From the biography: Sociologist Irawati Karve’s first impressions of Berlin after World War One

Irawati had never before seen a metropolis like Berlin. The wide main streets streamed with every conceivable kind of traffic – people on foot and on bicycles, motorcycles with sidecars, cars, horse carts, she once even saw a dog dragging a small wheelbarrow. The vastly varied architecture felt familiar to her at first glance, but not if she looked closer. Fascinating and deep contrasts ran through every aspect of the city. There were opulent buildings, like the new shopping palace that took up a whole city block and had its own metro rail stop, or the enormous restaurants with tables spilling out onto tree-lined sidewalks, and then there were the concrete slums, each with a single street door that led to an endless labyrinth of courtyards, where families were packed into small, unhygienic rooms with several households sharing a single toilet.

The incessant sound of human life – couples fighting, babies crying, tired mothers screaming – emanated from within. Irawati noticed the washing hanging out of the windows, the visibly underfed, rickets-ridden children playing in dirty alleyways and yards where the sun never reached them. She was assailed by the smell of boiled cabbage that hung over these tenements, punctuated by the occasional whiff of wurst, and she wondered how they managed. Some four million people crammed into a single city. It was not so different from the city of Bombay, and yet, it was. This city had a dark side to it, a despair that seemed to her to come from another history.

This country Irawati had packed her bags for was perhaps not what she had imagined, or even hoped for. It was, after all, recently vanquished, in a war of its own making. The First World War of 1914-18 which had involved enough states and killed enough people to be called the Great War, had been over for a decade. Although the fighting was done, the aftermath was still felt painfully by the country that had started it. The Treaty of Versailles (signed in 1919, and ratified in 1921), in laying down the terms of reparations, had delivered the revenge of the victorious countries Germany had drawn into what was until then the bloodiest conflict in human history.

Germany, assumed to be the instigator and perpetrator of the war, was to disarm, give up territories, and pay reparations that it believed would cripple it financially for decades. In a letter protesting the terms of the treaty, the German government said, “We were aghast when we read in documents the demands made upon us, the victorious violence of our enemies.”

Not everyone, at the time as well as in the years that followed, has analysed the effects of the treaty in the same way. John Maynard Keynes, one of the earliest critics of the treaty, wrote in 1919 that the closeness of the countries involved, both geographically and economically, meant that making Germany pay enormous reparations would negatively affect all of them. In Germany, it was referred to as the Diktat of Versailles, a fitting term considering that Germany itself had almost no say in the terms of the treaty. After an initial period of economic and political instability, however, the country could have been called stable, if not prosperous. It would not stay that way through Irawati’s time there. Life in Germany, as Irawati came to know, and Berlin itself, was hard for much of the population. Poverty, crime, a growing political climate of unease and instability, all contributed to an exciting, if restless atmosphere.

By the time Irawati became a temporary citizen of Berlin, it was a thrilling, and perhaps difficult city. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which would reach into the next century of science fiction cinema, was released in that year. The Bauhaus school was leaking design ideas into the commercial mainstream, Alfred Döblin was writing Berlin Alexanderplatz, his great novel about the city, and Josephine Baker was dancing joyfully wearing nothing but pearls and a skirt made of bananas. Although Irawati was familiar with the work of her brother-in-law, RD Karve, in the area of public sexual and reproductive health and his views on women’s right to sexual freedom and pleasure, his was a one-man enterprise, and one that was thoroughly frowned upon.

In her new city, Magnus Hirschfield’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was doing invaluable work on sexual health and reproduction, and also on what he then termed sexual transitions (homosexuality) and transvestism and transsexuality (terms that Hirschfield himself invented). Hirschfield was of the quite progressive view for that time that homosexuality was inborn and natural, rather than a morally repugnant illness. Together with his medical colleagues, they even offered sex reassignment surgery. The institute would, tragically, be violently attacked in 1933, and all their research and documents burned by Hitlerjugend – Hitler Youth – the youth organisation of the Nazi Party. The Nazis tried to snuff out everything that Berlin, and the world could have been: the art, the music, the literature, and the artists, the musicians, the writers and philosophers themselves as well. But, as yet, while Irawati was a Berlin citizen in the anxious but liberal, Utopianistic 1920s, the Nazi party had little influence or following.

At the time she was there, it seemed as if Germany was suddenly free of its past, free to express itself in ways that were so ground-breaking and unique that the reverberations and influences, positive, and also negative, are still with us today, and will always be. In cinema, art, architecture, science, and literature – in every aspect of culture and human endeavour, the rich moment of Weimar Republic Germany cast its shadow, its spell. This was the decade that would be called the golden twenties.

In some ways, it was also a hopeful time: Germany got a seat at the League of Nations, the terms of reparations were being reconsidered, peace in Europe seemed likely. The poverty and misery seemed at times temporary. But during Irawati’s time there, Hitler’s star did begin its rise. Irawati would write, years later, that Germany seemed to her a country seething with anger over the dismissal of their “just and reasonable” demands to the League of Nations, and their unfair treatment by Britain and France in the drafting of the Versailles treaty. She, like many Germans, saw the post-war period as a lost opportunity – a moment to bring Germany into the world that was squandered because of selfishness and then fear, which Germany laid at the feet of other European nations, America, and even the whole world. And all that marvellous, forward-thinking art and social freedoms did not stop the great tragedy that was unfolding and tearing at the fabric of the Weimar Republic.

If there was anything about Berlin that disturbed Irawati, it was the beggars. The city was full of them. They were not the kind of beggars that beleaguered her in India, where she was particularly irked by those who gathered outside temples and around religious sites. She encountered these when she went on her pilgrimages to Pandharpur, Jejuri, Badri Kedar – all over India. In her writings, she says that for her the beauty of the Himalayan landscapes was marred by this practice of ordinary people, children of local farmers and shopkeepers, constantly following pilgrims and begging.

Charity gets you credit in heaven, so people gave alms, and so people begged. This was not the case in 1927 Berlin, where the beggars were war-torn men. Irawati had seen lepers, and cripples too, but in Berlin, she saw the most horrific injuries that a person could experience and still live. These were men from the Great War, a war in which it was common for limbs to be lost to gangrene in the trenches and faces blown off in artillery fire or mines. Not just mines that soldiers stepped on, but ones that were tunnelled below the trenches, ones that killed, some say, the lucky ones.

Those who lived had wounds that left men – and they were almost all men – unable to work, unable to support themselves by any means other than begging. Some of these men got to their daily begging spots by themselves, some were brought there every day by transport. In Berlin, like elsewhere in the world where the war had created such men, begging was a livelihood. She saw them in every part of the city as she went about her life in Berlin. But she did not have enough spare coins for them.

Excerpted with permission from Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Speaking Tiger Books.