The Republic's Last Dance
Saturday, January 28

Berlin has been freezing for weeks. Shortly after New Year's Day a stinging frost set in - even the largest lakes, the Wannsee and Müggelsee, have disappeared beneath solid sheets of ice - and now, to add insult to injury, it has snowed. Carl Zuckmayer is standing before the mirror in his attic flat across from the Schöneberg district's municipal park, wearing a tuxedo and tugging his white bow tie into place over his shirt collar. The prospect of leaving the house tonight in eveningwear is not enticing.

Zuckmayer has no great love of large parties. He is usually bored and stays only just long enough to be able to vanish without a fuss into a random dive bar together with his friends. The Press Ball, however, is the most important social event of Berlin's winter season, a spectacle of the rich, the powerful, and the beautiful. It would be a mistake not to make an appearance; the ball will benefit his reputation as an up-and-coming star in the literature business with many irons in the fire.

The memory of the hardships during his first years as an author is all too vivid for Zuckmayer to turn his back on opportunities like this one. When he was completely broke, he got work as a barker, trolling adventure-hungry visitors to Berlin from the streets after curfew to conduct them to the illicit sideshow bars in backstreet courtyards. In some of these, the girls were half naked and not demure when it came to their guests' desires. Once he even dabbled as a dealer on Tauentzienstrasse by night with a few packets of cocaine in his pockets. It wasn't long before he called it quits; he's a sturdy fellow and unafraid, but even for him such business was too dangerous.

All that is behind him since The Merry Vineyard. After four pathos-laden and thoroughly miscarried dramas, all of which flopped, he tried his hand at his first comedic subject, a German screwball comedy about a vintner's daughter looking for marriage in the boondocks of Rhine-Hesse, Zuckmayer's homeland. In the milieu of wine growers and merchants, he knows every detail. In his treatment the whole transformed into a kind of folk play in which every inflection clicked and every joke landed. Initially, Berlin's stages were above such pastoral comic fare, but when the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm hazarded the premiere shortly before Christmas of 1925, the seemingly featherweight farce bared its claws, to everyone's surprise. The vast majority of the audience howled with laughter - and a smaller portion with rage - at the satiric bite with which Zuckmayer mocked the völkisch prattle of bone-headed war veterans and saber-rattling corps students. Their fury only made The Merry Vineyard more famous and heightened its success. It became a real blockbuster, perhaps the most staged play of the 1920s, and it was adapted for film as well.

Now, seven years later, not one but three plays by Zuckmayer are on the season schedules of Berlin theaters; the Freie Volksbühne will stage Schinderhannes, at the Rose-Theater in Friedrichshain they're showing his sensationally successful Captain of Köpenick, and at the Schillertheater Katharina Knie. For Tobis Film he's working on a fairy-tale picture, and the Berliner Illustrirte will soon begin serializing his tale Eine Liebesgeschichte [A Love Story], which is to appear right afterward in book form. Things are going swimmingly for him. Few authors in their mid-thirties have enjoyed the success he's already had.

Gazing from his rooftop terrace he can see Berlin's lights, from the radio tower to the cupola of the Cathedral. Together with the house outside Salzburg he purchased with the royalties from The Merry Vineyard, the apartment is Zuckmayer's second residence. It's of manageable size - an office, two tiny bedrooms, a nursery, kitchen, bathroom, nothing more - but he loves it and especially its views over the city rooftops. He bought it off Otto Firle, the architect and graphic artist who designed, among other things, the flying crane, Lufthansa's insignia. In recent years Firle has become favorite architect to the wealthy Berlin Grand Burghers and educated classes and no longer outfits attic apartments, instead contriving villas by the dozen. In two years - although Zuckmayer of course cannot anticipate such a thing tonight - Firle will build a country home on the Darss peninsula in the Baltic Sea for a newly wealthy and powerful minister named Hermann Göring.

