BERLIN
Berlin, when I reached it, first manifested itself in a driving rain.
If I laugh at it forever and ever as a blunder-headed, vainglorious,
self-appreciative city I shall always love it too. Paris has had its
day, and will no doubt have others; London is content with an endless,
conservative day; Berlin’s is still to come and come brilliantly.
The blood is there, and the hope, and the moody, lustful, Wagnerian
temperament.
But first, before I reached it, I suffered a strange mental revolt
at being in Germany at all. Why? I can scarcely say. Perhaps I was
beginning to be depressed with what in my prejudice I called the
dullness of Germany. A little while later I recognized that while
there is an extreme conflict of temperament between the average German
and myself, I could yet admire them without wishing to be anything
like them. Of all the peoples I saw I should place the Germans first
for sobriety, industry, thoroughness, a hearty intolerance of sham, a
desire and a willingness to make the best of a very difficult earthly
condition. In many respects they are not artistically appetizing, being
gross physically, heartily passionate, vain, and cocksure; but those
things after all are unimportant. They have, in spite of all their
defects, great emotional, intellectual, and physical capacities, and
these things _are_ important. I think it is unquestionable that in
the main they take life far too seriously. The belief in a hell, for
instance, took a tremendous grip on the Teutonic mind and the Lutheran
interpretation of Protestantism, as it finally worked out, was as
dreary as anything could be--almost as dreary as Presbyterianism in
Scotland. That is the sad German temperament. A great nationality,
business success, public distinction is probably tending to make over
or at least modify the Teutonic cast of thought which is gray; but in
parts of Germany, for instance at Mayence, you see the older spirit
almost in full force.
In the next place I was out of Italy and that land had taken such a
strange hold on me. What a far cry from Italy to Germany! I thought.
Gone; once and for all, the wonderful clarity of atmosphere that
pervades almost the whole of Italy from the Alps to Rome and I presume
Sicily. Gone the obvious _dolce far niente_, the lovely cities set on
hills, the castles, the fortresses, the strange stone bridges, the
hot, white roads winding like snowy ribbons in the distance. No olive
trees, no cypresses, no umbrella trees or ilexes, no white, yellow,
blue, brown and sea-green houses, no wooden plows, white oxen and
ambling, bare-footed friars. In its place (the Alps and Switzerland
between) this low rich land, its railroads threading it like steel
bands, its citizens standing up as though at command, its houses in
the smaller towns almost uniformly red, its architecture a twentieth
century modification of an older order of many-gabled roofs--the order
of Albrecht Dürer--with its fanciful decorations, conical roofs and
pinnacles and quaint windows and doors that suggest the bird-boxes of
our childhood. Germany appears in a way to have attempted to abandon
the medieval architectural ideal that still may be seen in Mayence,
Mayen, the heart of Frankfort, Nuremberg, Heidelberg and other places
and to adapt its mood to the modern theory of how buildings ought to
be constructed, but it has not quite done so. The German scroll-loving
mind of the Middle Ages is still the German scroll-loving mind of
to-day. Look and you will see it quaintly cropping out everywhere. Not
in those wonderful details of intricacy, Teutonic fussiness, naïve,
jester-like grotesqueness which makes the older sections of so many old
German cities so wonderful, but in a slight suggestion of them here
and there--a quirk of roof, an over-elaborateness of decoration, a
too protuberant frieze or grape-viney, Bacchus-mooded, sex-ornamented
panel, until you say to yourself quite wisely, “Ah, Teutons will be
Teutons still.” They are making a very different Germany from what the
old Germany was--modern Germany dating from 1871--but it is not an
entirely different Germany. Its citizens are still stocky, red-blooded,
physically excited and excitable, emotional, mercurial, morbid,
enthusiastic, women-loving and life-loving, and no doubt will be so,
praise God, until German soil loses its inherent essentials, and German
climate makes for some other variations not yet indicated in the race.
[Illustration: A German dance hall, Berlin]
But to return to Berlin. I saw it first jogging down Unter den Linden
from the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof (station) to Cook’s Berlin agency,
seated comfortably in a closed cab behind as fat a horse and driver
as one would wish to see. And from there, still farther along Unter
den Linden and through the Wilhelmstrasse to Leipzigstrasse and the
Potsdamer Bahnhof I saw more of it. Oh, the rich guttural value of the
German “platzes” and “strasses” and “ufers” and “dams.” They make up
a considerable portion of your city atmosphere for you in Berlin. You
just have to get used to them--just as you have to accept the “fabriks”
and the “restaurations” and the “wein handlungs,” and all the other
“ichs,” “lings,” “bergs,” “brückes,” until you sigh for the French
and Italian “-rics” and the English-American “-rys.” However, among
the first things that impressed me were these: all Berlin streets,
seemingly, were wide with buildings rarely more than five stories
high. Everything, literally _everything_, was American new--and
newer--German new! And the cabbies were the largest, fattest, most
broad-backed, most thick-through and _Deutschiest_ looking creatures I
have ever beheld. Oh, the marvel of those glazed German cabby hats with
the little hard rubber decorations on the side. Nowhere else in Europe
is there anything like these cabbies. They do not stand; they sit,
heavily and spaciously--alone.
