by Jan Morris
Berlin is the capital of a lost empire, and its imperial past lies like a helmeted skeleton in its cupboard. It forms on one side the capital of the Democratic Republic of East Germany, on the other a province of the Federal German Republic: but the Germanness of it survives by sufferance, by suggestion, by retrospection. In the eastern sector the placards and the exhortations, the state shops and the slit-eyed arrogance of Lenin-allee bring to the purlieus of the old Unter den Linden an oily whiff of Asia. In the west all the gallimaufry of the American world prances and preens itself: neon signs, juke boxes, Time, apartments by Corbusier, hotel rooms by Conrad Hilton, paperbacks, pony-tails, dry martinis and Brigitte Bardot. The old Germany lives on underground, surfacing sometimes in a splendid opera, a Schiller play, a melody or a neo-Nazi.
On the one side the East Berliners find themselves remoulded, month by month, year by year, crisis by crisis, into a new kind of people – brainwashed, as it were, en masse and by force of habit. On the other, the West Berliners have become walking symbols: inhabitants of a city that has no economic meaning, no geographical sense, no certainties and no security, but which is kept alive like some doomed and cadaverous magnate, just to spite the beneficiaries. Few Berliners seem to suppose that their city will ever again be the capital of a free united Germany. The East Berliners live for the hour, or the Party meeting after work. The West Berliners accept what a paradoxical fortune offers them, and move blithely enough through life, like fish in a glittering goldfish bowl.
It remains, though, a single city, and there is no disguising its traumatic quality, its mingled sense of ignominy, defiance, futility and pathos. Bitterly mordant are the comments of the Berliners when they show you around their boulevards. Their jokes are coarse and often cruel, their allusions streaked with self-mockery. Caustically they tell you that each side of the Brandenburger Tor calls itself democratic – the east with a capital D, the west with a small one. Wryly they observe that the Perpetual Flame of Freedom uses an awful lot of gas. Almost apologetically they point to Tempelhof, still the most astonishing of the world’s airports, as ‘the one good job that Hitler did’. They sound resigned but secretly resentful. They know what you are thinking.
For the fact is that their city remains, to this day, a constant and terrible reproach against all that Germany has meant to the twentieth century. The Liberty Bell, no less than the gigantic Russian war memorial, is a reminder that in our times German values have been rotten values. Berlin, east and west, is a city built upon the ruins of Germany, watered with German tears, haunted by the shades of a million lost young men, a million lost illusions, the ghost of a dead and discredited patriotism. It is the most melancholy of cities. It has lost its soul, and is still acquiring replacements.
And for myself, I find its neuroses ever apparent: in the almost obsessive pride, for example, that Berliners have in their zoo, deposited in the very middle of the city and famous for its shackled elephants; in the passion for flowers that bloom so eerily in this most warlike and fearful of capitals; in the bizarre assurance of the nightlife – the placid composure with which, for instance, comfortable burghers and their homely wives accept their beers from a man dressed up as a waitress; in the flashy extravagance of the western sectors and the dulled apathy of the east; in the inevitable, ever-growing alienation of one side from the other; in the absolute stunned silence with which the cinema audience files out from the ghastly film Mein Kampf, an appalling laceration of German pride and self-respect.
So it is I say that Berlin’s heart is the Brandenburger Tor, with its great Quadriga restored but hardly regnant upon the top of it. Around that symbol of old pomp the real Berlin still stands: the gaping Reichstag, the ruined Wilhelmstrasse, the shells of broken cathedrals and shattered palaces, Goering’s offices and Hitler’s bunker, the tumbled halls of the Third Reich, the grave of a lost empire. Anything may happen to Berlin in the second half of our century; but whoever rules it, until the shades of that dreadful capital are exorcized at last, until the very memory of it dims, all the brilliance and bluster of the new city will be sham, and its spirit will never be easy.
Paris
In Paris, physically unscathed by the war, I tracked the progress through the city of an imaginary Englishman, evidently some years older than I was myself. Like many Britons he obviously resented France’s ability to surmount shameful memories of a war which they themselves had fought so epically.
