IF a preliminary glance at Switzerland suggested to me a high individuality, primarily Teutonic but secondarily national and distinctive, all I saw afterwards in Germany and Holland with which I contrasted it, confirmed my first impression. I believe that the Swiss, for all that they speak the German language and have an architecture that certainly has much in common with that of medieval Germany, are yet of markedly diverging character. They struck me in the main as colder, more taciturn, more introspective and less flamboyant than the Germans. The rank and file, in so far as I could see, were extremely sparing, saving, reserved. They reminded me more of such Austrians and Tyrolians as I have known, than of Germans. They were thinner, livelier in their actions, not so lusty nor yet so aggressive.
The new architecture which I saw between Lucerne and the German frontier reminded me of much of that which one sees in northern Ohio and Indiana and southern Michigan. There are still traces of the over-elaborate curlicue type of structure and decoration so interesting as being representative of medieval Teutonic life, but not much. The new manufacturing towns were very clean and spruce with modern factory buildings of the latest almost-all-glass type; and churches and public buildings, obviously an improvement or an attempt at improvement on older Swiss and Teutonic ideals, were everywhere apparent. Lucerne itself is divided into an old section, honored and preserved for its historic and commercial value, as being attractive to travelers; a new section, crowded with stores, tenements and apartments of the latest German and American type; and a hotel section, filled with large Anglicized and Parisianized structures, esplanades, small lounging squares and the like. I never bothered to look at Thorwaldsen’s famous lion. One look at a photograph years ago alienated me forever.
I had an interesting final talk on the morning of my departure from Lucerne with the resident manager of the hotel who was only one of many employees of a company that controlled, so he told me, hotels in Berlin, Frankfort, Paris, Rome and London. He had formerly been resident manager of a hotel in Frankfort, the one to which I was going, and said that he might be transferred any time to some other one. He was the man, as I learned, whom I had seen rowing on the lake the first morning I sat out on my balcony—the one whom the wild ducks followed.
“I saw you,” I said as I paid my bill, “out rowing on the lake the other morning. I should say that was pleasant exercise.”
“I always do it,” he said very cheerfully. He was a tall, pale, meditative man with a smooth, longish, waxen countenance and very dark hair. He was the last word as to toilet and courtesy. “I am glad to have the chance. I love nature.”
“Are those wild ducks I see on the lake flying about?”
“Oh, yes. We have lots of them. They are not allowed to be shot. That’s why they come here. We have gulls, too. There is a whole flock of gulls that comes here every winter. I feed them right out here at the dock every day.”
“Why, where can they come from?” I asked. “This is a long way from the sea.”
“I know it,” he replied. “It is strange. They come over the Alps from the Mediterranean I suppose. You will see them on the Rhine, too, if you go there. I don’t know. They come though. Sometimes they leave for four or five days or a week, but they always come back. The captain of the steamer tells me he thinks they go to some other lake. They know me though. When they come back in the fall and I go out to feed them they make a great fuss.”
“They are the same gulls, then?”
“The very same.”
I had to smile.
“Those two ducks are great friends of mine, too,” he went on, referring to the two I had seen following him. “They always come up to the dock when I come out and when I come back from my row they come again. Oh, they make a great clatter.”
He looked at me and smiled in a pleased way.
* * * * *
The train which I boarded at Lucerne was a through express from Milan to Frankfort with special cars for Paris and Berlin. It was crowded with Germans of a ruddy, solid variety, radiating health, warmth, assurance, defiance. I never saw a more marked contrast than existed between these travelers on the train and the local Swiss outside. The latter seemed much paler and less forceful by contrast, though not less intellectual and certainly more refined.
One stout, German lady, with something like eighteen packages, had made a veritable express room of her second-class compartment. The average traveler, entitled to a seat beside her, would take one look at her defenses and pass on. She was barricaded beyond any hope of successful attack.
I watched interestedly to see how the character of the people, soil and climate would change as we crossed the frontier into Germany. Every other country I had entered had presented a great contrast to the last. After passing fifteen or twenty Swiss towns and small cities, perhaps more, we finally reached Basle and there the crew was changed. I did not know it, being busy thinking of other things, until an immense, rotund, guttural-voiced conductor appeared at the door and wanted to know if I was bound for Frankfort. I looked out. It was just as I expected: another world and another atmosphere had been substituted for that of Switzerland. Already the cars and depot platforms were different, heavier I thought, more pretentious. Heavy German porters (packträger) were in evidence. The cars, the vast majority of them here, bore the label of Imperial Germany—the wide-winged, black eagle with the crown above it, painted against a pinkish-white background, with the inscription “Kaiserlicher Deutsche Post.” A station-master, erect as a soldier, very large, with splendiferous parted whiskers, arrayed in a blue uniform and cap, regulated the departure of trains. The “Uscita” and “Entrata” of Italy here became “Eingang” and “Ausgang,” and the “Bagaglia” of every Italian station was here “Gepäck.” The endless German “Verboten,” and “Es ist untersagt” also came into evidence. We rolled out into a wide, open, flat, mountainless plain with only the thin poplars of France in evidence and no waterways of any kind, and then I knew that Switzerland was truly no more.
