Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

me, but still failed to recognize my aversion to film every time, and still inflicts on me twice a day the unpleasant duty of leaving him disappointed. I tried with various demonstrations, holding my hat in front of my head, looking toward the other side of the street, waving him aside with my arms and hands, but nothing works—the cameraman interpreted everything as just a new and interesting variant of his action studies.

Recently I thought I could escape my fate by choosing a side street beyond the range of the camera. But I hadn’t counted on the tripod being mobile, and all it took was a little rotation to catch up with me on my escapade.

After giving the matter quite a bit of thought, I have now tried an experiment that I hope will free me from the film terror once and for all. Not grudgingly, offering opposition as I had in the past, no, smiling gleefully, with a stiff posture, eyes right to the camera, really photography-friendly, I allowed myself to be filmed, then gratefully received the announcement of my film premiere.

Yesterday I picked up my picture. My legs seemed somewhat overly crooked—most likely a problem with the lens—but other than that it was a very lifelike, moving photograph. Under the photograph I wrote in red ink, “This person no longer wishes to be filmed,” and handed it to the cameraman at noon. “You see,” I explained to him, “it would be best for you to attach this picture directly to your camera. If you do that, you’ll save a filmstrip every day and I can finally go into my restaurant undisturbed.” He seemed too astonished at my offer to come up with a reply on the spot. I don’t seriously think he’ll fulfill my wish, but even so, he will surely remember my face. That someone does not pick up his picture is something he understands, from his everyday experience, as a reflection of financial inertia. But the idea that someone would forfeit payment of a mark in order not to be filmed is ultimately a thinly veiled attack on his professional honor. Something of that sort is not forgotten. I hope he doesn’t now come up with the idea of launching a new business in—film removal.

Berliner Börsen Courier, September 1, 1927

Berlin Rendezvous

Rendezvous (Fr., pronounced raan-dey-voo, “present yourselves”): a meetup, together, at a specific spot, also the place itself.

Adam, for example, liked to meet up with Eve at a certain apple tree. As for Ramses, he waited patiently every single evening at the third corner of the twelfth pyramid for his favorite lady. Caesar, by contrast, met up with Vercingetorix in the rain under the Rhine Bridge. The excesses in which Casanova indulged cannot be described in view of space limitations; his rendezvous are said to have been recorded in a saffiano leather tome as thick as a Berlin telephone book.

There are distinctions between rendezvous pertaining to business, friendship, love, and family; consequently, there are rendezvous that people are happy to go to and others they dread.

Rendezvous at apple trees, pyramids, and under Rhine bridges have naturally fallen out of fashion. Nowadays people prefer to use a café, a restaurant for these purposes. People meet up outdoors, at popular gathering spots, under monuments and clocks, at streetcar stops, and in front of theaters and cinema houses.

In Berlin, three places are the top choices: the Kranzlerecke, that famous street corner on Kurfürstendamm; the Berolina on Alexanderplatz; and the Normaluhr, the oversized clock, at the Zoo railway station. (This does not claim to be a complete list.)

As far as the Kranzlerecke is concerned, it vividly recalls one of the world’s classic meeting points, the Sirkecke in Vienna. It is the rendezvous spot for international society, the gathering place of the glamorous set that is at home in the hotels on Unter den Linden. Madame sports a chinchilla fur and doesn’t wait for too long; her pinscher looks around for Monsieur and barks. Mustaches carry the fragrance of Paris pomades, every trouser crease is absolutely precise, and the honking cars sound like a well-rehearsed saxophone concert. Berliners get together there too, of course, but rarely, usually to go to the theater or to amble through the museum in the evening: midtown Berlin.

Alexanderplatz is the rendezvous spot for the stream of women in the workforce—civil servants and shopgirls—who move along until the plaza and jam up at the bus stops and the subway. There, a young woman waits. Determinedly. He has to come. She’ll wait three more minutes, and if he doesn’t come then … He doesn’t come. The girl decides to count to a hundred. Counts up to nine hundred. Not a trace of him. It is well past the fifteen-minute mark. I’m going to strangle him, she tells herself. Then he comes. And arm in arm they flutter away.

The most popular summer rendezvous point is the Normaluhr at the Zoo railway station. The gateway to nature. Packed with families on Sundays. Kith and kin. Sunday drivers. Juveniles. Boy scouts. Country bumpkins with badges at their buttonholes. A date for the Wannsee. Or for the Kurfürstendamm Kino. Or for five o’clock tea. For the amusement park. Or for the zoo. Everyone stares up at the clock. Sometimes it goes so fast, sometimes so slow. But there are also rendezvous that are not kept.

Why, it occurred to me, would I choose the Tiergarten bench as a meeting point in this cold weather, where I waited for her in vain? And it didn’t hail and it didn’t rain.

Berliner Börsen Courier, November 13, 1927

Night Ride over Berlin

HOW GERMAN NIGHT FLIGHT OPERATIONS ARE ORGANIZED

“But now I’m curious,” said the neighbor to my left, as she pressed her nose against the ice-cold windowpane of the airplane cabin and looked down while we were passing by Schöneberg, “whether my husband is home yet.” Fifteen minutes earlier she was still a bundle of nerves, freezing, her teeth chattering. She put up a brave front