The Rhineland has a nervous, boring, neurotic atmosphere but is not commonplace. The obsessive feeling of the place persists, putting everything slightly out of true, distorting, casting strange lights and shadows, always with a persistent, sinister undertone. It is hard to render in words – in music?
Of the social situation and our relations with the Germans, Elizabeth Bowen says, “It is a great, bright, ghastly smile covering an incurably false position.” Elizabeth’s new book, A World of Love, is marvellous, a masterpiece of her own genius. She wrote a lot of it in the sitting-room of this house when she was staying here, and on the verandah of that small hotel in Bonn.
20 December 1954. Hotel Plaza-Athénée, Paris.
I am here for Mike Pearson’s1 visit, spending my time with the Canadian Delegation. Rye whisky in the hotel sitting-room, then a straggle of the delegation, a couple of secretaries, and a tame journalist; we all drift out to some unlikely restaurant or night club for the evening. All day is spent wandering round hotel corridors, waiting for the Minister to come in or to go out, waiting for the typing to be finished, knocking at doors with Draft 3 of the speech in one’s hand. Where is the Minister? Out buying a present for his wife? A good dose of Canadians. When I went to the plane to see them off I felt I’d like to stay and arrive home for Christmas, coming down in the snow and icy wind at Dorval, flying on down to Halifax. I thought what hell it would be to be an exile, to see a plane leaving for Canada and to know that I could never go back.
24 December 1954. Cologne.
Wild wind blowing. Yesterday it blew the scaffolding off Cologne Cathedral. It came hurtling down from the high tower into a narrow street, scattering the people like a thunderbolt from Heaven and sending them scurrying into side-streets and shop fronts for shelter. The household is disorganized by the new dachshund puppy we have just bought. A long-haired dachshund, an attractive little creature. It peed in the middle of the new dining-room carpet where no table, chair, or rug can conceal the damage.
The Vice-Chancellor, Blücher, came to lunch. He represented Germany at the Queen’s coronation in London. His eyes filled with tears when he spoke of the significance and beauty of the coronation ceremony and of the kindness of Princess Alice. He said that here was a lesson for Germany, and expressed deep nostalgia for the monarchy. Blücher struck me as rather commonplace and absurdly vain. When we were talking of different German accents and which was the best, he said, “I do not want to boast, but you could not possibly do better than listen to my accent.” He is anxious to play a part in foreign affairs and he indicates that his views are wider and less narrowly political than those of Adenauer.
26 December 1954.
Overcast weather, rushing wind, mire in the fields, swollen, dirty little rivers, trees snapped by the gale. We are sitting in the upstairs sitting-room among the presents for today’s children’s Christmas party – children of the staff, Canadian and German. The presents include Indian headdresses, teddy bears, jigsaw puzzles. The radio is going full blast but I am afraid to touch it for fear of breaking it for the third time. The puppy, now called Popski, is locked in the bathroom and barking incessantly. The German servants are delighted with their presents, delighted with our Christmas party, the cook making endless cakes covered with marzipan flowers.
1 January 1955.
Had an obscene-looking upside-down egg with shreds of ham adhering to it for breakfast. Began rereading Swann’s Way in my bath and thought of when I first read it in a cold bath in my lodgings in Earls Court Road over the creamery during the heat wave of 1932 when I was earning four pounds a week as a reporter for the Evening Standard, and then later in Paris she and I read Proust aloud to each other in the intervals of making love.
2 January 1955.
A New Year’s party last night, all English. A lady called Mrs. Tusket said, “Hamlet was only fourteen years of age.” How does she know? Did some friend of his tell her? She said that it is a part that is played too old by men too old for it. Sat next to an Englishman after dinner who said, “After nine years in Germany I have been offered a job in Rhodesia, so my wife and I are off. Quite remunerative, the job, with a house thrown in.” I asked, “Is Rhodesia a colony on its own or part of a federation?” “No idea,” he said, “never been in Africa except in Tangiers for one day and that’s no guide.”
