GERMANS AT EASE

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 96, 20 October 1933, Page 16

GERMANS AT EASE

A BERLIN PANORAMA

THE SECRET OF THE REICH

DISJOINTED COTJNTEY

Ton. o'clock, the. air is blue-grey and opaque, the cafe jammed, but the Berlin cafe is like the London omnibus in that there is always room for one more —or a score more, writes Idwal Jones in-the "San Francisco Chronicle." I ■have a. table with a cartoonist, who draws typos for a /funny Munich paper.. We agree there is not "a" German ■type, but that there are hundreds of German types. And that the Berliner is almost extinct. Sixty per cent, of Berliners como from elsewhere, tho old Berlin is gone, and outside crashes and thunders a new Berlin, with electric 'lights glittering 'in the praises of cameras, gargles, aspirin, . cigars, motors,, tooth paste, and chewing gum. ■ A stiff group of men in frock coats ■: march'to a table, headed by a spare professional type, with ribbon and silk hat, and he.is greeted stiffly by the host, who has a boar's head, with tJiick folds on his neck, and bristling ■up-ended moustache. The host bows, •with. ■ clicked heels', registers hauteur, ■but looks only pompous and arrogant. His politeness looks forced. After a found of Pilsener the combined groups mellow and talk music. They are Brahms devotees, the cartoonist says, and in a few minutes they will all be genial and charming, even tho boar's head host —who is one. of the finest amateur 'cellists in Germany, iiiao a glassware manufacturer. His head is shaved, except for a small tuft in front to takethe parting. You could ; crash a stein on his occiput without getting more than a blink from'him. They will argue on Brahms until 3 o'clock, and all except the Lower Saxons—the host is one—will agree that Brahms is muddy in tho lighter passages because he was born in _ Hamburg. German musical appreciation far transcends the American, because when a concert is over with us it is time to jjoto bed; and since German concerts start at 6.3Q a«d are over by 9, tho postmortem and the beer drinking merely continue a well-begun night. ' ONE MORE CLUB. . This is. a great place for types, the cartoonist remarks, as be draws a boar's head in five strokes, because all Berlin conventions wind"u]3 here. _ The long table'in the middle is crowded with delegates. to a meeting of the Association for Conserving Provincial Costumes. The intent is to induce peasants of Franconia. and Swabia to keep on wearing their linen smocks, the Frisians their bodices and filigree buttons, the Bavarians their . knee trousers and feathers, the_ ThuTingians their sticks and Grimm's fairy-talo garb, and so forth. A useless but charming idea, for the peasants ■keep on wearing them, anyway, as they always have done. Peasant garb disappears only in those countries that- have a national capital, a capital with a racial brain and a heart. Berlin has not these. Berlin is a clearing house, a power station, .a phenomenon which has nothing to do with the Test of Gerniany. But it. is an excuse for one more club. Germany is the most complex, disjointed and "organised" country in [Ourope. The German seems powerless to get along with his colleagues as an individual, but takes refuge in a club in the hope.that this club -will get in rapport with some similar club for ■ends socjal, industrial, political, or what not. In France culture may be witnessed in its finest flower when one cultivated Frenchman is talking with another, in Germany, when one group talks, smokes, and drinks with another that has the same opinion. Eugen. Diesel was saying the other day that "Societies among us spring up like a stupendous cellular state round anything that supplies the faintest vestige of a nucleus for such a cell—hay fever, cigars, metaphysics, nudism, or Kichard Wagner." MANY AND VARIOUS. The town of Anhalt, with hardly more than. 6000 people, has a hundred associations. In Potsdam there is an. association for the sons of master bakers; Dresden has one for the sons of former Burgomasters; Munich has a so, ciety composed of the descendants of famous brewers whose brands are still extant. Not a national ideal, but the calling or hobby is the beacon for gregariousness. Not so much the Keich. as the town or province, with its racial roots, dialects, landscape, brew, and costume has the living meaning for the German. In short, the salient phenomenon in Germany is its "split-uppityness."; Our Costume Association delegates just now were not worrying much about the lack of a valid social ideal. They had switched from Pilsener to the Berlin higer, Schultheiss-Patzenhofer, made in the largest brewery in the world, and which is recommended to go best with cigars. They were having a sumptuous time, and talking on everything except filigree ' buttons and feathered hats. The cartoonist swiftly limned Swabians, awkwardly, built, with expressive, bony features; shaggy' and. garrulous Bavarians, of a rough heartiness; comic and rather shabby Saxons, who made all smile when they talked. A Saxon dictator, we are told, would be impossible in tho Keich, for his manner and accent would prevent his being taken seriously, though I dispute this. Anyone can be takon seriously—even . the dark waiter-Hitler type—if he is serious and talks incessantly in a girding screech. And there were three or four Jews, with intelligent, animated ivory faces, from villages on the Franconian Main, where Jewish villages have existed for centures and will exist for centuries to come. . BEER TABLE BUDDHAS. There were the usual 'Simplieissimus" types—Buddhas of the beer table, with straight backs to their heads, sitting in detached groups, and who probably did nothing all day or night but pour Schultheiss-Patzenhofer down their gullets, exhale columns of < smoke, and look monumentally German —the Bismarck ideal.' From any ideal magnificently, achieved it is difficult to withohld admiration. .Though there were only about twenty such in the cafe that seated a. thousand, I suppose (such is tho tenacity of symbols) their sort will stand'for another century as the universal German type. At least this type isn't a myth, a creature of the cartoonist only. To tho Scandinavians the Germans are small, dark people—and so they aro cartooned by these Northerners, who regard German blondness as almost black in comparison with their own pink-and-white blondness. The teeth of the English are not conspicuous beyond the ordinary, but -no self-respecting French or. German" cartoonist would dare to depict a Briton without teeth that project like a gift horse's or a Chinese washerman's in a burlesque show.

I once dropped into a music hall in fiyons, and a comedian was having a hard time of it. Nothing that ho could say could puncture the gloom that weighed'on'-the audience, who were bored with his. impersonations. He tittpped'oh a horn spectacle frame. The f fFcc't •was instantaneous. An Ameri-