by Ian Fleming
Half-way down the Elbe there is an establishment which is apt to cause confusion and embarrassment to visiting ships and particularly to units of foreign navies. Here some enterprising innkeeper has set up ‘Welcome Point Schulau’ with a large coffee house and tea gardens. The Hamburgers come here to watch the ships sailing in and out of the river and the innkeeper has devised a private welcome system. As soon as an arriving ship comes within range, huge loudspeakers blare out three or four bars of the Flying Dutchman, followed by further bars of ‘Stadt Hamburg’, a local folksong. The ship is then greeted in German, followed by her native language, and the welcome is closed by the national anthem of the ship’s country of origin, followed by a few more bars of the Flying Dutchman. At the beginning of the national anthem the Hamburg flag on top of the coffee house is dipped. Much the same rigmarole is followed for departing ships. Ships’ captains who have been through this before now merely wave a cheerful hand, if that, but units of the Royal Navy have been known to go through frenzied counter-gallantries with hastily mustered hands standing to attention and every kind of ceremonial refinement – all much to the delight of the paying customers ashore.
Other pleasures of the city are Hagenbecks Zoo – built in 1884 and the first zoo without fences – a feature of which is the circus-animal training school, where you can judge whether this science involves cruelty or not; the ‘Planten un Blomen’ (Hamburg dialect) Park, which is an enchantment; the Church of England, appropriately situated in the middle of St Pauli, where a resident English chaplain has officiated since 1612; the Hamburg History Museum, where there is the longest model railway, scale , in Europe; the Modern Art Gallery, outstandingly well designed and containing an exciting collection of Impressionists and modern pictures (I just missed a much-lauded Hans Arp exhibition); excellent theatres (they gave the premiere of Lawrence Durrell’s Sappho here); the Hansa Theater, the premier variety house in Germany, where drinks and snacks can be served during the show at all of the four hundred and eighty seats; several excellent restaurants headed, for me, by Ehmke, and, lower down the list, Onkel Hugo’s in St Pauli, which is a good starting-point for the night life.
There is much literary and artistic activity in the town, which is the headquarters of the great post-war publishing empire of Springer; and Hamburg is the centre of the modern German film industry, at whose extensive studios Paul Rotha is now filming the life of Hitler with, surprisingly enough, the full collaboration of the Soviet Government, who have made available to him all their rich documentation on the subject.
One small point for the gastronome: you will be unable to find a hamburger in Hamburg – chopped steak is known there as Deutscher steak, and you would be considered eccentric if you were to slice open a roll and stuff your Deutscher steak inside it in the fashion of American hamburgers.
A last word of reassurance on the night life of Hamburg on which I may be thought to have dwelt immodestly and too long. The local guide-book says, ‘The greatest charm St Pauli offers is that here you can watch people of all nations amusing themselves as they do at home.’ Ahem!
INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE
Hotels
Five-star: Undoubtedly the best is the world-famous and dignified Vierjahreszeiten, the Four Seasons, in the Neuer Jungfemstieg. Hamburg’s patrician families also swear by its cuisine, its grill and its snack bar, the Condi. The other main five-star hotel in Hamburg is the Atlantic, over-looking the Alster at its wateriest; it is more pretentious, but has superb service. The British Control Commission used it as a transit hotel after the war, but that has not affected its quality today. I recommend also the Baseler Hospiz, on the Esplanade, comfortable, quiet, small and reasonably unpretentious. Its one hundred and ninety-eight rooms mostly have baths or showers. Rebuilt since the war-time bombing. Food is good North-German style, no frills, but wholesome and appetizing. Medium priced.
One-star: The Park Hotel Beyer, on the Blumenstrasse, a quarter of an hour from the centre of Hamburg, quiet, comfortable and small. Room prices range from 13 Marks, (£1 1s. 0d.) for single room without bath to 40 Marks (£3 4s. 0d.) for double room with bath, both without breakfast. Cheaper but brasher and noisier is the newly built Hotel Im Parkhochhaus am Dammtor, Drehbahn 15, in the centre of the city.
