Here too they were viewed as a burden on the state—the son engaged in unauthorized selling of clothes—and they drifted on to the wretched east of Berlin, to Hirtenstrasse, where the black market promises undreamed-of riches and doesn’t deliver. Finally a cousin got in touch from New York, a street vendor of oranges and lemons and he sent them steamer tickets and ten dollars apiece—God helps those who are abandoned. Now they are on their way to America and a vast, beautiful freedom beckons to the children, a grave to their old mother, but they will have got away from Europe, the continent of pogroms, of the police, the black market and unauthorized dealing in second-hand clothes. The Ukrainian peasants are fleeing hunger, the plague, and a creeping charity. One has a brother-in-law there—Nikita is his name—another has a nephew, Timofei. The barely legible addresses are scribbled on old crumpled envelopes. For many weeks the peasants have been carrying them tucked into waistcoat pockets, in snuff boxes, and in carved pipe bowls of cherry wood. The peasants’ wives have the timid, flickering eyes of frightened animals as they watch the bustle, great ships’ cranes taking up huge quantities of coals, slowly swiveling in mid-air, the scoops opening like giant hands, and spilling their load into the hold. They hear the unfamiliar clang of the heavy ship’s bell, the warning cries of the dockers, the thunder or clatter of the rolling trucks. They see how the harbour goes on and on, offering the illimitable ocean to the eye, a never-before-seen endlessness of blue.

Way up in the air the Stars and Stripes flutter over the international shipping banner, which is as blue as the sky and the sea, and with a white circle in the middle, like a perfectly regular cloud. On the bridge stands a man with his cap strapped over chin and ears, giving out orders in incomprehensible terms. His commands are as mysterious as the great sea itself. A little tug tows the ship with thick hawsers; like a willing triumphal gate the harbour locks slowly and ceremonially open. The emigrants are on board; they call out to the disappearing land. No one has come to see them off, so they wave to strangers, to the luminous policeman, to the dockers and porters. Up at the rim of a huge chimney appears a black figure, a chimneysweep, a toy figure compared to the enormous liner, so tiny is his silhouette against the endless blue background. Out of the perfectly round windows of their cabins the emigrants’ faces catch their last sight of Europe.

Prager Tagblatt, 18 February 1923

 

6. The Currency-Reformed City

The only affordable currency-reformed city in Germany is Hamburg. It has introduced its own currency, the much-praised, much-sought-after Hamburg Gold Mark, which sells at a premium on the black market. I have seen one for myself, a Hamburg Gold Mark, it’s a little scrap of paper that proclaims that the Hamburg banks will vouch for its full convertibility. And as people know the world over, Hamburg banks are solid and reliable, and so Hamburg has become the cheapest, most affordable city in Germany.

A hotel room costs half a dollar, lunch costs a quarter of a dollar, a taxi ride costs half a dollar, a pound of meat costs a dollar. There is unemployment. Unemployed dockworkers, laid-off sailors and factory workers. A month ago there was a risk that this great mass of unemployed, cultivated assiduously by communist and nationalist propaganda, might spark a revolution, or at the very least a series of disturbances. And lo! The Hamburg Gold Mark came along, and everything went quiet. It’s one of the mysteries of economics why a great mass of hungry people, none of whom have so much as a Hamburg gold pfennig to their name, are pacified by the existence of the Hamburg Gold Mark. Greybeard economists scratch their heads at this wonder. Although no one knows how long it will last.

No one knows, because in waterside dives, in shady bars haunted by desperate people, sailors who have missed their ships, criminals hunted by the police forces of various cities and countries—in these sinister breeding-grounds of international crime, what has been on the agenda for the last few months is politics. A curious kind of politics. People who were left cold by the European economy or the constitutional arrangements of the German Reich, for whom swastika and red star are emblems of foreign worlds, not for outsiders, for people outside of society, these same people now spend all their evenings in smoke-filled rooms—not because they’re interested in the speeches, but because they are given food there, and schnapps and—money.