Pieke Biermann

The west side of Zieten Strasse was in the shade. A few kids were playing there. The treeless east side, on which houses were mercilessly exposed to the burning sun, baked in tbe heat. The curtains were drawn in all the windows. The temperature inside the few cars in the parking bay must have been close to boiling, and it wouldn’t drop much for the next four or five hours. The two cars parked closest to Winterfeldt Strasse would have to endure the light and heat for as long it took the sun to complete the whole of its westward journey.

Most of the windows on the shady side were wide open. A sign that the people living there didn't go out to work all day. Proper families, still ruled by housewives who could respond flexibly to such influential phenomena as the weather.

The door, the two opaque windows which prevented anyone looking in, and the display case with faded pictures of striptease dancers in feathers and sequins, didn't put this shop in the category of what might be called "proper". But that was a relatively recent development. In earlier days, to be more precise, in the first third of the twentieth century, places nominally like it had defined not only Zieten Strasse, but the whole area around Nollendorf Platz and Winterfeldt Platz. Not even the horrors of the First World War had interrupted the tradition. On the contrary. That war created the volcano around whose crater the whole city danced after the eruption, addicted to pleasure in the final, unpredictable, beautiful hundred or ten or five minutes before the end. Pandora's box was wide open. A spiritual meridian ran right down the middle of Motz Strasse. And the gulf stream flowed through the whole area, warming the Dorian Grays and Kleists, the dollar-girls and butches. And those who belonged lit the candle at both ends, and burned up all the most expensive coke with the briefest, most intoxicating effect.