BERLIN NIGHT LIFE

Hokitika Guardian, 21 April 1920, Page 3

BERLIN NIGHT LIFE

V.. - ■*- BERLIN, March 12. The goose-step set to music—that is the German idea of the fox-trot.

They dance it with a stamp that shakes the room. On a crowded floor — all Berlin dancing floors are crowded “to capacity”—the effect produced .is something" bet ween a Rugger scrum and a mass-attack.

I ventured into the melee that was going on in the middle of one of the dancing-restaurants after dinner the other night and came out with dusty footmarks on my trouser-legs above the knees.

You saw women limping out of the unequal contest and removing their broken slioe-buckles crushed by heavy German feet. But there were queues of people waiting in all the gangways leading to the dancing floor to take their places in the justling lnuly-burlv. One-half of Berlin dances while Ihe other half goes hungry. I am told that it is found an excellent arrangement as neither half interferes with the other.

People who think that a Socialist Government in England would ensure a fairly equal distribution of the good things of the world all round should study Berlin.

Here they have had a Socialist Government for more than a year, and one with the most urgent reasons) for repressing personal extravagance and keeping the proletariat satisfied- Yet. never were the poor worse off; never were the rich more criminally wasteful.

No alteration of a country’s Constitution can abolish human nature. The most it seems to be able to do is to shift the money round a little so that it gets concentrated - into new hands. ° But the new rich war profiteers and food speculators of Berlin are just as ih.solent and self-indulgent; quiet as selfish and cruel, ns those who had the money before the war and now have lost it. And the poor themselves, members of the very proletariat which the anti-luxury measure of the Government are intended to benefit, make themselves the ready accomplices of the new rich who exploit them-and have grown fat on their blood, in the hope of personal gain. To save coal*for the people, for instance, the German Government’s orders all dancing-places and night resorts generally to close at 11 p.ni. Yet Beilin is full of illicit restaurants, bars, and dancing-saloons that stay open all night, and poor, shivering people of the very class for whose protection the law is made wait about the doom of the regular places to show the way to them for a ten-mark note, (nominally 10s in Berlin). They lead you down some dark pas* sage and knock on a, closed iron door. This opens, and from behind a blinding electric torch you are scrutinised by the door-keeper. If you do not look sufficiently respectable to be a policeman in P'« ,n clothes, vou are admitted, and pressing two and five mark notes into hands that thrust themselves at you from the surrounding obscurity you are passed 0 n through a little side-door into a brightly lighted, well-warmed room, where a band is playing and people are dancing ,and you can sit till 6 a.m. if you want to with a bottle of German champagne, costing a nominal £7 10s., ;ui the table before you.

Sometimes these places are raided, usunlly by the “Green Police,” as the new Sicherheitswehr (“Security Police”), is called. But they flourish exceedingly all the same.