Europe After 8:15
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H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright >> Europe After 8:15
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The Mathaeserbraeu is up a narrow alley, and that alley is always full
of Muencheners going in. Follow the crowd, and one comes presently to a
row of booths set up by radish sellers--ancient dames of incredible
diameter, gnarled old peasants in tapestry waistcoats and country boots;
veterans, one half ventures, of the Napoleonic wars, even of the wars of
Frederick the Great. A ten-pfennig piece buys a noble white radish, and
the seller slices it free of charge, slices it with a silver revolving
blade into two score thin schnitzels, and puts salt between each
adjacent pair. A radish so sliced and salted is the perfect complement
of this dark Mathaeser beer. One nibbles and drinks, drinks and nibbles,
and so slides the lazy afternoon. The scene is an incredible, playhouse
courtyard, with shrubs in tubs and tables painted scarlet; a fit setting
for the first act of "Manon." But instead of choristers in short skirts,
tripping, the whoop-la and boosting the landlord's wine, one feasts the
eye upon Muenchenese of a rhinocerous fatness, dropsical and gargantuan
creatures, bisons in skirts, who pass laboriously among the bibuli,
offering bunches of little pretzels strung upon red strings. Six
pretzels for ten pfennigs. A five-pfennig tip for Frau Dickleibig, and
she brings you the _Fliegende Blaetter_, _Le Rire_, the Munich or Berlin
papers, whatever you want. A drowsy, hedonistic, easy-going place. Not
much talk, not much rattling of crockery, not much card playing. The
mountain, one guesses, of Munich meditation. The incubator of Munich
_gemuetlichkeit_.
Upstairs there is the big Mathaeser hall, with room for three thousand
visitors of an evening, a great resort for Bavarian high privates and
their best girls, the scene of honest and public courting. Between the
Bavarian high private and the Bavarian lieutenant all the differences
are in favour of the former. He wears no corsets, he is innocent of the
monocle, he sticks to native beer. A man of amour like his officer, he
disdains the elaborate winks, the complex _diableries_ of that superior
being, and confines himself to open hugging. One sees him, in these
great beer halls, with his arm around his Lizzie. Anon he arouses
himself from his coma of love to offer her a sip from his _mass_ or to
whisper some bovine nothing into her ear. Before they depart for the
evening he escorts her to the huge sign, "_Fuer Damen_," and waits
patiently while she goes in and fixes her mussed hair.
The Bavarians have no false pruderies, no nasty little nicenesses.
There is, indeed, no race in Europe more innocent, more frank, more
clean-minded. Postcards of a homely and harmless vulgarity are for sale
in every Munich stationer's shop, but the connoisseur looks in vain for
the studied indecencies of Paris, the appalling obscenities of the Swiss
towns. Munich has little to show the American Sunday school
superintendent on the loose. The ideal there is not a sharp and stinging
deviltry, a swift massacre of all the commandments, but a liquid and
tolerant geniality, a great forgiveness. Beer does not refine, perhaps,
but at any rate it mellows. No Muenchener ever threw a stone.
And so, passing swiftly over the Burgerbraeu in the Kaufingerstrasse,
the Hackerbraeu, the Kreuzbraeu, and the Kochelbraeu, all hospitable
_lokale_, selling pure beer in honest measures; and over the various
Pilsener fountains and the agency for Vienna beer--dish-watery
stuff!--in the Maximilianstrasse; and over the various summer _keller_
on the heights of Au and Haidhausen across the river, with their
spacious terraces and their ancient traditions--passing over all these
tempting sanctuaries of _mass_ and _kellnerin_, we arrive finally at the
Loewenbraeukeller and the Hofbraeuhaus, which is quite a feat of arriving,
it must be granted, for the one is in the Nymphenburgerstrasse, in
Northwest Munich, and the other is in the Platzl, not two blocks from
the royal palace, and the distance from the one to the other is a good
mile and a half.
The Loewenbraeu first--a rococo castle sprawling over a whole city block,
and with accommodations in its "halls, galleries, loges, verandas,
terraces, outlying garden promenades and beer rooms" (I quote the
official guide) for eight thousand drinkers. A lordly and impressive
establishment is this Loewenbraeu, an edifice of countless towers,
buttresses, minarets and dungeons. It was designed by the learned Prof.
