Europe in the Looking Glass

by Morris, Jan, Byron, Robert

  ‘Everyone’ consisted of an American in a straw hat talking business with another in a Lincoln Bennett Hamberg bound in white; an Englishman in chocolate suede shoes and a Guards’ moustache, who looked as if he had been turned out of England; and a Mr Hutten, London-tailored, a friend of David’s early days in Germany, who now conducts a furniture business in New York. I heard of him when I returned to England, from other sources. He told us to lunch at Pelzer’s. Simon explained that the plethora of ‘Bristol’ Hotels in Europe was due to the restlessness of a former Lord Bristol, also a bishop, who travelled so incessantly and in such magnificence, that the very fact of his having stopped at an hotel gave it a reputation which it could only preserve by assuming his name.

  We lunched at Pelzer’s in a bower formed of gilded trellis-work and real vines, the back of which was decorated with scene-painters’ landscapes. I ate nothing. David had a haunch of venison stuffed with foie gras and covered with cherries, but was too lazy to touch it. Afterwards Simon went home to read, while David and I scoured the city for a cinema. None were open till six o’clock. Berlin has not sunk to the depravity of afternoon amusements.

  That evening, after dining early, we drove out to Charlottenburg to a musical comedy called ‘Anna Marie’. The hotel had reserved us seats in the front row; but when we arrived late there were only two instead of three. David fell into the most extravagant rage and abused the officials, old men in pinces-nez, with such effect that they compelled a man to vacate his seat for one of us. Then Simon decided that it was too hot and that he would prefer to sit in the beer garden outside after all. So David and I went in alone, in the middle of the act, to the very audible annoyance of the audience.

  The cast consisted of five. The leading man was bald and dressed in tennis clothes, perfected by a college tie and leather belt. The leading lady was pretty, but her mass of fluffy yellow hair, done over one eye, and a set smile, redolent of the Victorian music hall stage, rather detracted from her charms. Her clothes were 1923. The phenomenal idea of an evening scarf attached to the dress had reached Berlin in the same breath as it had gone out of fashion elsewhere. At the end, with a wickedly indecent high kick, she disclosed a long pair of thick purple drawers reaching to the knee. But the favourite was a very fat old woman in a tight, sleeveless modern dress and bangles, her hair done in a chignon, who burlesqued the others, flinging her plump calves from side to side and singing in a high, raucous, and rather pathetic voice. The tunes were delightful and composed by the brothers Gilbert. At length the whole backcloth began to revolve, displaying an illuminated panorama of Berlin at night, and all five danced in front as it went round behind them. The plot was snobbish, Anna Marie being a girl of noble birth, which she conceals, in order to induce the bald man, the love of her life, to marry her in a suburban back garden. The transports of her husband’s family when they discovered her origin were touching, and even her father, in a frock coat and top hat, was reconciled. This is a favourite theme for continental comedy and light opera. We saw it repeated several times in Italy and once on a film, in which the girls at a convent school bullied the life out of one of their number, because she was the daughter of a cocoa king – ‘uno cacao-re’.

  In the intervals we rejoined Simon in the garden; the band beneath the trees would repeat the tune of the act before; and it was a sight that filled the heart with pleasure to see the whole audience, mostly consisting of short, fat women in dark skirts and white blouses, swaying to and fro to the prevailing lilt, with pint mugs of yellow Pilsener beer held tightly in their right hands.

  About half-past eleven we drove to the Adlon Bar to meet Mr Hütten. He appeared in a bowler hat, with a friend. They were to show us the Berlin underworld. This was some way away and we went in a taxi, the driver of which was ashamed of us. Eventually we arrived at an orange door in the slums flanked by two box trees. Beyond it was a room that resembled the lounge of a station hotel in the Midlands. At one table at the back, David espied his friend, Henry Featherstonhaugh, attaché in Prague, seated with the son of a member of the German Cabinet, and some other more beautiful companions. The vigour of David’s recognition caused him some embarrassment. He combined incomparable pomp of manner with extreme cynicism. His friend, dark and sinister, purred suavely about the charm of travel. Other people collected, and we formed a larger and larger ring, finally returning to bed about half-past one.

