on the part of the parents, also discussions we had with them during discussion meetings and at home. Parents always asked me to come over whenever the situation at home became unbearable. I once had a long conversation with a very progressive kind of mother, who said that she was always glad when her children had returned from their ramblings with their dirt all washed off. But what, she asked, was she to do with the soul-soiling dirt with which we burdened her children? That stopped our conversation because I had nothing to say to that. I, in turn, received but a summary answer to my question, what she might mean by soul-soiling dirt. Was it plays and poems by Brecht? pictures by Georg Grosz? books on sexual education? preoccupation with politics? Or was it the influence of children of the proletariat who slowly began to join our groups as well? The more pointed my questions were, the more indistinct became the answers.

You ask, when did I begin to love Margot more than the other comrades? Love is such an ambiguous word, much like freedom and similar concepts. Everybody understands something different by them. I loved, in the sense of a sudden rush, girls who were quite different: the beautiful ones, the brilliant ones, whom one craves to have at once, as soon as one lays eyes on them. Love at first sight is very questionable. But I did not give much thought to it in those days. An attempt to tell of the beginning of our love, if one wants to call it that, is not so simple. I would, first of all, have to tell of our youth group and of Berlin.

The big row, which, among other things, brought about my acquaintance with Margot’s parents in their apartment, happened because we rented an apartment in the Mulak Strasse as home for our youth group. There were many reasons for that protest on the part of the parents. I shall tell more of that later. Now only this much: Margot and a few other friends had left home; and we had thereby accomplished the opposite of what had been planned. All of the parents came to an agreement to proceed against us united. The measures parents and school together could take could become dangerous, especially for the younger members of the youth group. So we decided to yield. I went to the parents, smoothed out things wherever I could, and brought back their prodigal sons and daughters. That episode would long have been forgotten had it not been such a peculiar event for me, the beginning of love, so to speak. Margot and I were asked to wait in the children’s room for an entire, unbearably tense hour. Margot had put on her stubborn child’s face, which I had not seen on her before. I don’t know why, but I began to speak to her, not about her problems, nor those of the youth group, but about the Bauhaus: about modern architecture, (Lionel) Feininger, (Paul) Klee -- all things which occupied my mind at the time. The Bauhaus was one of the great beacons of hope in those years, closely tied to the reconstruction of the human being; tied closely to our own ideals as well, because we had realized that by that time the ideals of the youth movement had gone rancid. This left us looking for new ways, not backward, but into our own time. I was getting enthused. Margot’s face relaxed; and we agreed that our own misery weighed little when compared with the great expectation inherent in our time. So we were fairly quiet when we stepped in front of the father’s judgment seat. Margot’s father quite obviously did not feel well in the role that had been imposed upon him. Therefore he was especially terse, and emphasized authority. There developed the usual conversation between people who don’t understand each other and who merely play their roles. Did I not know that Margot is only fourteen years old? I shrugged my shoulders and tried to say as soberly as I could that this state of affairs would improve rapidly. Then came what every father to this day says in such a situation: I want my daughter to be a decent human being. And when this brought no answer, nor any political speech-making, he continued: I shall see to it with every means available. Margot was silent; and at some moment or other I saw a large tear on her face. I left. We had barely mentioned the youth home in the Mulak Strasse. He only mentioned that it was a crime to bring children into such a neighborhood. I thought differently about it, but deemed it superfluous in this situation to hold forth on social pedagogy. I was merely sad that I had to leave Margot there.