Albert Schmidt, one of the creators of modern Munich, and when it was
opened, on June 14, 1883, all the military bands in Munich played at
once in the great hall, and the royal family of Bavaria turned out in
state coaches, and 100,000 eager Muencheners tried to fight their way in.
How large that great hall may be I don't know, but I venture to guess
that it seats four thousand people--not huddled together, as a theatre
seats them, but comfortably, loosely, spaciously, with plenty of room
between the tables for the 250 _kellnerinen_ to navigate safely with
their cargoes of Loewenbraeu. Four nights a week a military band plays in
this hall or a _maennerchor_ rowels the air with song, and there is an
admission fee of thirty pfennigs (7-1/5 cents). One night I heard the
band of the second Bavarian (Crown Prince's) Regiment, playing as an
orchestra, go through a programme that would have done credit to the New
York philharmonic. A young violinist in corporal's stripes lifted the
crowd to its feet with the slow movement of the Tschaikowsky concerto;
the band itself began with Wagner's "Siegfried Idyl" and ended with
Strauss's "Rosen aus dem Sueden," a superb waltz, magnificently
performed. Three hours of first-rate music for 7-1/5 cents! And a _mass_
of Loewenbraeu, twice the size of the seidel sold in this country at
twenty cents, for forty pfennigs (9-1/2 cents)! An inviting and
appetizing spot, believe me. A place to stretch your legs. A temple of
Lethe. There, when my days of moneylust are over, I go to chew my
memories and dream my dreams and listen to my arteries hardening.
By taxicab down the wide Briennerstrasse, past the Luitpold and the
Odeon, to the Ludwigstrasse, gay with its after-the-opera crowds, and
then to the left into the Residenzstrasse, past the Hoftheatre and its
cafe (ah, Sophie, thou angel!), and so to the Maximilianstrasse, to the
Neuthurmstrasse, and at last, with a sharp turn, into the Platzl.
The Hofbraeuhaus! One hears it from afar; a loud buzzing, the rattle of
_mass_ lids, the sputter of the released _dunkle_, the sharp cries of
pretzel and radish sellers, the scratching of matches, the shuffling of
feet, the eternal gurgling of the plain people. No palace this, for all
its towering battlements and the frescos by Ferdinand Wagner in the
great hall upstairs, but drinking butts for them that labour and are
heavy laden: station porter, teamsters, servant girls, soldiers,
bricklayers, blacksmiths, tinners, sweeps.
There sits the fair lady who gathers cigar stumps from the platz in
front of the Bayerischer Hof, still in her green hat of labour, but now
with an earthen cylinder of Hofbraeu in her hands. The gentleman beside
her, obviously wooing her, is third fireman at the same hotel. At the
next table, a squad of yokels just in from the oberland, in their short
jackets and their hobnailed boots. Beyond, a noisy meeting of
Socialists, a rehearsal of some _liedertafel_, a family reunion of four
generations, a beer party of gay young bloods from the gas works, a
conference of the executive committee of the horse butchers' union.
Every second drinker has brought his lunch wrapped in newspaper; half a
_blutwurst_, two radishes, an onion, a heel of rye bread. The debris of
such lunches covers the floor. One wades through escaped beer, among
floating islands of radish top and newspaper. Children go overboard and
are succoured with shouts. Leviathans of this underground lake,
_Lusitanias_ of beer, Pantagruels of the Hofbraeuhaus, collide, draw off,
collide again and are wrecked in the narrow channels.... A great puffing
and blowing. Stranded craft on every bench.... Noses like cigar bands.
No waitresses here. Each drinker for himself! You go to the long shelf,
select your _mass_, wash it at the spouting faucet and fall into line.
