At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  To these distinctions there is added another one—corroding, embittering, boring but somehow energizing: the distinction of the Wall. It is true that last Christmas thousands of Berliners were allowed to go through and visit their relations briefly; and although some returned overcome by the experience of meeting and parting, the tension has slightly lessened. But the Wall is a monument to man’s inhumanity to man; it even resembles a moral symbol of the struggle between light and darkness. It is also a tourist attraction and a point of pilgrimage. Against that wall (ironically enough) it is the Germans’ turn to wail. Crowds come from Europe and America to look at it. The tourist buses run in to East Berlin several times a day and the passengers come back silenced, emotionally poised between dislike and boredom. They have had their morbid sensation. They report well of the reconstructed Opera House in East Berlin which (the older ones say) looks much better than it used to in prewar days. They report a certain amount of new building. Things are getting a bit better in the East, they all agree. But the East German police! They are the Nazis reborn. Compared to them the Russians are easygoing and pleasant. The Russians have often a saving incompetence; the East German police and the Party have all the cold efficiency, the blind order-obeying cruelty of the bad German military and official heritage. Many West German students go on trips to East Germany and they see, better than any history book can ever show them, what it is the outside world has always feared in the German character. They also see the unabashed survival of Stalinism.

  That West Berlin retains a pleasant calm despite its dismaying neighbor is partly due to the flatness of the city. It is as flat as a board, as flat as an Oriental city under a lifeless sky. The place has no vertical skyline. The spear and helmet, the armored, medieval look are absent. If either sector of the city had been on a hill and so overlooked the other, the calm would have sensibly diminished. As it is, one has the illusion that the “other side” is itself an illusion: so much do we live by the eye. I suppose the only people who get a depressing view are those who live on the top floor of the high apartment block called the Giraffe, near the Zoo.

  The calm changes as one approaches the Wall; it turns to a nasty, gunbarrel stillness where the no-man’s-land of dead grass, bomb sites, hunks of broken buildings and tank screens begins. Up near the Potsdamer Platz only two new big buildings have been put up on the West Side: a printing works and the bizarre Concert Hall—lonely taunts at the East. And then, as low to the view as a front-line trench in the First World War, is the obscene structure itself, winding like some gray concrete worm, with rusting wire on top. It wriggles mostly through a wilderness, though occasionally along the backs of houses, silent on either side; its sentries are out of sight except at the narrow checkpoints through which so many brilliant escapes were at one time made. There is a meanness about the Wall, mean in the sense that the organization of Buchenwald and Dachau was mean and disorientated. The builders of the Wall are the heirs of those who built the extermination camps; they have worked with a similar pedestrian and wearying malice. The Wall is the dreary monument to the natural affinity of Stalinism and Nazism. The only relief is the American name of Checkpoint Charlie. As one of my Berlin friends says, there ought to be a dance tune called The Checkpoint Charlie Blues; for such a tune, as macabre as Harry Lime’s whistle, plays continually in the backs of Berliners’ minds. I have noticed once or twice, out in the pretty suburb of Dahlem, how the sound of a police car going by at night will make people look up from their card games for one short frightened moment.

  One turns back from the Wall and the gloom vanishes. The trees of the Tiergarten are growing tall now. A wide, fast road system has been built in West Berlin, too grand and fast for the relatively small amount of traffic; traffic in the East can be said just to exist, but that is all. One goes back to the Kurfürstendamm—the Prince’s street, again reminding one of how important the Princes once were in forming German life—to the crowded cafés of a northern Paris. For Berlin is light and witty in the Parisian manner; it is more spirited than any other German city. Berliners, people say, think only of Berlin and no doubt Bavarians think only of Munich; but the pride of Berlin is cosmopolitan and worldly, and quickens the city tongue, even though it is only the broken shell of what it had been in the twenties and thirties.

