Page 4 of The Banned Books of Berlin

Berlin, November 1930

A random act of fate had brought Freya to this small cabaret club in the Schoneberg district, she reflected as she cut and stitched on that cold winter’s morning: the place she hadn’t realised she’d been looking for. All she’d known was that if she didn’t get out of the apartment, and soon, she would suffocate. Working and living at home was stifling, whereas here in Schoneberg she felt part of the world again. She could hear the place gradually coming to life: footsteps overhead and whistling down the corridor, someone playing scales on the piano above, Frau Brodsky muttering to herself in the next room – and then a sudden bang followed by an alarming crash, which made her jump up, throw down her scissors and rush to the door.

Frau Brodsky was embracing a girl with a shock of ginger hair falling over her face, the pair of them swaying together in the centre of the room beside an overturned chair. The girl was groaning, while Frau Brodsky struggled to keep her upright. When she saw Freya, she called, ‘Grab the chair – quick!’

Freya rushed forward to do as she was told, and together they lowered the girl on to it. She sat with her head slumped to one side. Her skin was chalk white and a chemical smell overlaid the reek of alcohol on her breath.

Frau Brodsky shook her head. ‘Oh, Perle,’ she sighed. ‘Not again.’

The girl opened one sooty eye, looked at her sideways and laughed. Then her stomach heaved and she put her hand to her mouth. Frau Brodsky lunged for a nearby wastepaper basket and just managed to catch a stream of foul-smelling vomit that splattered into it.

‘Here,’ she said, passing the basket to Freya once Perle had stopped retching. ‘Make yourself useful. There’s a lavatory down the passage.’

Holding the receptacle at arm’s length and turning her face away, Freya ventured into the corridor to find it. She hadn’t gone far before a door opened and Herr Schwartz’s head appeared.

‘Fr?ulein Amsel!’ he hissed. ‘Come and talk to me about chiffon and sequins. I know you are the one to turn my dreams into reality.’

‘I can’t at the moment,’ Freya replied, indicating the basket. ‘Perhaps another time?’

‘Is that ogre sending you on errands?’ he asked, leaning forward to peer into it.

‘Don’t!’ Freya cried – but too late. He recoiled, staring at her in mute horror before closing the door in her face. She couldn’t help but smile.

By the time she’d found the lavatory, done her best with the wastepaper basket and returned to the dressing room, all that could be seen of Perle was a mop of red hair falling over a blanket on a mattress in the corner.

‘Is she all right?’ she asked.

‘She’d better be,’ Frau Brodsky replied. ‘We’ve a matinée this afternoon. Once the drugs are out of her system she can usually manage, just about. She might need some more pills to rev her up but one of the other girls will no doubt oblige.’

‘Well, I’d better get back to work,’ Freya said.

‘I had a look at your toile,’ Frau Brodsky told her, and Freya stiffened, wondering what was coming next. ‘Not bad,’ she went on. ‘A little rough around the edges but you obviously know what you’re doing. Your mother taught you well.’

Freya had to blink away the tears which Frau Brodsky either didn’t notice, or pretended not to. ‘Carry on,’ she said briskly. ‘At least attach that bodice to a skirt. I don’t expect you to hem it.’

For the next however long – time seemed to fly past without Freya noticing – she worked on the sailor suit: shaping, pinning and stitching with a focus and enthusiasm she couldn’t summon for the pile of half-finished outfits waiting for her attention back at the apartment. In this extraordinary place, people might fall down drunk, shout or throw things at each other, but they were also interesting and funny (if unintentionally). They expressed their emotions rather than brooding over them in silence. She felt at ease here; liberated. As she worked, she devised a plan for the future that seemed so obvious and so practical, she couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t occurred to her before.

Eventually she emerged, the garment over her arm, to find red-haired Perle sitting against the wall with her head thrown back and her eyes closed. Her face was chalk white, streaked with black rivulets where her make-up had run. Frau Brodsky cracked an egg into a glass and threw its shell into the wastepaper basket Freya had emptied and rinsed.

