A rich Munich Jew, a cinema merchant, wanted to adopt a Vienna orphan. He wrote to Vienna for a Jewish male child, well-authenticated as an orphan; he did not want the parents to come and sponge on him in later years. The child was brought to Munich. Presently application was made to the police for an extra milk ration on account of the boy. Then the police discovered the new arrival. "What!" said they, "living here without a permit! Application for permission to reside must be made at once."
Application was made and permission was refused. The reason given was that the housing shortage in Munich was too great. But some one was at pains to find out the real reason. It was that the boy was a Jew, and who could say—in twenty years, educated in the best institutions of Munich—he might become a Trotsky or a Bela Kun or Bavarian Eisner.
"But why not a Disraeli?" said some one who listened to the story.
Permission was eventually granted.
One attempt has been made to seize Munich for the proletariat, and the comfortable Bavarian realized that whilst he has a never-failing stomach for good brown beer he has no stomach for revolution. The great city is a monument of bourgeois enterprise. Business is more than politics, and social conviviality than either.
S—— drove me out to the valley of the Iser, "Iser rolling rapidly." We went to Grunewald, we passed Ludendorf's villa, curious credulous Ludendorf, who took Winston Churchill at his word when the later penned his appeal to Germany in the "Evening News" to save Europe by fighting the Bolsheviks, and prepared a plan whereby the German army was reconstituted in the strength at which in 1918 it was dissolved. We surveyed from the hurrying car a fine park-like country, rich and calm, and sensibly remote from Europe's centre. It was a lovely springtide, and new hope fallaciously decked Southern Germany, as if all trouble were over and all had been forgiven. We walked, too, in the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have made the late war, and that Victorian England was much nearer to Germany. It was nearer to the Germany of Queen Victoria's time. That is quite true.
England has gone on and become more European; her passion for individual freedom and self-expression has steadily developed, whilst Germany has remained submissively under the yoke of authority and discipline. Germany, with all her learning and her industry, her unstinted application, and her good parts, has become dull. There was an enormous amount of dulness, genuine uninspired dulness, in the Germans in the war. You can identify it now when you visit Germany in peace.
LETTERS OF TRAVEL
XII. FROM BERLIN (I)
Old men and war-cripples as porters at the station, dirty streets encumbered by hawkers and their wares, strings of pitiful beggars shaking their hands and exposing mortified limbs—can this be Berlin, Berlin the prim, the orderly, the clean? Something has happened here in seven years, some sort of psychological change has been wrought in the mind of a people. Here, as in some Slav countries, there are laws and they are not kept, regulations and they are not observed. Unshaven men and ill-washed women on the streets, and dowdy, hatless girls with dirty hair crowding into cheap cinema theatres! A city that had no slums and no poor in 1914 now becoming a slum en bloc. And the litter on the roadways! You will not find its like in Warsaw. You must seek comparisons in the Bowery of New York or that part of the City of Westminster called Soho. The horse has come back to Berlin to make up for loss of motors, and needs more scavengers to follow him than the modern municipality can afford.
Not that Berlin has broken down in any way. It is the same great hive of industrialism. Everyone is employed. More are employed than before. The leisured class is smaller. All the workshops and factories and offices are full. The shops display as many wares. There is evidence of an enormous overflowing productivity. Cheap lines of goods are run out in hawkers' barrows and auctioned on the pavement, measures of cloth for suits, overcoats, soaps, stationery. Trams, 'buses, railways all are used to the last seat and standing-room. And the working people are thinking about their work and their wages and their homes and their beer—and not about the peace treaty and the latest move of France for their destruction.