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Thrilling Cities

Page 13

by Ian Fleming


  Every visitor should try a delicatessen at least once, to sample the American way of life. The Stage Delicatessen is full of Broadway characters and also of the exuberant talk of the owner, Max Asna. When broke, there is always the automat of Horn and Hardnut, and Glorifried Ham’n’ Eggs.

  Outside of El Morocco and the Stork Club (both for dancing) and the Copacabana (where there is cabaret), and the rest of the well-trodden night-spot trail, one might try Julius Monk’s Upstairs at the Downstairs and the Downstairs at the Upstairs. Both these whimsically-named joints are under the same roof on West 56th Street: go to the Downstairs for sophisticated songs at the piano, and to the Upstairs for a full-length revue. No dancing, but drinks and/or supper.

  For jazz, there is the famous Birdland on Broadway, and the equally celebrated Jimmy Ryan’s on West 52nd Street, among many others. For the rest, it depends on who is currently performing. There may be somebody interesting at the Blue Angel or the Embers. In Greenwich Village, I would pick the Bon Soir, especially when Mae Barnes is singing there, or the Village Vanguard, which was the jumping-off place for Harry Belafonte, and, more recently, Miriam Makeba from South Africa.

  In the small hours, one of the noted bars on Third Avenue is in order. Say Costello’s near 44th Street, or P. J. Clarke’s, where a hamburger tastes good at about 3.30 a.m.

  If you make the mistake of omitting the trip to the top of the Empire State Building as being too banal for your notice, look down on the city from a helicopter, price five dollars. Poets read every night at 2 a.m. at the Seven Arts Coffee Gallery, a ‘beat’ haunt near Times Square. And don’t miss Staten Island, which has a shabby, run-down charm and is reached by New York’s best bargain, a five-cent ferry from the Battery.

  So that was that. I had gone round the world in thirty days, and all I had to show for the journey was a handful of pretty light-weight impressions and some superficial and occasionally disrespectful comment. Had I then, have I today, no more serious message for Britain from the great world outside?

  Well, I have, but it is only a brief and rather dull exhortation to our young to ‘Go East, young man!’ See the Pacific Ocean and die!

  It was a source of constant depression to observe how little of our own influence was left in that great half of the world where we did so much of the pioneering. I cannot remember meeting a single Briton all the way from Hong Kong to New York, with the exception of the British Consul in Hawaii. Of course, Japan was conquered and occupied by the Americans, and American culture, communications and trade have almost a monopoly of the Pacific. They are even penetrating Australia, our last and, because of the miracle of her athletic prowess, most glamorous bastion. But it is a measure of our surrender that there are, I think, only three staff correspondents, excluding Reuter, covering the entire Orient for the British press, and our trading posts are everywhere in retreat.

  So a trip round the world, however hasty, brings home all too vividly the fantastically rapid contraction of our influence, commercial and cultural, over half the globe, and our apparent lack of interest in what can broadly be described as the Orient.

  Can this contraction be halted or even reversed? Only, I think, if the spirit of adventure which opened the Orient to us can be rekindled and our youth can heave itself off its featherbed and stream out and off across the world again.

  One way for a young man to do this, if he hasn’t got the Sunday Times behind him, is to take a job as a steward or deckhand in a ship, any ship, and go and see the other side of the world for himself. Travel broadens the mind and it is broad minds we need in a world that is so very much broader than the posters of travel agents suggest.

  After this trite little homily, back to the Sunday Times. My series, as I have said, entertained readers of the paper and, since it is in the nature of good editors to flog a successful formula until it is well and truly dead, in the spring of 1960 I was cajoled into taking to the road again, but this time round a narrower circuit – round the thrilling cities of Europe.

  8

  HAMBURG

  SHE WAS A big girl with a good figure. She wore nothing but a frilly white bathing-cap and short black bathing-trunks. During the fight in the pool of peat mud she had become streaked with the stuff, and one wondered how she would ever get clean again. With a ferocious shout of ‘Huzza!!’ she put her head down and charged the smaller girl with ferocity. The smaller girl gave a realistic ‘Ouch!’ as the bathing-cap hit her square in the stomach, she then described an elegant cartwheel over the larger girl’s head and fell with a dull squelch into the black morass. There was clapping and cat-calling from the predominantly male audience. The referee, a girl in gold lame, began to count.

