Europe in the Looking Glass (3 page)

Eventually, at closing time, the manager was so overcome that he beseeched us to return with him to his flat and ‘have a drink’. This was the last thing we wanted. However, off we drove in a body through impenetrable labyrinths and rows of narrow streets, until at length, after feeling our way through a courtyard, we were ushered into three rooms and a
bathroom-kitchen
on the ground floor of a large tenement building. The sitting room was the home of the coloured photograph
in excelsis:
life-size men with square beards and pink faces against blue skies, alternated with their wives in high sleeves and gold lockets. Next door, in a worn copper bath, reposed a mass of dirty socks in thick, grey water; while the remainder of the washing, cuddling to itself the kitchen utensils, cried to Heaven from the top of an old trunk.

By four o’clock it was raining hard. We left, to awake next morning with a slight feeling of nausea, which decided us to leave Berlin at once.

Nevertheless, from the point of view of talking German, our evenings had been a great success.

Berlin has a pleasant atmosphere. Unlike Paris, it is far enough away from London to feel as if it were somewhere else. The Unter den Linden is magnificent. Whereas in Vienna the famous ‘Rings’ are entirely spoilt by the rows of plane trees that obscure them, this is wide enough to carry its double avenue. The traffic is sparse and slow. The streets are well kept and the tramlines run through the little lawns, green and well watered, that are planted in the squares, so that men are to be seen carefully cutting round them with pairs of shears. The Brandenburger Tor, surrounded by the palaces of the nobility, compares favourably with the unruined ruin at Hyde Park Corner or the flamboyance of the Arc de Triomphe. And the people are friendly – far more friendly than in France or Italy. It is this, after all, that counts most in the impression that a city gives.

THE DISTANCE FROM BERLIN TO NUREMBERG
is three hundred and twelve miles. We had intended to start at eight o’clock, but were none of us dressed until ten. The garage was situated at the other end of the town, and the car was deposited in a cellar reached by a lift. When it came to the surface, it had to be oiled, greased and filled with petrol. Also a valve needed adjusting. The heat of the sun was intense and paralysed our actions. On our way back to the hotel we passed Henry Featherstonhaugh, bouncing along in a black satin tie and Oxford trousers. Then the operation of loading began. This in itself invariably took half-an-hour, at the end of which time a bevy of porters and pages, varying in numbers, according to the size of the hotel, would cluster round for tips. On these occasions, Simon, to whom the mention of money is anathema, used to put his hand in his pocket and distribute, without looking at them, any scraps of paper that he might find, usually leaving the whole party destitute for the rest of the day.

It was therefore twenty minutes to twelve before we actually left the Potsdammerplatz. The first place of interest on the road was Wittenberg. The large open square in the middle of the town lined with high-fronted old houses, themselves dwarfed by the upstanding and irregularly-built Gothic cathedral, must look much the same now but for a statue or two commemorating the event, as when Luther flung the Papal Bull into the flames and started the Reformation on this identical spot four hundred and nine years ago. Simon tentatively suggested lunch; but David hurried through rather faster than usual, as though he were a practising Roman Catholic.

Though, as a matter of fact, he personally suffers from no form of religious hysteria, the way in which moral scruples can distort the actions of persons otherwise sane is sometimes scarcely believable. I have a relation who once sat eight hours without food or drink in a railway carriage at Monte Carlo on a boiling day in June, rather than set foot even on the platform of such a place. But then, after all, self-martyrdom is the greatest of all joys.

After driving some way further, the country began to assume an industrial complexion; but not as in England. This was no ‘black country’. The grey and now more or less hedgeless panorama of small cultivated fields, relieved at intervals by rows of miniature Eiffel Towers bearing festoons of electric cable from one horizon to another, remained unchanged. Yet the inhabitants grew grimy, and a sudden wave of depression seemed to weight the air. The mining of coal and iron is all conducted in enormous craters two or three hundred feet below the surface of the fields. It is as though a peepshow designer had created a miniature replica of an industrial landscape at the bottom of a packing-case. Trucks and cranes and human beings can be seen moving vaguely about in miniature, like the people on the floor of St Paul’s viewed through the hole in the floor of the ball. Then the fields continue again, until the next crater cleaves their midst.

As we drove by, the bands of workers on the road became ill-favoured and were at no pains to conceal their dislike of us, shaking their fists and shouting
‘Langsam, langsam!’
(Slowly, slowly!) Germans always slow down to pass anything. David accelerates.