‘Finished?’ she asked, whisking the egg with the handle of a tortoiseshell comb. ‘Hold it up and let’s have a look.’

Freya displayed the dress from both the front and the back, turning it around slowly so that every detail was visible.

‘Well done,’ Frau Brodsky commented, producing a hip flask from her pocket and pouring a slosh of what smelt like brandy into the glass. ‘I think we have a workable pattern there.’

‘So have I passed the test?’ Freya asked.

‘Yes, I’d say so.’ Frau Brodsky pushed the concoction into Perle’s hand. The girl opened her eyes, took one look at the glass and closed them again. ‘I’d be happy to have you making up costumes for me.’

‘That’s not what I want,’ Freya said, because she was tired and angry now, and not ready to give up without a fight. ‘I’m better than that and you know it. Why did you ask me to create this costume if you only wanted a piece worker?’

‘Because it amused me,’ Frau Brodsky replied coolly. ‘You had a nerve, marching in here and asking for a job, so why not put you through your paces? And I thought maybe you could teach that idiot Schwartz a thing or two. But money’s tight around here and I doubt the owner’s going to let either of us have an assistant.’

‘You don’t know that, though,’ Freya insisted. ‘There’s no harm in asking him, is there? That’s the least you owe me. And you’d better be quick. Imagine if I ended up working for Herr Schwartz rather than you. Think about it: if I were on your side, I could deal with him so you didn’t have to. Wouldn’t that be a weight off your shoulders?’

Frau Brodsky pursed her lips.

‘Come on, Bubbe,’ said a sepulchral voice, and they turned to find Perle had come to life – almost – and was squinting down her nose at them through half-closed lids. ‘Give the girl a break,’ she went on. ‘We all have to start somewhere.’

‘Thank you, Fr?ulein,’ Frau Brodsky remarked. ‘When I want the opinion of a drunken guttersnipe, you can be sure I’ll ask for it.’ All the same, she stood with her hands on her hips for a minute or so, then plucked the dress from Freya’s arms and sailed out of the room with it.

‘Thanks,’ Freya said awkwardly.

‘Don’t mention it.’ Perle swallowed a mouthful of egg and brandy, shuddered and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Wouldn’t kill the old trout to help someone else up the ladder.’ She closed her eyes again.

Taking the hint, Freya retreated to tidy up the workroom while she waited for Frau Brodsky to return.

The lady was back within an hour, with a determined set to her jaw. ‘Schwartz got there first,’ was all she’d say. ‘But the battle’s only just beginning.’

And now Freya knew she had a chance. It would have been foolish to throw in her lot with Herr Schwartz – he was far too flighty, and who knew how long his position at the club would last – but she could use him to make Frau Brodsky want to hire her instead. Piece work was no use; she had already decided to clear out the workroom at home and turn it into a bedroom, which they would rent out for a steady income. The Amsels’ apartment was well-located at the front of the building, rather than in the Hinterhaus at the back where the factory workers, street sweepers and labourers lived, and where gypsy children sang for small change in the courtyard. It was a respectable address with a balcony and she could charge extra for breakfast and supper. If Ernst and Otto didn’t like having a stranger in their home, they’d have to lump it. Grief and worry had hardened Freya from a dutiful daughter and sister into someone altogether more ruthless. If an opportunity came her way, she wasn’t going to let it slip by.