  The next morning, in company with a large crowd, we gazed at Hindenburg’s windows. He did not appear. After a sleepy afternoon we dined at a Russian restaurant. This was not one of the up-to-date, semi-smart establishments that are so common in Paris, but a small, sordid, double room on the ground floor, run simply for the benefit of some of the three hundred thousand exiles in Berlin. The menu was printed in Russian, and so were the newspapers. We ate the traditional salad and drank kwass and vodka, the former tasting like strong, but not dark, sweetened beer. After dinner we proceeded to the ‘Elysium’, of which we became members on the spot. Simon was good enough to consider that my having been posted that morning in the Times as recipient of third-class honours in history, warranted a bottle of champagne. This caused a sensation. Not only did the movable units of the band transplant themselves and their instruments to the backs of our chairs, but the proprietor himself arrived, extremely thirsty. He was followed by a ‘friend’. The ‘friend’ passed some champagne to another ‘friend’, who also joined the circle. Bottles arrived automatically. We were in evening dress and felt that we were raising the tone of Berlin.

  Eventually, at closing time, the manager was so overcome that he beseeched us to return with him to his flat and ‘have a drink’. This was the last thing we wanted. However, off we drove in a body through impenetrable labyrinths and rows of narrow streets, until at length, after feeling our way through a courtyard, we were ushered into three rooms and a bathroom-kitchen on the ground floor of a large tenement building. The sitting room was the home of the coloured photograph in excelsis: life-size men with square beards and pink faces against blue skies, alternated with their wives in high sleeves and gold lockets. Next door, in a worn copper bath, reposed a mass of dirty socks in thick, grey water; while the remainder of the washing, cuddling to itself the kitchen utensils, cried to Heaven from the top of an old trunk.

  By four o’clock it was raining hard. We left, to awake next morning with a slight feeling of nausea, which decided us to leave Berlin at once.

  Nevertheless, from the point of view of talking German, our evenings had been a great success.

  Berlin has a pleasant atmosphere. Unlike Paris, it is far enough away from London to feel as if it were somewhere else. The Unter den Linden is magnificent. Whereas in Vienna the famous ‘Rings’ are entirely spoilt by the rows of plane trees that obscure them, this is wide enough to carry its double avenue. The traffic is sparse and slow. The streets are well kept and the tramlines run through the little lawns, green and well watered, that are planted in the squares, so that men are to be seen carefully cutting round them with pairs of shears. The Brandenburger Tor, surrounded by the palaces of the nobility, compares favourably with the unruined ruin at Hyde Park Corner or the flamboyance of the Arc de Triomphe. And the people are friendly – far more friendly than in France or Italy. It is this, after all, that counts most in the impression that a city gives.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE DISTANCE FROM BERLIN TO NUREMBERG is three hundred and twelve miles. We had intended to start at eight o’clock, but were none of us dressed until ten. The garage was situated at the other end of the town, and the car was deposited in a cellar reached by a lift. When it came to the surface, it had to be oiled, greased and filled with petrol. Also a valve needed adjusting. The heat of the sun was intense and paralysed our actions. On our way back to the hotel we passed Henry Featherstonhaugh, bouncing along in a black satin tie and Oxford trousers. Then the operation of loading began. This in itself invariably took half-an-hour, at the end of which time a bevy of porters and pages, varying i
n numbers, according to the size of the hotel, would cluster round for tips. On these occasions, Simon, to whom the mention of money is anathema, used to put his hand in his pocket and distribute, without looking at them, any scraps of paper that he might find, usually leaving the whole party destitute for the rest of the day.

