In Europe

of skinheads settled in on the platform between compartments. They sat there smoking and drinking beer, occasionally breaking into raucous laughter and loud belching. Beans, goulash soup and potatoes with sausage were being served in the club car. The first-class passengers ate in silence. The skinheads and the restaurant personnel were the only ones who spoke. ‘Shit!’ the boys kept yelling at each other, ‘Shit! Shit!’ It was a grey day, an unremitting greyish-green, all the way from Paris to Berlin.
    Now, from my room, I look out on a courtyard full of brown leaves, a part of the earth where no one ever walks, sits or plays, occupied only by a large tree grasping for light. Darkness is falling. There is snow in the air. The windows across the way are dark, except for one warm, yellow rectangle, behind which someone is writing at a table.
    These are lovely, private surroundings, excellent for getting some work done on my dispatches or doing a little background reading. For days I have been immersed in the diary of Käthe Kollwitz: sculptress and cartoonist for the satirical weekly
Simplicissimus
; wife of the social democrat general practitioner Karl Kollwitz; mother of two sons, Hans and Peter. A vivacious woman who was gradually tethered to earth by life at respectable Weissenburger Strasse 25. Here, to quote a few of her entries, is how she saw Berlin at the time:
    8 September, 1909
    Went with Peter to Tempelhof airfield yesterday. Wright flew for fifty-two minutes. He looked handsome, and seemed sure of himself. Once Wright had flown by, a little boy asked: ‘Is he real? I thought he was glued to it.’ The North Pole was discovered by both Cook
and
Peary.
    30 November, 1909
    With Karl and Hans to the third Sombart reading, which was about whether there was such a thing as a Jewish essence, and if so what that might be … He talked about ghetto Jews and non-ghetto Jews. Why are the Spanish Jews, who are of pure Semitic origin, not ghetto Jews? Can't they be forced into that? In any case, they are more handsome and walk more erectly than ghetto Jews.
    5 February, 1911
    At [SDP leader Paul] Singer's funeral, the entire fourth borough walked in front of the coffin. The procession lasted more than an hour before the hearses passed. After a while, the appearance of the crowd made me sad. So many undereducated people. So many mean, stupid faces. So many ill and malformed. Yet still, as social democrats, they represented a favourable cross section of the population.
    16 April, 1912
    The British steamer
Titantic
has sunk, with more than a thousand people on board. Soost, the workman, earns twenty-eight marks a week, six of which go to pay the rent, twenty-two he hands overto his wife. She has to pay for beds and sleeping space, leaving fourteen or fifteen marks for Soost, his wife and their six children to live on.
    Their youngest is one month old … One of the older children is mentally retarded. Soost's wife is thirty-five, and she's already borne nine children, three of whom died. But all of them, she says, were as sturdy as this little boy at birth, they only weakened and died because she couldn't breastfeed them; she had no milk because she had to perform hard labour and couldn't care for herself.
    October 1912
    A Polygamy Bond has been set up in Jena. A hundred superior specimens of manhood desire intercourse with 1,000 superior specimens of womanhood, for the purposes of propagation. As soon as the woman becomes pregnant, the conjugal bonds are dissolved. All this with a view to racial advancement.
    New Year's Eve, 1913
    Last New Year's Eve, with all the rumours of war, was a hard one for me to bear. Now the year is over and nothing much in particular has happened … Mother is still alive. I asked her whether she wouldn't like to start all over again. She shook her head slowly and said: ‘It's enough.’ So she slowly fades, a languid, dusky sinking.
    The name of the hotel where I am staying is the Imperator. It's actually more like a boarding house, an enormous apartment building built around two courtyards, with high-ceilinged hallways and rooms en suite. In imperial times it housed the families of citizens of substance, but since the 1920s it has served as a boarding house. Miraculously enough, the building survived the war. Here is Berlin at its best: cozy, the walls covered in art, the sheets and napkins snowy white, the crispiest
Brötchen
in town. The entrance to all this solid living, a lovely