Restaurants
Five-star: Lembcke, on the Holzdamm 49, near the Atlantic Hotel. Famous for the quality of its meat; popular with the local theatrical community, a sort of Hamburg Cafe Royal as it used to be, with a touch of neo-Victorian or neo-Wilhelmian about it. As an alternative the Kleine Fiihrhaus, Harvestehuder Fährdamm on the Alster. One of Hamburg’s fashionable restaurants, patronized by all the visiting Prominenz. Another old-fashioned and excellent restaurant on the Gansemarkt in the town centre is Ehmke. Speciality: oysters.
One-star: I can recommend the Fischereihafen-Restaurant, on the Neuen Fischereihafen in Altona, right on the fish harbour itself. Small, popular with food-lovers, fairly inexpensive. Speciality: Hamburg crayfish and eel soups, and a sort of Hamburg bouillabaisse.
Night-clubs
Five-star: For dancing, used by the jeunesse dorée of the patrician families: the Riverside, Alster Arkaden. Usually a first-class band. Owned by an Italian. Excellent food, no floor show but usually frequented by lots of pretty girls.
One-star: The Reeperbahn has everything to offer, from the big, breezy strip-tease girl-shows at the Trichter and the Allotria to quieter dance-hall places like the Café Lauser, where the dancing partners are the prettiest in Hamburg but only dance with the customers if invited to. It is different at the Café Keese where ladies can make the running and male guests have to take the floor when asked.
Out-of-the-Way: The Glocken-Kate, Eichholz 15, an unusual but popular night-spot visited mainly by Hamburg people. The owner, an ex-ship’s cook, puts on nightly performances on a remarkable one-man band, a sort of Madame Tussaud orchestra of dummy figures playing different instruments and all done by means of strings, ropes and pulleys. Absolutely no deception! A sort of Dali-ish nonsense which appeals to the Hamburgers.
9
BERLIN
EVERY CAPITAL CITY has its own smell. London smells of fried fish and Player’s, Paris of coffee, onions and Caporals, Moscow of cheap eau-de-Cologne and sweat. Berlin smells of cigars and boiled cabbage, and B.E.A. dropped me into the middle of the smell on the kind of day I associate with this lugubrious city. The sky was asphalt-colour above the asphalt-coloured town, and the Prussian wind, as sharp as a knife, blew the rubble dust into one’s eyes and mouth.
Berlin was fifty per cent destroyed during the war as part of the great Strafe, the great corporal punishment meted out to the people who have caused more pain and grief in the world than any other nation in this century. Around eight million Germans were killed in the last war and, in West Germany alone, there survive nearly three and a half million victims, maimed, widowed and orphaned, drawing war pensions amounting to over four billion D-marks annually, and the reverberations of the tremendous thrashing Berlin received still hang on the air.
As I walked and drove through the West Sector and the East, noting the smattering of new buildings and the rather meagre and sham-looking new streets and housing projects, I was accompanied by the echo of vast and shattering explosions, and expected at any moment to see the town crumble away again in smoke and flames.
The tidying up goes on apace, but there are still acres and acres that will have to be knocked down before there can be any real impression of a new city rising from the ruins of the old.
This is very much more so, of course, in the Eastern Sector, where remembered death and chaos and, worst of all, present drabness hang most heavily on the air, and where there is no speck of colour or glitter in the cleaning up that has already, with typical Russian bad taste and skimped workmanship, been achieved. This contrast with the West is underlined by comparison between the two great Berlin streets, Kurfürstendamm in the West and Under den Linden in the East.
The former, though only
a shadow of its old self, is brightly lit and thronged and busy. Its rather uninteresting shops are wide open to business and the cafes are crowded. But Unter den Linden now contains only a handful of drab, makeshift shops against a great backdrop of ruins, and the new lime trees are skimpy and stark. Few people are about and few cars and, as in all the Eastern Sector, one wonders where in heaven everybody is.
The seventy million cubic metres of rubble in Berlin are gradually being made into mountains, which then will be turfed and have trees planted on them. These mountains are known as Monte Klamotten – Rubbish Mountains – and the total operation is known as ‘Hitler’s Collected Works’.
