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Hokitika Guardian, 7 January 1921, Page 1

BACK TO GERMANY

THE WELL-FED CHILDREN OF BERLIN. '

(By G. Valentine Williams, late correspondent of Reuter’s Agency in Berlin).

BJCR LIN

Berlin to-day is a. city of millionaires and paupers. Speaking broadly, there is nothing between the two.

The millionaires are to he met with wherever money can lie spent—in the great hotels, in tlie restaurants, in the theatres, and in the dancing houses, as well as in the 'hundreds of illicit drinking and gambling dens which open all over Berlin after the regulation closing hour of 11.30 p.m. is past. They are the new rich,tlie profiteers —Scliieber, they call them here— and I can characterise them adequately by saying that England’s new rich might belong to tlie caste of Yere de Yore by comparison with tlie revolting personal appearance and gross ill-breeding of these gentry. Apart from the profound social change which this redistribution of the national fortune represents, 1 do not find that tlie appearance of the population ol Berlin has much ■ altered. The crowds in the streets are well-dressed and well-shod after spurious German fashion in dress, and the shaven .head with the rolls of lat at the hack is as much in evidence among Berlin business men as it was before the war.

The hideous field-grey (which, when worn and shabby, lias an incredibly squalid appearance) is rapidly vanishing from the street scene except in the case of the very poor, and a walk which f took through the swarming workingclass quarters of the Ackerstras.se and the Linienstrasse* showed me that irio great majority of the children to he seen playing in the dirty and neglected streets were well nourished, neatly, il thinly clad, and slnyl with leather. During the past few months there has been, 1. understand, a great improvement in the quantity and quality of food available, and tlie refusal ol the public to play the game of the profiteers has led to a sensible reduction in the price of clothing, notably in the case of footwear,

The new era oi freedom in Germany lias brought l a flood of hawkers of every description into the streets. Sausage, fish, fruit, vegetables, and cheese are displayed on harrows decorated with placards setting forth in jargon dear to the German mind the qualiities—“latrichness” or caloric:-: —of the wares. There is a regular street trade in cigar Hove, and (lie night-hawks who frcqiu-n the Fried; ielislrasse in thi' evenings include many pedlars oi liqueurs and Schnapps served on a little tr Berlin to-day is an open sink oi in quity. All barriers erected by the cynically paternal police legislation ol the old days have been broken down. The craze for the naked on the singis not confined to the hole-and-corner cabarets. A lending Berlin music-hall (ho Apolli, as the chief attraction, in its programme, u two-act •'naturalistic’’—the camouflage word for this description of peri’o; manee—ballet In which the star is a coal-black Negress and in which Negroes and white women figure. For sheer crudeness and vulgarity 1 doubt if such a performance in public could lie equalled.

Street-walkers have the run of even some of the leading hotels, while degeneracy is flaunted openly in hooks and pamphlets sold in the hook simps and in the streets.