sometimes a return to Berlin of 1923 is in line

sometimes a return to Berlin of 1923 is in line

fiction
Edward w Pritchard

Is it voyeuristic, is it pornographic for one to wish to return to times long past, more imagined than real? On a cold dark impersonal night mid-December the fitfully recalled sounds of the Cabaret, faded Art nouveau pictures, the brusque whisper of a woman speaking German and the clang of champagne glasses lulls one in a revelry of nostalgia for years long gone but spent once in Berlin, in the Fall of 1923.

here's what I wrote before about those days:

Weimar Germany is where my heart finds fellowship/draft 1

fiction
edward w pritchard

Wherever now I abide Weimar Germany is where my heart finds fellowship. I still hear the music and still smell Berlin's unguent dancing naked ladies. Now it all seems a dream, as if it happened to someone else, but then it was real and I had no to reason to suspect that it would be soon be over. We were young and old ways of failure needed to be forgotten so for me there was no day, only endless nights. By night we lived our lives with  abandon, from club to club, perverse, perhaps aware subconsciously that it all would end brutally. What I thought then was the sound of my racing heart was a faint rumble of distant goose-stepping soldiers, marching to annihilate Berlin's decedent permutations.

My life then revolved around the shoreline at the lakes. My Brother was fighting the Communists and I had sole use of Father's cottage, the luxurious fishing shack as my Brother the eternal soldier fighting for Fatherland called our families second home.

A light rain was falling, ruining the leather bound copy of Hegel's dialectics I read as I watched the lights, one by one blink on to illuminate hundreds of  comfortable kitchens; as families along the Lake, celebrated their dinner tonight, June 28, 1924. This would be my last quiet evening at home.

Lotte carried French champagne as she walked up to the bench where I was reading there on the shoreline, near a small flickering fire. Hegel was forgotten. Lotte wore nothing under the yellow rain slicker. Whatever Lotte asked, I did, always. Fishing through the inside pockets of her yellow crinkling slicker for crystal champagne glasses, the smell of her perfume and the rustle of the scraping wet yellow slicker and clinking champagne glasses ended my life as a scholar as Lotte and I conspired to sample Berlin's perversity's one club at a time for the next seven years.
end part one