Europe-Whither Bound? Part 11

W----, who receives the "Nation" regularly, nevertheless did not think any English paper would print what he might write on the theme.

I visited, among others, Herr Baumfelder, the editor of the "European Press," once dropped from aeroplanes among our lines under the t.i.tle of the "European Times," but now under entirely new management, though still a propagandist sheet. It is nothing like so strong a propagandist for Germany as the "Continental Daily Mail" is for France.

But it has the potentiality of a counterblast. It makes one blush to see English newspapers on German book-stalls with "HUNS' LATEST WHINE"

in large letters staring at the Germans as they pa.s.s. Strangely enough, the Germans don't seem to mind these headlines; they don't tear the papers off the stalls and burn them in indignation. They've been drilled not to do such things. One would think, however, there would be considerable scope for a good German daily, printed in the English language, expounding European events from another point of view. The European Press has that possibility.

Here, however, you find little that is helpful yet. I am all for truth. It is the best type of propaganda--the only type that is not loathsome. And surely there is enough in the domain of the simple truth about Europe and Germany to touch men's hearts, whilst

There groans a world in anguish Just to teach us sympathy.

I hoped Herr Baumfelder would make his paper into a living journal which all would be glad to buy in order to know the facts of the hour in Germany. No use to continue working the familiar lines of German propaganda such as the "Menace to German Women of the Black Troops on the Rhine," now so much exploited in press and cinema in Germany--or the "Who was responsible for the war?" theme, alluded to above. It is sad to read the verbal violence of some president of "League of German Patriots" who does not believe the editor of the "Spectator" when he says "_We for our part, can honestly say that ever since the Armistice we have wanted to create an atmosphere helpful to Germany._"

"You the murderers of hundreds of thousands of innocent German children dare to publish such a deliberate falsehood," says "The president."

"You are practically sodden with falsehood and hypocrisy."

No doubt the president of the L.G.P. has lost money in the war, and has an especial grudge against England, but that sort of writing makes potential friends into persistent enemies. And English readers of the paper will say, "After all, what fools the Germans are."

There is a cynical disbelief in England's idealism. Perhaps that cannot be wondered at. We have been, or seem to have been, very false to our idealism at times. We are judged by our public acts. But because of our professed idealism we are hailed as hypocrites, appalling hypocrites. And yet those public acts and that idealism are distinct. Both are authentic, and neither contradicts the other. We fastened on Germany a shameful treaty at Versailles. But the idealists never agreed to it, and do not do so now. Our idealism is genuine enough and it is, indeed, the germ of Europe's hope. But for that the outlook would be blacker still.

All that has been done to ease the application of the treaty has been done at England's instance. We stand as wardens against the infringement of the treaty, as for instance in the Silesian attack.

Indeed, the general tendency of England's policy is to save the integrity of Germany and give her a chance to rehabilitate herself among the nations.

The sophisticated educated cla.s.s in Germany smiles in superior knowledge, ascribing to us selfish motives of one kind or another. The contempt for Englishmen pa.s.sing through the country is somewhat brutally expressed in the phrase _valuta-Englander_, the currency Englishman, who is probably a n.o.body at home but swaggers here on the difference of the exchange of the mark and the pound sterling. The new educated cla.s.s has always found difficulty in being tolerant and in recognizing who were its potential enemies or friends. But I noticed that the working cla.s.s had less pre-judgment and was more open-hearted.

The working cla.s.s grasped the truth of the situation. It was not merely a desire to flatter and curry favour that prompted their att.i.tude.

"France is our real enemy--not England," was the frequent greeting of the ex-soldier working man who grinned and asked if I'd been a soldier, too, and on what front. Rank and file on both sides conceived a respect for one another in the war, which the educated cla.s.s somehow missed. Perhaps the educated cla.s.s in Germany would be more indulgent if they were not so hard hit financially. The working man still has money, has, indeed, a flattering number of marks in his pocket. When he has not so much money he is as morose as his educated brother.

In Saxony, where an industrial depression not half so deep as that of England is being felt, you have a strong Communist movement. The devitalized ma.s.ses of Leipzig are not so brotherly as the Berliners.

The signs of street-fighting are visible in the many cracked and broken windows of shops, and the helplessness of police seems to be expressed in gatherings under the auspices of the red flag, where internationalism is bawled across the square by unshaven, collarless young men, and it is "_Hoch die Weltrevolution_!"

"If we lose our export trade then the enfeebled industrial population of places like Leipzig must die off, and Germany return to the land,"

said a Leipzig editor to me. "But before they die off they'll make red war in Germany."

