Happy Ending, Nice and Tidy

I have only two or three dim recollections of my visit to Berlin in 1928. One of the sights I recall is a rainy, brightly lighted nighttime street, raucous with cars and trolleys, jammed with people who towered over my eight-year-old height; somehow it was cheerful and festive. High above the sidewalk there was a theatre sign made of white light bulbs. The letters were script, underlined, I believe, with a swirl like an old-fashioned signature. They spelled Dreigroschenoper.

I did not know that Dreigroschenoper was the name of a play by Bert Brecht, with music by Kurt Weill, which had opened in an obscure Berlin theatre earlier that year and overnight had taken the desperately gay Germany of those days by storm. But for some time I remained fascinated by the word, with the unexplained incongruity between the paltriness of drei Groschen and the magnificence of Oper.