Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

Many people whom I have met, not only foreigners but Germans from other parts of Germany, are loud in their denunciations of the Berliners. “Frech” and “roh” are words often used about them. There is a surly malice of speech and manner among the working classes, that seems to indicate a wish to atone for political impotence, by braggart impudence to those whom they regard as superior. When we played horse as children, we champed the wooden bit, shied, and balked and kicked, and the worse we behaved the more spirited horses we thought ourselves. There is a certain social and political radicalism verging upon anarchy, which plays at life in much the same way, with no better reason, and with little better result. Shying, balking, and kicking, and champing the political bit, are only spirited to the childish.

Their awkward and annoying attentions to women alone on the streets; their staring and gaping; their rudeness in pushing and shoving; the general underbred look, the slouching gait, the country-store clothes, hats, and boots; the fearful and wonderful combinations of raiment; the sweetbread complexions, as of men under-exercised and not sufficiently aired and scrubbed; their stiff courtesy to one another when they recognize acquaintances with hat-sweeping bows; their fierce gobbling in the restaurants; their lack of small services and attentions to their own women when they go about in public with them; their selfish disregard of others in public places, their giving and taking of hats, coats, sticks, and umbrellas at the garde-robes of the theatres, for example; their habit of straggling about in the middle of the streets, like the chickens and geese on a country road: all these things I have noted too, but I must admit the surprising personal conclusion that I have grown to like the people. A good pair of shoulders and an engaging smile go far to mitigate these nuisances. It makes for good sense in this matter of criticism always to bear in mind that delicious piece of humor of the psalmist: “Let the righteous rather smite me friendly; and reprove me. But let not their precious balms break my head.” The “precious balms” of the lofty and righteous critic are not of much value when they merely break heads.

I have been all over Berlin, and in all sorts of places, by day and by night. I have found myself seated beside all sorts of people in restaurants and public places, and I have yet to chronicle any rudeness to me or mine. I like their innocent curiosity, their unsophisticated ways, their bumpkin love-making in public; and many a time I have found entertainment from odd companions who seated themselves near me, when I have strayed into the cheaper restaurants, to hear and to see something of the Berliner in his native wilds. Their malice and rudeness and apparent impertinences are due to lack of experience, to the fact that their manners are still untilled, I believe, rather than to intentional insult. They are not house-broken to their new capital, that is all, and that will come in time. Their malicious jealousy peeps out in all sorts of ways. In the lower house of the Prussian Diet, recently, a member protested vigorously against the employment of an American singer in the Opera House! Chauvinism carried to this extreme becomes comic, and is noted here only to indicate to what depths of farm-yard provinciality some of the citizens of this great city can descend.

They are dreamers and sentimentalists too. There are more kissing, more fondling, more exuberance of affection, more displays of friendliness in Germany in a week than in England and America in six months. I confess without shame that I like to see it, and when it comes my way, as beyond my deserts it has, I like to feel it. How lasting is this friendliness I have no means of knowing till the years to come tell me, but that it is a pleasant atmosphere to live in there can be no doubt.

The driving is of the very worst. A man behind a horse, or horses, who knows even the elements of handling the reins and the whip and the brake, would be a curiosity indeed. I have not seen a dozen coachmen, private or public, to whom my youngest child could not have given invaluable suggestions as to the bitting, harnessing, and handling of his cattle. On the other hand, I one day saw a street sign twisted out of its place. I was fascinated by this unexampled mark of negligence. I determined to watch that sign; alas, within forty-eight hours it was put right again.

Let it not be understood that there are no fine horses to be seen in Berlin. You will go far to find a better lot of horse-flesh, or better-looking men on the horses, than you will see when the Kaiser rides by to the castle after his morning exercise; and he sits his horse and manages him with the easy skill of the real horseman, and looks every inch a king besides. It is told of Daniel Webster, walking in London, that a navvy turned to his companion and remarked: “That bloke must be a king!” You would say the same of the Kaiser if you saw him on horseback.