  It was therefore twenty minutes to twelve before we actually left the Potsdammerplatz. The first place of interest on the road was Wittenberg. The large open square in the middle of the town lined with high-fronted old houses, themselves dwarfed by the upstanding and irregularly-built Gothic cathedral, must look much the same now but for a statue or two commemorating the event, as when Luther flung the Papal Bull into the flames and started the Reformation on this identical spot four hundred and nine years ago. Simon tentatively suggested lunch; but David hurried through rather faster than usual, as though he were a practising Roman Catholic.

  Though, as a matter of fact, he personally suffers from no form of religious hysteria, the way in which moral scruples can distort the actions of persons otherwise sane is sometimes scarcely believable. I have a relation who once sat eight hours without food or drink in a railway carriage at Monte Carlo on a boiling day in June, rather than set foot even on the platform of such a place. But then, after all, self-martyrdom is the greatest of all joys.

  After driving some way further, the country began to assume an industrial complexion; but not as in England. This was no ‘black country’. The grey and now more or less hedgeless panorama of small cultivated fields, relieved at intervals by rows of miniature Eiffel Towers bearing festoons of electric cable from one horizon to another, remained unchanged. Yet the inhabitants grew grimy, and a sudden wave of depression seemed to weight the air. The mining of coal and iron is all conducted in enormous craters two or three hundred feet below the surface of the fields. It is as though a peepshow designer had created a miniature replica of an industrial landscape at the bottom of a packing-case. Trucks and cranes and human beings can be seen moving vaguely about in miniature, like the people on the floor of St Paul’s viewed through the hole in the floor of the ball. Then the fields continue again, until the next crater cleaves their midst.

  As we drove by, the bands of workers on the road became ill-favoured and were at no pains to conceal their dislike of us, shaking their fists and shouting ‘Langsam, langsam!’ (Slowly, slowly!) Germans always slow down to pass anything. David accelerates.

  Though we had complained of the frequency with which the Hamburg-Berlin road had been closed for repairs, that indeed might have been an uncharted prairie compared with the present thoroughfare. Until at last, as Simon remarked, it was a comfort to be on a road at all, even if it was going in the wrong direction. One barrier necessitated a ten-mile detour along tracks that would have disgraced an Irish farm. David vowed he would make no further digressions into the countryside. Round the next corner stood the inevitable obstruction and its notice:

  VORSICHT

  GESPERRT.

  A convenient field offered a way round. Then followed another obstacle, also circumventable. But the third was more formidable. A wooden pole was stretched across the road at a point where it was crossing a small valley on an embankment, so that on either side was a steep declivity. Below this barrier, which we removed, lay a row of stone blocks, heaped higgledy-piggledy on top of one another; and at one side an inflexible iron pin, eighteen inches high and one-and-a-half in diameter, was embedded deep into the roadway. We could move neither backward nor forward. A crowd collected from some neighbouring cottages, full of hostility. Suddenly David, without another moment’s hesitation, charged the entire barricade. Bending the iron pin into a right-angle, Diana heaved her enormous body on to the stones and scattered them like the walls of Jericho. Simon and I rushed frantically in her wake, followed by the curses of the populace. Poised one on either step, we drove off in triumph.

  At length we reached Leipzig, through long wastes of industrial suburbs. Simon, no longer tentative, insisted that we should have tea. David said that first we must find our way through the town. So we drove for half-an-hour through unending labyrinths of tramlined streets, and at last succeeded in coming out the other side, immediately beneath the grotesque stone denkmal, two hundred feet high, which was erected to commemorate the ‘Battle of the Nations’, the defeat that sent Napoleon to Elba – a shapeless mass resembling a squat chimney-stack built on the scale of the Great Pyramid. We also passed through the famous square where the allied troops were reviewed after the conflict.

  Half a mile further on we ran into a bank backwards and doubled up the exhaust pipe, so that it now rent the ground with a loud tearing noise whenever Diana came down particularly heavily over any bump. Without a halt we continued our way to Altenburg, where we were obliged to stop, after seven hours uninterrupted driving, not for tea, but for petrol. This was Roumanian and unsatisfactory. The youth who filled the tank disliked us so much that he refused a tip. We passed through Plauen and stopped again to put on our coats.

