1936 On the Continent

Kranzler—the name has long been known because of the historic café in the Unter den Linden—Café Bristol, Uhlandeck, Café Wien with good Austrian cooking, Café des Westens, are all good cheap places where you can see the life of the Kurfürstendamm flow past you and sit for hours over a cup of coffee. The Romanische Café in the shadow of the Gedächtniskirche was once the rendezvous of the Berlin bohemians.
Berlin: The Tiergarten
    On your way to the Tiergarten you pass through the Joachimsthaler Strasse, where you will find an excellent automatic buffet with the English name “Quick,” and many good drinking places; then you will come to yet another entertainment centre, also quite near the Kurfürstendamm and the Gedächtniskirche. At the dance-hall Barbarina there were particularly nice girls at the bar. Here in the glittering light of thousands of illuminated advertisements you will find one of the biggest railway stations in Berlin, the Zoo station, a few steps only from the Zoological Garden, where I spent a pleasant afternoon. The Zoo has nothing to do, however, with the TiergartenI have already referred to; the Tiergarten was once a hunting preserve, but to-day is the biggest park in Berlin, though quite unlike our Hyde Park. Beautiful avenues of trees alternate with romantic lakes and well-kept promenades. The centre of the Tiergarten is intersected by the Siegesallee, with statues of all the German Emperors, which leads to the monumental Reichstag building, the burning of which gave a new turn to German history.
    The Tiergartenstrasse and its side streets were once the most fashionable residential quarter in Berlin, but the huge amount of traffic which streams through the Tiergartenstrasse from the centre of the town to the West End has driven away many of the former residents. Yet this is still the diplomatic quarter of Berlin, and many prominent families have beautiful houses here surrounded by large gardens. The best fashion salons are also here, and in the Budapester Strasse, which takes us back to the Gedächtniskirche.
    From here to the Wittenbergplatz stretches the Tauentzienstrasse, containing the best and most important shops in the West End. This is the promenade of Berlin where, especially in the afternoon, you will find a crowd of people. In the evening, however, everybody walks in the Kurfürstendamm, which in spite of its traffic looks almost like the promenade of a well-known spa.
Potsdam
    We spent one day in Potsdam, where the mighty ruler of Prussia, Frederick the Great, built his imposing palaces and wonderful gardens right in the midst of this very Prussian town. Here is the Sanssouci with its majestic flights of steps and fairy-like park. We went by car to Potsdam but alighted at Havelufer and walked for some hours round this unique town which, in spite of the fact that some of its buildings are in the French style, is as typical of Germany as any in the Reich. Potsdam too is still remarkable to-day for what is called the “Potsdamer Geist” (
esprit de Potsdam
), the inhabitants being mostly very aristocratic and including many old army people.
    This excursion to Potsdam gave me the opportunity of confirming Tom’s remark that Berlin, the largest town onthe Continent with its four and a half million inhabitants, possesses particularly beautiful and varied surroundings. Although there are no mountains, the Brandenburg Mark where Berlin lies being rather flat, the city is surrounded by an endless chain of lakes, rivers and wooded slopes, where hundreds of excursions may be taken.
    These lakes and the wooded country begin, so to speak, in the middle of the town, with the fashionable residential district of Grunewald adjoining the Kurfürstendamm. Wannsee, Dahlem, Zehlendorf are only a few of these lake and wood-bordered suburbs for which we Londoners may well envy the Berliners.
    The afternoon we spent on the terrace of the Schloss Marquardt, not far from the Potsdam Café, an old nobleman’s residence which was converted into a café-restaurant; the park and the lake which surround it are so beautiful that the Schloss Marquardt is one of Berlin’s most popular of the short excursions.
Berlin: Shops and Other Things to See
    We also visited the great shops, Karstadt in Neukölln, Tietz und Wertheim in the Leipziger Strasse, K.D.W. in the Tauentzienstrasse. I liked the way they were fitted up, but our London shops are even bigger and perhaps also smarter and more