At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  The action of Adenauer reflected the fact—depressing to democrats—that the Germans are not great newspaper readers. Circulations are small compared with British and French circulations. The Germans, it seems, are book buyers rather than periodical buyers. There is no really national newspaper. One interesting point emerged when I was discussing this with the editor of one of the Hamburg newspapers (which are very good). We were talking about the great loss to Germany caused by the Jewish massacres and emigrations. The Jewish businessman never returns; there has also been a great loss in German medicine. But to journalism, especially to literary journalism, the Jews have come back. They give a high quality to this part of the German press.

  Hamburg does not take antiliberal acts lying down. (It is considerably more sensible about East Germany than is, say, Berlin or Munich.) For example, Bertolt Brecht is not universally admired in West Germany owing to the West’s built-in angst about Communism. But in Hamburg they were playing Brecht’s opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in the very fine new opera house when I was there, to the usual packed and elegantly dressed audience—every German city has its opera house and it is always packed. When, in the middle of the opera, Brecht’s line about the law was spoken—“The Courts are as rotten as they always have been”—there was loud applause from a part of the audience. (Perhaps I should mention that to interrupt an opera in Germany is like protesting in church.) It is in Hamburg that you hear most of the talk about the activities of Nazi judges still in office; about Government interference in justice; about the “three secret services” in German life, with old Gestapo men still in them. Many Germans in Hamburg—and in Bonn—drew the moral of the Profumo case. Profumo resigned and has not returned to office. In Germany, they say, he would have been back in a few weeks. This, to them, indicates that public opinion in Germany is still not a serious force. They shake their heads sadly: “It will take years to educate us for democracy.” It is in Hamburg also that one meets the emphatic phrase: “The Germans—they will never change,” as if the Germans were other Germans of other regions and not themselves.

  In fact, the Germans do change—if I judge by a tale I heard from a young foreign student, though his case may simply illuminate the traditional spirit of Hamburg. He was an Arab who had been so chivvied by the French police in Paris during the Algerian war that he had moved to carry on his studies in Hamburg. There, once more, he got into very serious trouble with the police. I shall not go into the facts of his case for I do not wish to identify him; but it was grave enough to get him a prison sentence. He swore he was innocent. The matter came to the notice of lawyers, and others, who were far from having the usual German docility. They saw at once the flimsiness of the evidence brought against the youth; the sentence looked like an example of racial prejudice. This does not go down in Hamburg. Several citizens took up his case. There was an appeal, and the sentence was quashed. There are, of course, few colored people in Germany, even if one extends the term beyond the Negro to all southern people of dark “non-Nordic” skin; but a considerable number of colored opera singers who say they cannot get jobs in the States are now singing in German opera.

  Whether the old Rosenberg notions of the superiority of the so-called Nordic or Aryan race still exist in the background of any German minds, one cannot tell. Whether most Germans, or only some Germans, knew about the extermination camps, all Germans knew about the virulence of anti-Semitism which had existed as a political force in the nationalist and center parties long before Hitler. But the Nuremberg trials, the subsequent trials in the German courts, the trials in Frankfurt, the educative films and exhibitions exposing the history of anti-Semitism, and, above all, the Eichmann trial, have had a cumulative effect on the German mind. In Cologne there was an impressive exhibition called the Monumenta Judaica which gave a full account of the work of the Jews in the Rhineland for two thousand years. It included a great many objects of Jewish craftsmanship, a large number of ancient documents, and a great deal of well-displayed statistical material exposing the fictions of anti-Semitism. The exhibition ends with the awful pictorial story of the camps. Lecturers were taking groups of young people around every day; the place was crowded.

  On the subject of racial persecution, the Germans appear to have had their eyes opened. They are aware of their guilt. One must suppose that this is a good thing, though in German literature there does seem to have been a traditional and morbid interest in having guilt for its own sake. All the young people I have met are shocked not only by the horrors but by what they call the “stupidity” of their elders. And from time to time one hears questions about how much guilt they ought to feel. They are bewildered. I used to go to a cozy, ugly little Bierstube in Hamburg, a place where small businessmen and clerks drop in for a sausage and a beer in the middle of the day, under the eye of a massive lady wearing creaking shoes and an old-fashioned starched apron that stretched stiffly from her chin to the floor. The place filled up with the old-style German characters who obviously survive from generation to generation in provincial life. There was, for example, the classic white-haired, rosy-faced, roly-poly old man, gazing like a clown out of large, doleful blue eyes, who sat giggling and joking with everyone.

  One morning a returned Chicago-German came in to tell his friends about America. Suddenly I heard him mention Birmingham, Alabama, and he said cynically, “Yet the poor bloody Germans can’t get away with anything.” I am not sure what the moral of that remark is. It may have been a protest about self-righteousness, it may have just been a salesman’s meaningless barroom swank. It may have had something to do with simple literalness of mind. For that does crop up rather often in Germany. Against the electric-light switch on the wall of this little bar there was a very fine enamel plate with the boldly engraved words “Light Switch” on it.