The faithful Baedeker has little to say for Berlin. Art? It is
almost all in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, in the vicinity of the
Kupferdam. And as for public institutions, spots of great historic
interest--they are a dreary and negligible list. But, nevertheless and
notwithstanding, Berlin appealed to me instantly as one of the most
interesting and forceful of all the cities, and that solely because it
is new, crude, human, growing feverishly, unbelievably; and growing in
a distinct and individual way. They have achieved and are achieving
something totally distinct and worth while--a new place to go; and
after a while, I haven’t the slightest doubt, thousands and even
hundreds of thousands of travelers will go there. But for many and many
a day the sensitive and artistically inclined will not admire it.
My visit to Cook’s brought me a mass of delayed mail which cheered
me greatly. It was now raining pitchforks but my bovine driver, who
looked somehow like a segment of a wall, managed to bestow my trunk
and bags in such a fashion that they were kept dry, and off we went
for the hotel. I had a preconceived notion that Unter den Linden
was a magnificent avenue lined shadily with trees and crowded with
palaces. Nothing could have been more erroneous. The trees are few and
insignificant, the palaces entirely wanting. It is a very wide business
street, lined with hotels, shops, restaurants, newspaper offices and
filled with a parading throng in pleasant weather. At one end it
gives into an area known as the Lustgarten crowded with palaces, art
galleries, the Berlin Cathedral, the Imperial Opera House and what
not; at the other end (it is only about a mile long) into the famous
Berlin Thiergarten, formerly a part of the Imperial (Hohenzollern)
hunting-forest. On the whole, the avenue was a disappointment.
For suggestions of character, individuality, innate Teutonic charm or
the reverse--as these things strike one--growth, prosperity, promise,
and the like, Berlin cannot be equaled in Europe. Quite readily I can
see how it might irritate and repel the less aggressive denizens of
less hopeful and determined realms. The German, when he is oppressed
is terribly depressed; when he is in the saddle, nothing can equal his
bump of I-am-ity. It becomes so balloon-like and astounding that the
world may only gaze in astonishment or retreat in anger, dismay, or
uproarious amusement. The present-day Germans do take themselves so
seriously and from many points of view with good reason, too.
I don’t know where in Europe, outside of Paris, if even there, you will
see a better-kept city. It is so clean and spruce and fresh that it is
a joy to walk there--anywhere. Mile after mile of straight, imposing
streets greet your gaze. Berlin needs a great Pantheon, an avenue
such as Unter den Linden lined with official palaces (not shops), and
unquestionably a magnificent museum of art--I mean a better building.
Its present public and imperial structures are most uninspired. They
suggest the American-European architecture of 1860–1870. The public
monuments of Berlin, and particularly their sculptural adornments are
for the most part a crime against humanity.
I remember standing and looking one evening at that noble German
effort known as the memorial statue of William I, in the Lustgarten,
unquestionably the fiercest and most imposing of all the Berlin
military sculptures. This statue speaks loudly for all Berlin and for
all Germany and for just what the Teutonic disposition would like to
be--namely, terrible, colossal, astounding, world-scarifying, and the
like. It almost shouts “Ho! see what I am,” but the sad part of it is
that it does it badly, not with that reserve that somehow invariably
indicates tremendous power so much better than mere bluster does. What
the Germans seem not to have learned in their art at least is that
“easy does it.” Their art is anything but easy. It is almost invariably
showy, truculent, vainglorious. But to continue: The whole neighborhood
in which this statue occurs, and the other neighborhood at the other
end of Unter den Linden, where stands the Reichstag and the like,
all in the center of Berlin, as it were, is conceived, designed, and
executed (in my judgment) in the same mistaken spirit. Truly, when you
look about you at the cathedral (save the mark) or the Royal Palace in
the Lustgarten, or at the Winged Victory before the Reichstag or at the
Reichstag itself, and the statue of Bismarck in the Königs-Platz (the
two great imperial centers), you sigh for the artistic spirit of Italy.
