At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  “The Germans long to be loved.”

  We have been listening to the talk of German acquaintances, and sentences like these stick in the mind.

  We are in Cologne, looking at the luxurious shops, the jewelry, the travel goods, the dresses, the Americanized restaurants, the glossy packs of automobiles in the car parks. Half the city is old Germany; half of it is sparkling, rich and new. We are pleased to see it like this. Then we go down to the banks of the Rhine and there we try to collect our thoughts. We are standing in a country that, twice in a lifetime, has wrecked our civilization and brought humiliation upon itself; and yet each time it has recovered to look us in the face with childlike candor, as if it remembered nothing. We may be wrong in that last phrase: we hope we are. But we stand there, under the enormous shaft of Cologne Cathedral, which rises like the figure of some great Gothic emperor turned to stone, before a people that are an enigma to us. And—more alarming—an enigma to themselves.

  At Cologne the greatest and richest of the Western European rivers flows fast and choppy in the wind. The Rhine is busier than the Hudson and, I would guess, busier than the Saint Lawrence. The heavy barge and seagoing traffic goes crowding down to the Ruhr factories, the seaports of Holland and Belgium. This is the most densely populated region in Europe and, quite probably, in the modern world. The oil and gasoline barges, the coal, coke and wine go up and down one a minute (by my counting), often in convoys or fleets, with the German, Dutch, Belgian, French and Swiss flags on them, and the house flags of Krupp and Shell. They are not dawdling barges; they go at speed and there are small seagoing ships among them. The Rhine flows through factory land, pasture, wooded cliffs, past dozens of pretty little spas with their rose beds and parading lime trees and dozens of grandiose villas, past imitation castles and cherished ruined ones, past vineyards and manufacturing cities. Over the high steel bridges, the very efficient trains are racing to Düsseldorf, symbol of the German “miracle.” Northward in the Ruhr is the monolithic private empire of Krupp’s hundred and fifty factories—Krupps who were the servants of German militarism, and who now build harbors and steel mills for Africa and the Far East and have opened an office in Moscow; farther north are the shipyards and docks of Hamburg; southeast the freight trains clatter on to Frankfurt, Munich and Basel. Close to the tracks are the dangerous autobahns, packed with cars on an almost American scale. Whatever else we shall have to say about the Germans, there is a foundation of toil and power, and of wealth that flows.

  Today is Ascension Day, a holiday, and sometimes called Father’s Day, for Germany is the land of the Father. No mother country here: fatherland.

  On the Rhine and to the Rhinelanders and the industrial millions, this is the day for the Rhine trip. The crowds troop in their thousands onto the river steamers for the long trips up the beloved river. For hours they will be drinking beer, gallons of it, or the wines of the Rhine or Moselle. They will be shouting and singing. The majority will be cheerfully, harmlessly, bawling drunk. The young men will wear comic straw hats and carry light swagger canes for a lark. Some will have fixed bicycle bells to their canes, to make as much din as possible. Male choruses! Female choruses! Groups of stout women—to be middle-aged and robust and stout is the popular ideal for women—will toast one another and sing vehemently. At each little town, where some of the crowd get off and a new swarm comes on, these flushed ladies will be singing Auf Wiedersehen with an energy that recalls the turbine. The British crowd on holiday in England is just as rowdy, of course; it is just as noisy, and it is bawdier. In England, fights soon start up. Things get smashed, shops are wrecked. In Germany, no; the beer orgy is not pretty, but it is blameless. No one fights. Everyone laughs. There is a fundamental domestic good nature. And there is another thing which makes the Germans differ from most other Europeans: on holiday, as on every working day, they hate casualness of dress. On holiday, they are in their best clothes. The little boys will wear suits and white socks; the little girls their party frocks. Germans are always neat and correct, indeed correctness they admire above everything. One of the things which really humiliated them in the early postwar period was having to dress roughly in whatever clothes they had left. In the previous pre-Hitler generation they had been deeply shamed in their persons by the ruin brought by inflation.

