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They are shivering and hungry. In the Studentenheim there’s no heat, not much light, millions of roaches. A smell of cabbage, old second Reich, grandmothers’ cabbage, of lard smoke that has found, over the years, some détente with the air that seeks to break it down, smells of long illness and terminal occupation stir off the crumbling walls. One of the walls is stained yellow with waste from the broken lines upstairs. Leni sits on the floor with four or five others, passing a dark chunk of bread. In a damp nest of Die Faust Hoch, back issues no one will read, her daughter Ilse sleeps, breathing so shallow it can hardly be seen. Her eyelashes make enormous shadows on the upper curves of her cheeks.

They have left for good this time. This room will be all right for another day, even two… after that Leni doesn’t know. She took one valise for both of them. Does he know what it means for a woman born under the Crab, a mother, to have all her home in a valise? She has a few marks with her, Franz has his toy rockets to the moon. It is really over.

As she used to dream it, she’d go directly to Peter Sachsa. If he didn’t take her in, he’d at least help her to find a job. But now that she’s really broken away from Franz… there’s something, some nasty earth-sign belligerence that will rise up in Peter now and then… . Lately she isn’t sure about his moods. He’s under pressure from levels she guesses to be higher than usual, and he isn’t handling it well… .

But Peter’s worst infantile rages are still better than the most tranquil evenings of her Piscean husband, swimming his seas of fantasy, death-wish, rocket-mysticism—Franz is just the type they want. They know how to use that. They know how to use nearly everybody. What will happen to the ones they can’t use?

Rudi, Vanya, Rebecca, here we are a slice of Berlin life, another Ufa masterpiece, token La Bohème Student, token Slav, token Jewess, look at us: the Revolution. Of course there is no Revolution, not even in the Kinos, no German October, not under this “Republic.” The Revolution died—though Leni was only a young girl and not political—with Rosa Luxemburg. The best there is to believe in right now is a Revolution-in-exile-in-residence, a continuity, surviving at the bleak edge over these Weimar years, waiting its moment and its reincarnated Luxemburg… .

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. These things appear on the walls of the Red districts in the course of the night. Nobody can track down author or painter for any of them, leading you to suspect they’re one and the same. Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness. They are not slogans so much as texts, revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people… .