BERLIN, UNTER DEN LINDEN
All Berlin is now out of doors. The millionaires of the exclusive Tiergarten purlieus are cooling themselves in their villa gardens, and the middle-class man is beaming at the band at the Zoo, where the restaurant-terraces are overflowing into the flowered walks among the trees. There is a boisterous coterie of shouting children to every prim fountain in the prim squares. Out under the pines and cypresses of Grunewald crowds returning from the races are gazing admiringly at the pretty white villas that rim the verges of the placid forest lakes; and others are turning aside for the spectacular amusements of Luna Park. At Steglitz the bicycle races are ending and merrymakers are swarming into the Botanic Gardens to marvel over the cacti and palms of the long hot-houses. Capital boating is in progress on the Spree, and sailing at Wannsee, and steamer trips all through the suburbs. Bands are crashing in the noisy penny-shows of the tumultuous Zeltern; they are having beer in crowded Weinhandlungen, chocolate at dainty Conditoreien, and much besides in the jolly Vienna cafés that open out invitingly to the street. In every part of the city rise music and laughter and the sound of early revelry in pretty, tree-shaded summer gardens. It is an audible expression of the Berliners’ joy of living—their cherished Lebensfreude.
Could we rise with Zeppelin we should find it the same now at Charlottenburg, and over at Potsdam. Charlottenburg the Prosperous is having its serene and dignified companies sauntering in quiet evening talk along the broad, handsome streets. The gay are at the lively Orangerie, the philosophic in the trim, pert little parks, and the sentimental among the flaming roses and fragrant trellises of the charming Palace Garden. In solemn and conscious superiority the great Technical High School and famed Reichanstalt shroud their learned cornices in the gloaming of tree-tops, and that chiefest mecca of all, the royal mausoleum, embowers its gleaming marble walls in heavy shrubbery at the bottom of its avenue of pines. No loiterer, you may be sure, but thinks reverently of the recumbent snowy effigies of the dead rulers that lie in the hushed gloom of that dim interior.
Potsdam, Germany’s Versailles, steeped in the melancholy beauties of the Havelland pine forests, redolent of old Frederick the Great and his dream of an earthly Sans Souci, thinks nothing of drawing Berliners twenty miles to its twilight peace and calm. Exuberance tempers to the dignity and beauty of those parks and palaces where the Kaiser has his favorite royal seat. Up the broad Hauptweg they stroll by hundreds and gladden their patriotic eyes with the colonnades, porticoes, and statues of the vast New Palace that proved to the foes of defiant old Fritz that the sturdy warrior was far from bankrupt despite the Seven Years’ War. Nor do they forget that it was here the late emperor, beloved “Unser Fritz,” learned how
“unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square.”
The classic Town Palace of Potsdam is receiving its compliments, as usual, and no less the artistic Lustgarten, opulent in marbles and fountains; and many will be wandering even out to the cool and spacious park that lies about the charming Babelsberg Château. But old Frederick remains the local hero, and there is sure to be a crowd at the venerable lime-tree where petitioners used to stand to catch the eye of the king, and a kind of procession will be passing reverently before the garrison church, where lie his remains in the vault before which Napoleon outdid himself in eulogy the while he pilfered the old warrior’s sword. And the leaping column of the Great Fountain will be the centre of an admiring throng, and scores will be going up and down the vista of broad stairs and fruited terraces that lead to the long, low palace of Sans Souci. As to the latter, a stranger might be pardoned if he were to mistake it for a casino, which it strikingly resembles, with its flat-domed entrance, line of caryatids like pedestal busts, and the row of stone urns on the balustraded top of the façade. At this hour there is no admission, but one may peer through the low French windows and, in fancy, people Voltaire’s room with a miserly ghost of the crafty old philosopher, see him fraternizing and quarreling with the king, imagine a royal soirée in progress with Frederick playing skillfully on the flute, recall the brilliant talk of the Round Table, and think with pity of the cheerless, childless old soldier toiling wearily on those histories that Macaulay praised, and winding his big clock, and yearning all the while to lie buried among his dogs out on the terrace. To many will come visions wrought from the extravagant fiction of Luise Mühlbach. What moral observations and theatrical posings fell to poor Frederick’s lot in her “Berlin and Sans Souci,” sandwiched in among the woeful loves of Amelia and Baron Trenck and of the dancer Barbarina and the High Chancellor’s son! But perhaps such literature helps one to understand the application to Frederick of the celebrated characterization of a very different personage, the “wisest, greatest, meanest of mankind.”
In Berlin proper there are two fine squares that best serve the well-advised as start-and-finish places for the most interesting evening walk to be had in the city—the Lustgarten before the Royal Palace and the Königs-Platz at the Tiergarten corner. By this notable route one arrives, within the smoking of two cigars, at something like an intelligent comprehension of Berlin and Berliners.
The gracious expanse of the Lustgarten is so appealing in the melancholy light of sunset that one almost feels, at the very beginning of the stroll, like going no farther for fear of faring worse, but rather remaining where he is among the trees and fountains and artistic shrubbery and watching the children playing Hashekater around the colossal Granite Basin, or Ringer-Ringer-Rosa at the marble stairs of Frederick William’s lofty statue. Soft splashes of deep colors warm the long rows of blinking windows in the Royal Palace on the left, and flush the domes of the cathedral and the columns of the Old Museum’s Ionic portico. Hundreds of Berliners are idling along the asphalt walks that entice to the Palace Bridge that arches the Spree in a double line of marble groups and so opens up the long, tree-shaded perspective of the Linden. To see it at this hour one would not guess that this fair Lustgarten had once been a neglected palace-close and even a dusty drill-ground; no more than one could believe that the occasional decrepit church or twisting, narrow street in the district in the rear is all that marks antiquity in the whole of the city. For the furious tempo of Berlin’s development has swept everything before it. Three out of every four buildings, all over town, are garishly modern. Indeed, it is all so utterly of the present moment that it is hard to believe that even a group of fishermen’s huts could have stood here beside the Spree so long as seven hundred years ago. Were one to see no more of Germany than its capital he might very easily imagine a Chicago or two somewhere in the empire, but certainly not a Nuremberg.
Sunset imparts an air of cordiality to the ponderous, baroque, seven-hundred-roomed Royal Palace, whose four stories of regular window lines suggest an ornate and elaborate factory that had been diverted from its original purpose by the addition of the chapel dome on the west wing. However, for those who cross its low terrace and enter the sculptured portals there awaits a revelation of pomp and majesty, of throne-room splendors and saloon magnificence, that rivals the best of Versailles and Vienna. Unhappily we cannot here see the windows of the royal family’s apartments, for they are on the second floor of the opposite wing; whence the Kaiser looks out on the Neptune fountain of the Schloss-Platz and the elaborate façade of the royal stables when the purple banner that denotes his presence flies from the palace standard.