1936 On the Continent

glad if I can only see the most celebrated.
    “We shall not have to go far to find something unique,” said Tom. “Just look round. You are on the most beautiful and complete flying ground in Europe. It is not a flying ground in the usual sense, but a railway station of the air, and one which is much more beautiful than our old railway stations here. Every quarter of an hour come and go the aeroplanes of the wonderful German air service. However great the traffic in connection with the Olympiad, this marvellous organisation with its great terraces, its hotel, its huge graduated flying ground, will be competent to meet all demands made upon it. But the Germans are never satisfied. Tempelhof, which with its signal lights is a dream of beauty at night (and impresses me more than any museum), is to be made still larger.”
    “Would you like to walk or drive into the town?” I looked at him as if he were mad, and thought of our Croydon, but then I remembered that Tempelhof is hardly a quarter-of-an-hour’s walk from the heart of the city. Nevertheless we took a Lufthansa bus.
Berlin: Hotels
    Tom had booked a room for me. I had decided beforehand to stay at the Adlon, which is one of the most famous hotels on the Continent, and where to-day one can live in the greatest luxury for 10 marks a day. But I had to give in to my old friend, and he had a surprise for me. Not the fashionable Hotel Esplanade, a favourite of the Kaiser’s, had he chosen for me, nor the Kaiserhof, Hitler’s headquarters before the seizure of power, nor yet the Hotel Eden, which is the liveliest and most amusing of the big hotels, nor the Hotel Bristol, near the Adlon, where one can get a meal for 4.50 marks which would certainly cost three times as much with us. The giant Hotel Excelsior, which is connected with the Anhalter station by an underground escalator and where a thousandrooms await visitors, he only showed me in passing. Of the Fürstenhof, in the busiest part of the city, on the Potsdamer Platz, he remarked that it belonged to the Aschinger concern. I did not enquire further, but the name Aschinger was soon to become known to me.
    Tom Sutton lived in the Knesebeckstrasse in Berlin West, and as a practical man he had taken for me a room at the Hotel-Pension am Steinplatz. He thought that I might well have got tired of big hotels on my travels, and a change would be good for me. This excellently managed house with its charming rooms appealed to me at first sight. It was something after the style of our best family hotels, but in many ways even more comfortable. The charge in the Hotel-Pension am Steinplatz is somewhat over the average Berlin hotel price (9 marks, with private bathroom).
    I must confess that I did not take in everything he told me in his hour-long dissertations. However, I did gather how Berlin is divided up. For visitors to Berlin, two districts are of chief importance, the centre, also called the city—but quite unlike our London city—and the West End, where I am now staying, known as Berlin W., and including the great residential districts of Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Schöneberg and also Grünewald. All this part included in the West End is grouped round the Kurfürstendamm, a seemingly endless and imposing street, which alone I thought gave me the explanation of why Tom was such an admirer of Berlin. The backbone of the inner town is the Unter den Linden, a much shorter street than the Kurfürstendamm, but certainly one of the best worth seeing of any in the world, and in spite of its huge buildings, a friendly one. It combines all the features of our Mall, is at least as interesting as Whitehall, and has shops like Bond Street and hotels like Park Lane.

    The Government offices are situated partly in the Unter den Linden itself and partly in neighbouring streets. The name of the Wilhelmstrasse, with the new Reich Chancellor’s palace, now Hitler’s residence, is known to the whole world on account of the great conferences which have taken and still take place there. The Foreign Office is also here, so that the Wilhemstrasse ranks with our Downing Street in importance, but it is much longer and more imposing.
Berlin: Streets and Sights
    The Friedrichstrasse also, one of the best known of Berlin’s streets, crosses the Linden. It is a busy shopping and pleasure street; once it was also the most fashionable, but the West End has to a certain extent conquered it. In spite of this, however, the