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| Queuing up for butter |
An excerpt from Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood
That is the novel on which the film Cabaret, with Liza Minelli, was based.
« Herr
Krampf, a young engineer, one of my pupils, describes his childhood
during the days of the War and the Inflation. During the last years
of the War, the straps disappeared from the windows of railway
carriages: people had cut them off in order to sell the leather. You
even saw men and women going about in clothes made from the carriage
upholstery. A party of Krampf’s school friends broke into a factory
one night and stole all the leather driving-belts. Everybody stole.
Everybody sold what they had to sell--themselves included. A boy of
fourteen, from Krampf’s class, peddled cocaine between school
hours, in the streets.
Farmers
and butchers were omnipotent. Their slightest whim had to be
gratified, if you wanted vegetables or meat. The Krampf family knew
of a butcher in a little village outside Berlin who always had meat
to sell. But the butcher had a peculiar sexual perversion. His
greatest erotic pleasure was to pinch and slap the cheeks of a
sensitive, well-bred girl or woman. The possibility of thus
humiliating a lady like Frau Krampf excited him enormously: unless he
was allowed to realise his fantasy, he refused, absolutely, to do
business. So, every Sunday, Krampf’s mother would travel out to the
village with her children, and patiently offer her cheeks to be
slapped and pinched, in exchange for some cutlets or a steak. »
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| One billion marks. How many zeroes? |
One
wonders whether this comical but above all brutal and tragic social
reality did not have its share in the "demoralization" of
Berlin society in the 1920s. Was the emergence of “swinging”
Berlin, with its sexual freedom, linked to the need for many women
(and men) to prostitute themselves, especially during the war and in
the first years of the decade, when the misery was worst? Maybe it
"dedramatized" sex for money, and even other kinds of sex ?
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