  As evening fell, the road led over the uplands; we were entering Bavaria. The flat country gave place to undulating hills covered with pinewoods, not of that familiar inky grey, but a lovely deep green, stretching away amongst yellow fields of corn and rich grassy valleys, till the blue horizon, still undulating, merged into a dull and misty lilac sunset. Gradually it became dark and we could smell the sweet scent of the pines that rose steep on either side as we whistled down the valleys; we could hear the trickle of streams; and could breathe the sharp fresh gusts of upland air as we climbed the hills again.

  Bayreuth was but a pattern of lights. Simon hugged his stomach; I fell asleep. At half-past eleven we were on the Nuremberg tramlines when we again ran out of petrol. The spare tank was hauled from beneath the suitcases, a funnel formed of an Illustrated London News, and at twenty minutes to midnight, exactly twelve hours after leaving Berlin, we drew up outside the Hotel Palast-Fürstenhof, having touched neither food nor drink the whole day, and having made two stops of one and two minutes respectively.

  We had a delicious meal of cold ham, poached eggs, and light beer brought up to our bedroom, and then slept soundly.

  Nuremberg is the apotheosis of the tourist-town. There flourishes about her streets that kind of obvious antiquity, those over-ornamented crooked gables and twisted turrets, that appeal most strongly to those who love Age for its own sake, without being able to distinguish the textural beauty, and in some cases damage, that it can confer. It can be seen at a glance that these buildings are ‘Old’. They shout Oldness. It needs no artistic acumen to tell that they were built without the aid of plumb-line and set-square. Nuremberg, in fact, is a place without atmosphere. Its main streets are lined with hotels and antique-shops and the buildings convey the same impression of affectation as the baronial rafters of the Queen’s Hotel, Margate. After visiting the bank and being refused a cup of coffee at the ‘Blue Bottle’, we had lunch, and set out to drive the sixty-five miles to Rothenburg.

  The Bavarian countryside is the most attractive in Central Europe. Rather than bewitching, it appears bewitched. Its mannerisms are those of the Albertian Christians. Santa Claus, who only visits other countries in the winter, makes this his home; and somehow, even in the bright August sunlight, with veitches and blue cranesbill growing from the long grass by the side of the narrow white roads, the idea seemed to have no incongruity about it. The villages and market towns consist of long twisted rows of white houses, sometimes frescoed with angels, which are drawn and tinted rather than painted. The roof of each house is half as high again as the side walls, and if old, it leans heavily towards its neighbour, or bellies the isosceles triangle of wall on which it rests out into the roadway. There is a fresh, clean atmosphere. The farmyard and the road are one, which makes motoring difficult. Little girls with tight, fair plaits scurry their flocks of geese out of the way. Bent and aged women, with brown, wrinkled faces peering from out their black handkerchiefs, may be seen going out in twos and threes
to work in the fields. Everywhere the arms of the old kingdom are displayed, blue and white diagonal lozenges. In most of the villages are poles, a hundred feet or more high, which are striped round and round in blue and white and surmounted by a wreath hanging from the top. From these poles jut horizontal arms on which are placed innumerable painted, wooden toys, men on bicycles, motor cars, churches and animals.

  On every second hill is perched a schloss, generally baroque, with a massive rounded tower or two surviving from an older fortress. Many of the schlossen, however, are situated in the middle of the towns, such as the enormous and very fine rococo palace at Ansbach, home of George II’s queen. The Bavarian baroque is pleasant and not unwieldy, the churches being covered in a sort of yellow wash. Catholicism is very evident in the numerous shrines and figures of saints, in agitated stone draperies and iron halos, that guard the bridges on the road. Bavaria is the most German part of Germany; here all the ‘Youth’ movements originated, the country being especially suited to walking-tours. And it is here, more than in Prussia, that the survival of militarism is to be feared. The Crown Prince Rupprecht is still the most powerful man in the province. Monarchism will always evoke sympathy. But an independent Bavaria in her present frame of mind would not conduce to the peace of Europe.