In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BARS 35
But if Babe Ruth himself is a great exception-a celebrity whose drinking
is an acceptable subject for journalists-his admirers follow a highly
generalized pattern when they list bars and liquor along with the other
pleasures in which he indulges, such as fist-fighting, dancing, and womanizing.
For, in popular discourse, drinking and bars belong to a paradigmatic
set of equivalent activities, and as such immediately become
associated with a set of related situations.
In this sense, Bertolt Brecht's hyperactive insurance broker Kiickelmann
is a close cousin to the baseball writers' Babe Ruth: "He had
stimulated his brain with strong American drinks, soothed himself with
absolutely unsurpassable coffee, flogged his exhausted spirit with jazz,
plunged into the cabarets of the comedians, and misused the revues of
the Metropole as spiritual enrichment ... He had landed in Aschinger's
beer joint" (Brecht, 170). [see Jazz, Revues] Day after day, the back page
of the 8 Uhr-Abendblatt is filled with advertisements for the Berlin bars,
beer joints, (Bierquellen), cabarets, dance halls, and revues to which
Brecht refers. And the bars of Berlin are always linked with other forms
of enjoyment: "The Parisienne: Berlin's largest nightclub. Come dance to
the music of the Formiggini Band" (February 4). Or on October 2, in
the same paper: "See the dance revue at the Rokoko Bar"; "Come to the
Ballet des Plastiques at the Moulins [sic] Rouge Paris, where the most
beautiful women dance."
It is one of the paradoxes in these years of Prohibition that, outside
the United States, bars that serve hard liquor are frequently called
"American Bars." The collective imagination constantly attributes hard
drinking to one of the few nations where the public consumption of
liquor has been officially banned. Bars and cocktails thus epitomize
whatever European intellectuals denigrate-or dream of-as" Americanism."
Drinking stands for lightness, speed, and superficiality, which are
perceived as essential for the most modern lifestyles. [see Authenticity vs.
Artificiality] Some of the metaphors that Americans themselves use for
the world of illegal liquor-consumption are telling in this sense: "speakeasies,"
"bootleggers," "rumrunners." A satirical vision of the "theaters
of the future" published by the Revista de Occidente elaborates on this
association of bars and drinking with ways of life devoid of any "serious"
function or meaning: "I came to have a great liking for these
theaters. Certainly they came to be a vice for people inclined to emotion,
because the vice of getting profound thrills with the same ease with