Another Green World (12 page)

“Just don't go acting like someone from Scott Fitzgerald,” her mother had said. As though speaking of a place, some perilous den of sophistication, rather than a fashionable young author.

“Yeah, I'd make a great flapper, wouldn't I, Ma? With these hips?”

Her mother rolled her eyes, pretending to be scandalized while enjoying the banter. “These days, nobody wants to look like what they are. The girls want to look like boys. The boys want to look like Al Capone. I suppose gangsters want to look like…I don't know, priests.”

“Girl
priests.”

“Oh, you. I was reading just the other day, maybe in
Collier's
, about some men over there someplace”— waving a hand,
over there
meaning Europe, where everyone had completely lost their minds—” who've started going around barefoot, dressed in old rags or what-have-you, traipsing from town to town singing and dancing and begging for food, like something out of the Middle Ages.”

“That's old news, Ma. They've been doing that since back in the Teens. We read about it in Contemporary Cultural Studies.”

“Back in the Teens! Ancient history, you're saying. Heavens, the world must be spinning faster nowadays.”

“It is, Ma. That's the whole point.”

“All the more need to be careful, then. You're only twenty.”

“Thank
heavens
Ingo Miller will be there.” Mocking the overbearing
Hausfrau. “
Now
there's
a fine young man. Goes to church, helps little ladies across the street—a regular Eagle Scout.”

Her mother couldn't help but laugh, then quickly atoned. “That's not nice at all! Poor Ingo.”

“Sure, Ma. It's what you sound like, though.”

But that made it all the more puzzling that Ingo should've agreed to tag along.

He tended to scoff nowadays at what he deemed Martina's, quote, modern ideas, unquote. Especially the ones that could be put down, even remotely, to Anthropology, her most recently declared major. (The last had been Drama, and before that, fleetingly, Psychology.) Her sudden, all-absorbing fascination with this or that culture, her craving for some exotic cuisine, her abrupt changes in musical taste or style of dress…you could see how that kind of thing might seem faddish to someone like Ingo, who was still listening to scratchy recordings of the Vienna Philharmonic playing
The Blue Danube.

“Even Stravinsky likes ragtime,” she'd told him, showing off a new snippet of knowledge.

“Stravinsky—isn't he the fellow who caused a riot with his pagan dance piece? The one where the prima ballerina gets burned alive?”

Martina hadn't believed him; but on the other hand she wasn't a hundred percent certain he was wrong. Ingo, though pigheaded, was usually well informed. He knew about the Youth Movement, for instance. She expected him to write it off as modern nonsense, but instead he'd listened calmly for a while, eyes lifted reluctantly from his book—something thick,
with a title suspiciously French—then responded simply, “Yes, I know about that.”

“You know about what?”

“About the Jugendbewegung. Everyone should. It's a notable prewar development. It's where this craze for the guitar comes from. And for hiking and camping, all that Baden-Powell business. Among other things.”

As usual, she had neither fully believed him nor dared to voice her doubts. Ingo was majoring in History with a minor in Music. Which meant, as she saw it, that he dealt primarily in Fact, secondarily in Interpretation, with a touch of Feeling thrown in rarely. So she stuck to her artfully planned sales pitch, culminating in an invitation to join her this coming summer on a journey overseas, and Ingo let her go on trotting out her little knowledge, that well-known dangerous commodity.

She laid it out for him much like her Con-Cult professor—a handsome young Swiss with a pointed accent and Freudian goatee—had explained it for her class. The Youth Movement began as a reaction of Wilhelmine teenagers against the sterile, materialistic lives and bourgeois values of their parents—or something to that effect. In the beginning it comprised loosely organized bands that gathered on weekends for daylong jaunts through the countryside, fleeing the ugly, industrialized, polluted and decadent cities for a cleaner, more authentic and aesthetically satisfying realm of woods and fields, hills and streams, towering cliffs and deep, mist-veiled gorges.

“How very up-to-date,” Ingo put in. “As though the Romantics weren't doing that a hundred and fifty years ago.”

