17 May 1954.
Just back from our visit to Assmannshausen. A sunny, happy little interlude. Dinner on the terrace looking across the Rhine under arches of wisteria to the accompaniment of sentimental music, drinking lots of red champagne which doesn’t make you drunk but gives you the illusion that you can waltz. We did some rough-and-ready waltzing at a small nearby café. Sitting at the table on the terrace by the Rhine I was overcome by a sentimental mood, no doubt inspired by the red champagne but also by the Rhineland atmosphere. The pleasure of intimate talk about feelings, about life, a kind of nostalgia for romantic happiness (for you are looking into the eyes of the other one) – it is the return of the mood of youth, of youth that talks more than it does and dreams more than either, a mood which in New York would seem inconceivably dated, in Paris – beside the point. In Germany I find myself often thinking of the French, their cutting edge of style, the finality of their speech, their contemptuous impatience of blunders. As for Germany, if it is not like England it is not like anything, and of course it is not like England; yet every now and then at the corner of one of those suburban streets, or in the face of a schoolboy, or in the unexpected identity of a word in the language, there is a resemblance, the more disconcerting because the Germans seem so profoundly alien. As for me, I like my foreigners foreign. “Vive la France!”
2 June 1954.
This house in the Linden Allee, Cologne, which is the Embassy residence, was built by the owner of a chain of stores in the characterless red-brick suburban style of the 1920s, so different from the ambitious, uninhibited monstrosities of pre-1914 German capitalist mansions. Almost the whole of this bourgeois residential part of Cologne escaped the bombing which wrecked the old medieval city and demolished the factories and the workers’ quarters.
There is a garden full of rambler roses on trellises. There is breakfast on the pillared terrace. There are drinks in the evening, when the weather allows, sitting on garden chairs watching the birds poking about in the bowl of the fountain, where a single jet of water gently pisses. There is, of course, a swimming-pool and, next to the pool, a barbecue, the creation of my predecessor as ambassador – a shrewd, kind Western Canadian judge with a folksy vein to which we also owe the tooth-mugs in the bathroom with their alarming inscription “O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us.”
Inside the house the rooms are well-spaced and tall. There is a vista from the marble-paved hall of flowers against the tapestry. There is a colossal fireplace. There is a candelabra hanging from the ceiling composed of bronze cupids which some previous occupant thought fit to clothe with little gilt jock-straps. On the terrace, imprisoned in a wooden packing-case, is a vast male marble nude which used to be in the hall. My predecessors could not live with him. Some day I plan an unveiling ceremony. Supplies and Properties of the Department of External Affairs have repainted formerly dark walls and ceilings of the interior of the house in an effort to induce cheerfulness. All the furniture has been re-covered in bright materials, with a fondness – almost amounting to a mania – for brilliant, strident yellow. Upstairs, tout le confort moderne – yet I think the big marble bathrooms stink like badgers’ dens. Something wrong with the elaborate German plumbing. The house is pleasant enough to live in, but I hate the German servants’ practice of locking the doors and windows from the inside at night. Down come steel shutters over all the ground-floor windows while the butler locks the doors from within and retires with the keys. I have now stopped him from doing this. It gives me the feeling of being incarcerated in a private lunatic asylum.
8 June 1954.
Developing an anonymous public face which expresses only cautious benevolence, controlling the spasms of nervous exasperation or high spirits, getting into the groove, the ambassadorial groove. It is a game, like learning German. Whether it is a game worthy of a grown man I cannot say.
How fortunate it is that the Embassy residence is in Cologne rather than Bonn. For Bonn, like most arbitrarily designated political capitals without a metropolitan tradition, is hard to love. The Germans themselves certainly do not love it. No doubt once as a university town it had its charm, before the politicians and the bureaucracy moved in and the new styleless government office buildings sprouted. In its environs are neat, agreeable residences suitable for residence by civil servants. Its admirers say that “it is a good place to bring up children” – an unenticing recommendation to childless adults like Sylvia and myself. Also in Bonn is the enclave (known locally as the Gold Coast) where the large American community of diplomats and officials is concentrated. There it is possible to purchase at the PX stores all sorts of American goods and to dispense with German shops. There, too, is the American Club, to which we Canadians have kindly been given courtesy membership and where cocktails are properly mixed and Germany seems further away than the Burning Tree Golf Club, Washington, D.C. In Zittelmannstrasse is the Canadian Chancery, to which I am conveyed every weekday in the official car via the Cologne–Bonn autobahn. The Chancery is modestly housed in a medium-sized villa. Its outlook is pleasantly pastoral. At the end of the quiet street is a rough, grassy field where sheep browse – a reminder that until recently this was a village lane on the outskirts of the town. Beyond the field the land slopes down through a municipal park of repellent aspect to the Rhine – an easy stroll to the river’s bank when things in the office become too tedious. Bonn seems to me like an acquaintance – agreeable enough unless one does not fancy that particular mix: bureaucracy plus suburbia. Cologne is a very different matter. A flourishing centre of civilization for centuries and now what? The bombardment of Cologne during the war was concentrated on the ancient core of the city. In a series of hammer-blows the medieval walled town and most of its renowned monuments were reduced to rubble. The vast and overpraised cathedral and, oddly enough, the main railway station survived, with the tottering remains of some Romanesque churches and a medieval gateway opening on to the desolation within. Ten years after, on damp days, there hangs in the air of Cologne the stale stink of buried rubble and scorched beams that brings back to me London after a blitz. But here the destruction was more nearly total. When a city has been murdered, does its spirit survive the corruption of the body? The people of Cologne have kept their pride in their tradition of guild and church. Its affinities are with Trier and Aachen; the roots are Roman, the flowering was medieval. The corporate pride is exclusive – one hears its echo in the patronizing tone in which a citizen of Cologne speaks of upstart Düsseldorf, alien Berlin, or Americanized Frankfurt. I have no part in all this – I am an outsider to these memories and to the daily life of the city. Yet I feel an absurd borrowed sense of superiority when I say, “We live in Cologne,” as though it were grander to inhabit a noble ruined city than neat, middle-class Bonn.