Though we had complained of the frequency with which the Hamburg-Berlin road had been closed for repairs, that indeed might have been an uncharted prairie compared with the present thoroughfare. Until at last, as Simon remarked, it was a comfort to be on a road at all, even if it was going in the wrong direction. One barrier necessitated a ten-mile detour along tracks that would have disgraced an Irish farm. David vowed
he would make no further digressions into the countryside. Round the next corner stood the inevitable obstruction and its notice:

A convenient field offered a way round. Then followed another obstacle, also circumventable. But the third was more formidable. A wooden pole was stretched across the road at a point where it was crossing a small valley on an embankment, so that on either side was a steep declivity. Below this barrier, which we removed, lay a row of stone blocks, heaped higgledy-piggledy on top of one another; and at one side an inflexible iron pin, eighteen inches high and one-and-a-half in diameter, was embedded deep into the roadway. We could move neither backward nor forward. A crowd collected from some neighbouring cottages, full of hostility. Suddenly David, without another moment’s hesitation, charged the entire barricade. Bending the iron pin into a right-angle, Diana heaved her enormous body on to the stones and scattered them like the walls of Jericho. Simon and I rushed frantically in her wake, followed by the curses of the populace. Poised one on either step, we drove off in triumph.

At length we reached Leipzig, through long wastes of industrial suburbs. Simon, no longer tentative, insisted that we should have tea. David said that first we must find our way through the town. So we drove for half-an-hour through unending labyrinths of tramlined streets, and at last succeeded in coming out the other side, immediately beneath the grotesque stone
denkmal
, two hundred feet high, which was erected to commemorate the ‘Battle of the Nations’, the defeat that sent Napoleon to Elba – a shapeless mass resembling a squat chimney-stack built on the scale of the Great Pyramid. We also passed through the famous square where the allied troops were reviewed after the conflict.

Half a mile further on we ran into a bank backwards and doubled up the exhaust pipe, so that it now rent the ground with a loud tearing noise whenever Diana came down particularly heavily over any bump. Without a halt we continued our way to Altenburg, where we were obliged to stop, after seven hours uninterrupted driving, not for tea, but for petrol. This was Roumanian and unsatisfactory. The youth who filled the tank disliked us so much that he refused a tip. We passed through Plauen and stopped again to put on our coats.

As evening fell, the road led over the uplands; we were entering Bavaria. The flat country gave place to undulating hills covered with pinewoods, not of that familiar inky grey, but a lovely deep green, stretching away amongst yellow fields of corn and rich grassy valleys, till the blue horizon, still undulating, merged into a dull and misty lilac sunset. Gradually it became dark and we could smell the sweet scent of the pines that rose steep on either side as we whistled down the valleys; we could hear the trickle of streams; and could breathe the sharp fresh gusts of upland air as we climbed the hills again.

Bayreuth was but a pattern of lights. Simon hugged his stomach; I fell asleep. At half-past eleven we were on the Nuremberg tramlines when we again ran out of petrol. The spare tank was hauled from beneath the suitcases, a funnel formed of an
Illustrated London News,
and at twenty minutes to midnight, exactly twelve hours after leaving Berlin, we drew up outside the Hotel Palast-Fürstenhof, having touched neither food nor drink the whole day, and having made two stops of one and two minutes respectively.

We had a delicious meal of cold ham, poached eggs, and light beer brought up to our bedroom, and then slept soundly.

Nuremberg is the apotheosis of the tourist-town. There flourishes about her streets that kind of obvious antiquity, those over-ornamented crooked gables and twisted turrets, that appeal most strongly to those who love Age for its own sake, without being able to distinguish the textural beauty,
and in some cases damage, that it can confer. It can be seen at a glance that these buildings are ‘Old’. They shout Oldness. It needs no artistic acumen to tell that they were built without the aid of plumb-line and set-square. Nuremberg, in fact, is a place without atmosphere. Its main streets are lined with hotels and antique-shops and the buildings convey the same impression of affectation as the baronial rafters of the Queen’s Hotel, Margate. After visiting the bank and being refused a cup of coffee at the ‘Blue Bottle’, we had lunch, and set out to drive the sixty-five miles to Rothenburg.