Behind the rail the _zahlmeister_ takes your twenty-eight pfennigs and
pushes your _mass_ along the counter. Then the perspiring _bierbischof_
fills it from the naked keg, and you carry it to the table of your
choice, or drink it standing up and at one suffocating gulp, or take it
out into the yard, to wrestle with it beneath the open sky. Roughnecks
enter eternally with fresh kegs; the thud of the mallet never ceases;
the rude clamour of the bung-starter is as the rattle of departing time
itself. Huge damsels in dirty aprons--retired _kellnerinen_, too bulky,
even, for that trade of human battleships--go among the tables rescuing
empty _maesse_. Each _mass_ returns to the shelf and begins another
circuit of faucet, counter and table. A dame so fat that she must remain
permanently at anchor--the venerable _Constitution_ of this
fleet!--bawls postcards and matches. A man in _pince-nez_, a decadent
doctor of philosophy, sells pale German cigars at three for ten
pfennigs. Here we are among the plain people. They believe in Karl Marx,
_blutwurst_ and the Hofbraeuhaus. They speak a German that is half speech
and half grunt. One passes them to windward and enters the yard.
A brighter scene. A cleaner, greener land. In the centre a circular
fountain; on four sides the mediaeval gables of the old beerhouse; here
and there a barrel on end, to serve as table. The yard is most gay on a
Sunday morning, when thousands stop on their way to church--not only
Socialists and servant girls, remember, but also solemn gentlemen in
plug hats and frock coats, students in their polychrome caps and in all
the glory of their astounding duelling scars, citizens' wives in holiday
finery. The fountain is a great place for gossip. One rests one's _mass_
on the stone coping and engages one's nearest neighbour. He has a cousin
who is brewmaster of the largest brewery in Zanesville, Ohio. Is it true
that all the policemen in America are convicts? That some of the
skyscrapers have more than twenty stories? What a country! And those
millionaire Socialists! Imagine a rich man denouncing riches! And then,
"_Gruess' Gott!_"--and the pots clink. A kindly, hospitable, tolerant
folk, these Bavarians! "_Gruess' Gott!_"--"the compliments of God." What
other land has such a greeting for strangers?
On May day all Munich goes to the Hofbraeuhaus to "prove" the new bock.
I was there last May in company with a Virginian weighing 190 pounds. He
wept with joy when he smelled that heavenly brew. It had the coppery
glint of old Falernian, the pungent bouquet of good port, the acrid grip
of English ale, and the bubble and bounce of good champagne. A beer to
drink reverently and silently, as if in the presence of something
transcendental, ineffable--but not too slowly, for the supply is
limited! One year it ran out in thirty hours and there were riots from
the Max-Joseph-Platz to the Isar. But last May day there was enough and
to spare--enough, at all events, to last until the Virginian and I gave
up, at high noon of May 3. The Virginian went to bed at the Bayerischer
Hof at 12:30, leaving a call for 4 P.M. of May 5.
Ah, the Hofbraeuhaus! A massive and majestic shrine, the Parthenon of
beer drinking, seductive to virtuosi, fascinating to the connoisseur,
but a bit too strenuous, a trifle too cruel, perhaps, for the
dilettante. The Muencheners love it as hillmen love the hills. There
every one of them returns, soon or late. There he takes his children, to
teach them his hereditary art. There he takes his old grandfather, to
say farewell to the world. There, when he has passed out himself, his
pallbearers in their gauds of grief will stop to refresh themselves, and
to praise him in speech and song, and to weep unashamed for the loss of
so _gemuethlich_ a fellow.
But, as I have said, the Hofbraeuhaus is no playroom for amateurs. My
advice to you, if you would sip the cream of Munich and leave the hot
acids and lye, is that you have yourself hauled forthwith to the
Hoftheatre Cafe, and that you there tackle a modest seidel of
Spatenbraeu--first one, and then another, and so on until you master the
science.
And all that I ask in payment for that tip--the most valuable,
perhaps, you have ever got from a book--is that you make polite inquiry
of the Herr Wirt regarding Fraeulein Sophie, and that you present to her,
when she comes tripping to your table, the respects and compliments of
one who forgets not her cerulean eyes, her swanlike glide, her Mona Lisa
smile and her leucemic and superbly manicured hands!