  It was two o’clock in the morning in Hamburg. I was in the inner heart of the notorious St Pauli night-club district. This heart is appropriately called ‘Die Grosse Freiheit’ – the Great Freedom – and in this small area survives the last bastion in Europe of ‘anything goes’.

  I had come here by way of Ostend, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Haarlem, Wilhelmshaven and Bremen on the first leg of what was to be a six-thousand-mile tour of the thrilling cities of Europe.

  Appropriately enough, as I thought, Europe had greeted me with flowers – so many flowers that in the end one was almost sickened by the profusion of graceful stalks bowing to the northern, Simenon weather and by the eternally smiling faces.

  Rotterdam was in the grip of the spring Floriade and then, from Leiden well past Haarlem, the thousands of acres of tulip and hyacinth fields spread their patchwork quilt over the dull landscape. Even the rubbish heaps in the fields were composed entirely of flower petals, and the Belgian cars driving back after the week-end were decked in huge garlands of red, yellow and my own Bavarian-Tyrolean mixture told me just how long I would have survived on Wangerooge!

  These war-time memories, that one had thought banished forever in 1946, come back in a town like Wilhelmshaven where the giant V-boat pens still clutter up the harbour front, and where vast chunks of blasted concrete lie among tangles of rusted metal. One seems still to hear the ghostly strains of ‘Wir fahren gegen Engel-land’ whispering of the days before the bombs, the days of Iron Crosses, of daggers of honour and of secret weapons that would win the war for Germany. And then one hears the giant whistle of the bombs that shattered the dream. It was good to escape these ghosts for the warmth and life of Hamburg.

  When the referee had counted to nine, and the taller woman was standing facing the audience with her hands clasped victoriously above her head, silently the smaller one got up from the mud, took two large handfuls of the stuff, crept up behind her adversary and crammed them down the seat of her bathing pants. With a howl of delight from the audience, the fight went on until, appropriately, the smaller girl tripped the larger, who measured her length with a terrific explosion of mud fragments which caused the front row of spectators to pull over their heads the sheets with which the thoughtful management had provided them. The bout was awarded to the small girl, a stage was slid over the huge bath of mud and we proceeded to the bucolic pleasures of ‘They also sin in the Alps’, described aptly as a ‘Sex Nacht revue’.

  All this and much more, until four o’clock in the morning, takes place in the Bikini, but the hardy night-hawk has still got a choice of some twenty other haunts from the Galopp, where semi-nude women ride horses round and round a small ring, through Casanova with its ‘Strip-tease Explosiv’, and an indeterminate Lokal advertising in English, ‘You get here the strongest beer of the world’, the Aladin where guitars twang softly all the night, to the Erotic, and on beyond.

  The Erotic (Sinnlich! Schamlos! Sundig! – Sensual, Shameless, Sinful) concentrates on giving value for money, and four shows are displayed more or less at the same time. First, on a small stage, there is conventional strip-tease backed up by a semi-transparent panel in the wall through which the performers may be seen clothing themselves before their appearance. At each interval there is a serial semi-blue film depicting pretty girls wi
th nothing on cavorting on a rocky seascape which might be somewhere in the south of France, but is more probably in the Baltic. And, for good measure, an assortment of full-size colour photographs of nudes are shown on an adjoining panel in the wall. All these you can see for about five shillings while an agreeable half-hour passes.

  Now all this may sound pretty devilish in cold print on a Sunday morning in England, but in fact, except to the exceedingly chaste, it is all good clean German fun. People are cheerful. They laugh and applaud and whistle at a kind of erotic dumb crambo which is yet totally unlascivious. Everybody wandering up and down the garish, brightly lit alleys seems engaged in a light-hearted conspiracy to pretend that ‘anything goes’. When you have been into one night-club you have got the tone of all of them, and the tone is a homely and harmless ‘good time’ to be topped off perhaps by a visit to the Zillertal, a gigantic Bavarian beer hall with a brass band that blows and beats to crack the windows, where everyone’s eyes are glazed with beer and where the waitresses scream dramatically as they get pinched.