Gingerly the middle-aged Englishman, tilting his trilby, emerges out of the Gare du Nord into the streets of Paris. He has a couple of hours to spend before he rejoins his train at the Gare de Lyon, but he views the prospect with no wild abandon, for deep inside him, however hard he tries, however polite his French or cosmopolitan his past, deep inside him there stirs, like a rustle of bones in a dark cavern, an old English antipathy to the place. It stems from centuries of bloodshed and rivalry; from the bitterness of tragic alliance; from the puritan strain that still runs through the English character, and long ago stigmatized this incomparable capital as ante-room of Purgatory; from envy, and a sense of provincial origins; from the robust self-assertion of sea-going islanders, and the blinkered vision of history. Americans adore Paris, hasten there to write their novels or paint their violent abstracts, love her in the springtime, hire her same old taxi-cabs, set themselves up with slinky blondes in desperately expensive garrets. The middle-aged English approach, however, is altogether more wary and restrained, and the visitor looks sharply right and left, tucking his wallet more securely into his pocket, as he walks briskly through the maniacal taxis and settles at the corner café for what, he thinks with a wry smile, the French comically call a cup of tea. He knows he is in the wrong. He knows he ought to have coffee. But there is something about Paris that inflames his insularity, and makes the Channel behind his back feel very deep, wide and important.
It is partly the confounded foreignness of the place. To this Englishman nowhere in the world is more irrevocably abroad than Paris, which is a good deal nearer London than Newcastle is. If it felt a little closer before the war, four years incommunicado sealed it once and for all as a city beyond the divide. Danger and ignominy have hardened its arteries of pride, and spared as it is the burden of a common language it remains today, in a world of fading frontiers, overwhelmingly and magnificently French. It is the fulcrum of Europe, but it is emblazoned with all the splendours of old-school patriotism. It shelters, as always, a vast foreign community, but its guests are clothed in the fabric of France. Hardly anybody in the Paris streets seems to speak English. Hardly anybody looks Americanized, or Anglicized, or Italianized, let alone Germanized. Paris is French all through, from pissoir to Academy, and the middle-aged Englishman, with all his inherited instincts of patronage, feels himself at an unfair disadvantage. Like the poet before him, he loves Humanity with a love that’s pure and pringlish, but he feels an obscure resentment towards the French, who never will be English.
Then, says he to himself, Paris is so damned pompous. A Mall or two is all right in its way, of course, and comes in useful for royal processions or emergency car parks: but a whole city drawn geometrically, in circles, arcs and right angles, offends the English taste for studied informality. Paris has, it is perfectly true, its vast rambling filigree of back streets, climbing over Montparnasse and through the warrens of Montmartre, but as the Englishman pays his bill and sets off through the city, he feels himself to be transiting endless acres of formality. The Champs-Elysées goes on and on. The Place de l’Etoile goes round and round. It feels a mile from one corner of the Place de la Concorde to another, and retreating through the Tuileries from the gorgeous severity of the Louvre is like retiring backwards, with frequent obsequious bows, down the interminable audience chamber of some royal presence. The very river of Paris feels artificial, like a long water-folly in an elaborate belvedere, and the Eiffel Tower looks as though it has been placed there by a divine landscape gardener, as a lesser practitioner might erect a wicker pagoda behind th
e rose-beds. All this upsets our Chestertonian, who, reflecting that Britannia needs no boulevards, no spaces wide and gay, feels it somehow irritating that the French should need them either.
He supposes, as he broods down the Rue de Rivoli, that it’s all part of the Frenchman’s cleverness. Everyone knows the Parisians are as clever as so many monkeys, and in this city nothing feels simple or unsophisticated. Everything is scented. Even the crusty door-keepers inspect you with a knowing air, and the fat market ladies of Les Halles do not look like proper working women at all, but rather like enormous eccentric dowagers slumming it for fun, or honouring some cracked family conviction. The worldly Parisiennes are not only unattainably elegant, but also dauntingly well read, and have a maddening habit of being good with horses, too. The suave young men are rubbed smooth as almonds with the unguent of savoir faire. The students at the Sorbonne blaze with politics and weird philosophical speculation, but never seem to ladder a stocking. Even the dustmen sip modish drinks, like Pernod, and eat fancy cheeses, like Camembert or Brie, and smoke strong tart cigarettes, and generally behave with an urbanity that seems to the middle-aged Englishman just a little presumptuous. He stifles the thought at once, of course, for he is a liberal sort of fellow: but it is there, it is there, as it was when the heads rolled.