But no words can do justice to the folly of spending three million
dollars to erect such a thing as this Berlin _Dom_ or cathedral. It is
so bad that it hurts. And I am told that the Kaiser himself sanctioned
some of the architectural designs. And it was only completed between
1894 and 1906. Shades of Brabante and Pisano!
But if I seem disgusted with this section of Berlin--its evidence
of Empire, as it were--there was much more that truly charmed me.
Wherever I wandered I could perceive through all the pulsing life
of this busy city the thoroughgoing German temperament--its moody
poverty, its phlegmatic middle-class prosperity, its aggressive
commercial, financial, and, above all, its official and imperial life.
Berlin is shot through with the constant suggestion of officialism
and imperialism. The German policeman with his shining brass helmet
and brass belt; the Berlin sentry in his long military gray overcoat,
his musket over his shoulder, his high cap shading his eyes, his
black-and-white striped sentry-box behind him, stationed apparently at
every really important corner and before every official palace; the
German military and imperial automobiles speeding their independent
ways, all traffic cleared away before them, the small flag of
officialdom or imperialism fluttering defiantly from the foot-rails
as they flash at express speed past you;--these things suggest an
individuality which no other European city that I saw quite equaled. It
represented what I would call determination, self-sufficiency, pride.
Berlin is new, green, vigorous, astounding--a city that for speed of
growth puts Chicago entirely into the shade; that for appearance,
cleanliness, order, for military precision and thoroughness has no
counterpart anywhere. It suggests to you all the time, something very
much greater to come which is the most interesting thing that can be
said about any city, anywhere.
One panegyric I should like to write on Berlin concerns not so much
its social organization as a city, though that is interesting enough,
but specifically its traffic and travel arrangements. To be sure it is
not yet such a city as either New York, London or Paris, but it has
over three million people, a crowded business heart and a heavy, daily,
to-and-fro-swinging tide of suburban traffic. There are a number of
railway stations in the great German capital, the Potsdamer Bahnhof,
the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, the Anhalter Bahnhof and so on, and
coming from each in the early hours of the morning, or pouring toward
them at evening are the same eager streams of people that one meets in
New York at similar hours.
The Germans are amazingly like the Americans. Sometimes I think that we
get the better portion of our progressive, constructive characteristics
from them. Only, the Germans, I am convinced, are so much more
thorough. They go us one better in economy, energy, endurance, and
thoroughness. The American already is beginning to want to play too
much. The Germans have not reached that stage.
The railway stations I found were excellent, with great switching-yards
and enormous sheds arched with glass and steel, where the trains
waited. In Berlin I admired the suburban train service as much as I
did that of London, if not more. That in Paris was atrocious. Here the
trains offered a choice of first, second, and third class, with the
vast majority using the second and third. I saw little difference in
the crowds occupying either class. The second-class compartments were
upholstered in a greyish-brown corduroy. The third-class seats were of
plain wood, varnished and scrupulously clean. I tried all three classes
and finally fixed on the third as good enough for me.
I wish all Americans who at present suffer the indignities of the
American street-railway and steam-railway suburban service could go to
Berlin and see what that city has to teach them in this respect. Berlin
is much larger than Chicago. It is certain soon to be a city of five or
six millions of people--very soon. The plans for handling this mass of
people comfortably and courteously are already in operation. The German
public service is obviously not left to supposedly kindly minded
business gentlemen--“Christian gentlemen,”--as Mr. Baer of the Reading
once chose to put it, “in partnership with God.” The populace may be
underlings to an imperial Kaiser, subject to conscription and eternal
inspection, but at least the money-making “Christian gentlemen” with
their hearts and souls centered on their private purses and working, as
Mr. Croker once said of himself, “for their own pockets all the time,”
are not allowed to “take it out of” the rank and file.
No doubt the German street-railways and steam-railways are making a
reasonable sum of money and are eager to make more. I haven’t the least
doubt but that heavy, self-opinionated, vainglorious German directors
of great wealth gather around mahogany tables in chambers devoted to
meetings of directors and listen to ways and means of cutting down
expenses and “improving” the service. Beyond the shadow of a doubt
there are hard, hired managers, eager to win the confidence and support
of their superiors and ready to feather their own nests at the expense
of the masses, who would gladly cut down the service, “pack ’em in,”
introduce the “cutting out” system of car service and see that the “car
ahead” idea was worked to the last maddening extreme; but in Germany,
for some strange, amazing reason, they don’t get a chance. What is the
matter with Germany, anyhow? I should like to know. Really I would.
