Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

CHAPTER VII
THE BERGISCHE LAND

One of the real advantages of life in Cologne is the charm of the surrounding neighbourhood. Not that the neighbourhood to which I refer is near at hand or very accessible except by train or by motor car. Cologne lies in the centre of a great fertile plain, through which the Rhine flows nobly in that last stage of its career before entering the mud flats of Holland. At a distance varying from ten to fifteen miles the plain east and west is bounded by a chain of low hills broken up, especially on the eastern side, by delicious valleys. Here are woods and trout streams, meadows and flowers. No district with which I am acquainted is more adapted to walks, delightful without being arduous, or to longer expeditions by motor. These low hills commanding the plain abound in views of extraordinary vastness and extent. The hills are so easily climbed! Yet from their summits the wanderer has the impression that the kingdoms of the earth lie spread at his feet. For very little real exertion, therefore, he has the impression of having mastered some Alpine peak—an observation for which I hope I may be pardoned by any member of the Alpine Club.

From the eastern ridge, known as the Bergische Land, the sunset view is one of special beauty. The cultivated slopes and pasture lands fall away gently to the plain below, in spring fresh with the vivid green of young grass or corn, in autumn rich with harvest gold. In the distance, chimneys stretching north and south reveal the course of the Rhine, whose waters are hidden from view. Far away to the left is the outline of the Siebengebirge mounting guard over Bonn and the entrance to the romantic reach of the stream known as the Rheingau. Above the chimneys and the remote huddle of houses and factories, the twin spires of Cologne Cathedral, their clumsiness softened by distance, raise their symbol of man’s hope and aspiration to heaven.

The low range lying on the west side of Cologne known as the Vorgebirge is less attractive than the Bergische Land to the east. Industry preponderates on this side, for the Vorgebirge is of special importance owing to the famous black coal extracted from the hills. Here is dug, without any apparatus of shafts or sinking, a special brown deposit which, pressed and pounded, turns into the briquettes on which Cologne relies for its light and heat. The presence in the near neighbourhood of this ample supply of cheap fuel has been a factor of the utmost importance in the commercial development of Cologne. We of the Occupation have learnt to bless the black briquettes, which feed the central heating in winter and give us abundant electric light throughout the year.

How well these people manage their industrialism! That is a reflection borne in upon me time and again in the Rhineland. Prussianism, however bad for the soul, was very efficient in the organisation of daily life. Wages in Germany before the war were not high; the liberty and rights of the worker were restricted in many directions. On the other hand, no country in the world could approach Germany in the excellence of its municipal organisation and the many advantages of the population as regards public services. German authorities excelled in arrangements concerned with health, communication, and amusement. Town planning and building operations were controlled; cities were laid out and houses built on lines destined to promote the welfare of the whole community. The speculative builder was not allowed to wax fat at the expense of his neighbours. Electric light is supplied even in small villages, and an admirable service of trams and light railways brings the amenities of life within reach of the poorest.

Amusements are dealt with in a rational spirit, which makes for happiness and self-respect. Cafés, beer gardens with concert rooms attached, are decent places, where a man does not drink furtively but takes his glass of wine or beer in the company of his family. Not only have large towns a first-rate opera house and theatre, but good music and good drama can be heard in quite small places. Industry in particular has been brought to heel. Factory chimneys are not allowed to pollute a district at will or to poison the air with noxious fumes. A modern school of painters has taught us to see qualities of strength and even beauty in certain aspects of industry. But those qualities cannot be obvious to the working-class wife who has to struggle with the intolerable grime and dirt produced. The strength of a nation is rooted in the homes of a nation, and there are many districts in England where no man can be proud of his home. Men and women whose lot in life is cast in the Black Country, or who are forced to dwell in the long, mean street of dirty houses which extends from Nottingham to Leeds, might well envy the better conditions of existence which obtain in Germany.