  What strikes one now is the mass of young people. Many of them come in from West Germany—some of the boys to escape military service. The young German has always been a banjo-carrying animal (banjo, or guitar, or saxophone); groups of lively young men and girls will sit on the sidewalks and strike up a tune for the delighted crowd. The sidewalk artist laboring at his compulsive portrait of Brahms or Beethoven or his abstract masterpiece in chalk amuses the passer-by. There are Arabs, Spaniards, Italian working men and students about. A buffoon dressed up as a rollicking bear lures ladies to be photographed. All day and late into the night the cafés are packed—and mostly with the young; though here and there, especially at Kempinski’s, one sees one of those impassive, monocled old Berliners staring into vacancy, or those pairs of very masculine-looking widows dressed with a severe elegance that suggests a mixture of old Prussia and old Boston. The women are fashionably dressed. There is a smell of caraway and cigars.

  There are several kinds of popular Berlin rendezvous. There is the common Bierstube, where the atmosphere is very much like that of a London pub; everyone talks to everyone in a friendly way; you are at home, so to speak, with a larger family than your own. Or there are the huge restaurants, usually heavily upholstered in the American manner—it was the Germans, after all, who brought to the United States the notion of furnishing everything, of creating the “conspicuous waste” of comfort. Germany as a whole has a passion for tablecloths and curtains, cushions, anything—however revolting—that can create “coziness”; not satisfied with a mere bar stool, the German demands a velvet-cushioned bar stool with brass or copper fittings. Everything is desirable that keeps this most house-proud of peoples continually polishing, cleaning, brightening every inch of floor, seat, table and wall. And in the winter, when the hard winds blow or the sleet and snow drive down, one understands why the German wants to insulate himself inside a cocoon of Things. He may be by nature an out-of-doors man but he is determined, once he gets inside, to take his ease and keep anything as inclement as air and nature out.

  The mass eating-places are packed, noisy, steamy and rough. A perpetual eater, the German worker stands to his sausage and his beer or his plate of thick bean soup, jostled by other bodies. The massing of Germans is phenomenal. Most of us get swept into the crowd at some time in our day and suffer bewilderment or resentment as a result. Not so the lonely German; unsure of himself, he finds his identity once he is shouting in a group. The group—from a foreigner’s point of view—is most agreeable in the old-style taverns which abound all over Germany, where one sits together perhaps with ten or twelve others at a scrubbed beechwood table. Talk is immediate and kindly. One is in a club, among passing friends who bow politely before they join the common table and bow as they leave. In these places the Germans reveal themselves without shyness. No English reserve, no French discretion, no American air of being on the alert and on the job. A sort of explosion takes place in the German personality. A region, if not a whole nation, unbuttons in all degrees of amiability from the boisterous, the preposterous, the sentimentally amorous or the absurd to the grave and engaging.

  Most people who go to Berlin spend an hour or two in Hardtke’s, the place for the traditional German dishes: the pork, the huge steaming knuckle of ham, the platters of liver and veal are planked down, in a cloud of steam, on the board before you. At the counter, glasses clatter and one watches the one thing that in Germany never stops: the sacred, slow dripping of the draught lager being brought to perfect condition in the waiting glasses. No vulgar shouts of “Where’s my beer?” “Es kommt,” they will say reproachfully, tenderly watching the foaming head like a poem that comes slowly word by word. At Hardtke’s one sees
all the German types; the fat man of folded neck with the great Brünnhilde-like woman, her blue eyes flashing like the German lakes; the classic German anecdotalist, crowing out his story in a simmering tenor voice like a cockerel inflamed by the sunrise; the actress got up not merely like a gypsy but like several gypsies at once; the shouting groups of friends; the quiet serious German up from the Rhine on some business deal worrying about his nine-hour bus journey home.

