“POSTILLONS D’AMOUR”

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 75, 21 December 1929, Page 33

“POSTILLONS D’AMOUR”

NOVEL CONVIENCES IN A BERLIN BALLROOM

A certain amount of jealousy felt in Berlin at the magnificence of the new Theatre Pigalle in Paris has been pleasantly mitigated by the opening this week of a colossal specimen of that peculiar type of place of amusement at popular prices in which Germany specialises. The very name of tl establishment, “Femina,” would, in any other city than., Berlin imply the naughtily, or at least cosily, intimate. In Berlin, however, it signifies a vast ballroom, surrounded by every conceivable kind of bar, in which some two thousand people' may not only dance but indulge in open, decent, and brilliantly illuminated love-making at one and the same time. There are in Berlin and elsewhere other establishments provided with table telephones, one telephone to each table, but there can be few others supplied with a pneumatic postal plant, which provides for the delivery of letters in the shortest possible space of

time by veritable postilions d’amour. While, presumably, husbands and wives may go out together and have the jolliest time making the acquaintance of occupants at other tables, comfortably supervised by the rest of their families, Berlin’s young men and women declare that thF is the finest idea yet devised in a city open to every new idea under the sun or moon.

The dancing floor, with a mighty crash of machinery, is raised late in the evening for a cabaret chow, during which the little telephones are silent and the postilions d’amour creep on tiptoe. The very lift to this establishment is as big and luxurious ass a large-sized drawingroom. True to the bourgeois tone of the place, which is carefully stressed by the management, “Femina” is described by the old pre-war term of “Ball-House,” and not as a palace of dancing, although, such is the belief in the pleasure-loving tendency of this city, it cost ever a hundred thousand pounds to build.