There are also the flattened plains, from which the new buildings are gradually rising to give living-space and workroom to the two and a quarter million West Berliners, and I spent some time visiting the more publicized of these new erections, notably the Hansa Settlement and the Corbusier ‘living unit’ built more or less on his ‘Modulor’ system, and vaunted as the ‘new face’ of Berlin.
This ‘new face’ is the ‘new face’ we are all coming to know – the ‘up-ended-packet-of-fags’ design for the maximum number of people to live in the minimum amount of space.
This system treats the human being as a six-foot cube of flesh and breathing-space and fits him with exquisite economy into steel and concrete cells. He is allotted about three times the size of his cube as his ‘bed-sitter’, once his cube for his bathroom and once for his kitchen. So that he won’t hate this cellular existence too much, he is well warmed and lighted, and he is provided with a chute in the wall through which he can dispose of the muck of his life – cartons, newspapers, love-letters and gin bottles – the last chaotic remains of his architecturally undesirable ‘non-cube’ life. These untidy bits of him are consumed by some great iron stomach in the basement.
Having taken a quick and shuddering look at Corbusier’s flattened human ants’ nest in Marseilles some years ago, and having visited his recent architectural exhibition in England, I had already decided that he and I did not see eye to eye in architectural matters, and I am glad to learn that the Berliners, however anxious to clamber out of their ruins into a new home, are inclined to agree with me. When they heard of his plan and were later sharply lectured by him on the life beautiful, they christened him the ‘Devil with Thick Spectacles’, and his two-thousand-person apartment house – if it can be so called – is still ungratefully known as the ‘Living Machine’. Much to his rage, their chaotic wishes partially triumphed over the symmetrical bee-ant mathematical principles on which his mumbo-jumbological Modular system is based. This system lays down, in part, that the correct height of a room shall be a six-foot man with his arm raised straight above his head (try it!). Corbusier complained that the increase in height from 2.26 metres to 2.50 metres that the Berliners forced upon him had painfully upset what he describes as his ‘architectonic masterpiece’, and he was even more bitter when the authorities decided that his ‘living units’ were, in fact, not the ‘paradise for children and mothers’ which he claimed they were, and turned them into apartments for bachelors and childless couples. The shop centre which he wished to place in the middle of his sixteen storeys was put down on the ground floor, which spoilt ‘the grandeur of the entrance hall’.
The argument was a wonderful example of the eternal struggle between the designer-planner and the awkward human being who would rather be called a ‘square’ than a ‘cube’.
One feature of this giant ‘Living Machine’ amused me. Not knowing what to do with all the entrails involved in the heating and water systems, the designer had been forced to let them pour out on the ground in a tangle of aluminium snakes. Corbusier made the best of the mess by enclosing the whole untidiness in a kind of glass house, so that the inhabitants may proudly watch the workings of their ‘Living Machine’s’ stomach.
The Hansa quarter on the edge of the Tiergarten, the big central open-air space of Berlin, was thrown open to a ‘Living Machine’ competition amongst the world’s finest architects, and it is depressing to see that the German, Israeli, French, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Swiss and American architects have all plumped for variations on the ‘packet-of-fags’ motif, with the addition of a couple of truly startling churches and a conference hall, christened the ‘Pregnant Oyster’ by the ungrateful Berliners.
That all these buildings strike me and most Berliners as quite hideous cannot alter the fact that only by these vertical means could the government of West Berlin have managed to tuck away nearly half a million inhabitants in something over ten years, and one only has to go over to the Eastern Sector and drive down the pretentious turn-of-the-century Tiflis-style Stalin Allee to accept the fact that all the ‘new world’, independent of nationality, is getting more and more hideous every day.
I was accompanied on this architectural foray by ‘Our Man in Germany’, Antony Terry, sometimes in company with his wife, Sarah Gainham, the noted thriller-writer and correspondent for the Spectator. Between them, they know most of Germany, and certainly every inch of Berlin, and in Terry’s Volkswagen we proceeded on a series of splendid zigzags between pleasures and duties which, for the sake of brevity, I will cannibalize into a rather haphazard catalogue.