  This literalness is puzzling. There is a fussy, myopic, rule-of-thumb element in it. In this old-fashioned Bierstube the good lady made out a small check for every drink and placed it with the others, which were arranged on the bar counter in a chessboard pattern. The checks covered most of the bar. When you paid for your drink, she searched her chessboard for your check. A simple, thorough, orderly but pettifogging method. In banks and hotels I have often met the same cautious, patient and maddening regard for bureaucratic detail. When the operator is pigheaded and arrogant, the effect is awful. What is even worse is that if you raise your voice and shout as though you were giving an order, the effect is magical.

  I had not been to Hamburg for six years. That is to say since the high moment of the “German miracle.” Old Hamburg was still in ruins then, but the new city was rising. Now most of the domestic building is down, but huge office blocks are still going up and districts change from week to week. Some of the new work is harsh and crude and has not yet settled into the scene, though I noticed that Unilever has put up a fine building, every bit as good as its remarkable building on Park Avenue, New York. Six years ago shipbuilding was booming; in 1961 there was a bad slump, but the superb harbor, one of the best on the Continent, was busy. St. Pauli, the famous Montmartre of Hamburg, still goes in for striptease; the tarts still sit in the windows of the brothel street, looking far more mercantile than their domesticated opposite numbers in Amsterdam, and having the grim soigné look of models in a dress-shop window.

  Hordes of provincial tourists, especially Bavarians, parade the streets with cameras strapped, à l’Américain, or stand rollicking drunk arm-inarm, a dozen or so at a time, on the tables of the Bavarian café where the bands play and everyone bellows Prosit! The Tanz bars and cabarets of all Germany have a certain harsh, electric efficiency. Pleasure is one more form of money-making work. The modern Germans love the glittering surface. They were born for costume jewelry, fluorescent lighting, snack bars, neon and the twenty-four-hour day.

  “Have you noticed,” a young student said to me when we were sitting in a new Espresso—a place not much approved by the older people of Hamburg but filled with elegant young
boys and girls from the university—“Have you noticed that the Germans never eat a real meal ? They go through the day eating a snack here, a sausage there, a sandwich, a hamburger, on and off; they like to be always nibbling and on the move. It is the continual eating of small tidbits from morning until late in the night that destroys their figures.”

  True. The number of people who go along eating a cake or a sausage or an ice cream in the street is extraordinary. This young man was French; he was not as smartly dressed as the German students for, as he said, the German university student usually comes from the well-off middle class. He found the young Germans delightful and (he thought) very different from their elders; to him they represented a real break with the past. (Later on, this was also my impression.) They are benefiting from the breakup of the particularist or regional spirit. The thing that baffled him in German life was that there was no “politique” that is to say no continuous stream of analyzed political thought. Where the political man ought to be, there is a vacuum. “They do not reflect between one action and the next. They are always taken by surprise,” he said. And at the moment, he said, they realize there is something artificial in their political situation: it depends on two “false friendships,” one with France, the other with the far-off United States. These “false friendships” make them apprehensive and the fear stops them from thinking. The curious thing (for him) was what he called the two faces of the German, the “they” and “we” difficulty I have already referred to. In private, he said, he had met with warm, sincere and incredibly solicitous kindness. People had gone to great lengths in helping him in serious, intimate matters, without being asked. If he was ill, they nursed him. If he was poor, they fed him. But the Germans he ran into casually had a public face, cold, arrogant and aggressively hostile. In their formal social life he had found them stiff and without intimacy, as if they lived by rules. When it was not their turn to speak, they folded their arms in frozen silence; if you spoke to them out of turn, they looked startled, gave a small offended bow, raised their glasses politely but said nothing. General conversation on these public occasions offended and even bewildered them. I could hear his next phrase coming: “They long to be loved,” he said. And since love is something one gives only by one’s own choice, this longing seems overweening, demanding and eventually oppressive. They realize this and swing to the other extreme: self-pity. That remark about Alabama, which I had overheard earlier in the Bierstube, was perhaps an example of German self-pity.

  I have set out this young Frenchman’s view at length because it seemed penetrating, if partial. It confirmed what I have often noticed in Germany and what I have heard put forward by Germans themselves. Yet I must say that little of this applies to my close German friends.

  Up on the hill with a view of the harbor, in a quarter which was terribly devastated in the war, is the old Saint Micaelis Church. An elevator takes you to the belfry and from there you can see the whole of Hamburg. This church was hit by bombs and gutted. It is now completely restored. It is—to use a German epithet that often comes to mind in this country—a princely church, like an opera house in its dimensions. Only in some of the very much smaller but carefully preserved small churches of the United States—there is one in Princeton that I especially remember—have I seen a comparable polish, comfort and care: German and American attention to the material things of life run hand in hand. With its starch-white walls, its gilded Corinthian columns, its delicate state boxes or loges, its pulpit like a cornucopia of marble and Saint Michael leaping in gold on the canopy above, this church has all the classical order and self-consequent invention of baroque art on the grandiose German scale.

