Berlin and Its Burghers

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 3, 20 January 1909, Page 44

Berlin and Its Burghers

THE HOME OF THE APPETITE.

By

Samuel G, Blythe,

in "Everybody’s Magazine,"

Wc were on Unter den Un den, and it was one o'clock in the morning. "Come,” «aid my Berlin friend, “we will go up here and see what is going on.” We went up. The place was a cafe, judging from the number of tables. Nobody was there; that is, nobody but a Jot of waiters standing around. 1 scoffed a bit. "Fine, lively morgue you’ve broken into,” I said. “An accurate picture of night life in Berlin, I take it.”

There was a big negro, in a green uniform, decorated with many brass buttons, at the door. He heard me. "’Deed, sah,” he remonstrated, in real darky tall:. "you-all is too early. Come in, sah, in 'bout a hour an’ a half.” That made me blink. And I blinked again when we turned the corner into Frledrirh-strasse and found ourselves in the middle of a strolling crowd of Berliners that filled the sidewalks.

“Something uncommon going on. I suppose,” I ventured. •‘Oh, no,” my Berlin friend replied. "Usual thing. Always this way. This street coesn't begin to get good until after midnight, and it is as crowded at three or four o'clock in the morning as it is now.”

And all these years we have been hearing about the stolid, phlegmatic, philosophical German, who stodgily smokes a long pipe and reads abstruse speculations on the ultimate theory of matter as contrasted with the penultimate hypothesis of the inner soul. Well, we’ll change that. The German may be stolid and phlegmatic and philosophical. Granted. But the Berliner seems To have aspects of gaiety and pleasure-seeking that put him somewhat outside of the diagnosis. They have l>een handing out the la-la-la Parisian and the whoop-it-up New Yorker to us as the real exemplars of how to have what they call "fun” after dark. But the Parisian vanishes along about two o’clock in the morning, and the New Yorker fades away about the same time, in a large majority. But the phlegmatic, stolid German, the student of philosophy, is just beginning to get under way when our gay blades of the Great White Way are yawning and steering toward the subway. This moans the Berliner, of course. What they do in other parts of Germany is beside the mark; but you can get a good imitation of Berlin in Dresden and Munich and in other plains, if you care to investigate. A city where the cafes remain filled until four o'clock in the morning cannot 1»e classed rightly as a dun. grey, melancholy community*, although it must lie said there is a certain sedateness about much of the merrymaking in Berlin that

gives it the conventional Teutonic tinge. It does not comport, for example, with American ideas of hilarity, for the whole family to go to a beer-hall and sit four hours at a table, solemnly drinking beer. Still, as it is the Germany way, and they know what they want to do, the fai t that they can be found sitting there until two and three o’clock in the morning helps a good deal in holding up the contention. Beilin is organised for eating and

drinking, and so are the Berliners organised for it. Scattered all over the city are enormous places where food is served. The Berliners, apparently, like to eat and drink in company, if not in communion, with vast numbers of their fellows. One of the boasts of Berlin is the Rheingold, a huge place recently completed, where four thousand people can be fed at one time. At the Zoo, on a pleasant evening, you can find several thousand, and so at the Terrace Garden, while Kempinski’s is an amazing institution.

Wine-halls, where only wines are served, and bepr-halls, which deal in beer alone, are everywhere, some of them most respectable and some of them not so impeccable. It is the rule that it is perfectly proper to take your mother or your wife or your sister to a beer hall or a wine-hall that is frequented by the officers of the army. They go only to the proper ones—publicly. The etiquette

