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 class. 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 passing of that funeral cortège 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 Strassburg.