But it hadn't ended there.
At times Martina found that you had to grit your teeth and soldier onward. It hadn't ended with hiking clubs and Saturday outings in the Black Forest. Soon the youth groups joined up, the leaders drafted manifestos and the German flair for organization asserted itself. Local chapters of the leading group, the Wandervogel, sprang up at several universities; membership grew and diversified; the outings became longer, more frequent and better planned; and after a decade or so, what had begun as a spontaneous, inchoate phenomenon began to take on a distinctive style, an identity. It became, as her professor rather grandly had declared, for the first time ever, an authentic voice of youth.

Having now acquired a voice, Youth cast about for something to say with it. Bit by bit the movement, or rather the various branches of this sprawling phenomenon, took up such causes as vegetarianism, universal education, agrarian reform, sexual equality, ecumenism, folk music, the freedom to choose one's own career—

“Tell me,” Ingo interrupted, “have they discovered FKK yet? Free-Body Culture? Naked swimming and sunbathing—the body as a temple of beauty, nudity equals nature equals health? That'll be next. With Germans, that's always the next thing.”

A decade into the new century—Martina pressed on—the Movement entered a kind of adolescence. The early, innocent days yielded to a period of greater complexity but also greater promise. The original groups spawned factions and subfactions that not infrequently found themselves at odds. Magazines started up, flourished for a time and ceased publication. The movement songbook, the
Zupfgeigenhansl
, sold hundreds of thousands of copies. A new vocabulary, including such stirring terms as
Jugendkultur
, Youth Culture, entered the vernacular. Wandervogelstyle clothing—loose, functional, pseudo-peasant garb of roughly woven cotton—gained popularity. Even the new musical fashion, which rejected the stylized complexity of “art music” in favor of a simpler, more direct and participatory manner of performance, attained remarkable currency in the land of Wagner and Beethoven.

“Sure,” said Ingo, “and an ensemble called Duke Ellington's Jungle Band has reared its head in the land of John Philip Sousa. Your point, please?”

Martina was almost there. By the eve of the Great War, the Movement had grown to encompass every facet of modern European life. Its membership ranged from evangelical young Lutherans through occult-minded Anthroposophists to “neo-heathens,” Wotanists, adherents of worldwide Socialism, readers of Nordic runes, defenders of
völkisch
nationalism, advocates of “racial hygiene,” and even a faction advocating full civil liberties for homosexuals.

“For heaven's sake, Marty,” complained Ingo, the prude, who seemed to have gone a little pink around the ears.

At last, in the summer of 1913, all these disparate groups came together for a Youth Summit, literally on a mountaintop: someplace outside Kassel in central Germany. Kids from everywhere held meetings and gymnastic competitions and made speeches and staged late-night singing contests, made more speeches and who knows
what else
they did—giving the prude a little wink—and at the end of it all they ratified an official declaration stating the shared ideals and aspirations of Free Youth.

But the summit—you have to understand this—wasn't about meetings and agendas. It was about
being there.
Imagine! Tens of thousands of young people, from all over Europe. Germans and Czechs and Austrians and Poles and Danes, even a few White Russians. The Boy Scouts had sent a delegation from England. There were smaller numbers of French, Swedes,
Lithuanians, Italians. In the end, this gathering, formally known as the
Jugendtag
, turned out to be so much bigger than anyone had anticipated, and coverage in the mainstream press so minimal, that nobody really knew how many kids had been there, where they'd come from or what manner of things had happened outside the published agenda. Legends abounded. But all anyone could say for sure was that some amazing alchemical fusion of massed, unsupervised youth had taken place.

“That's wonderful,” said Ingo, “really wonderful. So you didn't actually have a point after all.”

When he picked up his book again, she reached over and batted it out of his hand. “
They're doing it all again,”
she blurted. “A second Youth Summit. This summer. Same place, same mountain. Middle of August. I want you to come with me. Please, Ingo. I
have
to be there—it's once in a lifetime— and I need somebody to travel with. Somebody my parents trust. Will you at least
think
about it?”

Ingo said nothing at first. He got a smug look on his face, that aggravating little smile. I know something you don't know, the look said. Then he gathered up his books.

Always with the books. Stacks of them, by writers Martina had never heard of.
The Immoralist
, André Gide.
Der Tod in Venedig
, Thomas Mann.
Cities of the Plain
, Marcel Proust.
Demian
, Hermann Hesse. Some of them were not even translated. Ingo seemed to prefer this, apparently thinking it made him look mysterious. As if there were anything about him that Martina hadn't known for a long, long time.