BERLIN
[Illustration: BERLIN]
BERLIN
I am back again, back again in New York. My rooms are littered with
battered bags and down-at-the-heel walking sticks and still-damp
steamer rugs, lying where they dropped from the hands of maudlin
bellboys. My trunks are creaking their way down the hall, urged on by
a perspiring, muttering porter. The windows, still locked and gone
blue-grey with the August heat, rattle to the echo of the "L" trains a
block away, trains rankling up to Harlem with a sweating, struggling
people, the people of the Republic, their day's grind over, jamming
their one way to a thousand flat houses, there to await, in an all
unconscious poverty, the sunrise of still such another day. The last
crack of a triphammer, peckering at a giant pile of iron down the
block, dies out on the dead air. A taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the street
below, grunts its horn. A newsboy, in neuralgic yowl, bawls out a
sporting extra. Another "L" train and the panes rattle again. A
momentary quiet ... and from somewhere in a nearby street I hear a
grind-organ. What is the tune it is playing? I've heard it, I
know--somewhere; but--no, I can't remember. I try--I try to follow the
air--but no use. And then, presently, one of the notes whispers into
my puckering lips a single word--"_Mariechen_." Then other notes
whisper others--"_du suesses Viehchen_"; and then others still
others--"_du bist mein alles, bist mein Traum_." And the battered bags
and the down-at-the-heel walking sticks and the still-damp steamer
rugs and the trunks creaking down the hallway and the rattle of the
"L" trains fade out of my eyes and ears and again dear little Hulda is
with me under the Linden trees--poor dear little Hulda who ever in the
years to come shall bring back to me the starlit romance of youth--and
again I feel her so soft hand in mine and again I hear her whisper the
_auf wiederseh'n_ that was to be our last good-bye--and I am three
thousand miles over the seas. For it's night for me again in
Berlin--_kronprinzessin_ of the cities of the world.
I am again on the hitherward shore of the Hundekehlensee, flashing back
its diamond smiles at the setting sun. I am sitting again near the
water's edge in the moist shade of the Grunewald, and the trees sing for
me the poetry that they once sang to the palette of Leistikow. My nose
cools itself in the recesses of a translucent _schoppen_ of
Johannisberger, proud beverage in whose every topaz drop lies imprisoned
the kiss of a peasant girl of Prussia. From the southward side of the
Grunewaldsee the horn of a distant hunting lodge seems to call a welcome
to the timid stars; and then I seem to hear another--or is it just an
echo?--from somewhere out the spur of the Havelberge beyond. Or is just
the Johannesberger, soul of the most imaginative grape in Christendom?
Or--woe is me--am I really back again across the seas in New York, and
is what I hear only the horn of the taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the street
below?
But I open my too-dreaming eyes--and yes; I am in the Grunewald. And
the summer sun is saffron in the waters of the lake. And about me, at a
thousand tables under the Grunewald trees, are a thousand people and
more, the people of the Kaiserland, their day's work over, clinking a
thousand _wohlseins_ in a great twilight peace and awaiting, in all
unconscious opulence, the sunrise of yet such another day. And a great
band, swung into the measures by a firm-bellied _kapellmeister_ as
gorgeous in his pounds of gold braid as a peafowl, sets sail into
"Parsifal" against a spray of salivary brass. And the air about me is
full of "_Kellner!_" and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and "_Wiener
Roastbraten und Stangenspargel mit geschlagener Butter!_" and "_Zwei
Seidel, bitte!_" and "_Junge Kohlrabi mit gebratenen Sardellenklopsen!_"
and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and "_Sahnenfilets mit Schwenkkartoffeln!_"
and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and a thousand _schmeckt's guts_ and a
thousand _prosits_ and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" And no outrage upon the
ear is in all this guttural B minor, no rape of exotic tympani, but a
sense rather of superb languor and wholesome tranquillity, of harmonious
stomachic socialism, an orchestration of honest ovens and a diapason of
honest _braeus_ and _brunners_, with their balmy wealth of nostril
arpeggios and roulades.
And thus the evening breeze, come hither through the reeds and
cypress from over the purpling Havel hills beyond, takes on an added
perfume, an added bouquet, as it transports itself to the sniffer over
to the hurrying _krebs-suppen_ and thick brown-gravied platters and dewy
seidels. My nose, in its day, has engaged with many a seductive aroma.