Queen Nefertiti, for instance, rescued from the coal-mine at Eisenach, where she and most of the German art treasures spent the war, is now back in the Dahlem museum, her proud, smiling lips looking as kissable as ever. Hitler’s bunker in the Eastern Zone finally resisted all attempts by the Russians to blow it up, so it has now been converted into a hillock of rubble and will soon be a pretty green mound in the middle of a children’s playground. The ruins of the Gedächtnis-Kirche rise, and will apparently for ever rise, like a huge ugly thumb at the top of the Kurfürstendamm – gloomy memorial to yet another war. The church’s aesthetic shape could be greatly improved by a few more artistically sited explosions. The grim ruin will be somewhat cheered by a carillon of six new bells, for which Prince Louis Ferdinand, the last of the Hohenzollerns and grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm, has composed a melody. The Stauffenberg memorial, a naked youth in bronze, commemorating the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, stands in the gloomy, cavernous courtyard of Hitler’s Army and Navy Communications Centre, against a background of massive chunks of reinforced concrete that will for ever resist the demolition experts. The porter, Knoeller, who was there at the time of Stauffenberg’s execution, showed us the spot where he had stood facing the firing squad. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there were no bullet holes in the walls; all such executions were carried out against a background of broken rubble, so that the masonry should not show evidence of the shooting.’ This is a particularly haunted area of Berlin, hard by the Landwehr canal, into which the body of Rosa Luxemburg was thrown after she and Karl Liebknecht were captured and shot, ‘while trying to escape’, by the Brigade Ehrhard during the Spartakus rising of 1919.
The Hotel Adlon, where I had revelled before the war, is in the Eastern Sector and is now only Number 70A, Wilhelmstrasse. Nothing remains of the former glory, about which a whole book has been written, and you enter the surviving bullet-marked three storeys through the old servants’ entrance. We had cups of thickly grained coffee in the ‘restaurant’, a kind of tatty ‘good-pull-up-for-carmen’ with the beige wallpaper and dusty potted cacti that are the hallmark of Russian restaurant decor. The only other guests were a peaky, taut-skinned little man with a compulsive, hysterical face, obviously an informer or a blackmarketeer, whispering to a prosperous-looking businessman while his tow-haired mistress (we assumed) sipped her Caucasian Burgundy.
The Pergamon Museum is perhaps the only real ‘must’ in the Russian Sector. Here, in great majesty, have been reassembled the famed classical treasures of Germany, recently handed back by Russia. Here, in particular, is the Pergamon Altar Frieze, assembled in one vast hall against an architectural background of great splendour. As the Michelin guide would say, it is definitely ‘worth the detour’.
Inci
dentally, this splendid museum is noteworthy for one particular piece of Communist nonsense. Throughout, the exhibits are not dated ‘B.C.’ but ‘v.u.Z.’ (before our times), and ‘A.D.’ is not given at all.
From these grandeurs to the Alexanderplatz for a nervous glance at the East German Secret Police Headquarters, hard by Gunther Podola’s old private school and the grimy house where he spent much of his youth. On the other side of the square are the remains of Hitler’s notorious Secret Police Headquarters. The whole area, for me, was full of past and present screams, and we scurried off across the frontier to the friendly lights and busy turmoil of West Berlin and a Molle und Korn (boiler-maker and his assistant) of beer and schnapps.
Over this ‘traveller’s joy’, beneath the infra-red heaters of the Cafe Marquardt, we watched our neighbours consuming the economic ‘one cup of coffee and seven glasses of water’ of the old-time cafe squatters, and, outside, the dangerous traffic hurtling up and down the Kurfürstendamm. Antony Terry said that Germany has the highest traffic-accident rate in the world – more than double the English figures. The Germans, anyway a hysterical race, are now almost maddened by overwork – particularly in the management class. They spend their days in their offices and then roar off down the autobahns. They fall asleep at eighty miles an hour, and their cars tear across the middle section, headon into cars in the opposite lane, or dive off the shoulders of the roads into the trees. To prevent this, the drivers munch Pervitin or Preludin to keep themselves awake, thus submerging their exhaustion and heightening their tension. Heart disease, accelerated by over-eating food cooked in the universal cheap frying-fat, carries them off in their early fifties, and the newspapers are every day full of those black-bordered memorial notices saying that Herr Direktor So-and-so has passed away ‘at the height of his powers’.