Climb on the tram. In half an hour you’ll be in the next place. Is there any difference? Smoke over the world! You go to Oberhausen, and then Mülheim, and then to Recklinghausen, to Bochum, to Gladbeck, to Buer, to Hamborn, to Bottrop. Smoke over the world! No sky, no clouds. Rain precipitated from smoke: black rain. A hundred chimneys, so many fingers, pillars of the smoke sky, altars of the Almighty Smoke. Rails along the ground, corresponding wires through the air. All one grim city made of stacks of city, of bundles of towns. In amongst it all runs the abstract provincial boundary. But overhead is the uniform sky, and that is smoke, smoke, smoke.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 18 March 1926

10. Germany in Winter

There is something half-hearted about this winter. The calendrical harshness of nature is nothing to the boundless cruelty of history. Snow melts away a couple of hours after falling. A mild zephyr blows over the land. There is a relation between the desires and the fears of the hungry, the cold, the unshod and the unclothed, and the permanent laws of the changing seasons. God’s fist has never oppressed us so much; the hand that doles out frost and bitterness every year was never so mild. There is some compensatory mechanism.

I come from abroad, where they pack up mercy parcels for Germany’s army, and where the newspapers mount withering attacks on German politicians on their front pages, but their back, human pages stick up for German victims; where the window displays of banks and exchange parlours exhibit endless Reichsmark notes, not as negotiable objects of exchange, but as curiosities; where Germany’s best actors appear, not for fame, but for rustling currency; where the money still has a good oily sheen, and feels soft and smooth in the hand, as though coloured by the sacred, kingly fat of the Golden Calf.

But in this abroad the station-guard goes hungry, the trains come and go unpunctually, the heating doesn’t always work, the porters haggle, the toilets don’t flush, and the lighting in the ­compartments is wretched. Whereas in Germany railway carriages are full of embittered businessmen, and a hungry inspector checks your tickets—but the heating works, and a beaming lamp, worthy of a nice sitting room, sheds its light. The porters certainly have set fees. The timetable isn’t a work of fiction. The trains actually stick to it. Officials man the counters. Water flows into the WCs. The machinery of public life is well and dependably oiled. In the cities, busy brooms whisk canine excrement into purpose-built gutters. Outside food shops stands the tidy rank and file of the great army of hungry Germans.

In Leipzig I saw a man from a firm of undertakers. He wore a gleaming top hat. He had a pomaded, uptwirled black moustache. He looked like a first-class funeral. He provoked fear and respect.