of these plaees is most formal. If thv hall is crowded and tables are searee, before you sit down you draw your heels together and make a military bow to everybody sitting at the table you select. Then, also, you raise your glass or stein to those at the table when your refreshment is served. On leaving, you bow all around again. Or the other people at the table bow, if they leave before you do. The American way of asking the others at the table for permission to sit down is not ceremonious enough for the Germans, who are the most formally polite people in the world. Your German does not care for fancy, food. He wants “grub.” Eating to him is rt sacred ceremony, not to be trifled -with nor slighted. When he eats, he wants to eat, to masticate, to get a realising sense that he is communing with something that has substance in it. There was that occasion when Frederick W. Cauldwell, the American Vice-Consul General in Berlin, decided to give a re•ception to his friends. He went to his landlady and discussed the refreshments with her. 1 hey decided on sandwiches and some trifles of that character. In giving his parting instructions, Cauldwell said: “Be sure to cut the crusts off the bread when you make the sandwiches.” There was consternation at this. The landlady hold a consultation with the sei cants. Ihe n,-aster of the house was brought into it. The point Was debated for half an hour. Cut the erusts off the bread? Preposterous! After the situation had been canvassed in all its details, and the judgment of everybody in the house had been passed on the proposition the landlady went to Cauldwell. Is it so, she asked, “that we are to cut the erusts the bread off when the sandwiches we are making?” “Certainly,” Cauldwell replied. “Ah ” she said, a great light breaking over her, “I comprehend at last. Your friends have no teeth.” The Kaiser knows the fatal effects , these great German feasts. He knows the reason so many of his countrymen get paunchy is that they sit too long at table after the dinner is oyer. Whenever he gives or goes to a dinner, he gets up as soon as it is finished and walks about. Everybody ,dse has to get up and stand around as long as the Kaiser is standing. He keeps them on their feet for an hour. That is one way the Kaiser holds his waist hue in check, for he eats as heartily as any of his subjects, and likes to do it. Still, not all Germans, and especially not all Berliners, have this fear of paunchiness. One massive official was talking about his size. ; “Why not reduce?” he was asked. “Reduce!” he screamed, patting his paunch affectionately. “Why should I? Look what it cost me to get it up!” Berlin is the eity of the small tip, but, likewise, tho city of the numerous tip. It is amazing to observe the grateful thanks that follow the princely bestowal of ten pfennigs, or about one and a-half cents. Still, there need be no obsession that tips are not expensive -enough, in the total, for the Berliners have evolved a gradation of service that makes the outflow of ten-pfennig pieees rapid and continuous. You are waited upon all right, but it takes a platoon of servants to accomplish what is wanted. The Berliners and the rest of the Germans are the most governed people on earth. They like it and howl for more. They have restrictions of all kinds placed

on the order of their daily lives, but they are used to it.' Indeed, they have arrived at a sort of mental state in wKlch they look to the authorities to tell them

what to do, and how to do it, in every contingency. “Verboten!” is the German word that has the greatest vogue, so far as I was able to see. “Forbidden!” stares them in the face everywhere. They ale regulated in all sorts of ways, down to the manner they shall conduct themselves in their houses. There is a certain time for boating rugs, a certain time for playing the piano, a certain time for everything else. You can move your household goods only in a certain way. You cannot shake a dust rag out of the window. You cannot do this and you cannot do that, and, they told me, after you onoe get accustomed to it, it is a comfortable way to live. It absolves you from thought if you know what hours there are for doing your work and how you must do it.

The municipal authorities are not politicians, voted in or voted out of office. They are fixtures. For example, the mayor of Berlin was not elected in Bc#« lin and did not live in Berlin. He came from another city, where he had been

mayor liefore. He U a sort of professional mayor, aud he was brought to Berlin In-eauae he had been a good mayor elsewhere. He had been trained. Imagine

New York taking a mayor from Rochester because the Rochester man had been a good mayor and knew how to rim a municipality; or Chicago sending to Springfield or I’eroria for an executive? The imported mayor serves 12 years. He is not dependent on politics in any degree, ami the result is that there is little graft in the city government and that the municipal machinery works smoothly and well. As for the police, they are mostly mon who have served in the army, who have no fear of shifting captains or changes in commissionersliip. They arc policemen so long as they behave themselves properly. They are very important, very self-sufficient, and inclined to be brutal, but they keep the city in good order. The firemen are carefully selected. They have fire-fighting methods that might well bo.studied by the firemen in American cities. 1 saw a fire in an apartment house. It was on the third floor. The firemen came, took out some tarpaulins, spread thorn carefully on the

stairs up to that floor, went into the apartment, shut the doors, and put out ttie fire, confining it to two rooms. They did not come whooping down the street, turn the hose in at the top windows, aud drown everything aud everybody in the place; nor did they smash in any doors or windows with axes, nor ruin any furniture. Berlin streets are miraculously dealt If yon light a cigar while walking out of doors, you instinctively look for a place to put the stub of the match instead of throwing it on the pavement. If you see no place, the chances are you will put the burned match in your pocket, it seems so against the rules ■to <lo anything to muss up those streets. There are no glaring electric signs and no bill-boards. At various places in the city, round sheet - iron stands are placed. If you have any bill-posting to do, you must post your bills on these stands. Moreover, the bills must be of a certain size.