  Look around at those who are not drinking. They are eating. They eat their “fricassees,” their enormous dishes of potatoes and pork. (I have myself been faced by a dish which consisted of a slice of old ox—called veal—covered with lobster, lobster sauce, shrimps, crab, tangerines and cherries.) The German orgy requires a hardy stomach, as well as lung power and thirst. Here are people notorious for working themselves to the bone and who also thrust an animal energy into their pleasures. It is odd to see the deferential, fussing, slaving, detail-loving office worker turned now into a machine of a different kind—a machine that is boisterous.

  I don’t say that all Germans are as boisterous as those boatloads of trippers. There are the quiet families. Looking down the long reaches of the Rhine, you see not only the flotillas of barges, but the crews of scullers and canoeists who delight, as so many Germans do, in river and lake life. But I think it is fair to say that in most Germans there is a tendency, at some moment, to burst at the seams. All these people around us probably get up before seven in the morning on their working days, they go to work far earlier than most of us, they have constructed a country that hums with the smooth, busy efficiency of a power station; and yet, essentially, they are bursting, romantic extroverts. The word Deutsch means tribe, and tribes move back and forth knowing no set limit until they are exhausted or are stopped. They overflowed, in the last war, over a great part of Western Europe—all except Britain, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland. Before the First World War, Germany extended south into Alsace and Lorraine and through Prussia beyond Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in the Baltic. A large part of what is now Poland was ruled by Germans. Now Germany has shrunk. What is now called East Germany extends to the door of Lübeck in the north, bulges westward, swallowing Thuringia, and southward until it is only some seventy miles from Frankfurt. The frontier then turns back toward Czechoslovakia beyond Plauen. Leipzig and Dresden—two cities that, like Hamburg in the West, were hostile to Hitler—are now in the Eastern zone. In the West are Lower Saxony, the Ruhr, the Rhineland, Westphalia, the Palatinate, Württemberg and Bavaria. Some 74 million Germans are now divided into 57 million Westerners and 17 million Easterners.

  In short, the Germany of Bismarck and Hitler is broken—not, indeed, into the fragmentary kingdoms and principalities of the early nineteenth century, but into arbitrary pieces. There is the West or Federated Germany, there is the East; there is West Berlin, there is East Berlin. And here arises an immediate difficulty in discussing Germany with Germans. To any question their answers over and over again begin with the words: “The Germans, they are—” The rest of us identify ourselves with our nations. But so often the German splits into two: he thinks of himself privately as a man of his region, which is more important to him than the nation as a whole. He is a Rhinelander, a man from Hamburg, a Nuremberger, a Bavarian, a Swabian, a Berliner first. He is a refugee from the East. He is a Catholic or a Protestant. He is a man who loves to work, who loves domestic contentment, who has an almost pagan love of nature, but he bears on his mind the scars not only of the last two wars but of all the ferocious wars of German history. Despite a stolid appearance and an ingratiating manner he has the thinnest of European political skins; under his humility and kindness he has a temper and an arrogance that arise—in the manner of overcompensation—from the wound he cannot forget. The sense of a double life, privately wounded, publicly without definition, lies at the root of German life.

  “The differences of English, Welsh, Irish and Scots are deep, but they are fertilizing,” my Hamburg doctor says. “In Germany the differences between, say, Hamburg and Nuremberg or Munich are violent and separating in their effect.”

  My y
oung playwright friend in Cologne, as gay a fair-haired, blue-eyed German as you could wish to see, confirms him vehemently. “The Germans are infatuated with history,” he says. “People like myself are a minority. We always have been.”