The Mulak Strasse and environs was one of the most notorious neighborhoods in Berlin. People used to call it the burn-quarters. When I arrived in Berlin in 1927, I rented a room in the Münz Strasse, corner of Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse. (By the time I returned, that street was called Karl Liebknecht Strasse). It ran all the way to the Bülow square (Rosa Luxemburg square today). Once this neighborhood was the center of the Jewish quarter. It included Rücker Strasse, Alte Schönhauser Strasse, Lilien Strasse, Gips Strasse, August Strasse, Rosenthaler Platz (i.e.square), Schönhauser Tor, Artillerie Strasse, and Grenadier Strasse. Once at the turn of the century this had been a good middle-class neighborhood; and it has been so described in the books of (Theodor) Fontane. In my time the well-off citizens, including the Jewish citizens, had long since moved to the west side of Berlin. Those who stayed were the poorer shopkeepers and Jewish people who had not been long in Berlin. It was a neighborhood of little people -- densely populated, too. These streets, full of small and tiny shops, were always full of people who were going to work or returning from work. Prostitutes, too, were always standing about; they belonged to the street scene, and nobody was offended by them. There were department stores, too: Tietz and Wertheim, and large factory buildings, textile manufacturers, and wholesale businesses.

The Volksbühne (People’s Theater) stood at the Bülowplatz (Bülow Square). The Karl Liebknecht House stood across the street; it was the center of the Communist Party. Next door was the big movie theater, Babylon. And there were many small cafés, the Rosencafé, for instance, at the Rosenthaler Platz. Most of the houses had been built during the founders’ years. The houses facing the street were still quite lordly. Behind them there were most often backyards, followed by a second and third tier of tenements— warehouses for the storage of human beings. Any older Berliner will be able to amplify on what I am relating here. I loved this neighborhood, the old center of Berlin, where I lived from 1927 until 1935. At first I lived in the Münz Strasse. The entrance was wedged in between a pub and the big corner store on the Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse: Adam’s Cogar Factories, which belonged to a relative of Margot’s family. Mrs. Krause rented me her servant’s room in her still bourgeois-type apartment. The room had been created by dividing the bathroom horizontally. This was done in many apartments in Berlin. There was a door next to the entrance to the bathroom. From there a steep staircase went up to my room. There was just enough room for my bed, which was secured by a grid rail so I would not fall down the stairs in my sleep. A table, a narrow clothes locker, a wash pan, and a stool completed my furnishings. There was also a wide window sill in front of a medium-height window, a kerosene lamp, and a gas cooker. I did not install electric light there until sometime later when I left the place, so that Margot could move in. From this window sill I kept in contact with all of the different groups of our youth league. I also wrote articles for our paper, not a single issue of which seems to exist any more; and I had conferences there with friends and enemies of our group. Whenever my head was overheated, and I felt like one pumped empty and merely repeating myself, then I had a never-failing recipe. A few houses down the street— it could have been next door— there was a flea-movie. Entrance any time. You entered in the middle of the show, looked to the end, and then perhaps a little of the beginning. Admission cost but a few pennies. There were always people in there. True, most of them slept and snored noisily, especially whenever the weather was bad. In wintertime it was always full of unemployed people and sleepers, for whom this was the cheapest lodging. They showed hardly any interest in the newsreels and movies, but rather more in the not too comfortable seats, and in the hope that the ever lurking bouncer would not discover who of the ever changing audience was sitting there all day. A guy had to change seats whenever he awoke (during an especially noisy part of the movie). Then he was all right, even if the theater lighted up between films. The stale air in the place had the effect on me that it eased my mind. Distracted by the events in the movies— events that didn’t concern me much— I once again became keenly awake to the problems of my friends. Across the street there was an eating place. I don’t remember if it was still the Münz Strasse, or already the Memhardt Strasse— streets in Berlin changed their names abruptly. There was in Berlin the famous restaurant Aschinger, where a man could eat his fill of potato salad and buns that stood on the tables. But there were other places, too. There was, for instance, the Krokodil. It was a time when I was almost always unemployed. I had a good conscience about it because so many others were unemployed. I also had a bad conscience because I never had any money. Now and then I did accept some money from my friends because I had to buy stamps, and I needed it for riding the S-train and the subway. So the Krokodil became my food provider. Since I could not constantly live by bread and margarine, I went to the Krokodil, to eat their famous pea soup with bacon, which was a pretty good meal for 10 or 15 Pfennig, especially when a bun was added. It was a fine restaurant where one could meet many people: workers from the nearby market hall, the unemployed, and people who needed something quick to eat. Above the counter there hung a large stuffed crocodile. Pea soup with bacon: it gave me a tinge of conscience, because I was a vegetarian. When once I visited a stockyard with my group, I was so shocked that I decided never to eat meat again. Nor did I want to profit from a business I myself would have refused to work in. I stuck to my resolution, mostly, until in 1933 that entire set of morals went to the devil. But back to the Krokodil. There was a little bacon in the soup. But I took comfort in the song:

