We arrived in Berlin in a frozen winter, perhaps a cruel one. It was never, however, as cruel or scary as the riots that shook the city. Berlin's was a frozen geography, but before that, much before that, it was a hive of uncontrolled passions, of premonitions. This fervor annihilated the cold, it was the fervor of hate and it already burned. Rainer told me of infinite things, but, slowly, his repugnance, his hatred of decadent cosmopolitanism, concentrated itself in a den, his word, of nightly diversions, a freak Berlin that summed up all the lows of democracy, of parliamentary social democracy, of cosmopolitan Judaism, of Frenchified decadence (the "unworldly spirit of Baudelaire, that enemy of Hölderlin", he said) and of the opulence of the old German aristocracy, drunk to imbecility or dementia, ruined by the vices of defeat. That pestilent creation, demonic, he said, was the Cabaret. The very night we arrived he decided to take me to the worst of all. To the Kit Kat Club, who's repugnant master of ceremonies, a clown perhaps pathetic but at the same time the incarnation of the nightmare and the impossibility of the authentic Germany, greeted the public, not in German, but in three languages: Willkommen, Bienvenu, Welcome. Have you noticed, Dieter? Rainer was saying. In the land that speaks the language of Hölderlin, of Hegel, of Nietzsche, in this land, this imbecile says bienvenu and welcome, speaking the language of decadent France and North American-Jewish mercantilism.

That night, we went.

Before entering, or on the way, he added: "To top it off, they have a prostitute that sings and dances with limitless impudence. And she's North American, Dieter. You see? Pure cosmopolitan shit." We entered.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 8:17 AM