The sixteen-sheet stand is unknown. A modest two-rfheet is about the limit. If a cab knocks you down in the street, you are arrested for obstructing ♦he traffic. Your place is on the sidewalk. They tell a story of the extreme

to which this policy is followed. A man amt his small son were waiting at ac underground railroad station for a train. The boy fell off the platform to the track, and was struck by an approaching train and killed. Did Hie father get damages from the railroad? He did not. Instead, he was sued by the authorities for obstructing traffic through tlie person of his son. Every Berliner does exactly what he is expected to do, and you must do the same. As an example of how well trained they are: they are not obliged to have guards on the underground trains in Berlin. '1 he -Berlin folks know they' are expected to shut the doom, and they shut them. If you observe their regulations you are not disturbed, but if you violate one of them you instantly get into more kinds of trouble than yoii had imagined would exist. All you are expected to do is to walk a chalk-line, and you can be happy, if the regulations allow the kind of happiness that agrees

with you. If not, be gloomy. It. !j much more comfortable than to insist on your type of happiness, for there h no greater example of wasted effort than an argument with a Germ in official Berlin men, who are usually erect iiixd

soldierly, because vf tlu’r army vervice, have three method* of; adding *<» their noiir-tuu piiklnitudinou* facial charms. All are in great vogue. One the bi-ar embellishment, acquired in the duelling days at the universities. The more crisscrosses ther<‘ are on a German’s face, the greater satisfaction he takes when he looks in the glass. When they light their duels they arc so swathed in bandages that little harm can come to them, but they usually get a few shallow slashes. These slashes, I am told, are cultivated carefully, and elaborated by rubbing salt into them un-

til the required pictorial effect is produced. You'd think, to sec some of the men you meet over there, that somebody had held them down while other bloodthirsty ruffians had hacked their countenances with meat cleavers. 1 am assured this is not the case. A cut a thirty-second of an inch deep ran be elaborated into a forbidding scar by the judicious use of salt. The Kaiser owns fifty-three palaces, or hunting-seats, or houses, or whatever they may all be. in various parts of the Empire. and is thus reasonably well suppled with places for his royal residence, lie travels about his country a good bit, but Berlin sees much of him, for the ofliciaJ jpaLace yis there, lie has the thrift of the race. It costs fifty pfennigs to visit the State apartment in the palace, and he is never under any expense for keeping the waxed floors at a high polish. Every person, who makes the trip through the gaudy saloons must wear enormous felt slippers over his shoes. The se.ullling of the parties that go through every hall hour keeps them shining. Emperor William is the busiest man in Germany. When they want to illustrate his ceaseless activity as well as his resistless power, they tell the story of the star above the cross on the spire of the Emperor William Memorial Church. This is the tale as it was told to me: Of course, the Kaiser insisted on revising the plans of the church. That is one of his fondest prerogatives—revising everything and especially plans. The architect brought the plans to him. and the Kaiser scratched out what he didn’t like, and made such additions as he" fancied before he gave them the Imperial O.K. 'The church was built. I here was to be a big, gilt cross on the spire, and it appeared in its proper place. But, much t<> the general astonishment, when the cross was put up a largo, manypointed bold star was raised al»..ve it, on a heav\ rod. The Berliners could not understand the star. They inquired. 'I he architect said t he Kai**er had added the star t«> the plans. *'The plans were examined. Then it ■was found that, in revising them, the Kai-er had let fall a drop of ink from Li'-’ pen. which .hit the paper just above the « ro*>-. The architect , studied a long lime over this blot of *.nk. 11 i> Teutonic mind grappled with the problem for ■\veeks. Then- was no appeal. There could be n<> inquiries, lie finally decided the blot of ink signified a star above the cross, and ho put the star there, making it to corre>pon»l. as nearly as possible., with the outlines (l f tlie blot. The star is still there. ’I he people have good music, good art, fine theatres, big public gardens, museums, excellent schools, an<l line streets. •Still, they are essentially a solemn people. Notwithstanding their music, their cafetq their late hours, their social

functions, and the rest, they take their pleasures seriously ami formally, and do their work in the same way. They have an overplus of government. Each man Jives his life according to plans and specifications furnished Uy his superiors. He does what he is expected to do and rarely does what he is not expected to do. He is expected, of all, to keep Berlin clean and orderly ami to invest Jiis savings in commercial enterprise. He does all that methodically, and constantly, ami that is the reason for the great, busy, industrious city; that is the “why” of Berlin.