How wonderful! I was elated

When God the crocodile created.

The crocodile eats bacon only,

And leaves us with the pea soup wholly.

The Krokodil became more and more important to me and my friends.

By and by the waitresses came to the opinion that pea soup is not enough for a man. So they brought me potato salad and other salads; and in the end they fed my friends, too, who accompanied me there. This went on for several years. Whenever I wanted to pay, or had to pay, because a supervisor was close by, then I paid a Mark at the cash register, and I received the same amount back in change. Sometime prior to 1933 the Krokodil died. I don’t know how long such an animal lives. I only hope that I was not to blame for that end, or the good-heartedness of the waitresses.

You think I get off the subject. But this I do by no means, as our friend Ingegert from Sweden used to say. She is a scholar of German, and she likes to put her sentence formulation and grammar to use. A few years ago I walked with her from Alexander Platz toward my part of town. The reconstruction of the new Alexander Platz was not yet finished, and all of the detour signs stood the wrong way around. I am sure some little urchin had done this; and nobody had corrected it yet. So we searched a long time until we found the right way; because the street signs were no longer in place, or they had not yet been put back in place. The S-train was the only thing that ran on its tracks unchanged, and it was my only means for orientation. I showed Ingegert the houses, or what was left of them, where I and my friends had lived. Every house and street reminded me of a story. Oh, how does the city lie lonely and desolate that once was so filled with people!, Jeremiah lamented after the destruction of Jerusalem. We went through a desolate city where hardly any people could be seen. Broken windows, bombed-out buildings, stucco hanging in tatters. Now and then the old Ghetto could be discerned by the word kosher above a shop. Maybe it was painted over during the Nazi time, but the righteous rain had washed it clean again. Did these houses have such somber appearance when I used to live here? It would have been possible to comfort Jeremiah: Jerusalem was to be rebuilt several times over. Again and again happy children played in her streets; and busy shopkeepers walked the streets, too. New residents -- those who returned and those who migrated there -- lived in those buildings and did their laughing, their crying, their eating, and their starving.

Here in Berlin they call it sanitizing the city; and who would want to criticize the man who tears down those old barracks to build new streets, new buildings? But for the sake of Ingegert I made the old city come alive once more, and I want to do the same for you as well.

My room in the Münz Strasse had many advantages. The biggest of them was its location: it was directly in the heart of the city. Just a few paces, and I was in the Dircksen Strasse and at the train station Alexander Platz. The S-train and the ring train were, even more than the subway, the major traffic arteries. In the afternoon when the weather was bad and we had no place to hold our group meetings, then there was enough room in a few compartments of the ring train, where we could engage in our world-changing conversations. We circled Berlin for hours on end, and in the end the good train brought each of us home again, too.

Right behind the Alexander Platz station there is today a street named Hans Litten Strasse; and a sign reminds people of his actions, and of the way he died. I remember at once many other friends from my youth who could well have streets named after them. In time I shall tell their stories as well as that of Hans Litten. There might already be a Rudi Arndt Strasse; he certainly would be worthy of it; a Siegfried Adler Strasse, a Hilda Monte Strasse after Margot’s younger sister. Perhaps also one named after Karl Lehrburger, who was beaten to death in Fürth during the first days of the Nazi regime. I could add pages of names. Perhaps there already exists a Hannchen Gerbeit Strasse [Hannchen, diminutive of Hannah].

