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Sunday 27 May 2012

Notebook

The German capital had long been attacked as too big and too foreign, and the attacks escalated over the Weimar period as the city became yet more "alien" in its values. A brochure published in Karlsruhe, for example, denounced the Spree metropolis as a frightening cross between "Chikago und Moskau", a nasty mixture of "Amerikanismus und Bolshevismus."  ...Worried about this gulf between capital and nation, Kurt Tucholsky advised his fellow Berlin intellectuals to "radiate energy in the provinces instead of patting themselves on the back." They should, he said, respond to the provincial outcry against the capital by speaking out "with the power of Berlin, which is light, to the provinces, where it is dark." But what if the provinces preferred it in the dark? And what if the light from Berlin was rather like that cast by the moon: visible only under clear skies and ultimately dependent on an outside source?

David Clay Large, Berlin.

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