Not an unedifying place for the trial of war-criminals! There is little at Leipzig to give English witnesses an idea of a flourishing or promising Germany. A true study of the after-the-war Germany would naturally take in Leipzig and the other great centres of industry and trade. Berlin is admittedly deceptive, with its profiteers and its rich foreigners. Bremen and Hamburg would be vital points to reconsider. I visited the former--a beautiful quiet Hanse town, very quiet now, once the port of sailing of the Nord-deutscher Lloyd boats, and a port of many ships. There is an impoverished and diminished population, and gra.s.s is growing in streets where it never could have grown before. The German mercantile marine has dropped from six-and-a-half million tons to one-half million of tonnage of little vessels. You feel that fact at Bremen. The great ships, mishandled and in many cases disabled, now swell the numerical tonnage of other countries without adding so very much to their shipping power. The Hamburg-America line and Nord-deutscher Lloyd and others, shorn of their real glory, still continue a pettifogging existence booking tickets for pa.s.sengers on the ships of foreign lines. What a curious Germany! She has made a strange backward progress since the days of the Agadir incident, and the plea which eminent British and American journalists defended then, that she should be accorded "a place in the sun."

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

XIII. FROM BERLIN (II)

Berlin is a city of reason, not a city of faith. You cannot get people to try and do the impossible there. It loves to grade itself upon the possible and do that. Hence the apathy regarding Germany's resurrection. Here all is measured and planned and square and self-poised. No buildings aspire. The golden angels and the other things which are high--are perched there. Some one put them up; they did not fly so high. All the great capitals of Europe are redeemed more by their past than adorned by their present, but Berlin has no old Berlin to help her. If all that is worth while in London were built in the spirit of Downing Street and Whitehall and the statue of Nurse Cavell, it might be said that London was not unlike Berlin.

Clearly two ideas have tried to express themselves in Germany's capital: one is modern commerce, and the other, and more characteristic, is military glory. The commercial houses are naturally much the same as in the rest of Europe, gloomily utilitarian. The military in stone, however, is neither ornamental nor useful. Strange that the Kaiser, who was reputed to have quick intelligence, should not have felt how excruciatingly unspiritual and truly uninspiring the glory-statuary and architecture was. The German army was one of the greatest military organizations the world has seen, and it was in 1914 a potential terror to every nation in Europe, but its reflection in art was ugly. The Victory Column, the statues of Germany's heroes, the appalling queue of stone groups each side of the Sieges Allee, all show up now like a spiritual X-ray photograph of Prussia.

It may seem ungenerous to taunt some one who is down, after the event, but I did not see the Avenue of Victory before 1914, and it came as a shock. Despite the loathsome details of the war, there are many ex-enemies of Germany who have kept in their hearts an altar of admiration for German arms. An idea of Teutonic chivalry lurked somewhere in the imagination. But you can realize in Berlin from the militarist self-confession in art that there is no idealism there. How the Kaiser could go out day after day and confront these low conceptions of patriotism and of Germany, and not order them to be swept away, explains in great part how it was Germany made such a blunder as to go to war the way she did. One advantage of a revolution in Germany might be to sweep away these sad tokens of the past.

It was in this Avenue of Victory that old Hindenburg's wooden statue was set up and the populace struck nails into it to boost war-charities. It became so ugly that it was hidden away at last, and despite the Field-Marshal's great popularity has lately been broken up and destroyed. That was really worth keeping, and ought to have found a place in a war-museum. It was authentic, but it did not flatter, and it had to go.

Hindenburg is the greatest hero in Germany, and all the children idealize him. Whatever he puts his name to, goes. He and a popular pastor worked up a huge subscription for war-waifs, and when the money had been raised it was found the waifs were already well provided for.

I believe the money was appropriated to a fund for helping the indigent middle cla.s.s. At a cabaret one night there appeared a clever impersonator. A slim, clean-shaven man entertained the people sitting at the dinner-tables by rapid changes of personization. He was in turn every one who had a share in the making of modern Germany. Thus he was Bismarck and he was Karl Marx, and he was Ebert, in rapid succession.

No one cheered him, and the people looked at the undistinguished figure of Ebert without enthusiasm. Presently, as one foresaw, he came to Hindenburg, and then every one cheered and the place rocked with excitement. There were even a sprinkling of claps over to applaud his next impersonization, the late Emperor Franz Joseph who was sandwiched in to prepare the mind for something else. After that, one waited.