At horse shows and in the Tiergarten, and in riding-places in other cities, I have looked at hundreds of horses, and, if I mistake not, Germany is both buying and breeding the very best in the way of mounts, though their civilian riders are often of the scissors variety. There are comparatively few harness horses, and in Berlin scarcely a dozen well-turned-out private carriages, outside the imperial equipages, which are always superbly horsed and beautifully turned out; so my eyes tell me at least, and I have watched the streets carefully for months. The minor details of a properly turned-out carriage (bits, chains, liveries, saddle-cloths, and so on) are still unknown here. I have had the privilege of driving and riding some of the horses in the imperial stables; and I have seen all of them at one time or another being exercised in harness and under the saddle. I have never driven a better-mannered four, or ridden more perfectly broken saddle-horses. There are three hundred and twenty-six horses in his Majesty’s stables, and for a private stable of its size it has no equal in the world. I may add, too, that there is probably no better “whip” in the world to-day, whether with two horses, four horses, or six horses, than the gentleman who trains the harness horses in the imperial stables. This German coachman would be a revelation at a horse show in either New York or London. If the citizens of Berlin were as well-mannered as the horses in the imperial stables, this would be the most elegant capital in the world. It is to be regretted that his Majesty’s very accomplished master of the horse cannot also hold the position of censor morum to the citizens of Berlin. Individual prowess in the details of cosmopolitan etiquette has not reached a high level, but in all matters of mere house-keeping there are no better municipal housewives than these German cities and towns.

As a further example, the statues of Berlin are carefully cleaned in the spring, but what statues! With the exception of the Lessing, the Goethe, and the Great Elector statues, the statue of Frederick the Great, and the reclining statues of the late emperor and empress, by Begas, and one or two others, one sees at once that these citizens are no more capable of ornamenting their city than of dressing themselves.

Poor Bismarck! Grotesque figures (men, women, animals) surround the base of his statue in Berlin, in Leipsic; and in Hamburg, clad in a corrugated golf costume, with a colossal two-handed sword in front of him, he is a melancholy figure, gazing out over a tumble-down beer-garden. At Wannsee, near Berlin, there is, I must admit, a really fine bust of Bismarck. On a solid square pedestal of granite, covered with ivy and surrounded by the whispering, or sighing, or creaking and cracking trees that he loved, and facing the setting sun, and alone in a secluded corner, just the place he would have chosen, there are the head and shoulders of the real Bismarck. Here for once he has escaped the fussy attentions of the artistry that he detested. Lehnbach, who painted Bismarck so many scores of times, never gave him the color that his face kept all through life, and with the exception of this bust, of the scores of Bismarck memorials one sees all commiserate the lack of artist ability; they do not commemorate Bismarck. If this is what they do to the greatest man in their history, what is to be expected elsewhere? What has poor Joachim Friedrich done that he should pose forever in the Sieges Allee as an intoxicated hitching-post? What, indeed, have his companions done that they should stand in two rows there, studies in contortion, with a gilded Russian dancer with wings at one end of their line, and a woodeny Roland at the other? But there they are, simpering a paltry patriotism, insipid as history and ridiculous as art. What has become of Lessing, and Winckelmann, and Goethe, and their teachings? Is this the price that a nation must pay for its industrial progress?

The German, with all his boasting about the “centre of culture,” has not discovered that the beauty of antiquity is the expression of those virtues which were useful at the time of Theseus, as Stendhal rightly tells us. Individual force, which was everything of old, amounts to almost nothing in our modern civilization. The monk who invented gunpowder modified sculpture; strength is only necessary now among subalterns. No one thinks of asking whether Frederick the Great and Napoleon were good swordsmen. The strength we admire, is the strength of Napoleon advancing alone upon the First Battalion of the royal troops near Lake Loffrey in March, 1815; that is strength of soul. The moral qualities with which we are concerned are no longer the same as in the days of the Greeks. Before this cockney sculpture was planned, there should have been a closer study of the history and philosophy of art in Berlin.