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

and tried to fool all of us while facing the roaring three-engine plane, then refreshed her lipstick, which rendered her lips as signal red as the neon tubes that bordered the Tempelhof field.

Well, as we flew over Berlin, with one curve after another, at night at an altitude of two thousand feet, all nine passengers fell for her composure, even for the straightforward consideration she showed for her husband in Schöneberg, which she displayed clear as day or, rather, clear as night.

After all, how did we really feel? Cool to our very hearts.

And what was below us? The sea of lights of Berlin.

How were the motors working? Like precision instruments. What lay behind us? The concerns of an incredulous generation. And in front of us, any moment now, Bal paré in the giant aircraft, followed by a billiards tournament. The development is that rapid.

Because today even the night is a time for traffic.

In 1924, when we heard that American airship travel had instituted regular day-and-night service between New York and San Francisco, we shook our heads in disbelief. We had yet to be convinced of the safety of a daytime flight, and technical futurists were already planning to do everything they could not to waste the night, the terribly dark, perilous night: to fly independent of time, irrespective of whether land could be sighted below.

People are not drawn to fly at night for the sport of it; the impetus for nighttime travel arises from the need to travel great distances. The seasons, the winter, even the fall and the spring make it necessary to fly after dark as well. We no longer wish to sacrifice the day to travel; it is part of work.

Germany was ahead of all the other European countries in the arena of nighttime travel. In 1924 the Berlin–Warnemünde–Stockholm route was used for overnight airmail, and Berlin–Copenhagen and Berlin–Hamburg followed. The year 1926 saw the first nighttime passenger flights along the Berlin–Königsberg route as a link in the London–Moscow air route. In the course of the past few years, airports, routes, and the airplanes themselves have been adapted to accommodate night duty. Light signals were introduced, wind direction indicators were added, and landing areas were surrounded with floodlights that illuminated large areas in green and white and red. They even went to the length of compensating for the reduced visibility compared to daytime flying by constructing a row of lights with a high-wattage rotating searchlight mounted every eighteen miles, and prominent neon lamps every three miles. These light towers are in service night after night, all indicating emergency landing fields. But that’s not something to think about right off; a carefully devised system of signals, the use of radio telegraphy, landing lights, and magnesium lighting on the wings of the planes ensure the same level of safety as during the day. The pilots are all experienced veterans, and it is regarded as a special distinction to serve as a night pilot.

Director Milch, who gave these explanations yesterday during an official visit to the nighttime illumination of the Tempelhof airfield, remarked in closing that the comprehensive implementation of aviation on all routes by day and by night was one of the most important tasks of international airship travel. In the foreseeable future we will easily work with all routes independent of the time of day and the weather conditions.

The Berlin–Hanover route has already been completed, as has the one linking Berlin and Königsberg. Berlin–Cologne, Berlin–Halle–Munich, and Berlin–Breslau are under construction, and in the spring new Junker airplanes will make it possible for Lufthansa to service all German routes at night as well.

The airplane glided over Berlin like a giant bat, giving people a clear view of the streets and squares of the city as they marveled at their ability to scan the enormous distance from the radio tower to the thermal power station in Rummelsburg at a glance. No sooner were we flying over the Kurfürstendamm than, after just one curve, the airplane was already rolling across the Tempelhof lawn. Seconds earlier, millions of lights had been shining up from below, but now there was nothing but night around us, and the airport building, which from above had seemed like a match, now towered up like a skyscraper.

Berliner Börsen Courier, December 6, 1927

The Business of Thirst

WHAT PEOPLE ARE DRINKING NOWADAYS

The saying about love and hunger making the world go round is quite literally wrong. These elemental factors should be named, but thirst is even more elemental, powerful, and immediate than hunger. There are people who can go hungry for two to six weeks, yet they can cope with thirst for forty-eight hours at most.

Hunger is a furious, burning sensation at first, then a weakness. A person’s eagerness to satisfy hunger eases up, and the person is said to be too hungry to eat. Thirst is an opening up of the expectant body from deeper and deeper within, awaiting the moment when an overabundance of the long-anticipated drink streams into the dryness of the body.

Berlin has been dreaming of quenching thirst for days. Directly, with water, soda, beer, and ice cream, and indirectly (thirst of the skin), with baths, snow mountains, wind on a sailboat.

Heat renders manifest the most vital mystery of the body: we burn off moisture. The sun, which enables us to live, heightens its intensity: life, known in this form as sweat, breaks out. We dispense it to the atmosphere, we have to decompose. According to Joseph Löbl, perspiration amounts to ¾ quart per day even at moderate temperatures. Other numbers he cites: a ride through a southern Californian plain at 75 degrees produced 10½ quarts of sweat loss, an intense soccer game 14 pounds in 70 minutes, a marathon race 8½ pounds in three hours.

Berliners could now theoretically lose quite a bit of weight, free of charge! But they drink as much as their bodies can hold. Beer, with its thermal value, least of all. The spike in consumption is slight, as everyone