Would he show the Kaiser? What would happen if suddenly the familiar face of Wilhelm the Second confronted that gathering of Germans? The mimic, however, would not risk it, and his concluding make-up was not Wilhelm but, very cleverly chosen, Frederick the Great. And every one was at ease again.

Germany is not ready to have the Kaiser back. But, as at Athens, so in Berlin, national humiliation has reacted in favour of the monarch.

There is a vague feeling that the Kaiser is suffering for Germany's sake, and that his exile typifies the unhappy downfall of Germany. No one thinks the Kaiser less virtuous than Lloyd George or Clemenceau.

Except for the Communist movement, which naturally tends in an entirely different direction, there is a national sentimental reaction in favour of the Hohenzollerns. This was clearly focussed in the honours paid to the dead Kaiserin. Before the pa.s.sing of that funeral cortege the Kaiser's portrait was rare in public places. Now it has appeared again and is common.

There are nevertheless few things in Europe more improbable than the return of the Kaiser. He might come back before he died. But it would be as the result of some strange turn of affairs in Europe. He will probably die in Holland. And then will he not come back and receive the greatest honour?

I was naturally interested in the spirit of the rising generation, those who did not have to fight, those who perhaps will not be conscripted to fight the next war. The boys at school are said to be completely out of touch with the sordid reality of Germany's position.

Masters dare not explain her helplessness in its entirety. They are ashamed of what their generation has done with the great inheritance.

Nevertheless the children know that Germany has been beaten. They cannot know to what extent beaten. But a boy being asked what his politics were replied to a friend: "One thousand kilometres to the right of the right," and the constant thought in their talk, in their essays, in their boyish life is _We will get back Stra.s.sburg_.

The mature mind regards such impulses questioningly, and looks from the romantic children to the uninspired and uninspiring monuments of 1914 Germany. What sort of a Germany will it be fifty years hence, one asks. Not the old set up again. But if a new Germany, what will it be like and wherein will it excel?

The scenery of these years will no doubt be cleared away. In several ways Germany has excellence and possibilities of great service to humanity. In original research and invention, in applied science and in science itself, in scholarship, and in social and industrial development and organization, the German has shown himself to be a pioneer. In these pacific domains Germany was in happy rivalry for the leadership of the world. In several of them Germany actually was leader. It is very unfortunate that the war should continue to strike at these. And it would be idle to deny that those Germans whose work serves humanity as a whole have in any way escaped the crippling effect of the downfall of the State. In fact, the educated people have been hit most, and are most threatened.

Moreover, the atmosphere of Germany in these days is not creative. A black finger is pointing threateningly from the sky. The enormity of the punishment which Fate threatens is incredibly great, and yet it keeps threatening. It is perpetually:

The Ides of March are come, Aye Caesar, but not gone.

The first of May has come, the thirteenth of May has come, and so forth. The line trees are arrayed in tender green, and anon blossom along the length of the Unter den Linden, but it is not Germany's new summer, and it has that irrelevance which the murderer remarks when he is being led some beautiful spring morning to the scaffold to be killed. It was a fine morning, but not for him.

It is only too natural for the educated man to look out morbidly from the eye-gate of the soul. Thus R----, whose fine work on Central Asia was published gratis by some learned society in England before the war, says, "I will renounce my German nationality and become English as soon as your Home Office will let me. Germany is going to be no place for men of brains." Thus the famous theologian Harnack, having completed his latest work, speaks of circulating it only in ma.n.u.script as he is in no position to have it printed. Thus Z----, the chemist and metallurgist, has taken his laboratory and his a.s.sistants to Switzerland to escape the spiritual paralysis which has overtaken his native land.

Doubtless this black will-to-the-nothing is reflected in many lives in Germany, and in many spheres of activity. Nietzsche antic.i.p.ated it, though of course, he did not ask for Germany the psychology of one who has been beaten, the evil resentful frame of mind. This latter is strongly exemplified on the serious stage, not serenely and universally, but tinged and circ.u.mstanced by Germany's downfall--the what-does-it-matter-that-Sophocles-was-great-if-Germany-is-no-more point of view.

"Richard III" at the State Opera House was a strange performance. It was about the time of the Shakespeare Day celebration which Germany keeps once a year. All the newspapers devoted articles to Shakespeare, and one felt truly that a great master of words and of men was more honoured in ex-enemy Germany than in the land of his birth. And that should have been good for Germany; Shakespeare is universal, and it takes the universal to cleanse the national. As a German philosopher has said, it needs an ocean to receive such a muddy stream as man.

