GERMANS AT EASE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19632, 28 October 1933, Page 22

GERMANS AT EASE

A BERLIN PANORAMA THE SECRET OF THE REICH Ten 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 types 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 cenf. of Berliners come from elsewhere, the 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 thick 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 round 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 the boar's head host—who is one of the finest amateur 'cellists in Germany also a glassware manufacturer. His head is shaved, except for a small tuft in front to take the 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 the 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 go to bed; and since German concerts start at 6.30 and are over by 9, the post-mortem and the beer drinking merely continue a well-begun night.

One More Club. This is a great place for types, the cartoonist remarks, as he draws a boar’s head in five strokes, because all Berlin conventions wind up here. The long table in the middle is crowded with delegates to a meeting of the Association for Conserving Provincial Customs. 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 Thuringians their sticks and Grimm’s fairy-tale 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 rest of Germany. But it is an excuse for one more club. Germany is the most complex disjointed and “organised” country in Europe. 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 social, 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 stupendous cellular state round anything that supplies the faintest vestige of a neucleus for such a cell—hay fever, cigars, metaphysics, nudism, or Richard 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 society 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 Reich 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 lager, Schultheiss-Patzenhofer, made in the largest brewery in the world, andwhich 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, awkardly 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 the Reich, for his manner and accent would prevent his being taken seriously, though I dispute this. Anyone can be taken 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 centuries and will exist for centuries to come. Beer Table Buddahs. There were the usual ‘Simplicissimus” tj'pes—Buddahs 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 Schulteiss-Patzenhofer down their gullets, exhale columns of smoke, and look monumentally German—the Bismark ideal. From any ideal magnificently achieved it is difficult to withold admiration.

Though there were only about twenty such in the cafe that seated a thousand, I suppose (such is the tendency 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 the Scandinavians the Germans are small, dark people—and so they are 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 selfrespecting 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 Lyons, and a comedian was having a hard time of it. Nothing that he

could say could puncture the gloom j that weighed on the audience, who ! were bored with his Impersonations, j He clapped on a horn spectacle frame The effect was instantaneous.