  It was at Hardtke’s one morning that I had one of my most interesting encounters with young Germans. There were four of them, good-looking and well-dressed young men who were students reading economics in the famous school at Cologne. They had arrived from Moscow and Warsaw just an hour before, after two and a half days of what they described as primitive, sleepless train travel. They had been shocked by the incompetence and backwardness of the things they had seen in Moscow and outside it; they had been bored by the lectures the Russians had given them; they had been charmed by the Poles: “The Poles do not lecture.” They had gone prepared to be told of the German war guilt and—in Poland particularly—had been shocked by what they had seen and been told. But to them the German guilt was something they already knew and felt. “We knew about it intellectually, of course,” one said. “Now we saw our guilt with our own eyes.” It was the first time I heard any German speak of “our guilt” as distinct from “their guilt.” But what they could not stomach was the assumption of the East Germans that they were not Germans themselves and therefore had no guilt. The East Germans had convinced themselves that only West Germany had a Nazi past, yet the East Germans were in fact Nazis still in spirit. These young West Germans were going in either for industry or for academic work. They knew all the chief foreign books. Two had read Rolf Hoch-huth’s play The Deputy and disapproved of it: in blaming the Pope for not intervening in the persecution of the Jews, the playwright had given the Germans the chance to say, How indeed can we be blamed after that? (Many other Germans said the same thing to me.) We were joined by three workmen who had just come back from a sightseeing tour in East Berlin and who were indignant about the beer, the prices and what they had been told about conditions of work. Although the big boom of the fifties has slackened, West German wages are still rising. One of the workmen read out bits of propaganda from an East Berlin paper, amid shouts of laughter. On top of that, they had been held up for two or three hours, on some pretext, at the checkpoint. But one thing the West Germans do concede: the best German opera is to be heard in East Berlin.

  There is a certain tension—so people say—between the Hamburgers and the Berliners: the latter feel exposed to Communism and untouched by the miracle. The Berliners’ attitude is close to the American hysteria or—to be polite—tenseness about Communism: Hamburg reflects the more pliable attitude of the rest of Europe. But both parties have the sort of alarm about the Bavarians which the British once had about the Irish or the Yankees have about Southerners. For the north German, Bavaria is headstrong, violent, engulfed in dangerous political rhetoric, and has never really got over its separation. Strauss, the onetime defense minister, is a Bavarian; and non-Bavarians are relieved that he is not now in office. You hear people say: “The Bavarians hate us,” but in fact one is up against the vast differences of temperament in different German regions. One forgets how violent the mild-sounding Germans are underneath. One is told in the United States that one cannot safely generalize about Americans because of the size of the country and the varying racial and social strains; a parallel complexity exists among the Germans. Germans recall that Hitler first succeeded in noisy, histrionic, egocentric Bavaria; but I fancy that north Germany is more diverted than anything else by Bavarian exaggeration, play-acting and emotionalism. They think of Bavaria as a carnival afloat on oceans of beer; and indeed at the Oktoberfest it is something like that. The sight of thousands of men and women comically fuddled, flopping red-faced into each other’s sweating arms, singsonging, passing out, vomiting, and relieving themselves when and where they feel like it has a medieval coarseness. They do not quarrel. They sing and declaim nonsense and roll harmlessly into the streets.

  The wine-tasting occasions in Munich are more seemly. There in the wine halls they sit in groups at their tables, but this time the group-life of the scrubbed beech table is solemn and silent as they consider the vintages of the white wine. Hundreds sit there in the high-beamed, stone-flagged hall; a man will rise formally and “call” on his friends politely at another table; indeed it would be a fatal solecism to fail to see or greet a friend. These social duties are taken formally and seriously. And the high spirits of the wine drinker have a certain fantasy and refinement. I have wandered around Munich at night, in the falling snow, with a chance German acquaintance who has stood reciting poetry in a loud voice and with great feeling at street corners, while we were converted into snowmen; for under the braggadocio of the Bavarian is the eloquent comic sense one notices among the Irish, but without the Irish bent for quarreling. Bavaria is the beautiful, Alpine, recalcitrant kingdom, the enemy of the old, Prussian-enforced unity. And Munich—once more rebuilt, regal and romantic in its outward air—is, after all,

  one of the three great cities of Germany. Italy is just over the mountains, the airs of the South blow in, the famous northern “hardness” and severity are not there; the German speech has less of the sergeant-major in it and is either rhetorical or caressing.