3 January 1955.
Holiday. Spent the day playing with the dog, reading Swann’s Way. Tea before the fire, house still hung with Christmas cards, greyness outside. Hamlet was not fourteen as Mrs. Tusket pretends, but over twenty-four, as the Anglican archdeacon has proved to me from the evidence of the Yorick scene.
The evening party last night – danced with a pretty Irish woman. Asked her, “What do women mean by security?” She said, “I could give you a ribald answer to that one. We want to know it’s there. Anyway,” she said, glancing out of the corner of her green eyes, “that’s one thing I’ve never bothered my head about. Security I care nothing for.”
9 January 1955.
The servants are calling for Popski up and down the house. They adore him and spoil him incessantly. He will be lucky if he doesn’t turn into a self-centred little neurotic.
The German men are good company. They enjoy jokes, although preferring the one about the other man slipping on the banana peel. They have a streak of adolescent cynicism. But they are not hypocrites, they are not platitudinous. Although they may be deceitful about their intentions, they are frank and rather indiscreet about their feelings. They are by nature terrific talkers. Their most striking lack seems to be grace, style, elegance. The so-called festival gaiety of the Rhineland depends on immense quantities of beer or wine, and ends in moon-faced boorishness.
A bold, unstable race. They have the attraction of vitality and the fascination which the adventurous exercise. They are not a middle-aged race as so many of the English and French are (not to mention Canadians).
I was thinking today about the ups and downs through which so many of the diplomats here in Bonn have passed during the course of the war years. So many of the Europeans have been in exile from their own countries, the Dutch Ambassador for one, living in a bed-sitting-room in London, then – with the liberation of the Netherlands – becoming Governor General of Indonesia in a palace with a hundred servants. François-Poncet, Figaro hack, French Ambassador, a prisoner of the Gestapo, and now Ambassador again. As for the Asians, many of them have served their term in prisons during the colonial period, whereas the communist diplomats have of course had a training as revolutionaries. Yet all this variety of experience is triumphed over by the extraordinary force of the convention of the diplomatic corps, a caste which envelops everyone, so tenacious of its privileges that it has maintained a sort of eighteenth-century enclave in the modern world, ruled by privilege – manners good, bad, and indifferent – and, above all, rank.
A Bavarian gentleman came to lunch today. Brilliantly blue eyes a little too expressive, a bachelor, takes immense trouble over his fingernails. He had an odd expression for near-Nazis, saying they had “a brownish tinge” (an allusion to the Brown Shirts). He said, “I never had any sympathy for the Nazis, yet after all even I fought in Hitler’s army. But then, you people were allied with communism. So there you are. I remember the first time I said ‘Heil Hitler.’ It was to get into a military hospital to take a present to a sick friend; otherwise they would not have let me in. But I was never a Nazi. Not that I suppose you will want to check up on that, but it is a fact.” I felt like saying, “It’s not your guilt or lack of guilt that interests me, it’s your experiences. Tell me what it was like to live through all that.”
There was a domestic crisis today. The butler, Erich, has been having an affair with one of the housemaids. His wife has found out and insists that he should leave and go to Munich to start a restaurant with her. In talking to me he burst into tears, saying he didn’t want to leave and that women were terrible – the same all the world over – so unreasonable. In fact I am
very anxious to keep Erich as he is an extremely good butler with a sympathetic although weak character. I have suggested to him that I would pay the rent of his wife’s house in Munich if she wanted to go there and he could join her at some indefinite period in the future. He seems inclined to accept this, but no doubt when his wife has talked to him he will change his mind.
12 January 1955.
Started the day with a very irritating conversation with François-Poncet on the telephone in which he got the better of me. What a genius the French have for putting one in the wrong. It is a great mistake to discuss business with them in their own language. Even a stupid Frenchman, which François-Poncet certainly is not, can score off one with that weapon in hand.
A professor of chemistry from Bonn University to lunch today. He talked about conditions in his former university of Leipzig. He is in touch with his colleagues there and says that the régime bears hardest on law and the humanities. Scientists have no trouble and are doing very good work, with excellent pay.
