In Europe

fake text put together by the czar's secret police to provide ‘definitive’ proof of an international Jewish conspiracy.
    Thousands of such confused and embittered expatriates were wandering in Berlin, running into each other everywhere: anarchists, monarchists,businessmen, everyday citizens, Poles, Hungarians, Russians. They arrived wearing their best clothes, but decline was not long in coming. The jewels were hocked, the hotel tenancy terminated, the elegant clothing became threadbare, Kurfürstendamm was given the nickname ‘Nöpsky Prospekt’, and the panic grew.
    And in that same ragbag of a town, a miracle took place: Berlin became, for Europe,
the
city of the modern day. Perhaps it had to do with the way Wilhelm's Berlin had suddenly deflated like a balloon in 1918, leaving an enormous vacuum behind and the accompanying demand for new content, radically different forms and ideas. A cursory glance at the names of those who fled the city in the 1930s shows us something of the talent that had gathered in Berlin: Albert Einstein, Arnold Schönberg, Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, Heinrich Mann and his two children Klaus and Erika, Arthur Koestler, Marlene Dietrich, Hermann Ullstein.
    In the eyes of many, Berlin was a man-eating monster of machines, factories, anonymous housing blocks and speeding trains and cars. It served as the model for
Metropolis
, the masterpiece by Viennese-born cineaste Fritz Lang. But at the same time it was the world in which Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill created their
Threepenny Opera
. It was there that Yehudi Menuhin gave his first concert, at the age of thirteen. Looking back on it, he found the Berlin of those days above all a neurotic place. Not an authentic society, ‘but a new society based on new money, and on extravagance, brashness, show. Everything became possible. Everything became Experience with a capital “E” – and a capital “X”.’
    The epicentre of this movement of modernity was Café des Westens. This was where the literary magazines were passed around, hot off the presses. This is where the captains of the avant-garde granted audience to their followers, the expressionists associated with
Der Sturm
, with artists like Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinksy, the young Marc Chagall and countless Futurists, constructivists and Dadaists. One of the café's focal points was the Dadaist painter George Grosz, famous for his unflattering prints of whores, beggars, paraplegic war invalids on rollers and fat-necked real-estate speculators, street scenes often not at all far removed from reality.
    When the owner of Café des Westens boosted his prices in 1920, they all moved to the Romanisches Café, a huge, ugly space across from theKaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche. In Paris the tone was set by the
esprit du salon
, but the Romanisches Café had the atmosphere of a popular uprising. Everyone shouted, everyone wanted to be right. Beside the revolving doors sat the old, bearded expressionist painters. Up on the balcony people played chess. There was a sculptors’ table, a philosophers’ table, a newspaper table, a sociologists’ table. Pulling up a chair at a table to which one did not belong gave immediate cause for uproar. George Grosz would come storming in, dressed as an American cowboy, complete with boots and spurs. The Dutch poet Hendrik Marsman made ‘calligrams’ there (‘
Gertrude
. GERTRUDE. GERTRUDE.
Slut
.’), and spoke of city life that had run amok into ‘randiness, opium, madness and anarchy’. ‘Berlin,’ he wrote, ‘hung from the sky on a silken thread, a ponderous, colossal behemoth dangling above a roiling inferno.’
    Meanwhile, Joseph Roth was touring a different Germany. At the railway station in Chemnitz he saw a conductor eating bonbons out of a box someone had left behind on the train. The conductor was a serious man with hairy fists. Now he was eating this ‘candy for naughty girls’ as though it were a sausage sandwich. ‘Six months earlier this conductor would never have eaten bonbons. Now he is overpowered by hunger.’
    In Berlin he sees two prep-school boys marching down a busy street singing:
    Down, down with the Republic of Jews,
    Fucking Republic of Jews,
    Fucking Republic of Jews!
    The adults stepped aside to let the boys pass. ‘And no one boxed their ears.’
    He sees the growth of the German ‘periodical forest’, its seedbed on Potsdamer Platz.‘The saplings are called the
Völkischer Ratgeber
,