In Europe

the colours of the German flag. ‘Our boys, at last!’
    Back at my boarding house, the Jewish proprietress is sitting in front of the TV, her face white as a sheet. ‘They're actually going to start the bombings,’ she says shakily. ‘They really are. It's madness, complete madness.’ She's afraid, and keeps bursting into tears.



Chapter SIXTEEN
Berlin
    IN THE 1920S, BERLIN CONSISTED OF THREE STREETS. FOR BERLINERS , Unter den Linden was the walking street, the boulevard where foreigners and provincials strolled back and forth to view all the cardboard grandeur of the German Empire. Leipziger Strasse was the shopping street, home to the department stores belonging to Wertheim, Israel, Tietz and Jandorf. Friedrichstrasse was the quaffing street, with bars, beer joints, grand cafés and houses of pleasure back to back. And Wilhelmstrasse was the seat of government, but that was a different story.
    In those days one arrived in Berlin by train. Everyone came by train: the Russians arrived at Schlesischer Bahnhof (now Ostbahnhof), the French, English, Belgians and Dutch at Potsdamer Bahnhof. All these station districts with their eating-places, brothels and cheap hotels were like magnets around which the city revolved. ‘Asia begins at Schlesischer Bahnhof,’ the citizens of Berlin said, pointing to the tracks that ran all the way to Vladivostok and reminding each other of the price of a train ticket to Tokyo: 650 imperial marks. One could as well have said: ‘Europe begins at Potsdamer Bahnhof’, and point to the tracks running all the way to Hook of Holland. Here lay Europe's natural crossroads. Everything and everyone passed through this city.
    In those days, Berlin was a city of soldiers returned home from the front. A picture taken in December 1918 shows troops marching through the Brandenburg gate: their frowning, unshaved faces lined with hunger and cold, silent crowds along the road, the soldiers step briskly to shake off the humiliation. Their comrades were broken, invalids, wreckage, they themselves had become accomplished killers. They were baffled by the defeat that had been suddenly imposed upon them. Until summer 1918,after all, Germany had won one victory after the next. Had a single enemy soldier ever set foot on German territory? And what about the capitulation, right after a new ‘left wing’ government had come to power, after Wilhelm's fall? ‘The victorious front has been killed by a knife in the back,’ the army's former commanders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, had said – and ah, that had to be it.
    Berlin was also a city of the exiled and uprooted. After 1918, more than nine million Europeans had been cast adrift. Two million Poles, an equal number of Russians, a million Germans and 250,000 Hungarians were wandering the roads between Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London and Amsterdam.
    Berlin was the natural centre to which they were drawn. The signs outside the cafés and restaurants around Nollendorfplatz were written in Cyrillic letters. When bus drivers stopped at Bülowstrasse, they shouted: ‘Russia!’ In 1918 there were 50,000 Russians in Berlin, by 1924 there were 300,000. The city had six Russian-language dailies and twenty Russian bookshops. There were at least a dozen Russian galleries and cabarets and countless cafés, all full of failed revolutionaries, would-be Bolsheviks, drunken artists, down-at-heel nobility and armchair generals.
    In his reports from Berlin, the quintessential journalist Joseph Roth described these exiles’ fate. The Hungarian boy Geza, for example, who had accidentally fought on the wrong side during the revolution and now dreamed of becoming a cabin boy on a cruise ship to America. Or Mr Schwartzbach from Galicia, who poured his lonely heart into building a miniature model of Solomon's temple, complete with countless details dreamed up by Schwartzbach himself. After nine years his magnum opus was finished, and disappeared into the back room of a Jewish restaurant on Hirtenstrasse, where no one ever looked at it again. But there were also others, like General Biskupsky, the Beast of Odessa, who hoped to create a ‘Russian-German alliance’ with his German colleague Ludendorff, towards the day on which both gentlemen would someday return to power. Or Fyodor Vinberg, a former czarist officer and one of the first advocates of a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’. Vinberg walked around all day touting
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, a