13 January 1955.
I cut my throat this morning when shaving and have gone about all day looking like a failed suicide. The sitting-room is full of hyacinths, white, pink, and mauve, and smells delicious. I must go and dress for the fancy-dress ball at the French Embassy. False beard. Erich says it makes me look like a Russian prince. I think it makes me look like a commissar. Sylvia looks lovely in her costume.
15 January 1955.
I am certainly lucky in the staff of the Embassy. John Starnes, the Counsellor, would make a better Ambassador than I. He has an acute, questioning mind and a grasp of German affairs. He is also a companion and friend with whom one never has a dull moment. Helen, his wife, is a delight – lovely to look at, funny, and equal to any occasion. Pam McDougall, the First Secretary, is handsome, humorous, and exceptionally able. The Air Attaché, Doug Edwards, and his wife Lois have become what one could call “boon companions” of ours. We knew them in Paris days when he was at the Embassy there. He is the easiest of company and she is witty and attractive. The younger members of the staff, Peyton Lyon and Frank Stone, are among the most promising of their generation in the public service.
16 January 1955.
Luncheon party here today, including the Wittgensteins and her mother, old Countess Metternich. She was English by birth, the daughter of an admiral, and her mother was a Miss Kenny from Halifax, Nova Scotia. She said to me in earnest tones, “Have you ever seen Thornvale, outside Halifax? It must be a beautiful house. My mother always told me that it was far finer than the Metternich castle.” In fact, Thornvale is a Victorian wooden villa. I was much amused by this piece of Nova Scotian loyalty and I backed it up strongly, saying, “Your mother was quite right. Thornvale is indeed magnificent and makes most German castles seem quite insignificant.” Countess Metternich gave a sigh of deep satisfaction. The Wittgensteins are becoming friends. She is very pretty and a great charmer – she certainly charms me.
Little Prince Wittgenstein embarked on a series of questions about Canada. “Canada is part of the Commonwealth but not a province of the United Kingdom?” I agreed. “Why then do you have a Governor General?” I tried to sketch out the constitutional position of the Commonwealth and the monarchy. He looked very suspicious, as though I was concealing something, probably our subordination to Britain.
21 January 1955.
Went to an English cocktail party in honour of the new clergyman just out from England. The English colony is riddled with fights over running the English church here.
A member of the German Socialist Party (SPD) to lunch. A clever, cynical little man, but sincere in his immovable suspicion of creating a German army in any form. He kept on saying, “We do not know what it will be like. We can only judge by the record.” Indeed, if we encourage the Germans to be rearmed it will be very largely our responsibility. There is no enthusiasm for it, partly due to full employment in this country, partly to the fact that the Germans have felt protected by the Occupation forces and now by NATO troops. The mood of the younger generation seems to be one of indifference to slogans and causes. They had enough of that growing up under the Nazis. They want to settle down, get good jobs. There are many early marriages. I was talking the other day to one of the refugees from the lost territories in Prussia, where he had been a landlord. He said he and his generation would never be reconciled to the loss of these lands, nor would this generation of German refugees from Czechoslovakia ever accept their exile, but he said his own sons were typical of the new generation in being bored with the whole subject and wanting to settle down to a good paying job in Düsseldorf or Frankfurt.
On the other hand, many people with whom I have talked believe that once the new German army is in existence the Germans will toe the line, and that the German tradition of militarism is deeper than any passing mood. One of the NATO military attachés said to me the other day, “Good martial music and a few parades and they will be back where they started.” But the question is – do we want them back where they started? We can’t have it both ways.