  If we put contemporary history aside for the moment, this double character of the Germans seems to have been long established. The cathedral at Cologne is one symbol of this dualism. It is a power symbol. The edifice is heavily medieval, with that speared, bucklered, helmeted and gargoyled Gothic detail which we expect. It stands like Charlemagne, a Knight Emperor armored in stone. And yet nothing like the whole of this cathedral genuinely belongs to the Middle Ages; it had been small and incomplete for centuries, though the promise of scale was there. The fact is that the most ambitious and successful part of this great mass was created in the late nineteenth century, when German nationalism, fed on the wealth of modern industry, was at its most aggressive and exuberant. Industrialism came late. A newborn modern nation, united for less than thirty years and suddenly very rich, had chosen a medieval emblem. And not out of nostalgia for an unknown past, like, say, the Gothic architecture in the United States, which is pastiche and artifice; nor like, say, the House of Commons in England, which was the product of a literary Gothic revival; the German choice grew from an ineradicable attachment to military feudalism and feudal authority. The men who completed Cologne, like the men who built the empires of Krupp or I. G. Farben, were authoritarians. The relation of Emperor to Minister, of industrialist to worker, of man to man, had this medieval basis of authority and hierarchy. Germany is the country of the strict father. It was as if Germany, coming very late to the modern world, had expertly copied the appearance but was hostile to its essential spirit.

  There was nothing new in this. One hundred and fifty years ago, long, long before German unity, nationalism and industrialism were dreamed of in Germany, foreign travelers saw and felt very much what we see and feel. They noticed how the relics of chivalry abounded in the country in perfect condition and to an extent unknown elsewhere. As Mme de Staël, Napoleon’s great enemy, said during her long exile from France, the onetime wandering world conquerors of northern Europe had long left all this behind them when they passed into other lands. They went to other countries; behind hem they left only a museum of knightly images. The effect is romantic, but it is funereal and (she said) “painful.” These are death images. Even now, in spite of the destruction of the last war, the medieval house, spire, hall, fortress, wall and city gate abound in Germany; the skyline of mercantile Hamburg is all spears and helmets, and just when we are charmed by its picturesqueness, by the gaiety of chivalry and the care of preservation, we have also the inner feeling of a buried drama and know the pain of living in two violently different worlds at once. And when we talk to the German engineer or the slaving executive dictating letters in the train, we find that something of the medieval ethos rules his mind. He likes to feel anonymous before authority. He likes to command and be commanded; he reveres the curt utterance. In the rest of Western Europe, that has died out. The Renaissance broke it; the French Revolution broke it; the gradual growth of democratic practice broke it. Only in Spain does anything comparable to the German outlook survive in Europe, for some of the same reasons.

  When we look at a German we realize that he is only recently and still nebulously German. In 1800, Americans, British, French, each had a country; in what is now called Germany there were still at that time 77 major principalities, 51 Imperial cities, 45 Imperial villages and 1475 territories ruled by Imperial Knights. Serfdom was not effectively abolished in Bavaria until 1848. By 1871, when Bismarck succeeded by war and Realpolitik in creating the German confederation and Wilhelm was proclaimed emperor in Versailles—a characteristic piece of tactless vainglory—complete unity still had not been achieved. Essentially, feudalism survived in Prussia until after 1918. Moreover, in the midst of the liberal nineteenth century, the German constitution was imposed from above; it did not grow out of “the will of the people.” The minority who represented the democratic view knew politics only in the abstract. One part, perhaps the most intense part of the German we are talking to, belongs to his region and his old lost principality; it is the part of him which has had few lessons in self-government and which waits for orders—the orders of the ghost Prince of the past on the one hand, and the orders of the military caste on the other.

  If you ask why your German’s ancestors were obliged to obey the orders of the Prince, the answer usually given is that it all dates back to the frightful destruction of the wars of religion. As Mme de Staël said, the Germans admire power because they see it as Destiny; and the Princes were the only power to whom the disorganized and fragmented people could turn. Absolute rule looked more practically effective than self-government; a sound administration—and the Prussians were brilliant bureaucrats—was more urgent and promised more stability than elective choice. It was left, for example, to the Princes to decide, quite arbitrarily, whether their little States should be Protestant or Catholic. The Thirty Years’ War had created a great lethargy. While clever young men in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America turned to parliamentary politics, their opposite numbers in Prussia became administrators. They were stern and brilliant administrators. I was in Hamburg at the time of Adenauer’s retirement, when he was succeeded by the liberal Erhard.. People spoke of Adenauer with a mixture of awe, admiration and amusement. They said that he had the mind of a typical provincial mayor. They grinned at his famous administrative intrigues, his tenacity and his dictatorial habits. They were, in a way, proud of him. He was in the tradition. For, they said, he was the quintessential old German type: the strict father who rules his country as severely as he rules his family.