The battle for Freya’s services lasted a week, at the end of which she was summoned back to the Zaubergarten and informed she was to work for Herr Schwartz in the morning and Frau Brodsky in the afternoon. She would start at eleven and finish at seven, just before the evening’s first performance began, and her wages would be low but better than nothing. That night, she took off her apron after cooking the supper and told her father and brother she’d secured a job in costume design. Without telling an outright lie, she managed to imply that it was at the much larger Scala theatre down the road, rather than what was essentially a cabaret club. She’d be working for a proper variety theatre, she told her father – a respectable, well-run place. Ernst wasn’t overjoyed about the idea of his daughter in such a precarious profession, especially if it meant his supper would be late, but the news she’d be earning a regular salary was cheering. Similarly, he was persuaded to accept the need for a lodger when he heard that he or she would pay two hundred marks a month for bed and board; housing was scarce in Berlin and people lucky enough to have jobs were always looking for cheap rooms.

So Freya finished off the last few orders in her book, put a cover over the sewing machine and stowed it away under her bed. She sold the workbench and bought a second-hand bed frame and mattress (carefully checked for stains and any signs of infestation), moved her own chest of drawers into the room and added a jug and washbasin to stand on top. The place looked cosy when she’d finished, and she’d cleaned it from top to bottom. She put up a card on the front door of the apartment block, and within a few days her advertisement was answered by one Walther Grube, who’d been visiting a friend on the third floor. Herr Grube was interviewed by Ernst and pronounced satisfactory. He was a bank clerk and also, Freya was alarmed to learn, a member of the National Socialist party.

‘Would you rather have a Commie or a Jew?’ her father retorted – to which the answer was yes, though she knew better than to say so. To hear Ernst talk, anyone would think Jews were responsible for all that was wrong in the world. Painting the comfortable homes of Jewish families sent him into a state of sullen fury. Their businesses were flourishing while his had folded because they were corrupt swindlers, in league with the banks. Take the Wertheim department store on Leipziger Platz, for example, with its glass atrium, frescoes and the colonnaded entrance that so fascinated Otto: how could such a monument to extravagance have been built, if not for dirty money? The architect had been Jewish and so were the brothers who’d founded the Wertheim chain; they were all in cahoots with each other and no one outside the tribe of Israel stood a chance. And as for that quack, Rosenthal, letting his poor wife suffer …

‘That’s not fair!’ Freya had protested, stung at last to defend the man who’d looked after her mother with such patience and compassion. ‘Herr Doktor did everything he could for her, you know that. All those times he visited and never charged us, even late at night. Mutti loved him. It wasn’t his fault she didn’t get better.’

Ernst didn’t pay her any attention. He was a bitter man these days; Adolf Hitler might have been speaking directly to him.

‘It could be useful to know someone like this Grube fellow,’ Otto told them. ‘The Nazis are going from strength to strength.’

The Nazi party had increased its share of the vote sevenfold in the election that September, and now the brown-shirted stormtroopers seemed to be everywhere in the streets, strutting around and expecting people to salute them. All those scruffy, unemployed youths who used to hang about on street corners had been given a haircut and an identity: one that made Freya shiver.

Still, the Amsels needed money and no one else replied to the card, so Herr Grube moved into the apartment the same day Freya started at the Zaubergarten. In some ways, he was an ideal lodger: he was quiet and clean, and spent most weekends cycling or hiking in lederhosen through the countryside south of the city, no matter the weather. On weekday mornings he left promptly for work at eight o’clock, wearing a navy-blue suit that had become shiny at the knees and elbows and a grey shirt that was just a little too tight, its buttons straining across his chest.

Freya didn’t trust him. He had an uncanny habit of materialising from nowhere, appearing suddenly before her when she was washing the dishes or on her way to the bathroom. He liked to walk around bare-chested, and his pale, smooth skin repelled her; she imagined it would be clammy to the touch, like that of some sea creature, and the thought made her shudder. His eyes were pale, the colour of slush, and always sliding away rather than meeting anyone’s gaze. She couldn’t bring herself to call him Walther, unlike her father and brother. Otto admired Herr Grube because he was fit and muscular, and possessed a set of weights that he occasionally allowed Otto to borrow. Ernst appreciated the fact their lodger kept himself to himself and didn’t indulge in unnecessary small talk.