The Bavarian countryside is the most attractive in Central Europe. Rather than bewitching, it appears bewitched. Its mannerisms are those of the Albertian Christians. Santa Claus, who only visits other countries in the winter, makes this his home; and somehow, even in the bright August sunlight, with veitches and blue cranesbill growing from the long grass by the side of the narrow white roads, the idea seemed to have no incongruity about it. The villages and market towns consist of long twisted rows of white houses, sometimes frescoed with angels, which are drawn and tinted rather than painted. The roof of each house is half as high again as the side walls, and if old, it leans heavily towards its neighbour, or bellies the isosceles triangle of wall on which it rests out into the roadway. There is a fresh, clean atmosphere. The farmyard and the road are one, which makes motoring difficult. Little girls with tight, fair plaits scurry their flocks of geese out of the way. Bent and aged women, with brown, wrinkled faces peering from out their black handkerchiefs, may be seen going out in twos and threes to work in the fields. Everywhere the arms of the old kingdom are displayed, blue and white diagonal lozenges. In most of the villages are poles, a hundred feet or more high, which are striped round and round in blue and white and surmounted by a wreath hanging from the top. From these poles jut horizontal arms on which are placed innumerable painted, wooden toys, men on bicycles, motor cars, churches and animals.

On every second hill is perched a
schloss
, generally baroque, with a massive rounded tower or two surviving from an older fortress. Many of the
schlossen
, however, are situated in the middle of the towns, such as the enormous and very fine rococo palace at Ansbach, home of George II’s queen. The Bavarian baroque is pleasant and not unwieldy, the churches being covered in a sort of yellow wash. Catholicism is very evident in the numerous shrines and figures of saints, in agitated stone draperies and iron halos, that guard the bridges on the road. Bavaria is the most German part of Germany; here all the ‘Youth’ movements originated, the country being especially suited to walking-tours. And it is here, more than in Prussia, that the survival of militarism is to be feared. The Crown Prince Rupprecht is still the most powerful man in the province. Monarchism will always evoke sympathy. But an independent Bavaria in her present frame of mind would not conduce to the peace of Europe.

Eventually, after taking a wrong turning out of Ansbach and being compelled to enquire the way of one of the witches of the field, we arrived at Rothenburg about four o’clock. This town surpasses belief. It is as though all the goblin haunts, palaces and fortress towers of fairyland were writhing in an elongated distortion glass; and yet, unlike those of Nuremberg, they ring true. There is a subtle distinction between the two towns. Both are visited by tourists, but Rothenberg by Germans only. Whereas Nuremberg is a conglomeration of all dates and styles, Rothenburg was built in the later Middle Ages and not a stone has been added or subtracted since. Her buildings are the more preposterous, but they do not suffer from that clustering ornamentation reminiscent of Burmese temples, with which the gables of Nuremberg are loaded. Rothenburg is a complete walled ‘burg’ of the Middle Ages. The walls have remained intact; at them, therefore, the town ends. In the fields beyond struggle one or two pink villas; that is all.

Entrance is effected through a series of gatehouses that are in themselves scarcely credible. From a central archway radiate
two arc-shaped walls ending in a couple of round flanking turrets, with high-pitched, conical roofs. Over the actual gateway rises a tower, square in shape, and over sixty feet in height, up which runs a succession of little windows; while at the top, under the projecting eaves of a twisted and
pagoda-like
tiled roof, is a tiny house, having a row of these windows back and front, each embowered with a window-box. From one depends a string, on the end of which is a basket in which to haul up food. Here, surely, is a domicile reached only on a broomstick. In reality it is probably the dwelling of a
neatly-dressed
jeweller’s assistant, newly married, who, owing to the housing shortage, is obliged to live either with his mother-
in-law
, or up 130 stairs.

The streets of the town shelve and twist like mountain paths. The roofs of the houses reach as high and half as high again as the walls on which they rest. Every window has its
window-box
, filled with geraniums, lobelia, and marguerites. At the end of the town furthest from the gate by which we entered, runs a street of magnificent old stone houses, into the front walls of which have been built, haphazard, the painted escutcheons of their former owners. One of these was erected by the Emperor Henry IV.

Groups of
Wandervögel
, with their bare necks and knees, were to be seen at every corner, making sketches. While David and Simon sat in a café, I also attempted, very unsuccessfully, to draw the town hall. Such, however, was the smell of the crowds of
Wandervögel
who insisted on looking over my shoulder, that I was eventually thankful to see Diana driving down the street to take me away.

Of all the fantastic, outlandish forms of medieval artistic expression that have come down to us, the Bavarian style of architecture is the most eccentric. That a perfect example of a complete town of the period should have survived in its entirety, unaltered, undemolished and unextended, in the heart of the country over which the Reformation and the counter-Reformation carried fire and sword, and the Thirty
Years War cannibalism and polygamy, is one of the miracles of history. Considering her absence of natural defences and the vicissitudes that she has endured, the phenomenon of Rothenburg’s conservation is without parallel in Europe.