I have never seen any information as to the stages of the Industrial Revolution in Germany. Naturally it came at a later date than our own and was able to benefit by our mistakes. But to what influence does it owe a character so different? Here in the lower Rhineland there are big industrial towns and great factories. These places are not beautiful, but they lack the overpowering dirt and ugliness of the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. All along the lower Rhine one factory succeeds another, but they consume their own smoke and fumes and are not allowed to tyrannise over the district. Düsseldorf even more than Cologne is a great manufacturing centre, and among other industries has large machine and puddling works in its suburbs. But the public gardens of the town, which are of great extent and beauty, might be a hundred miles removed from a factory. Leverkusen, the great dyeworks near Cologne, has the appearance of a model village. It is all to the credit of Germany that she has not allowed herself to be obsessed by that spirit of helpless fatalism which has descended on too many of the manufacturing districts and towns in England. Men and women’s lives are spent amid this grime, to the detriment of soul as well as body. It is a valuable object lesson to learn that, granted energy and a will to be clean, some of the drawbacks of an ugly industrialism can be avoided for the workers.

Lancashire and Yorkshire have one feature in common with the German industrial centres on the lower Rhine. Both have their own beautiful hinterland. The German hinterland in question has nothing so grand and so austere to show as the great heather-clad moors and rugged dales of Yorkshire and Derbyshire. But withal the rural districts of this smiling Bergische Land, with its wooded valleys and running streams and black and white houses buried deep among orchards, lie, so it seems, within a stone’s throw of factories and workshops. Full of charm are these little valleys, divided one from another by narrow watersheds. All of a family, yet each possesses its own features and has the impress of its own personality. A trout stream almost invariably meanders along the valley, sometimes finding its way through meadows of long lush grass, Alpine in its greenness, sometimes flowing among overhanging woods where the murmur of the waters mingles with the rustling of the leaves or the deeper, more melancholy note of the fir boughs. It is a smiling, almost park-like land, richly cultivated and well populated. There are no wild or desert places. Everything perhaps is a trifle sophisticated. Many of the black and white cottages, gabled and romantic, might have stepped off the light-comedy stage. Here and there the moated tower of some ruined Burg or an eighteenth-century country house set back in a walled garden strikes the same note. This is not Nature in her strength and power, but Nature laughing, gay, forthcoming, a sylvan goddess of woods and streams and meadows. “Intime” is the word which best expresses her charm. Last, but not least, Nature in the Bergische Land is a goddess of the fruits of the earth.

Spring is a season of wonder and beauty in the Rhineland. The villages disappear in a cloud of pink and white blossom. White and pink too are the country roads lined with fruit trees. Beech trees abound; and has Nature in her great spectacle of the changing year any sight more beautiful than the first shy unfolding of the young beech leaves? A little later come the chestnuts, stately and self-important, carrying their white candles on broad green candlesticks and lighting up the countryside with so brave an illumination. Then follows the deep-red blossom of the thorn, mingled with the purple and yellow of lilac and laburnum. Under foot the emerald green of the meadows is flecked yellow with cowslips. Yellow too are the great fields of mustard, which in turn yield place to carmine stretches of clover. It is a riot of colour and beauty throughout the Bergische Land. The high midsummer pomps find the cottage gardens a mass of roses and other homely flowers. Finally the white promise of spring gives way to the golden fulfilment of autumn. The orchards bend low under the weight of pear and apple and plum. And winter is no harsh thing in the valleys, where the delicate tracery of the leafless woods, detached against a frosty sky, has a charm as great as the young foliage of spring.

Though so little removed from the neighbourhood of industry, there is practically neither grime nor contamination about the Bergische Land. The German housewife, as I have said, is happily spared that hand-to-hand struggle with dirt which embitters existence for many an English working woman. The decentralisation of industry is much practised in Germany, and frequently isolated factories will be found in country surroundings which give employment to the immediate neighbourhood. It is perhaps for this reason that the game is not a hopeless one, that the extraordinary cleanliness of the German village is due. It is quite an experience to walk or motor through the villages on a Saturday evening when cleaning operations are in full swing. The whole population is out in the street tidying up. The oldest and the youngest inhabitant alike are hard at work with buckets and besoms. I am now able to appreciate why the Besom Binder always figures so largely in German fairy tales. As soon as a child can stagger it is provided with a besom three times the size of itself and turned out to sweep. Tiny children flourishing brooms will remain one of my permanent impressions of Germany.