"You had to be a nightbird in Berlin."
Nobody really thinks of Germany between the World Wars and the presence of black Americans. The whole thing seems so crazy out of place that you might as well be talking about black Americans in the Emerald City. Except that during that period—in Berlin, especially—everything goes. In describing what a nightbird in Berlin at this time might expect to see, the narrator describes an almost surreal cesspool of sin. The kind of place where something as strange as a black man in Berlin between the wars would not even come close to being the weirdest thing you ever saw.
A Luxury
The narrator describes himself with this metaphor as a means of extricating for the reader the difficult and rather prickly circumstances in which he finds himself being a black man in Berlin. In 1933, every relationship in Germany was transactional because nobody really expected the Nazis to stay in power and, from their point of view, anyone that might replace Hitler could wind up being worse. (Ah, the power of hindsight!)
“Winter fits the camp like death.”
Time has moved on. It is no longer between the wars. The camp the narrator is talking about is not a place for boys to learn to make campfires. The metaphor is so dead-on as to be trite and without meaning. But then that is precisely the meaning. Metaphor fails in the face of the savagery of the Holocaust.
Germans v. Russians
It may be difficult growing up in a world where the outcome will be forever known to appreciate just how uncertain the future of the world was during World War II. Life was lived on rumors and hopes could be dashed upon the slightest bit of false information. The narrator describes how the German invasion on Russia was being portrayed by the state media in metaphorical terms with the Germans “roaring unmolested through it like some ancient Teutonic giant.”
Killing is Candy
Once you get a taste for something you love, it’s hard to give up it through force. You want the decision to be your own and if it is something that you have grown to love so much you can never make that decision, the sweetness of those examples of enjoyment is all the sweeter:
“The SS and their camp police are like kids who must have a last taste of candy, except in this case, it’s not candy, but killing; they can’t seem to stop.”