The last Saturday in January is reserved for the Press Ball, a Berlin tradition for years now. His publisher, Ullstein, sent Zuckmayer his complimentary tickets, after which his wife Alice went about searching for a new evening gown straightaway. This year his mother has come from Mainz to visit for a week. She, too, is wearing a new dress, which he gave her for Christmas: silver gray with lace appliqué. It's her first big Berlin ball, and he can sense her excitement.

For now, though, they're planning to dine at a fine restaurant first. The evening will drag on, and it's better not to begin a night at the ball too early, and never on an empty stomach.

*

With regard to his evening plans, Klaus Mann has bet on the wrong horse: a masked party in Westend at a Frau Ruben's, quite normal and wretched. He feels out of place.

For three days now he's been in Berlin, living as usual in the guesthouse Fasaneneck. At Werner Finck's cabaret Katakombe he ran into Moni, his sister, who then encumbered him with the invitation to this Frau Ruben's. He found Finck's program wanting and without spark, but all the same he got to see Kadidja on stage again, the shy one of the two Wedekind sisters. He likes her. She's almost an ex-sister-in-law to him.

Klaus Mann has been frequenting cabarets of late, out of professional interest, since he himself is involved in one now in Munich, the Pfeffermühle, founded by his sister Erika, together with Therese Giehse and Magnus Henning. With Erika he writes couplets and sketches, Erika, Therese, and two others appear on stage, and Magnus furnishes the music. Klaus could really use inspiration for new scripts, but the acts in Katakombe left him empty-handed, and when Finck's actors started teasing him from the stage with interspersed taunts and little improvised jokes, it turned him off, and he left before the program ended.

He's making quick work of Frau Ruben's masked party as well. Instead of continuing to endure boredom, he leaves quite early despite knowing how unmannerly it is. A lame evening: so back to the guesthouse it shall be, where for his evening entertainment he will treat himself to a dose of morphine, and a large one at that.

*

In Erfurt's Reichshallentheater today, the premiere of Brecht's learning play The Measures Taken, with music by Hanns Eisler, is scheduled to take place. The police, however, terminate the performance by the Kampfgemeinschaft der Arbeitersänger [Action Group of Worker-Singers] with the justification that the play is "a communist-revolutionary depiction of the class struggle for the purpose of bringing about global revolution."

*

When Carl Zuckmayer pulls up in front of the Zoo Ballrooms with Alice and his mother, at first glance everything seems as it was in years past. Over 5,000 visitors are expected, of whom 1,500 are invited guests with complimentary tickets like himself. The others, well, they are curious onlookers who pay horrendous prices to mingle for a night among the country's celebrities.

In the foyer new arrivals must first squeeze past two magnificent automobiles, an Adler-Trumpf cabriolet and a DKW Meisterklasse, both polished to a high gloss: the grand prizes in the raffle for the welfare fund of the Berliner Presseverein [Berlin Press Association]. Just beyond the entrance, the stream of people disperses while tangos, waltzes, and boogie-woogie emanate from the ballrooms and corridors. Zuckmayer shepherds his ladies toward the waltzes. Provisions have been made for nearly every gastronomic predilection; there are bars with the ambience of a club, plush coffee parlors and beer counters, or quieter, more intimate side halls featuring solo musicians.

The grand two-story Marble Hall, festooned with fresh flowers and with antique Persian carpets draping the balustrades, has the most luxurious decorations. Couples twirl around the dancefloor in front of the stage with the orchestra. From above, in the gallery, one can watch as the parade of visitors elbows its way between the ballroom's side loges and the long rows of tables in the middle.

This year, a fact not to be overlooked, the most elegant ladies are sporting bright colors. And apparently the dernier cri is a long evening gown with small décolleté but a back neckline that plunges to the waistline, or even beyond.

Zuckmayer breaks off from the torrent of visitors as soon as they reach the Ullstein loge. There's more air here, less shoving, and right away the waiters procure him and his companions a table, glasses, and beverages. One of the publishing directors welcomes them with "Drink, drink up, who knows when you'll be drinking Champagne in an Ullstein loge again," thereby verbalizing...