217 Babel Street | A Nip In The Air
Lulu Klein is widely assumed to be the love-child of Sabina Klein and Erich Mendelsohn. Sabina, a student in Berlin in 1921, met the illustrious architect at the foot of his now famous Einstein Tower. Later she would record that she was both moved and intrigued when Mendelsohn admitted, privately, to her that its strange curvilinears had been inspired by “some unknown urge”. When he asked her opinion of the tower in front of the assembled dignitaries, she reportedly fumbled for words, at last dubbing it “a breathtaking erection” – a phrase that would delight future biographers.
Sabina quickly became a member of Mendelsohn’s inner circle, Der Ring. She travelled with him as his protégée to Munich, Cologne and Leningrad. In 1933, she and four-year-old Lulu followed him and his family when they fled Berlin for London, even though her own security in the new Germany was assured by old money and family connections.
In 1929, however, those dark fugitive days were not yet upon them. At Berlin’s Eden Hotel, where she elected her child would be born, the café-bar was still full of painters, film-makers, eccentrics, showgirls and philosophers. The porters catered to homosexuals in satin and gold lamé dresses, while the tea-room offered guests a choice of voluptuous or collar-and-tie lesbians. As a tribute to her beloved, wayward Berlin, Sabina named her firstborn "Lulu" after the heroine of Pabst’s ground-breaking silent film Pandora's Box, the cinematic sensation of that year.
From A Nip In The Air: The History of Blackthorn Sands, by Julian Landesbury