Why isn’t the “Christian gentleman” theory of business introduced
there? The population of Germany, acre for acre and mile for mile, is
much larger than that of America. They have sixty-five million people
crowded into an area as big as Texas. Why don’t they “pack ’em in”? Why
don’t they introduce the American “sardine” subway service? You don’t
find it anywhere in Germany, for some strange reason. Why? They have
a subway service in Berlin. It serves vast masses of people, just as
the subway does in New York; its platforms are crowded with people. But
you can get a seat just the same. There is no vociferated “step lively”
there. Overcrowding isn’t a joke over there as it is here--something
to be endured with a feeble smile until you are spiritually comparable
to a door mat. There must be “Christian gentlemen” of wealth and
refinement in Germany and Berlin. Why don’t they “get on the job”? The
thought arouses strange uncertain feelings in me.
Take, for instance, the simple matter of starting and stopping
street-railway cars in the Berlin business heart. In so far as I could
see, that area, mornings and evenings, was as crowded as any similar
area in Paris, London, or New York. Street-cars have to be run through
it, started, stopped; passengers let on and off--a vast tide carried in
and out of the city. Now the way this matter is worked in New York is
quite ingenious. We operate what might be described as a daily guessing
contest intended to develop the wits, muscles, lungs, and tempers of
the people. The scheme, in so far as the street railway companies are
concerned, is (after running the roads as economically as possible)
to see how thoroughly the people can be fooled in their efforts to
discover when and where a car will stop. In Berlin, however, they
have, for some reason, an entirely different idea. There the idea is
not to fool the people at all but to get them in and out of the city
as quickly as possible. So, as in Paris, London, Rome, and elsewhere,
a plan of fixed stopping-places has been arranged. Signs actually
indicate where the cars stop and there--marvel of marvels--they
all stop even in the so-called rush hours. No traffic policeman,
apparently, can order them to go ahead without stopping. They must
stop. And so the people do not run for the cars, the motorman has no
joy in outwitting anybody. Perhaps that is why the Germans are neither
so agile, quick-witted, or subtle as the Americans.
And then, take in addition--if you will bear with me another
moment--this matter of the Berlin suburban service as illustrated by
the lines to Potsdam and elsewhere. It is true the officers, and even
the Emperor of Germany, living at Potsdam and serving the Imperial
German Government there may occasionally use this line, but thousands
upon thousands of intermediate and plebeian Germans use it also. You
can _always_ get a seat. Please notice this word _always_. There are
three classes and you can _always_ get a seat in any class--not the
first or second classes only, but the third class and particularly the
_third_ class. There are “rush” hours in Berlin just as there are in
New York, dear reader. People swarm into the Berlin railway stations
and at Berlin street-railway corners and crowd on cars just as they
do here. The lines fairly seethe with cars. On the tracks ranged in
the Potsdamer Bahnhof, for instance, during the rush hours, you will
see trains consisting of eleven, twelve, and thirteen cars, mostly
third-class accommodation, waiting to receive you. And when one is
gone, another and an equally large train is there on the adjoining
track and it is going to leave in another minute or two also. And when
that is gone there will be another, and so it goes.
There is not the slightest desire evident anywhere to “pack” anybody
in. There isn’t any evidence that anybody wants to make anything
(dividends, for instance) out of straps. There _are_ no straps. These
poor, unliberated, Kaiser-ruled people would really object to straps
and standing in the aisles, They would compel a decent service and
there would be no loud cries on the part of “Christian gentlemen”
operating large and profitable systems as to the “rights of property,”
the need of “conserving the constitution,” the privilege of appealing
to Federal judges, and the right of having every legal technicality
invoked to the letter;--or, if there were, they would get scant
attention. Germany just doesn’t see public service in that light. It
hasn’t fought, bled, and died, perhaps, for “liberty.” It hasn’t had
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson and Abraham
Lincoln. All it has had is Frederick the Great and Emperor William I
and Bismarck and Von Moltke. Strange, isn’t it? Queer, how Imperialism
apparently teaches people to be civil, while Democracy does the
reverse. We ought to get a little “Imperialism” into our government,
I should say. We ought to make American law and American government
supreme, but over it there ought to be a “supremer” people who really
know what their rights are, who respect liberties, decencies, and
courtesies for themselves and others, and who demand and see that
their government and their law and their servants, public and private,
are responsive and responsible to them, rather than to the “Christian
gentlemen” who want to “pack ’em in.” If you don’t believe it, go to
Berlin and then see if you come home again cheerfully believing that
this is still the land of the _free_ and the home of the _brave_.
Rather I think you will begin to feel that we are getting to be the
land of the _dub_ and the home of the _door-mat_. Nothing more and
nothing less.