Dear Varsity,

Once upon a time, an English journalist moved to Berlin. He lived in the attic of a house by the canal, and winter was setting in. Not having enough money to turn the radiators on, nor the energy to lug coal four flights up from the cellar, he formed a ménage à trois with a couple of other like-minded unattached people and huddled under the covers with them every night. One on the left, one on the right, all toasty in the middle. As I sat warming my hands on my last cigarette and writing journalistic fluff in the style of Sex and the City, I got to wondering: were threesomes a useful substitute for central heating?

In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, there’s a scene where the man-machine witch-Maria, who has just destroyed the city’s machines, leads the revellers from Yoshiwara out to dance and “watch while the world goes to the devil”. Which is exactly what Berliners of the time, during the Weimar republic, were doing – waltzing on empty air, a vacuum of sense and purpose, a sickening, joyful freefall brought to a crashing end by the catastrophe of Nazism. Perhaps the best-known representation of the time is Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, adapted from a Novelle by Arthur Schnitzler (also the author of Germany’s best-selling porn novel Josefine Mutzenbacher) originally set in a contemporary Vienna; and if the part-mythology part-legend spun around the undocumented perversions of Weimar Berlin is to be believed, even that does not do it justice.

Today Berlin is still a vacuum – the industry is in Munich, the banks in Frankfurt, the port is Hamburg; and while nominally the seat of a janitorial government, many of the main functions of state go on elsewhere, a relic of the post-war dissipation of German power. And so the filth continues out of sight of the viewfinder, and everyone fiddles away while Rome, Paris, or somewhere, something, is burning.

Which is all really to say that threesomes in comparison are nothing worth writing home about. Oops. Still, they glean a deservingly shocked look from tramfuls of spinsters in the morning. And it is deliciously warm here in the middle.

Yours, and yours and yours,

Ali