Hannchen was slight of stature, something I always felt sad about when during my emigration I thought of the many Germans who might want to hide behind her when she would plead on behalf of Germany at the last judgment. The market halls used to be located behind Litten Strasse, only it was called something else— Court Strasse, I believe. I like to simply call them the Halls, as the Parisians do. A slight resemblance surely existed, especially at five in the morning, when the truckloads of meat and vegetables were unloaded, and where in wintertime the market helpers beat their arms about themselves to get warm, as they called after us: Hold on to her tight, or she’ll run away! as we walked by toward the station, holding each other tight. Why were we up and about so early? We had to leave the house so early for the landlady not to learn what had gone on in Margot’s room. There was actually nothing unusual about a pair of lovers, the likes of whom can be seen a thousand times over. Why do I tell about it then? Because it was so important for me. I have read many biographies lately; and the woman in the writer’s life is but rarely mentioned. A few flowers, a dedication, a hasty enumeration of data; beyond that the wife is rarely deemed important for the man’s vital statistics. It is different with me. My father used to call me girls’ boy. I grew up with four sisters, and I have always considered girls as equals. I have always shunned boring men -- boring women, too, for that matter. I have never been a he-man throughout my life. In Damon Runyon’s New York gangster stories the women are condescendingly referred to as his ever-loving wife. The mockery hides the fear of commitment, the fear of getting tied down. It is the fear of being a man no more because of the marriage -- no longer to be a free animal in the wild; as if any other form of co-habitation does not also impose ties, unexpected ties, not well understood, which produce new trials and fears.

Difficult, maintaining one’s freedom without subjugating others. So long as a new society does not exist, which would develop new forms of co-habitation, the law of the jungle should not be propagated, where only the stronger has the right to say what goes. But let me not theorize. I shall, rather, tell of a few things that I have seen. Going from Münz Strasse to the subway station, a person would go down the Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse to the Bülow Platz. First he would look at a streetcar stop or at a bus stop to see if he could pick up a transfer ticket. We were against waste; and we always found tickets on the street or in the wastepaper baskets that had not been used up. It was forbidden, but burdened our conscience little. It was a science, trying to figure out which direction the ticket just found was good for.

I once lived at the Bülow Platz, too, and in Schönhause Strasse close by. At first I was a run-about; later on I was being run about. By way of Schönhause Strasse I would reach the Mulak Strasse. That was the street I wanted to talk about; it was the reason I got into trouble with Margot’s parents. The Mulakei or the Ox-head, at the corner of Rücker Strasse was an old building with three large tenement houses in the rear. I don’t know if it is true what I had been told at that time, but it could well be that those buildings had been soldiers’ barracks at the time of Old Fritz (Frederic the Great). Later they were converted into a work house where vagrants were locked up. During that time it was given the name Ox Head. When work houses were no longer in use, or, rather, when this one was no longer serviceable, it was rented to poor people. That is when Jewish people started to live there, and Gypsies, and prostitutes, and people like my friend Hannchen. There was a blacksmith shop in the yard, also the toilets (much too good a word for those facilities). Hannchen never allowed her children to use them. She rather chose to carry all of the feces down there herself. Well, at least the kitchens had running water and electric light, but they had roaches, too, and bedbugs, against which Hannchen struggled in vain. The Ox Head was not the only place infested. I found not a single apartment in that whole neighborhood where a constant battle was not being waged against bedbugs. Later on she moved into a newly built apartment building behind the Volksbühne theater, but even there we found the bugs already built in: they had used old bricks from a torn-down building. When they had finished smoking out our building, the bugs there came crawling back up through the pipes of the central heating system. Nowadays people take a spray can whenever two flies are in the room, and people are upset because of the poisoning of the environment. But I still remember what joy it was when after the war the first DDT got on the market, and thus the war against those pests could be won.

In 1927 I worked in a cabinet shop in Stettin. The youth group had called me in Hannover and asked me