  Dangerous, they say, in the north; fantastic notions rush to the Bavarian’s head, orators bowl him over—as Hitler did—and the Bavarian tribe hangs enthusiastically together against the outsider.

  You come back to trim little Bonn. It is often derided because it is a prosaic university town where there is nothing to do. Like so many German small towns it has beautiful trees; it is decorous in architecture; in the spring the flowers in the park and gardens are beautiful.

  You sit in a café under the deep German chestnuts listening to the chatter of the handsome young people who are drinking their beer or their Coca-Cola. They look and sound gay and free. They certainly claim to be freer and happier than the older generation which is haunted by its past.

  You ask the old questions. Can we trust the Germans not to try and destroy the world again? Have they really changed? Will they ever discard the military or despotic traditions and learn to become a genuine democracy? Will they cease to be the dangerous adolescent among the European nations?

  These questions are unanswerable. We are told that the Germans have a profound moral need to assent, to say yes. This goes far beyond the everyday habit of ingratiating themselves. There is a real need to be governed by some large idea. In the early “good” Germany of Goethe, the Idea was philosophical and had touches of idealistic internationalism, and I have often heard it said that the old Germany is still alive in the minds of many. But they are consciously a minority. The worst aspect of the desire to say yes was seen in the tribal roars of the Hitler period and in the perversion of the international longings. Moreover, democracy is not built on the principle of assent, but on the dissenting spirit: the freedom to say no. It is extraordinary, for example, how few strikes there are in Germany. Only sixty thousand working days were lost there in 1959; in England, France and the United States, the figure is well over five million. Obedience still means a great deal to the German.

  When there is no overwhelming Idea, the German turns his back on politics and thinks of nothing but material contentment. The general complaint that Germans are now apathetic about what is serious and are simply out for a good time has something in it. But if an Idea does seize them, then one can only pray that it will not resemble the idea of dominion expressed by German nationalism since 1870.

  What really worries the Germans is the division of the country into West and East. They know this is likely to last for at least another generation, and they are resigned to it. But they hate the lack of “dialogue” between the two parts, the lack of any real human contact. They fear the two parts of Germany are hardening into a dang
erous, explosive civil hate. What they really fear is the atmosphere of the wars of religion, which smashed Germany two centuries ago. The two Germanys may be separated forever, but at least they should know each other. There are fanatics on either side of the frontier. The wise minority in Germany does what it can to reduce the German weakness for categorical utterance, by creating the thing they have had so little of: public opinion. What the thoughtful young German says is that his parents must have been either mad or stupid, but that he has been subjected to too much propaganda on behalf of democracy and has had nothing like enough education in it. The most hopeful thing is that this younger generation is at any rate not sick as the Hitler generation was.

  [1964]

  8

  The Irish Character

  There is one in every bar in the world, waiting for me to come in, expertly gauging my capacity to listen, his tongue as sly as a hook and baited with a phrase that I shall not be able to resist. There was one, for example, sitting next to me in the parlor car of the train that was just drawing out of Vancouver, in British Columbia. We were passing through the docks, and presently a group of grain elevators came into sight.

  “They’ve built those elevators quickly,” he said.

  “Are they new?”

  “Sure the old ones were burned down two years ago,” he said. “I set fire to them myself.”

  “Go on!”

  “Anyway, they said I did. They accused me of it. I backed a truck into the cable.”

  “Were you hurt?”

  “Not at all.” (Scornfully, but the gentle voice was delighted.) “There was a powerful explosion. The elevators were burned to a cinder.”

  The quiet, soft, precise voice musically considering the event, the half-evasive, insinuating encouragement to conspire with him in a vision of some transcendental piece of destruction, mark the man infallibly. “They were an eyesore,” he says.