Freya was to inhabit two different worlds. At home, she lived among taciturn men; at the club, she was surrounded by laughing, weeping, squabbling, struggling, loving, jealous women. For the first few weeks, she was so busy trying to find her way around and carry out the jobs Frau Brodsky assigned to her that she mainly knew the girls by sight – apart from Perle, for whom she would always feel a special affection. They accepted her straight away, and before long the dressing room echoed with cries of, ‘Freya? Come here, right away!’ Soon she could fit names to their faces too and, listening to their conversations as she fixed a broken shoulder strap or helped the dresser with a costume change, form an idea of their individual characters.

There was blonde Angelika with the lazy eye, who always arrived at the very last minute and smoked like a chimney even when in costume; the two Sophies, one who sang like a lark but couldn’t dance and the other who cartwheeled across the stage as though she were made of India rubber; motherly Gisela, everyone’s friend and confidante; angry Helga, in love with a banker who would never leave his wife; Karin, who was so thin and pale that she must surely be ill; Irmgard, who worked as a teacher in the daytime and was usually exhausted; and last but not least, the eccentric English girl, Violet.

The fashion at the time was for bobbed hair but Violet’s was dramatically cropped, shorn at the nape of her long, graceful neck. Heads turned wherever she went, partly because of her strange clothes – she was as likely to appear in a jacket and tie as a satin evening gown, and might have been mistaken for a beautiful boy were it not for the voluptuousness of her figure – and partly because of her dazzling skin, large grey eyes fringed with dark lashes and wide, generous mouth that turned down so fascinatingly at the corners. She had an unpronounceable second name so everyone simply called her Fr?ulein Violet. Nobody quite knew what she was doing in Berlin, let alone the Zaubergarten, but she was funny and the customers loved her, both men and women, so the other girls let her be. Violet and Helga were the tallest girls in the troupe and alternated in solo roles, but there could be no doubt that Violet was the star. There was a wildness about her, a lack of inhibition that made her performance magnetic. When Violet danced, Freya ached with indefinable longing: for freedom, for Leon, for a life full of drama and desire.

Inspired by Violet and the glamorous world in which she now moved, Freya began changing the way she dressed. She took scissors and needle and thread to her mother’s wardrobe, slashing necklines and hems, remaking the old-fashioned sleeves of blouses and embellishing Ingrid’s black work frocks with pintucks, sashes and ribbon – developing a style that, she liked to think, was both elegant and bohemian. And then one Saturday, she had her long brown hair cut into a bob that emphasised her cheekbones and determined jaw.

‘Mein Gott!’ Ernst exclaimed when he saw her. ‘Your beautiful hair, ruined! That was the one thing you had going for you. What would your mother say?’

‘She’d say I was being sensible,’ Freya replied. ‘She was always complaining about having to brush it every morning when I was small.’

‘Very full of yourself since you started working at that theatre,’ Ernst said, glowering.

Freya didn’t pay much attention to his disapproval. She would never have dared speak so boldly to her father in the old days but now she had to stand up for herself if she was ever to break away. With Ingrid no longer around to act as the family peacemaker, there was no buffer between Freya and Ernst, and his blinkered views were increasingly hard to put up with. Although he’d been forced to accept her job and the necessity for a lodger because they needed the money, he would sooner have her at home all day, cooking and cleaning. He didn’t care whether or not she was fulfilled; her growing independence only threatened him. Freya was sad this should be so and yet, selfishly, her father’s shortcomings made it easier for her to think of leaving him. He was alone and grieving but she couldn’t sacrifice her life for his. Ingrid had given her permission to escape and as soon as she’d saved enough money, she would.

It wasn’t long before Freya felt as though she had been working at the Zaubergarten for years. Herr Schwartz didn’t make too many demands on her time. Some days he only appeared in the middle of the afternoon, and when he summoned her to his office along the corridor (his atelier , as he liked to call it), he mainly wanted to talk about his troubles. Frau Brodsky had the artistic sensibility of a donkey, he complained, and the owner was beginning to take her side over his. Freya had been introduced to the owner, Herr Goldstein, a balding, jolly man in a brocade waistcoat that stretched across his stomach.