It has met, at Cassis on the Mediterranean, the fumes breathed by
_becasse sur canapes_ and Chateau Lafitte '69--and it has ffd and ffd
again and again in an ecstasy of inhalation. It has encountered in
Moscow, the regal vapours of _nevop astowka Dernidoff_ sweeping across a
slender goblet of golden sherry--and it has been abashed at the delirium
of scent. On the Grand Boulevards, it has skirmished with punch _a la
Toscane_ flavoured with Maraschino and with bitter almonds--and has
inhaled as if in a dream. The juicy, dripping cuts of Simpson's in
London, the paradisian pudding _sueldoiro_ on the little screened
veranda in the shadow of the six-minareted Mosque of El-Azhar in Cairo,
the salmon dipped in Chambertin and the artichokes, sauce Barigoule, at
Schoenbrunn on the road to Vienna, the _escaloppes de foie gras a la
russe_ (favourite dish of the late Beau McAllister) at Delmonico's at
home--all these and more have wooed my nostril with their rare
fragrances. But, though I have attended many a table and given audience
to many an attendant perfume, nowhere, nor never, has there been borne
in upon me the like of that exquisite nasal blend of _bratens_ and
_braeus_ with which the twilight breezes have christened me among the
trees of the Grunewald. Forgotten, there, are the roses on the moonlit
garden wall in Barbizon, chaperoned by the fairy forest of
Fontainebleau; forgotten the damp wild clover fields of the Indiana of
my boyhood. All vanished, gone, before the olfactory transports of this
concert of hops and schnitzels, of Rhineland vineyards and upland
_kaese_. And here it is, here in the great German out-of-doors, on the
border of the Hundekehlen lake, with a nimble _kellner_ at my elbow,
with the plain, homely German people to the right and left of me, with
the stars beginning to silver in the silent water, with the band lifting
me, a drab and absurd American, into the spirit of this kaiserwelt, and
with the innocent eyes of the fair fraeulein under yonder tree
intermittently englishing their coquettish glances from the
_eisschokolade_ that should alone engage them--here it is that I like
best to bide the climbing of the moon into the skies over Berlin--here
it is that I like best to wait upon the city's night.
Ah, Berlin, how little the world knows you--you and your children! It
sees you fat of figure, an Adam's apple struggling with your every
vowel, ponderous of temperament. It sees you a sullen and varicose
mistress, whose draperies hang heavy and ludicrous from a pudgy form. It
sees you a portly, pursy, foolish Undine struggling awkwardly from out a
cyclopean vat of beer. It hears your music in the ta-tata-tata-ta-ta of
your "_Ach, du lieber Augustin_" alone; the sum of your sentiment in
your "_Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten_." Wise American
journalists, commissioned to explore your soul, have returned
characteristically to announce that you "In your German way" (_American
synonyms: elephantine, phlegmatic, stodgy, clumsy, sluggish_) seek
desperately to appropriate, in ferocious lech to be metropolitan, the
"spirit of Paris" (_American synonyms: silk stockings, "wine," Maxim's,
jevousaime, Rat Mort_). Announce they also your "mechanical" pleasures,
your weighty light-heartedness, your stolid, stoic essay to take unto
yourself, still in tigerish itch to be cosmopolitan, the
frou-frouishness of the flirting capital over the frontier. Wise old
philosophers! Translating you in terms of your palaces of prostitution,
your Palais de Danse, your Admirals-Casinos; translating you in terms of
your purposely spurious Victorias, your Riche Cafes, your Fledermauses.
As well render the spirit of Vienna in the key of the Kaerntnerstrasse at
eleven of the Austrian night; as well play the spirit of Paris in the
discords of its Montmartre, in the leaden pitch of its Pre Catelan at
sunrise. Sing of London from the Astor Club; sing of New York from its
Bryant Park at moontide, its Rector's, its ridiculous Cafe San Souci and
its Madam Hunter's. 'Twere the same.
Pleasure in the mass, incidentally, is perforce ever mechanical; a levee
at Buckingham Palace, a fete on the velvet terraces sloping into the
Newport sea, a Coney Island gangfest, a city's electric den of gilt and
tinsel.
