Interesting book about Berlin between the wars. ( )

I first read Otto Friedrich's fascinating glimpse into post World War I Berlin in 1975. I have since returned to its pages many, many times. For, as its title promises, it is a portrait of Berlin that peeks into the music, science, film, theater, and literature of the era as well as the political clashes between Nazis and Communists. In many ways, it supplies a certain cultural heft to the more glitzy and glamorous vision of Berlin that appeared at about the same time as this book but on Broadway and in film, Cabaret. Fittingly, Friedrich's passage on Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret, then, is one of his best. As these lines from page 347 of my old Avon paperback edition give testimony:

. . . Isherwood succeeded, precisely by focusing his camera on the lost and rejected, in producing a matchless portrait of the city. But in transferring Ishwerwood's work to Broadway, the various creators of Cabaret decided that all the idiosyncratic characters of The Berlin Stories must become a series of types, and thus caricatures. Sally Bowles had to become a sprightly ingenue: Herr Issyvoo himself had to become a pink-cheeked American tenor named Clifford Bradshaw, and the tormented, self-destructive spirit of Berlin had to become a rousing chorus in which everyone sings, "Life is a cabaret".

Friedrich drew his portrait of the city and its people directly from the participants themselves. As such, because his work appeared 40 to 50 years after Berlin's cultural supernova, it today reads as if it were the visible remnants of some luminescent scroll of a bygone era whose own heat and vigor has long since failed. ( )

There is a small possibility I will visit Berlin in the next year or so. It is hard to imagine the contrary Berlin of the 1920's. Beautiful girls dressed in flapper style, kicking it up in glitzy cabarets (a la Louise Brooks, also known as Lulu) against a backdrop of war, and poverty, and influenza ravaged misery. One war was over while another bubbled just below the surface, waiting to burst forth.
The 1920's was also a great period of scientific inquiry and wonderment. Britain and Germany had been on opposite sides of World War I, but astronomers were not concerned with that detail. Scientists on both sides were single-minded in their desire to study the eclipse. At the same time, the German government saw the benefit of using the new technology of moving pictures to show their propaganda films. Albert Einstein was in his prime.
The most fascinating thing about Before the Deluge is Friedrich's interviews with people who could remember the height of the 20's in Berlin. People who were aware events like if the Communists had voted in force, Marshall Paul Von Hindenburg would have never been elected to rule the German Republic. If the weather had been slightly better Hindenburg never would have appointed a young man named Adolf Hitler as Chancellor.... ( )

יופי של ספר, מבדר, משכיל מרתק, על הרפובליקה של וויימר ובייחוד על חיי התרבות העשירים על רקע האסון שהולך ומתקרב ( )

An interesting collection of anecdotes about Berlin during the Weimar Republic. The author devotes each chapter to a year, but really the book is arranged thematically, as he ties each year to some cultural, economic, or political aspect of Berlin life. There is lots of color here, from gruesome crime scenes and assassinations to tales of the lives of famous artists. But you have to overlook several weaknesses: the heavy foreshadowing implied in the title, uneven treatments when themes and years don't overlap evenly, and an irritating proclivity for dropping the names of the famous refugees the author interviewed in the early 1970s. Still, for the kind of manic urban energy that produces really cutting-edge art and really interesting history, Berlin in the 20s was the place to be and this book conveys a strong sense of that whirlwind. ( )