  How do our generalizations apply to Germany now? If they were true when Bismarck, Wilhelm II and finally Hitler galvanized this extraordinary people, how must they be modified to fit the case of postwar Germany risen from ruin, joined to NATO, in the Common Market with France and trying to make a parliament work? The moment one crosses the frontier one is conscious that this is a country where the scale of things is large. Except for the monster statues to Stalin in Eastern Europe, the famous Bismarck monument overlooking the harbor at Hamburg is on a scale no other country gives to its great men. Its churches are taller, their pillars are vaster; even when they moved from the Gothic to the Baroque, the German architects built to inordinate size. The beautiful Micaeliskirche in Hamburg, perfectly reconstructed after its destruction in the war, startles the visitor by its princely proportions; and when the old palaces survive it is noticeable that every petty prince desired nothing short of an imitation Versailles in the eighteenth century. In their regard for the large—and not in that alone—the Germans are the Americans of Europe. The Kolossal is essentially a German notion. Even the beer halls of Germany are built, like cathedrals, for mass life, for huge congregations. It is as if Germany had always built for large gatherings of men and not for wayward individuals. The German takes to mass life. He forgets his uncertainty and his scars when he becomes part of a group.

  In Cologne men drop into bars at seven in the evening on the way home from the office. They are soon shouting and laughing. Already there are a few drunks toppling about in clownish fashion—serious businessmen behaving like simpletons or boys. In Hamburg the air is graver. Talk is quiet. The bars are sedate. Few people are in them. Grave men walk home briskly along the pretty paths of the Alster in the hard northeast wind, carrying their briefcases. Groups of athletes come running by or go sculling on the lake. Hard work at the office, exercise, and then home—that is the Hamburg day.

  “Other Germans complain,” says Doctor X as we sit in the privacy of one of the city’s excellent restaurants near the water, “that Hamburg is calm, soft and tolerant, liberal and Londonish.”

  They also complain of its staid regard for wealth and its phalanx of ruling families. And about that Doctor X says: “We are conscious of status and hierarchy—all
over Germany. The professor is still the most respected person in society. Your status in your profession is important—and it is immensely important to your wife. One rank defers to the one above and our hierarchies are rigid: student, assistant teacher, teacher, headmaster, professor are strictly separated ranks. It is so in all trades and professions.”

  “That is very military?”

  “Or a medieval inheritance,” he says.

  “Softness” is not well thought of; outside of Hamburg, at any rate, “hardness” is the thing. And although Germans are ingratiating there is an automatic formality in their manners: the greeting to the stranger as they sit next to him in the restaurant, the faint click of the heels and the brief bow as they leave.

  Hamburg is one of the beautiful cities of Germany. It is Hanseatic, deep in the mercantile tradition. It has always had a liberal past. It stood out against the Nazis. It has a large resident foreign population. Whereas Cologne and the Rhineland towns look southward and are Frankish if not French, Hamburg is an Atlantic city, looking to sea trade, London, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and New York. Hamburg might as well be Dutch or English and has often been derided, by other cities, as “the English agency.”

  The large Alster Lake in the middle of the city, edged by imposing villas and apartment houses, might be New York’s Central Park turned to water. You go home from the office by water bus. You sail your boat in the regattas. In the beautiful shaded avenues you see a domestic life that might be a copy of Kensington or New York’s fashionable East Side. A London autumn and a Hamburg autumn are indistinguishable. (It is a bitter irony that the German city which most certainly belongs to what we call Western civilization, which has no eye for the traditional eastward march of Germany, was terribly bombed during the war.)

  Hamburg is the city of protest. It is the home of famous papers like Die Welt, Der Spiegel and Die Zeit. And it was the editor of Der Spiegel who was arrested in 1962 (but never tried) for collecting facts about German rearmament. His imprisonment without trial was one of the scandals of the Adenauer regime; it led to the further scandal over telephone-tapping by the police. The matter appears to have been dropped and the editor is at last out of jail.