Germany Turns to Play

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 March 1928, Page 9

Germany Turns to Play

H(<] Germans,’ national at titude toward pleasure has undergone sweepK(W ius changes during the Past twenty—and more especially the recent three or four —years. Activity, ali along the line, displaces the older ideal of passivity. Athletics and all forms of sport, entailing rigid self-discipline and dietary and alco hoiic abstemiousness, are overturning former standards. Travel, always a German enthusiasm, is having a whole sale revival; new forms of transpoita tion, including the motor-bus, open larger horizons even to workers in the cities. The result to-day of these yeais of change and conflict is a bewildering variety of cults and beliefs. A hundred strangely contrasting elements compose recreation ——movies and Mav pdle" dancing, embroidery and saxo phone playing, modern art and canoeing, football and horticulture, revolutionary hymns and rifle contests, drinking festivals under blossoming trees and Swedish calisthenics, duelling and dancing the Charleston. Everywhere is clash of times and tendencies, Bavarian, Prussian, Fascist, Socialist, Victorian, Baroque, Cubist, medieval, industrial, rural, urban. It seems, tn a tourist at least, that modern Geimany is almost as much divided ot et her pleasures as in her politics.

To-day the undreamed of has become fact. Only a. mile or two. it may be, up a river's bank ‘•modern amusement may be in full swing. Around a huge tent colony, set up under the trees, group the nature devotees, sun-bronzed and attired with more bravery than formality. Some are singing old folk songs, some are working the more up-to-date crossword puzzle, others * playing basket ball or dancing hand-in-hand in circles. Between the two extremes of the cate and the camp, it seems, a gap of centuries, rather than of years, is spread (says a writer in the New York “Times”). The revolution is especially noticeable in the ideal of the young girl. Superseded is the wistful, blue-eyed maiden with long blond Jocks, to whom, in orthodox verse, “hearts in Heidelberg” were lost. Modern movies and novels create the image of a lean, fashionable, independent “sport girl, who has bobbed her blond hair and put a monocle over one satiric blue eye. If wealthy, she drives her own car: at least, she paddles her own canoe. Even the marriage advertisements in newspapers carry indications of hm prominence. No longer does X2o advertise herself merely as Inond, musically gifted and heiress to a sugar shop.” She proclaims herself also as “sport loving” and devoted to the "great outdoors.”