12 June 1954.
Back from Berlin today, from a visit to the Canadian Military Mission there, which comes under my authority. The Berliners are stout-hearted, with a front-line mentality, like Londoners during the war. They are condescending about Bonn, which they despise as provincial and as being remote from daily contact with the enemy (now the Russians). Visited the reception centre where the refugees from East Germany are given physical examinations and kept overnight before being sent to the refugee camps. The medical side of it is under Frau Doktor Gerhard, a tough sergeant-major of a woman of seventy, full of humour and magnetism. She has seventeen doctors working under her. What struck one was the smoothness of the organization, the incredible cleanness, the neatness of all the buildings in which thousands of refugees are housed. Not a scrap of paper lying on the floors, all clothes neatly folded in the dormitories. This mass of humanity, mostly rather dirty poor people with their miscellaneous belongings, passes through these buildings, living there without squalor or confusion. Imagine what it would be in France! More surprising was the humanity which seemed to accompany this efficiency, especially in the children’s quarters, where little blue-eyed, flaxen-haired children of
four and five were sitting round tables in pretty, airy nurseries playing with blocks with nurses who seemed kind and devoted. Even the quarters of the criminals and prostitutes who had slipped over the line to the transit camp were spotlessly clean. Did those who made the concentration camps make this?
I went to the interrogation of a woman member of the East German police who said she had deserted to come to the West, but who was suspected of being an East German spy. Narrow face, thin-lipped mouth, blank blue eyes. Something cold-blooded and vapid about her. She recited her story in a high, unfaltering voice, like a learned lesson. As a liar she failed by being too word-perfect. Age about twenty-two, formerly a saleswoman in a small town, then a private, later an officer, in the East German secret police, denounced a woman friend of hers to the police and was herself denounced to the police by her father because she had a boyfriend in West Berlin, hence her flight. She struck me as the type from which the Nazi women jailers came. As a saleswoman no doubt she was efficient, but would have been just as efficient at work in a gas chamber, and would have enjoyed the latter more.
Spent the day walking the streets of Berlin. Among the ruins are the new buildings. Some of the monumental buildings of the past survive like great mastodons of a vanished epoch. In a pile of rubble there would be an ornate doorway decorated with mouldering caryatids and leading to nothing.
14 June 1954.
“ ‘Damn’ braces, ‘bless’ relaxes.” Got up in a bad temper and found this quite useful stiffening during the day. Herr Kleiber, Chef de Cabinet of the President of the Republic, called and was very critical of the French. It is impossible to defend the French behaviour over the European Defence Community, but none the less it is irritating to have to listen to the Germans sitting in judgement on them, and galling to sense – under their “more in sorrow than in anger” attitude – their contempt for French pretensions, their self-satisfaction with their own record. I am afraid that “rather a Frenchman wrong than a German right” is hardly a possible answer.
Received by Chancellor Adenauer. The more I see of him the more impressed I am by him. He is a very wise and a very wily old man, much subtler than the other German politicians, making them seem raw and provincial.
17 June 1954.
Unity Day celebration at the Bundeshaus1 of the 17th June risings in Berlin against the Soviet occupants. Looking down from the diplomatic gallery at the rows of middle-aged, middle-class deputies, all listening with restrained boredom to long-winded speeches, I thought, “And these are the chaps who used to listen to Hitler.”
The ugliness of the Cologne population is something to be marvelled at. In the crowd outside Cologne Cathedral today listening to the Corpus Christi celebrations, there was not one attractive woman; unglossy, dry hair, pasty or weather-beaten complexions, little boot-button eyes, sack-like clothes, dun-coloured or grey, big bottoms, and a stumping, hausfrau walk. And so many of the men with long, badly modelled noses and high cheekbones, with something goose-like about their movements.
Last night, dinner at the French Ambassador’s (François-Poncet’s) château on the top of a hill overlooking the Rhine. The choice of the house was designed to impress the Germans and everybody else with the presence of a Great Power – France. It is more successful in general effect than on closer scrutiny. An “eighteenth-century” French château, in fact built by a rich German industrialist in 1912. There were the much-talked-of footmen in scarlet satin knee-breeches and there was the much-heralded cuisine. Not a single German there, all diplomats and their wives, several pretty Latin American women, bored with Bonn and living for their next shopping expedition to Paris. Agreeably frivolous conversation of the kind that the presence of Germans makes difficult. A little diplomatic world under a glass dome.
