Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis Page A

journalist, and he was Jewish. “Precisely. My best friend in the world. But would I give him my job? That fat fuck?” Nils had a laugh like a crow sometimes, when he was really amused, and a triumphant snort could sneak through his sobriety.

NILS SCHREIBER
    Girlfriend
    ON M ULACKSTRASSE IT LOOKED as if nobody had collected trash since the Wall fell. Empty lots like missing teeth, competing graffiti, foreigners out, Nazis out, on every exposed wall, and the faint traces of Yiddish over what had once been shop windows but were now as often as not boarded over. As midnight approached, a naked light bulb hung over a single open storefront. The storefront announced itself as an art gallery. In a spirit of bored curiosity, we entered. There were stairs and arrows leading to the basement. When we got down there, we had to walk over broken glass to get to the art, which was a dead rat suspended in the coal bin. Holly stifled what seemed like an unlikely scream. A girl with neon hair laconically held out a donation cup. I dropped a couple of marks in it. Holly wore flats with thin soles and was afraid she would cut her feet on the glass. The gallery was housed in the building her father had once owned, but her parents had never lived there and Holly showed little interest in this, her second claim. This was despite my suggestion that it might one day be worth a pile, that the old ghetto of the Scheunenviertel – centrally located, morbidly appealing, and left to rot during the GDR – was already showing signs of being Berlin’s next neighborhood of the future.

FRANZ ROSEN
    Hero
    THIS IS A STORY ABOUT MYSELF . I was born into prosperous circumstances. My father owned an industrial firm which processed tungsten for the production of electric light bulbs. He was a confidant of Walter Rathenau, the assimilationist business leader who became the Weimar Republic’s foreign minister in 1922 and was assassinated. When I was young, I led the life of a little prince. My elder brother was destined for the family business. I would be an artist, or a writer, or simply a dandy. My heroes were the assimilated Viennese writers with pens of quicksilver, Roth, Zweig, and (unfortunately if inevitably) for a certain period Weininger, who equated Jewishness with femininity and condemned them both. My father was neither a prophet about the Nazis nor a fool. When they came to power, he had the idea, I believe, of ducking down and muddling through: this too shall pass. A great believer in Germany’s modernity, he perhaps underestimated fascism’s appeal to that very modernity, a mistake in which of course he would not have been alone. My brother Paul was arrested and badly treated. On his release, he had sunken eyes. My father commenced considering emigration for us all. Paul was rearrested. This second time they sent him home in a box with his overcoat stuffed in. My father died of a broken heart. My mother suffered a nervous breakdown and the diagnosis of cancer virtually at once. It became too late to leave. We lost everything to confiscations. My mother was relocated to an overpopulated apartment in the ghetto of the ostjuden , where she promptly died, either from her cancer or the embarrassment of her new circumstances. I went underground in the city. My complexion and hair made me look sufficiently “Aryan.” I had never quit attending the city’s nightclubs, even after there were prohibitions. Now I made contact with other “U-Boaters,” as we were called, Jews who lived as we could, and we formed a loose alliance. My self-proclaimed role in “the underground” was to use my familiarity with the demimonde to begin love affairs with German officers, and to glean information which I passed along an uncertain chain. My circumcision proved an inevitable problem. I had to be both deft and clever, and in one instance, to an SS man who conceived a true crush on me, I was forced finally to admit