  One sees similar architectural rhetoric in certain churches in Munich. One realizes that the German imagination is an imitative and borrowing imagination, but one which borrows primarily for aggrandizement. Here, in Saint Micaelis, was a harmony acquired from abroad; the native things were the elaborate galleries for the princely or mercantile hierarchy, and the ambition. The organ pipes seemed to flame against the wall of the loft, as dramatically as they do in all old German churches. How dramatic, how theatrical, these seemingly rule-of-thumb manufacturers are!

  I listened to the organist and it seemed to me that the ingenious variations and dreamings of organ music perfectly expressed the wanderings of the Teutonic mind; a mind liable to the liquid, lyrical flight or the military blast; a mind laborious, practical and energetic, and yet at the same time drifting off into a cloudland of unanswerable questionings. And between this metaphysical cloudland—whether it was fine or sinister—and reality there was no connecting link. We were back at what Mme de Staël had detected: that there is a gap between what is felt and what is done. A morose and grubby young man operated the elevator to the tower. We looked down on the factories, the docks, the screaming road to the autobahn and the men shoveling away at the brick rubble that had fallen into the water of a dock.

  One generalizes. One says, “The Germans are this or that.” One talks of “typical Germans.” Doctor X teases me about this. He says the “typical German” is a woman. The fatherland, he says, has two million surplus women, due to the losses of the war. He brought a very pretty girl to lunch.

  “What is it like to be a German girl?”

  “Well—just a girl.”

  “A girl is a girl is a girl,” says Doctor X.

  She drank a glass of orange squash and later a little Moselle, and ate strawberries and cream. She had come to Hamburg for the day, from the Ruhr, to get a job out of Doctor X. Quite gracefully, but very firmly, she worked on Doctor X; when he evaded, she tried to enlist me to work on him for her.

  “There you see the modern German woman,” he philosophized. “Work—that is to say, earning their living—is the most important thing in their lives. No other country in the world, and I include the United States, has so high a proportion of wage-earning women. Every second woman has a job.”

  The average age of marriage is very late—about twenty-seven. After marriage this woman would probably still go on working. The crèche system looks after the children. The divorce rate is high because divorce is easy, but that does not seem to worry anybody. The ideal is not youth but middle age. To be middle-aged, have a job, run a family: this appears to be the general desire. And although the popular notion of the German woman is of the docile Hausfrau, this seems to be no longer quite true.

  It used to be said that what a German woman liked was beating carpets and using a scrubbing brush. She had physical energy and liked to work it off. She is still a great tidier. I have seen women in Bavaria sweeping every speck of sawdust in the street outside their houses after the log-cutting season. Last week more than once I saw women beating carpets in their gardens outside Düsseldorf. It was a hot day. But in a big store in Hamburg I also saw a sinister sign of the times. There was a male robot, standing over a washtub, working a mechanical scrubbing device. Whether one has to buy the robot or the machine I do not know. But on the placard beside him was the fantastically un-German sentence: “The day that father does the wash.” I can’t believe that day will ever come. The German women are too brisk to let it.

  I talked to one intelligent early-middle-aged lady who had been in Berlin all through the war. She was a beauty in the heavy manner; young, she must have been seductive, but determination was written all over her.

  “The Russian troops were no trouble,” she said, in formidable style. “It was easy to scare them off.”

  Hamburg has its urbanity. But all German cities stand alone. One thinks of Germany as a collection of city-states, each complete with museum, opera house and churches. Only Berlin seemed in the past to dominate. It was the one city that was not provincial. If it is not now the capital, it still has the relics of the cosmopolitan air. Maimed though it is, it has the resistance, the detachment, even the nonchalant air of a ghost metropolis. It is the cleverest, the least natural, the gayest of the German cities. It is the obvious symbol of the West German sit
uation: the Wall itself has given it that macabre dignity. It is at once an island, a Mecca and a political fiction—or, rather, a pair of political fictions—a gesture floating free in space. You have either to fly into it (at a restricted altitude), or, if you go by train or bus, you must enter the Eastern zone at fixed checkpoints where the Russian-controlled East German police do everything possible to delay and depress the traveler. Thousands of West Germans travel overland because it is cheaper, and endure the boredom and the uncertainties.

  The inhabitants of West Berlin have the nervous sparkle of people who live on the flank of an active volcano; if it is true that the Germans worship the idea of Destiny, here is Destiny itself utterly mysterious, perhaps even satisfying between the alarms. The crises come and go. Some people leave in panic; but from the outside, at one time from the East but now from the West, others pour in to replace them. The city is traditionally the home of the garment trade and after the war the owners of the garment factories moved to the Rhineland; the workers refused to leave their city, so the employers had to return. German regionalism and devotion to the native city has triumphed in Berlin. The Berliner feels himself to be superior; he is attached to his ghost, to the precarious joke of his situation. The city is his dreamland. He feels he is untarnished by the notorious materialism of, say, Frankfurt or the Ruhr; and if East Berlin thinks it is holier than the Western sector, West Berlin thinks it is holier than the rest of the country. (It is quieter, incidentally, than other German cities because it has fewer motor cars. A Berlin Sunday must be the quietest in the industrial world.)