Kurfürstendamm

In a Berlin still exhaling the gasps of Weimar’s decadence, the Prince of Darkness—bored stiff by the infernal bookkeeping of souls—slips into a cinnamon-striped suit, tips his brim to the furnace, and rides the overnight express to Kurfürstendamm, that neon artery where cabarets cough up sequins at dawn. He books a frayed velvet room at Pension Elvira, a crumbling boarding house run by a matriarch who could out-bargain Mephistopheles and still have breath for a foxtrot. Here, every guest nurses a scam like a sickly lapdog: a ruined baron forging cheques on the breath of champagne, a monocled con-man selling the very shadows off the walls, a chanteuse whose heart is mortgaged to any tenor who flatters her cracked mirror. Lucifer, expecting groveling obsequiousness, instead finds himself short-changed, pick-pocketed, and libeled in satirical couplets before the first coffee stain dries. Each corridor swivels into a moral Möbius strip: the more he brandishes brimstone, the quicker the residents shrug, bill him for imaginary services, and teach him the subtler torments of Prussian bureaucracy. By the time a syphilitic poet tries to sell him back his own forked tail as a limited-edition objet d’art, the Devil recognizes the neighborhood’s true genius: damnation outsourced to humans who’ve turned swindling into baroque opera. In a final dolly shot that glides from the pension’s cracked skylight to the star-scarred sky, he scurries home to Hell, tail metaphorically between his legs, whispering that the thermostat down below feels almost cozy compared with Berlin’s tireless ingenuity for self-inflicted misery.