THE NEW GIRL IN BERLIN

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 166, 10 April 1926, Page 22

THE NEW GIRL IN BERLIN

AMERICANISING TENDENCIES A deputation of the managers .of big German stores is being organised at the 1 present moment, which, after a prolonged tour, will set about Americanising the big shops of Berlin and the provinces; It will stay a few days in London on its way back and have a look-round, as most of the other German deputations have done, but the decision is likely to be in New York’s favour. The big German banks have all been reorganised on American methods, where one machine can perform the tabulating and calculating otherwise done by five employees. The great German works are all putting in the wonderful time-saving "conveyer” beloved by Mr. Ford, which brings the tool to the workman and the work to the next hand, piece by piece, so that there is no excuse for anybody to get up and go and look, or even wait, for anything. The scintillating street signs are coming but slowly on account of the expense, but the traffic of Berlin is complete with the latest devices in signals invented in New York, and which probably act there efficaciously. Changes in trams and motor-buses have not proved particularly successful. Just as the size of the normal national figure proved a stumbling-block when devising seats, so does the time honoured custom which regards it as not nice for ladies to sit on top prevent new covered-in models from being successful. The bar with the counter where cocktails are served is still only the resort of the would-be smart; Germans like cocktails at heart as little as they could ever countenance prohibition. But the jazz band, it seems, has come to stay —under American conductors. The quick-lunch counter is being tried but it can never become popular in a country where it is perfectly good form for a rich man to take thick pieces of bread and sausage with him to eat in a palatial office. Strange though it is, everything that has to do with tradition in manners and in clothes is still formed on the English model—froui “tea and toast” in the very smart hotels to the mixed pickles and Worcester sauce of the “international” restaurant—both the makes of shirts and collars, gloves and mackintoshes, in first-class shops all bear well-known British names.

It is in these things alone that England scores, for the most American thing of all is the girl. This is the young, slender, bobbed-haired, cigar-ette-smoking creature of to-day, who has succeeded the “Backfisch” of ancient times. The girl is, in spite of the English dance troupes, on the American plan, not the English; an English girl is still a “Miss,” and too fond of sport and sports clothes all day long to be a model for the smartness of cafes, and self-consciously saunters with the dachshund or the Alsatian. She does not drive a car yet, because the family car is still enormously expensive and her parents nervous, but she plays tennis, and spends hours practising the dance which came over here as file "Jimmy,” and the Charleston.