  For those who are not finished off by these pleasures there is the Blauer Peter, which does not open until four o’clock in the morning and closes, roughly, at midday. Here you can enjoy really hot jazz by small combination bands, as you also will at the New Orleans which specializes in Dixieland jazz.

  If you are in search of sin more solid than these naiveties, you walk across the broad street of the Reeperbahn (Ropemakers’ Walk) and up Davidstrasse, past the bogus-Dutch block of the police station that cuts into the pretty facade of the St Pauli theatre. Fifty yards up this street on your right you will find a tiny alley protected from prying eyes by a tall wooden barrier bearing the words ‘Adolescents forbidden’. When you go through this, you are greeted by a most astonishing sight – the brilliantly lit alley, blocked also at the other end, is thronged, like a long stage or narrow piazza, with strolling men. At first sight, the neat, three-storied houses on both sides of the alley are like any others except that they are all brightly lit as if for a gala occasion, but when you stroll down the alley you find that the bottom floors have been turned into wide show-cases elegantly furnished and decorated to resemble small parlours or drawing rooms, and, in each show-case, sitting in comfortable chairs or lounging on chaises-longues, are girls of varying ages and charms, all scantily, though not immodestly, dressed. These girls are, to put it bluntly, ‘for sale’ at a price, I am reliably informed, of twenty Reichsmarks.

  This street is no guilty hole-in-the-corner business such as we know in England, but a brightly lit, colourful, gay place of pleasure and laughter. During my visit (purely in the interests of sociological research!) there was not a drunken man to be seen, and if there had been I gather he would have been thrown out of the street by the two policemen who stand nonchalantly by the entrance. Some of the girls in the show-cases looked pretty bored with the whole procedure, but most of them smiled and chatted away or got on with their knitting or petit point with studied nonchalance. The street, I gather, operates throughout the twenty-four hours, with a population of some three hundred girls who do six-hour shifts. The street and the houses are spotlessly clean and medical supervision is very strict.

  Prostitution is not legal in the rest of Germany, but Hamburg, after brief enslavement under Hitler, is once again a ‘Free City’ and a law unto itself. Far from being shy about St Pauli and the Davidstrasse, it is extremely proud of its liberal attitude towards the weaknesses of mankind. It is not in the least impressed that France and, more recently, Italy have outlawed prostitution and driven it underground with the inevitable results – protection rackets, disease and squalor – which we know so well in England. The Hamburg patriarchs, with a tradition of enlightened municipal government dating from Charlemagne who founded the city in A.D. 811, cannot understand that two great nations such as France and Italy, so proud of their social and cultural freedoms, should have allowed two blue-stocking women, Marthe Richard, Minister of the Interior under the first post-war French government, and Signora Merlin, an Italian Senator, to dictate the morals of two such ‘passionate’ peoples. In Hamburg, normal heterosexual ‘vice’ is permitted to exist in appropriate ‘reservations’ and on condition that it remains open and light-hearted. How very different from the prudish and hypocritical manner in which we so disgracefully mismanage these things in England!

  I was altogether immensely impressed by Hamburg, which is now one of my favourite cities in the world. Perhaps I was favourably conditioned through staying at one of the few remaining really great hotels in Europe. This is the Vier Jahreszeiten (no connection with Herr Walterspiel’s excellent establishment in Munich) on the Inner Alster, one of the two fine artificial lakes that add so much to the beauty of the heart of the city. It was built, or at any rate modernized, around 1910 – the golden age for hotel design – and the rooms and bathrooms are solid, comfortable and elegant, with good period furniture which spreads lavishly down the corridors and into the public rooms. The cooking in the grill room – there are also a restaurant and a basement Keller – is first-class German, which at its best is as good as there is, and the wine list has everything. The chef even makes his own smoked salmon, but this is of course the region for sea fish and eel (eel soup is the speciality of Hamburg). I can particularly recommend the crayfish tails with dill sauce and buttered rice, and the saddle of venison with smitane sauce and cranberries. But what makes the Vier Jahreszeiten outstanding is, as in all great hotels, the quality of the service. Here and in other good out-of-the-way hotels as yet unsullied by the tourist smear, ‘service’ is not yet a dirty word, and in these days to be surrounded by helpful, friendly faces is a luxury without price. Hamburg is particularly blessed in this respect because the Hamburger is a most excellent person, solid, friendly and cheerful, and apparently with a soft spot (Hamburg has been the most important harbour in the Continent of Europe for several hundred years) for the foreigner.