“Okay, Marty,” he said at last, the stack of books balanced in his arms, “I'll go. You can tell your mom.”

Simple as that. Simple, yet impossible to figure. Martina was still amazed, when she thought about it. But she didn't have a lot of time to think just now, here on top of the Höhe Meissner, with the summer sun in her hair, uncounted hordes of young people swarming around her, life exploding into brilliance and color like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

As for Ingo, he must have wandered off somewhere. That's what you do here, Martina supposed. You wander. The term
Wandervogel
, before it was applied to free-spirited teenagers, had something to do with birds in flight. The image was apt, she thought—right down to all this weird, bright, colorful plumage.

She peered around from the safety of her beach blanket, her little rectangular patch of middle-class America amid the dark woods and flowery
meads of the Old World. The German countryside looked more or less how she'd imagined it from the Brothers Grimm. Overhead, the twisty limbs of ancient towering oaks stretched out like a giant's arms reaching to snatch you. Sunlight fell soft and golden through the boughs to dance on coralbells and lady's slippers. Great weathered rocks hunched like trolls, draped in hoary lichen. On three sides the forest pressed in, mysterious and dark, with little footpaths winding off into the shadows, forbidding yet seductive. On the fourth, you could gaze across a meadow dotted with scarlet poppies and blue cornflowers, and beyond, over a damp green vale, to the roofs and steeples of a perfect, fairy-tale village in the distance, a thousand feet below.

And everywhere between, in field and woods, sprawling in the grass, strolling down the paths, nestled among rocks and trees and wildflowers, were the laughing, heedless, golden-haired children of Hamelin Town, lured away by some wily Piper, lost forever to their families, disporting themselves now in a magical mountain land

But that, Ingo was quick to point out, was Browning. “And Browning”— raising a finger to emphasize this point—” was English. Whereas the Grimms, who spent some time around here, were German. Which is why”— and he again flashed that annoying, I-know-a-secret smile— “everything's so much darker in the Grimm version. Look around you. This is where a lot of the old stories come from. The Grimms hiked around the countryside listening to the old people. The real Hamelin is just up the road—as close as Baltimore, back home. And east of here, around Jena, that's where—”

“Oh, be quiet, Ingo.”

This spoken with no malice, like turning the radio down. Still, after that he had wandered off on his own, and Martina reminded herself that, all fancy aside, this was not make-believe. It was real, immediate, touchable. Anyhow, these kids were too old for the Pied Piper, weren't they? A good half of them were of college age, like her and Ingo. And there were grown-ups, too—veterans, she guessed, of 1913, ambling about with a dazed look, as though wondering what, exactly, they had wrought.

They had wrought, Martina thought, something marvelous. She'd never seen kids like these. You never would, in the States. Some of them wore traditional costumes, picture-book stuff—boys in
Lederhosen
, girls in
Dirndl.
A group of high school boys calling themselves the New Templar Knights had fashioned medieval-looking tunics and loosely woven skullcaps. Another, the Deutsche Jungenschaft von 1 November, wore blowzy, sky-blue shirts and pants so short Martina turned her head away the first time they trooped by, thinking they were walking around in their underwear. Most commonly, though, the kids wore whatever caught their fancy. If a girl felt like wearing a bright scarlet blouse, its tails billowing over a pair of men's hiking pants, then she did: easy as that. If a boy felt comfortable in a one-piece homespun garment like a nightshirt, dyed bright yellow and gathered at the waist with a leather cord—hey, why not? There were kids dressed like peasants from Prussia and kids dressed like mad alchemists from Prague. Girls with their hair cropped close enough to risk sunburn, boys with golden locks tumbling over bare shoulders, muscles rippling on their chests, like dancers in some exotic, manly ballet. One little cluster of friends was dressed all in black, their faces powdered, like walk-ons out of Bram Stoker. Half a dozen girls flitted by in flimsy, diaphanous dresses so thin their breasts showed through—wood-nymphs, Martina supposed. And then, of course, the naked gymnasts; but she still hadn't come to terms with
that.