He distrusts them, too. Yes, he does. He cannot restrain the sensation that he has fallen among thieves. There is something sly and underhand to the careful indolence of the little shops, those lovely clothes tossed into the windows like nightdresses in a bottom drawer, that calculated clutter of exquisite frivolities, that scalpel juxtaposition of the gay cheap and the ruinously extravagant. There is something very suspicious about the sullen brusqueness of the taxi-driver, as though he is swiftly summing his customer up with a view to disembowelling him. There is something horribly ingratiating to the waiter’s smile, as though he is secretly chuckling over false additions. Nothing feels quite straightforward to the middle-aged Englishman: and what’s more, he tells himself, as though this really were the last straw – ‘what’s more, I wouldn’t be surprised if these blighters actually cheat each other!’
For long ago, far back in his origins, he was taught to look twice at a Frenchman’s credentials, and in his own lifetime, he feels, the Parisian record has scarcely been impeccable. Philip Sidney could write of ‘that sweet enemy, France’, but later the feeling wore off. Who knows, the Englishman asks himself with a sniff, whether the French will be any better next time? Who knows when the next coup will occur? Who has not seen the gendarmes, in the land of Fraternity, bashing the poor students with batons, or spraying them with tear-gas? What about this fellow de Gaulle, and Laval, and Fashoda, and Old Bony, and the burning of Rye, and Agincourt? Who (says the middle-aged Englishman to himself, getting quite hot under his collar, which is made of the same heavy Sea Island cotton that his father always had) – who, says he bitterly, are the Parisians to talk?
And so at the end of his brief stay, disturbed but undeniably stimulated by his visit, he makes his way once more towards the station – a little apprehensively, for he feels pretty certain that they gave him the wrong departure time, and anyway he has never been very adept with the 24-hour clock. He is, you see, a man of habit, and he is also middle-aged. He is expressing all the prejudices of an imperial generation, reared to grandeur, fostered on the last fragments of splendid isolation. He can just remember, dimly in childhood, an England that was still the world’s arbiter, grandly correcting imbalances of power, here crossly checking a potentate, there patting a suitable revolutionary kindly on the head. He does not realize how fast they are draining his beloved Channel. He is not, I think, a married man, but if he had children of his own he would know that every thought that crossed his mind in Paris stamped him a child of his age. His is the last generation into whose silly old eye, when the white English cliffs appear at last above the blurred horizon, a hot atavistic tear embarrassingly insists upon rising. He is well the right side of fifty still, but he is almost the last of the islanders.
We should not blame him, or scoff at his ideas. His way was singularly successful in its time, and honourable too, and enabled the English, entrenched behind their moat, to evolve a national genius that has enriched, astonished and amused us all. The cycle of history has turned, though, and one of the excitements of our time is the thought that the old European comity is awakening again, recalling its estranged children, stretching itself like Rip Van Winkle and massaging its mighty muscles. Never again, I prophesy, will an English generation step so cautiously into Paris, with so many prickly reservations. Who could long be jealous of such a place? Even our friend in the trilby, startled to find his train at the right platform at the advertised time, has to admit, grudgingly, that the Parisians seem to be making some progress at last.
London
I had lived abroad for most of my adult life, and was somewhat of a stranger in my own capital. As a consequence I spent a happy morning wandering about a icty with which I was innocently infatuated.
The day was very early when I began my morning’s affair with London, and I started, as determined lovers should, with a nourishing English breakfast, the most potent of aphrodisiacs. The first watery sunshine was glimmering as I walked into the streets of Covent Garden, and the noble façade of the Opera House stood there above the vegetable-wagons pale and romantic. The alleys were stodgy with lorries, and the pavements were bustling with porters, and a fine old lady in black strode by with a tray of cabbages on her head. In the shade of a classical portico some union propagandist had pinned a notice suggesting several disagreeable methods of dealing with strike-breakers. Hanging, it observed, was too good for such vermin.