I had a long talk with Beaudissen the other day about all this. He is a German officer with an anti-Nazi record who is consultant to the German government on measures to be taken to ensure that the new German army will be different from the old, without its dangerous aggressive tendencies. He is a nice, well-meaning man but does not carry much conviction, at least to me. He talks of a citizen army, an army which would not feel itself separate from the people – not a state within a state, but an army of individuals who are not military robots but have a sense of belonging to the civilian community. He talked of a tank crew as the ideal size of the group where political discussion could develop individual initiative, and he linked this with the concept of mobility and the tendency away from the mass concentration of troops. He said that it was necessary to curb the caste character of the German army and make it more socially democratic. But he went on to admit that a great deal had been done in this way by Hitler, and that Hitler’s army had been much more democratic in spirit and composition than any German army of the past. This social democratization had gone furthest in the air force, yet the air force was the most fanatically Nazi element in the armed forces. I imagine that this talk of democratizing the German army may be beating a dead horse and that the dangers in the future will not be from the remains of an hereditary officer corps but from those trained in the new tradition of German militarism – the ex-officers and NCOS of Hitler’s army.
23 January 1955.
How I loathe dances. Why do I always drink too much at them? Why do I build up these killing hangovers? I should like to be living alone, or almost alone, by the sea somewhere, allowed three visitors a week, chosen by me, lots of books (and perfect eyesight to read indefinitely), solitary walks, and short sprees to places of my choice with people of my choice.
The Rhine is in flood up to the tops of the lamp-posts on the Rhine road outside the Bundestag. I was thinking this morning of my old boarding-school in Canada, a red-brick building on a hill, now – thank God – burnt down. There was one boy, a wall-eyed, bandy-legged, log-witted giant who hated me (or did I imagine that?) – at any rate, tormented me. I swore that later in life I should be revenged on this sadistic son-of-a-bitch. To my undying shame, when I met him in London in 1939 as a grown-up Toronto broker I not only did not kill him on sight, I shook hands with him, a betrayal of myself as a boy.
At that school the headmaster and most of the masters were Englishmen. The system of prefects, fagging, etc., was not natural to the Canadian scene any more than the cult of cricket. It was an alien system and I think it set up strains of which the boys were not conscious but which disturbed them. By 1922 or 1923 we had certainly ceased to be colonials but were not yet fully a nation. It was an Awkward Age. The idea of Empire, of which Canada was proud to be a part, was still alive to the older generation who sent their boys to this school, but my contemporaries were young Canadian nationalists without knowing it. Their Toronto conserva
tive fathers imposed things English on them but they remained like a Sunday suit and stiff collar worn for the occasion. Nothing could stop the natural slip into North American habits. Old Silver Balls, as we called the headmaster, said he wanted the school to be “an oasis of monastic seclusion in the desert of commercial modernity.” He got a horse-laugh from the boys. He was a Wykehamist and he wanted to make Wykehamists of these future Canadian brokers, bank managers, lawyers, and insurance men. His defeat was total. Although I had just come from an English school, I was a schoolboy and so, as a matter of course, on the other side of the barriers from the masters. Besides, I was not a natural Wykehamist.
The scene from my window this evening: Claus, the cook, is standing at the door in his white chef’s cap, which he never removes indoors or out, except I suppose when he goes to bed. The door has been thrown open by the butler to let Popski out for a pee in the garden. The night-watchman is standing by with a torch to light Popski’s way and the chauffeur is watching the gate lest he should slip out on to the road.
Lunch today with Charles and Natasha Johnston of the British Embassy. They are the people I like best here. The new Greek Ambassador and his wife were there. She is a big ox of a woman with dyed hair and a loud voice, a wonderful mimic, very funny, just what we need to lighten life in Bonn.
There is an article about me in Time magazine which says, among other things, that I have been “pepping up diplomatic dinner parties for twenty years.” What a ghastly epitaph for my tombstone!
29 January 1955.
Dinner with Terence Prittie and his wife. He is the Manchester Guardian man, an Anglo-Irish Etonian, intelligent and entertaining. When he puts on his granny glasses he looks dreary and respectable; when he takes them off he looks a little pugilistic. He has no faith whatever in the changed character of the Germans and says that Beaudissen will get nowhere in changing the German military and that one day there will be a showdown between the Protestant Church in the eastern zone and the Communists over the future of East German youth. Sat next to an Englishwoman at dinner who said, “My only problem is that my son should be my daughter and my daughter should be my son.”
Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790) Page 9