CLOCKWORK GIRL FROM MULACKSTRAßE – from Joseph Roth

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One of famous Mulackstraße “Destillen” (cheap bars with basic food offer) on the corner of Ruckerstraße in Berlin’s old and no-longer existing Jewish district known as Scheunenviertel (Barn District), inhabited mostly by East-European Jews. The dairy of H. Ewald could be found at Ruckerstraße 3.
(Photo by Berlin’s most famous cartoonist & photographer as well as social critic, Heinrich Zille). Image in public domain.

“At 11.00 at night Mulackstraße looks like a quarter of an excavated city. On the corner Schönhauser Straße a single streetlight squints at it sheepishly from across the road. A girl patrols the street, incessantly and at a steady pace like a pendulum, as if set in motion by an invisible clockwork.”

from Joseph roth “Neue Berliner Zeitung – 12-uhr-Blatt” (from a series of texts about berlin’s dives published between 23rd and 28th of ferbuary 1921)