Notes on The Berlin Stories

Goodbye To Berlin

Quotes:

• I am a camera with its shutter open, quote passive, responding, not thinking.
• Where in another ten years, shall I be, myself?  Certainly not here. How many seas and frontiers shall I have to cross to reach that distant day; how far shall I have to travel, on foot, on horseback, by car, push-bike, aeroplane, steamer, train, lift, moving-staircase and tram?  How much money shall I need for that enormous journey?  How much food will I gradually, wearily consume on my way?  How many pairs of shoes shall I wear out?  How many thousands of cigarettes shall I smoke?  How many cups of tea shall I drink and how many glasses of beer?  What an awful tasteless prospect!  And yet - to have to die ...  
• Sally lit another cigarette:she smoked the whole time.  I noticed how old her hands looked in the lamplight.  They were nervous, veined, and very thin - the hands of a middle-aged woman.  The green finger-nails seemed not to belong to them at all; to have settled on them by chance -- like hard, bright, ugly little beetles.
• ... I think the men in this country are awful.  They've none of them got any money, and they expect you to let them seduce you if they give you a bx of chocolates.
• He made me feel like a marvellous nymph, or something, miles away from anywhere in the middle of the forest.
• "I think," said Sally, it must be marvellous to be a novelist.  You're frightfully dreamy and unpractical, and unbusinesslike, and people imagine they can fairly swindle you as much as they want - and then you sit down and write a book about them which fairly shows them what swine they all are, and it's the most terrific success and you make pots of money."
• Having babies makes you feel awfully primitive, like a sort of wild animal or something, defending its young.

New (old) Words

• HALBERD: a weapon especially of the 15th and 16th centuries consisting typically of a battle-ax and pike mounted on a handle about six feet long
• PHALANX: a massed arrangement of persons, animals, or things
• FREIHERR: The German equivalent of baron, Freiherr, or “free lord” of the empire, originally implied a dynastic status.
• RITTMEISTER: (German and Scandinavian for "riding master" or "cavalry master") is or was a military rank of a commissioned cavalry officer in the armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Scandinavia, and some other countries. 
• JODLERIN: German word for yodler
• DEMI-MONDAINE: a woman considered to belong to the demimonde.  Demi-monde refers to a group of people who live hedonistic lifestyles, usually in a flagrant and conspicuous manner. 
• DOGMA: a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds

Recipes

The page-boy, spruce, discreetly grinning, swaying, from the waist like a flower, crossed the room with his tray of cigarettes: "Zigarren! Zigaretten!"  His voice was mocking, clear-pitched like an actor's.  And in the same tone, yet more loudly, joyfully, so we could all hear, the waiter ordered from Bobby: "Heidsick Monopol!"

 

"Would you like a Paririe Oyster?"  She produced glasses, eggs and a bottle of Worcester sauce from the boot-cupboard under the dismantled washstand: "I practically live on them."  Dexteriously, she broke the eggs into the glasses,  added the sauce and stirred up the mixture with the end of a fountainpen: "They're about all I can afford."  She was back on the sofa again, daintily curled up.

When she brought in the tea there were in  place of the usual little chunks of pale unappetising pastry, a plateful of jam tarts arranged in the shape of a star.

Have a chocolate, darling?  Klaus gave me three boxes.  If I eat any more, I shall be sick.

Mixtape

... it did not take Sally long to persuade Frl. Mayr to sing Sennerin Abschied von der Alm, which, after claret cup and a bottle of very inexpensive cognac, so exactly suited my mood that I shed a few tears.  We all joined in the repeats and the final, ear-splitting Juch-he!

Then Sally sang "I've got those Little Boy Blues" with so much epression that Bobby's mixer colleague, taking it personally seized her round the waist and had to be restrained by Bobby, who reminded him firmly that it was time to be getting along to business.