"The bells on the streetcars ring, buses clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people; taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the glassy asphalt," he wrote. "The fragrance of heavy perfume floats by. Harlots smile from the artful pastels of fashionable women's faces; so-called men stroll to and fro, monocles glinting; fake and precious stones sparkle." Berlin was, he wrote, a "stone desert" filled with sin and corruption and inhabited by a populace "borne to the grave with a smile."