But the essence of a city is never here. Berlin, in the wanderlust of
its darkened heavens, is not the ample-bosomed, begarneted,
crimson-lipped Minna angling in its gaudy dance decoy in the
Behrenstrasse; nor the satin-clad, pencilled-eyed Amelie ogling from her
"reserved" table in the silly sham called Moulin Rouge; nor yet the more
baby-glanced, shirtwaisted Ertrude laughing in the duntoned Cafe Lang.
Berlin is not she who beckons by night in the Friedrichstrasse; nor the
frowsy she who sings in the _bier-cabarets_ that hover about the
Lichtprunksaal. Berlin, under the stars, is the sound of soldiers
singing near the arch of the Brandenburger Tor, the peaceful _bauer_ and
his frau Hannah and his young daughters Lilla and Mia lodged before
their _abend bier_ at a bare table on the darker side of the far
Jaegerstrasse. Berlin, when skies are navy blue, is Heinrich, gallant
rear private of Regiment 31, publicly and with audible ado encircling
the waist of his most recent _engel_ on a bench in the Linden
promenade--Berlin, in the Inverness of night, is Hulda, little Alsatian
rebel--a rebel to France--a rebel to the Vosges and the
vineyards--Hulda, the provinces behind her, and in her heart, there to
rule forever, the spirit of the capital of Wilhelm der Groesste. For the
spirit of Berlin is the laughter of a pretty, clean and healthy
girl--not the neurotic simper of a devastated ware of the Madeleine
highway, not the raucous giggle of a bark that sails Piccadilly, not the
meaningfull and toothy beam of a fair American badger--none of these. It
is a laugh that has in it not the motive power of Krug and Company or
Ruinart _pere et fils_; it smells not of suspicioned guineas to be
enticed; it is not an answer to the baton of necessity. There's heart
behind it--and it means only that youth is in the air, that youth and
steaming blood and a living life, be the world soever stern on the
morrow, are a trinity invincible, unconquerable--that the music is good,
the seidel full. Ah, Berlin--ah, Hulda--ah, youth ... ah, youth, what
things you see that are not, that never will be, never were; foolish,
innocent, splendid youth!
An end to such so tender philosophies, such so blissful ruminations.
For even now the _kutsche_ has drawn us up before the door of Herr
Kempinski's victual studio, running from the Leipzigerstrasse through to
the Krausenstrasse and constituting what is probably the largest stomach
Senate and House of Representatives in the seven kingdoms. Here, in the
multitudinous _saele_--the Mosel-saal, the Berliner-saal, the huge
Grauer-saal, the Burgen-saal, the Alter-saal, the Erker-saal, the
Gelber-saal, the Cadiner-saal, the Eingangs-saal, the Durchgangs-saal,
the Brauner-saal and the various other chromatic and geographical
saals--one may listen in dyspeptic Anglo-Saxon abashment to such a
concerto of down-going _suppen_ and _coteletten_ and _gemuese_ and
down-gurgling Laubenheimer and Marcobrunner and Zeltinger and
Brauneberger as one may not hear elsewhere in the palatinates. And here,
in the preface to the night, one may prehend while again eating (for in
Germany, you must know, one's eating is limited in so far as time and
occasion are concerned only by the locks of the alimentary canal and the
contumacy of the intestines) the grand democracy of this kaiser city.
For in this giant eating hall that would hold a round half-dozen New
York restaurants and still offer ample elbow room for the dissection of
a knuckle and the wielding of a stein, one observes a vast and
heterogeneous commingling of the human breed such as may not be observed
outside an American charity ball. At one table, a lieutenant of Uhlans
with his _maedel_ of the moment, at another a jolly old _spitzbub'_
sending with a loose jest a girl from the chorus of the Theater des
Westens into blushes--and being sent himself in return with a looser. At
another (one removed from that of a duo of palpable daughters of joy
engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand encounter with a colossal _roastbif
englisch mit Leipziger allerlei_) a family man _with_ his family. At
still another, another family man with his. At another, the Salome from
the Koenigliches Opernhaus--at another a noted _advokat_--at another, two
little girls (they can't he more than sixteen years old) enjoying their
meal and their bottle of Rhenish wine undisturbed, unogled, unafraid.
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