23 June 1954.
I am trying to learn German. The woman who is teaching me is making me learn the German version of Little Red Riding Hood by heart. This is the only German I so far know. Last night we went to a German dinner party. I was seated between two wives of German high officials, stout bodies, little gold crosses on chains round their necks, reddish faces, not a word of English. Finally, unable to stand the silence any longer, I turned from one to the other and launched into Red Riding Hood. “Red Riding Hood comes into the wood. She is not frightened of the wolf. When she sees the grandmother she asks, ‘Why have you got such big eyes? Why have you got such big ears?’ ” All this in quite fluent German. The two ladies stared at me in dumb amazement. One of them asked on a questioning note, “Bitte, Exzellenz?” Otherwise, no reaction. However, the German official on the other side of the table, who could not hear what I was saying, came up to me afterwards and complimented me on my fluent German.
18 July 1954.
The servants in this house impose their own restrictions. Sylvia and I must sit solemnly at the long dinner table, taste the wine, be waited upon by butler and maid. When I leave the house for the office I must be bowed to the courtyard gate by the butler, who hands over the red leather dispatch box to the waiting chauffeur. It is impossible to create confusion in this house. Throw your clothes on the floor at night, they are picked up and sorted out by morning. How is one to resist this smoothing-out, flattening-out process which makes an ambassador of you from the collar-button inward?
26 July 1954.
Where are all the former Nazis in Germany? I mean, physically, where are they? They are certainly not to be met in Bonn, or, if they are, they are well disguised. On the evidence of one’s eyes and ears one would be led to believe that the entire German population was subjugated by Hitler and a small gang of his criminal associates. Another curious thing is that, of the many ex-officers of the German army I have met, none mention serving on the Western Front. With Rommel in Africa – yes, but mostly they talk of their service on the Eastern Front against the Russians, and the theme of their story is that they recognized the communist menace, that they were fighting to defend Western civilization against a danger which we were too blind to recognize. As to their casualties in Russia, they are mentioned in a tone which suggests “these died not only for us but for you.” If the Nazis have gone to ground, the Jews have vanished into the gas ovens. I have only met one Jew since I have been here. When the word “Jew” is mentioned among the Germans, a self-conscious silence sets in, as if a social gaffe had been made.
The Germans in their dealings with us seem on their best behaviour. Cautious, patient, kindly, friendly people without a trace of arrogance. It is as though they had all received a mysterious order from a hidden leader as to how they should behave.
These new bifocals are tormenting me. I feel like a horse wearing a bit for the first time, or as a boy when I had to wear woolly underwear. And to think that I have to live with these for the rest of my life!
10 October 1954.
A Sunday of getting into the car and motoring somewhere for lunch together and afterwards seeing old churches and castles. The abbey of Maria Laach has stood there by its lake for a thousand years, or as near as makes no difference. It is big, all right, but is it beautiful? At any rate it is startling, like meeting an elephant in a glade. Lunch in a manor-house-turned-motel, the family portraits looking down on fat men and women eating. Then to an ancient church near Bonn. The church made me shiver, and coming back in the car I felt a sudden, shuddering, Sunday-afternoon melancholy. In the mist, youths in belted mackintoshes down to their ankles, and old women in black suits, were stumping along. I wanted to get right into bed and start making love, as a sign of life in the face of those mineral monuments and vegetable people.
25 November 1954.
Dined again with the François-Poncets, guests consisting of rich Rhineland industrialists and their wives. They came from Duisburg and Düsseldorf with their diamonds and minks. The atmosphere was so thick with money that one felt it could be a subject embarrassing in any connection to mention. These people seemed to be a world in itself of big money, very different and quite apart from the local nobility and
gentry. The shabby-grand Wittgensteins and their friends live in the lodges of their castles with halls decorated with antlers and no springs in the drawing-room sofa. They are the easiest to get along with. They almost all had English governesses and talk a fluent English interspersed with pre-War slang and Mayfair expressions of the 1930s. They had no opportunity to catch up during the War. All talk of the Nazis with a sort of snobbish disgust. All the men seemed to have served in the army on the Eastern Front.
26 November 1954.
Lunch today with Brentano, who is to be the next Foreign Minister. I had heard that he was a stupid man, but I do not think so. Yet he seemed hardly tiresome enough to make a successful politician. He confirmed what I hear from everywhere, that there is no enthusiasm in this country for rearmament; no one seems keen about it in industry, in labour, or among the intelligentsia. We lunched in icy draughts at the Redoute Club and drank brandy after lunch, which made me sleepy, so that when I left Brentano at the door I absent-mindedly said “Goodnight” to him at two-thirty in the afternoon.
The other night François-Poncet was talking about Le Grand Meaulnes. He says it is German and not French in its kind of romantic inspiration. Curious, I have often thought of that book since coming to this country.
Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790) Page 8