There was a public house around the corner. Licensed for the porters of the market, it was the one pub in London where you could get beer at that time of the morning, so I sat down to a brown ale, three smoking golden sausages, and a slice of toast – a princely breakfast. Two extremely stout men shared my table and swapped an incessant flow of badinage. Their Cockney was proud and undiluted, and every now and then one of them winked blearily at me, to put me at my ease. I put lots of mustard on my sausages and tried hard to enjoy the ale. London is a rich and saucy city, for all its espresso-bar veneer, and its heart still thrives on beer and bangers and such old stalwarts of the palate.
Presently the sun, like a timid tippler, appeared through the glass of the saloon bar door: so I said goodbye to those two portly jokers and made my way east to Billingsgate. London Bridge was almost empty when I arrived there, and as I climbed down the gloomy staircase to the fish market my footsteps echoed desolately away beneath the bridge: but when I emerged from the tunnel into Lower Thames Street there before me was all the blast and colour and virility of Billingsgate, against one of the most glorious city settings on earth.
Away to the east stood the bastions of the Tower, like misty cardboard replicas; and behind me there arose the mountainous hump of Cannon Street Station, grandly cavernous; and beside me, hunched against an office block, there stood the fine old church of Magnus Martyr, with its ‘inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’; and to my left a meshwork of city lanes, Fish Street and Pudding Lane, Botolph Lane and St. Mary at Hill, clambered up the slope around the Monument; and everywhere there were the fish-men, in their white coats and queer leather hats, barging and pushing their way from the refrigerator trucks to the market, splashed with mud and gusto and fishy liquids. There was grandeur, and humour, and vivacity, and brutality to this compelling scene: and in the middle of it all stood the City policemen, like holy men, writing things down in little black notebooks.
Across the river on Bankside no such noble turmoil animated the wharves. A hush lay over the alleyways and warehouses, and only a few early dockers were coughing and talking throatily on the barges moored alongside. As I wandered, though, I could feel the rising animation of the place as the city woke to the day; and soon there approached me down an empty lane a figure whose eager strid
e and sharp decisive footfalls were the very epitome of morning purpose. It was dressed all in black, and as it advanced down the shadowy canyon of the warehouses I saw that its legs were sheathed in gaiters. I stopped in my tracks, overcome by this pungent confrontation of the commercial, the medieval, and the ecclesiastical. ‘Magnificent!’ said I. ‘Well, er, yes,’ said the clergyman, ‘it always is lovely at this time of the morning, and if you go a little farther you’ll see the new house they’ve just built for me next to Christopher Wren’s, thus enabling me to be the first Provost of Southwark to live on the spot since my cathedral was founded some, let me see, yes, some one thousand, three hundred years ago: Good morning!’ – and the Provost strode off to his cathedral.
But even London’s chain of associations is sometimes broken, and when one of the old landmarks is destroyed, replaced or made redundant, then you may feel the melancholy of the place, and realize how heavily it leans upon the grandeurs of the past. You may sense this nostalgia beside the forgotten India Office, or outside an Admiralty that is no longer the world’s final arbiter, or beside Buckingham Palace, where Queen Victoria gazes bleakly across an empire that has vanished: or you may do as I did that morning, cross by Blackfriars Bridge, meander down an awakening Fleet Street, turn into Kingsway, and pause for a moment to watch them pulling down the old Stoll Theatre, all too soon to be one with St James’s and the Tivoli.
A ramp leads you down through the gaunt skeletonic walls to the great pit of the theatre beneath; and there you can stand in reverie, like a sentimental singer in a Hollywood musical, gazing at the sad hulk of the building above you, with the dark wooden panelling of the box office still sedately in place among the ruins, and all the grabs and cranes and shovels burrowing desperately into the stalls. You can scarcely find a more evocative symbol of London than one of the celebrated Edwardian theatres, so long flushed with grace and gaiety, now being systematically bashed into oblivion.