"Richard III," however, showed what the war-spirit can make of Shakespeare. It was interpreted in the pedantic historical vein, and was given as a b.l.o.o.d.y, brutal mediaeval piece without a thought or a smile or a tear. Richard was shown as a "Hun" of the worst kind. His murderous career was facilitated by his characterless victims. Anne was a "characteristic English hypocrite," pretending to mourn her husband, and yet quite ready to marry Gloucester as "the average Englishwoman would do if the proposal were made." Clarence had no poetry in his soul, and was not even allowed to touch you by his dream in the Tower. Richard said his conscience-stricken, soul-torturing speech--"Richard loves Richard, that is I am I." in a matter-of-fact way. It is a great tragic note in Shakespeare, but in Berlin it was quite a playful matter. Just as the murderers played at murdering Clarence, so Richard joked with himself over, "is there a murderer here--Yes, I am."

The only way to explain such a Richard III to the audience was to suggest--That is the sort of people the English are--thank their G.o.d for their humility whilst in reality they stick at nothing to gain their private ends, and are not troubled with conscience.

This production was entirely modern in its presentment. There was a remarkable simplification of scenery. This was, perhaps, due to the new poverty of Berlin. But it comprised merely a wall, a hole in the wall called the Tower of London, a platform on top of the wall called Tower Hill, carpeted stairs against the wall called the Court at Westminster. Clarence mopes in the hole with one electric light--his b.u.t.t of malmsey wine is even out of view. Richard appears between the two archbishops on the top of the wall, and finally he fights the battle of Bosworth Field up and down the carpeted stairs. Indeed, he suddenly appears at the top of the stairs naked to his middle and then runs down the red carpet carrying his crown in his hand whilst he shouts, "Mein Konigsreich fur ein Pferd,"--my kingdom for a horse.

This last was deservedly hissed by the audience as a palpable absurdity being foisted on the half-stunned _intelligentsia_ of Berlin.

At the Lessing Theatre a few days later, "Peer Gynt," that poetical drama of the Teuton's destiny--much better done because really nearer to the German soul than Shakespeare. Solveig had faith; though it was not quite certain that she was the sort of woman to whom one _had_ to return. Peer's romantic return to his mother was, however, much stressed, as in the Greig music. The sentiment that Peer "had women behind him and, therefore, could not perish" appealed strongly to the German mood, though the application of the b.u.t.ton-moulder idea to the plight of Germany just now appeared to have been missed. Peer ought to have been a shining b.u.t.ton on the vest of the Lord, but has missed his chance, and now is to be melted down with other b.u.t.tons into something else--into a Polish b.u.t.ton, a Czech b.u.t.ton, an Alsatian b.u.t.ton. There was much scope for meditation looking at "Peer Gynt" at Berlin in 1921.

In lighter vein the traveller finds much more to delight him in the operettas of Berlin. As at Vienna, they are better done than cla.s.sical drama. That is not a slight on the stage. The vulgarity of English musical comedies and imported operettas is lacking on the Berlin and Vienna stage. German pieces of this kind are often extremely charming and diverting, and they impart that light-heartedness which is a first condition of a healthy mind. The audience is in no sense "highbrow,"

it is the general level of German humanity. It forgets and responds, and is ready to sing choruses with the leaders of song and dance.

Three or four evenings spent listening to operetta leave very pleasant memories, and the last of these was on the occasion of the first night of "Morgen wieder l.u.s.tik," a humorous presentation of the time when Napoleon was splitting up Germany much as the French wish to split her up now--and there was a King of Westphalia who is still memorable for that one phrase, "_Morgen wieder l.u.s.tik!_"--To-morrow we shall be happy again!

I visited Strasbourg, now outwardly Frenchified, but inwardly German enough. At the time of the commencement of the armistice and the German retirement "Simplicimus" published a picture of a "Farewell to Strasbourg." It was a stormy sunset and late evening, and the black silhouette of the very memorable cathedral, the stark and ragged grandeur of that cathedral and its spire which looks as if nothing exists in Strasbourg but it, stood for the significance of the city.

Some German horse-soldier symbolized the last to go, and lifting his hat, took one last look at the place, and said, "_Auf wiedersehen_."

And Alsace became French once more.

What a thing to graft two French provinces to the living body of Germany for fifty years and then dispart, when the blood has learned to flow strongly from the new flesh to the heart! You feel the break, the interruption, when you go there now.