‘He’s too soft for his own good,’ Frau Brodsky told Freya privately. ‘If I wasn’t here to keep an eye on things, the Zaubergarten wouldn’t make any money at all.’

Frau Brodsky, on the other hand, certainly needed an assistant. Although the costumes were made up by piece workers and she had a girl to take care of the mending and laundry, there was still a lot of work involved in day-to-day wardrobe maintenance and supervision. The dancers often had to change in a hurry and were hard on their clothes, which could end up torn, stained or mislaid. Furious arguments often erupted as shoes went missing, lipsticks were pinched or laddered stockings were secretly swapped with pristine ones. Yet when the lights dimmed, the piano quartet began to play and the velvet curtain rose, the girls all wore radiant smiles as they high-kicked their way on to the stage, flashing their glorious legs in unison: the epitome of glamour and physical perfection.

There were several other acts: two middle-aged men who sang satirical songs at the piano, an escapologist, an acrobat who juggled, a redhead who played swirling Alpine folk music on a fiddle, and a handsome, drunken poet who prowled the stage like a caged tiger. They were all introduced by Willi, a young man in evening dress with a monocle and an air of barely suppressed menace. Freya stayed to watch a whole performance from the wings one night and discovered that she did, after all, love the spectacle as much as she’d claimed. The music was so exhilarating and the girls so graceful and lovely that she couldn’t help but be entranced. The club wasn’t one of those tawdry places where you could hire a room by the hour with the girl of your choice, and where the dancers came dressed as milkmaids, schoolgirls or cats with false tails. Herr Goldstein had created an atmosphere of elegance and refinement, appealing to a discriminating clientele. The pianist was a virtuoso and the girls were well-trained and athletic; a choreographer dreamed up new dances and supervised rehearsals with them in the afternoons. Frau Brodsky’s costumes were truly beautiful creations, titillating but not tawdry, and although most of the dancers ended up naked, that was accomplished in the best possible taste.

All evening, a cigarette girl threaded her way among the round tables, dimly lit with rose-shaded lamps, while waiters were on hand to bring more bottles of champagne. The men in the audience craned forward, mesmerised by the long, lean legs of the Zaubergarten girls; the women smoked and drank, indifferent, or pretending indifference. Prostitutes – both male and female – were sitting with many of the men, that was clear, but they were a different class from those who hung about on street corners. Customers could buy champagne for the dancers to drink at their table and talk to them, but that was the extent of their contact. Herr Goldstein was in attendance most evenings and the barman, a bare-knuckle street fighter, was on hand in case of trouble.

The Zaubergarten was a well-run place, by and large, and Freya felt safe there from the beginning. The girls liked her because she was quiet and helpful, and a good listener. Soon they were telling her their secrets: Violet’s escape from life as a debutante, Karin’s recent stay in a sanatorium, Perle’s struggles with cocaine, Helga’s plan to tell her lover she was pregnant so he’d divorce his childless wife, and then pretend to have had a miscarriage. So many stories of love, desire and loss.

Freya began writing in the early morning and deep into the night, taking some detail one of the girls had told her as a starting point and letting her imagination embroider the rest. She hardly knew why, but for some reason she wanted to think more deeply about these young women and capture their fragile, precarious lives on paper, as though she were pinning gorgeous butterflies to a board. No one would have recognised them as she’d taken a feature from one and a habit from another, adding a background that was pure invention. Anyway, the pages were for her eyes only. Writing liberated her mind and crystallised her thoughts; it helped her see the world more clearly, and consider the type of person she might become. She wasn’t going to be a seamstress for ever. One day she would find her voice, as her mother had urged, and the world would hear what she had to say.