  Traditionally democratic, there is yet a powerful aristocracy, or more properly elite, of reserved and ancient families in Hamburg. Without titles or other marks of nobility, they are generally accepted as being the ‘City Fathers’, with a patriarchal concern for Hamburg more powerful and effective than the municipal government. And how pleasing it is to be in a city which is really proud of itself, proud of its flag, which until a hundred years ago was better known overseas than the flag of Germany, proud of its dislike of the Prussians and its mistrust of Hitler, proud of its shipyards and of the way it has rebuilt itself after the war! And how well its town-planners are working, and what a contrast with some of the modern hideosity of the new Berlin! Here they are still rebuilding individual homes and modest apartment houses close to the earth, and not giant steel and glass structures that would ruin the character of the city.

  Hamburg suffered terribly during the war. It was a comparatively easy target from England. Because of its naval importance, it always had a high priority from the Admiralty, and it was, to the delight of the scientists who advised on ‘bombability’, terribly combustible. Nearly fifty per cent of its dwellings – a quarter of a million of them – were annihilated, fifty-five thousand people were killed and hundreds of thousands wounded.

  Over a period of nine days, from July 24th to August 3rd, 1942, occurred the great incendiary attacks called the Katastrophe. In these nine days, forty-eight thousand people were killed. People escaped from their burning houses and crumbling cellars into the streets only to stick immovable in the softened asphalt until this also caught fire, so that thousands of people out in the open were burnt to death in rivers of flame. For a whole week after the Katastrophe the sun was unable to penetrate the smoke. After this, three-quarters of a million people left the city and lived for months in the surrounding fields and woods. Learning these grisly facts I remembered how, in those days, studying the blown-up photographs from the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit and reading the estimates of damage, we in the Admiralty used to rub our hands with delight. Ah me!

/>   At the end of the war Hamburg was saved by its patriarchs. On Hitler’s orders the town was to be defended to the last brick and demolition charges to implement the Fuhrer’s scorched-earth policy were installed on a huge scale. Bremen did the same and was almost totally razed to the ground, but at the last moment the Hamburg patriarchs overrode the local Gauleiter and his henchmen and engineered the surrender of the town.

  In 1946 the Allies completed the work of the bombs by destroying the slips in the great harbour and blowing up the yards and floating docks. Destruction was only halted when the town council pleaded that further explosions would breach the Elbe tunnel. Long arguments ensued and were only brought to a close by a sporting gesture from the British Consul, who took a chair to the centre of the Elbe tunnel and sat on it smoking his pipe at the moment when the final explosion was due. But, for reasons which I could not discover, the demolition was again postponed and finally cancelled, though the British Consul remains a local hero to this day.

  A tour of the harbour, where the names of Blohm and Voss, Howaldt and Deutscher Werft, the great shipyards where the U-boats were repaired and refitted, and where the Bismarck was built, brought back the war-time ghosts. But now the thirty-one miles of piers (the harbour is sixty-two miles up the Elbe from the sea) and the giant floating docks are ninety per cent effective again after the clearance of some three thousand wrecks, and the great shipscape is full of drama.

  The weather prevented a day trip to Heligoland to visit the bird sanctuary, or to Sylt, half of which is still an R.A.F. establishment and the other half the largest nudist colony in the world (an intriguing combination!). Here on Sylt, at a certain point on the beaches, is a notice saying ‘Nature Colony’ and from there on it is an offence to wear clothes. A Hamburg friend who occasionally visits the place gave me a delightful picture of well-bred Hamburg citizens with no clothes on greeting friends with painful clicks of the heels and gracious ‘Küss die Hand gnädige Fraus’.

 

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