If you want to see how the lesser Teutonic countries vary from this greater one, the dominant German Empire, pass this way from Switzerland into Germany, or from Germany into Holland. At Basle, as I have said, we left the mountains for once and for all. I saw but few frozen peaks after Lucerne. As we approached Basle they seemed to grow less and less and beyond that we entered a flat plain, as flat as Kansas and as arable as the Mississippi Valley, which stretched unbroken from Basle to Frankfort and from Frankfort to Berlin. Judging from what I saw the major part of Germany is a vast prairie, as flat as a pancake and as thickly strewn with orderly, new, bright forceful towns as England is with quaint ones.
However, now that I was here, I observed that it was just these qualities which make Germany powerful and the others weak. Such thoroughness, such force, such universal superintendence! Truly it is amazing. Once you are across the border, if you are at all sensitive to national or individual personalities you can feel it, vital, glowing, entirely superior and more ominous than that of Switzerland, or Italy, and often less pleasant. It is very much like the heat and glow of a furnace. Germany is a great forge or workshop. It resounds with the industry of a busy nation; it has all the daring and assurance of a successful man; it struts, commands, defies, asserts itself at every turn. You would not want to witness greater variety of character than you could by passing from England through France into Germany. After the stolidity and civility of the English, and the lightness and spirit of France, the blazing force and defiance of the Germans comes upon you as almost the most amazing of all.
In spite of the fact that my father was German and that I have known more or less of Germans all my life, I cannot say that I admired the personnel of the German Empire, the little that I saw of it, half so much as I admired some of the things they had apparently achieved. All the stations that I saw in Germany were in apple-pie order, new, bright, well-ordered. Big blue-lettered signs indicated just the things you wanted to know. The station platforms were exceedingly well built of red tile and white stone; the tracks looked as though they were laid on solid hardwood ties; the train ran as smoothly as if there were no flaws in it anywhere and it ran swiftly. I had to smile as occasionally on a platform—the train speeding swiftly—a straight, upstanding German officer or official, his uniform looking like new, his boots polished, his gold epaulets and buckles shining as brightly as gold can shine, his blond whiskers, red cap, glistening glasses or bright monocle, and above all his sharp, clear eyes looking directly at you, making an almost amazing combination of energy, vitality and superiority, came into view and disappeared again. It gave you a startling impression of the whole of Germany. “Are they all like that?” I asked myself. “Is the army really so dashing and forceful?”
As I traveled first to Frankfort, then to Mayence, Coblenz and Cologne and again from Cologne to Frankfort and Berlin, and thence out of the country via Holland, the wonder grew. I should say now that if Germany has any number of defects of temperament, and it truly has from almost any American point of view, it has virtues and capacities so noteworthy, admirable and advantageous that the whole world may well sit up and take notice. The one thing that came home to me with great force was that Germany is in no way loose jointed or idle but, on the contrary, strong, red-blooded, avid, imaginative. Germany is a terrific nation, hopeful, courageous, enthusiastic, orderly, self-disciplining, at present anyhow, and if it can keep its pace without engaging in some vast, self-destroying conflict, it can become internally so powerful that it will almost stand irresistible. I should say that any nation that to-day chose to pick a quarrel with Germany on her home ground would be foolish in the extreme. It is the beau ideal of the aggressive, militant, orderly spirit and, if it were properly captained and the gods were kind, it would be everywhere invincible.
* * * * *
When I entered Germany it was with just two definite things in mind. One was to seek out my father’s birthplace, a little hamlet, as I understood it, called Mayen, located somewhere between the Moselle and the Rhine at Coblenz,—the region where the Moselle wines come from. The other was to visit Berlin and see what Germany’s foremost city was really like and to get a look at the Kaiser if possible. In both of these I was quickly successful, though after I reached Frankfort some other things transpired which were not on the program.
Frankfort was a disappointment to me at first. It was a city of over four hundred thousand population, clean, vigorous, effective; but I saw it in a rain, to begin with, and I did not like it. It was too squat in appearance—too unvarying in its lines; it seemed to have no focal point such as one finds in all medieval cities. What has come over the spirit of city governments, directing architects, and individual enterprise? Is there no one who wants really to do the very exceptional thing? No German city I saw had a central heart worthy of the name—no Piazza del Campidoglio such as Rome has; no Piazza della Signoria such as Florence has; no Piazza San Marco such as Venice has; not even a cathedral center, lovely thing that it is, such as Milan has. Paris with its Gardens of the Tuileries, its Champs-de-Mars, its Esplanades des Invalides, and its Arc de Triomphe and Place de l’Opéra, does so much better in this matter than any German city has dreamed of doing. Even London has its splendid focal point about the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s and the Embankment, which are worth something. But German cities! Yet they are worthy cities, every one of them, and far more vital than those of Italy.
I should like to relate first, however, the story of the vanishing birthplace. Ever since I was three or four years old and dandled on my father’s knee in our Indiana homestead, I had heard more or less of Mayen, Coblenz, and the region on the Rhine from which my father came. As we all know, the Germans are a sentimental, fatherland-loving race and my father, honest German Catholic that he was, was no exception. He used to tell me what a lovely place Mayen was, how the hills rose about it, how grape-growing was its principal industry, how there were castles there and grafs and rich burghers, and how there was a wall about the city which in his day constituted it an armed fortress, and how often as a little child he had been taken out through some one of its great gates seated on the saddle of some kindly minded cavalryman and galloped about the drill-ground. He seems to have become, by the early death of his mother and second marriage of his father, a rather unwelcome stepchild and, early, to escape being draughted for the Prussian army which had seized this town—which only a few years before had belonged to France, though German enough in character—he had secretly decamped to the border with three others and so made his way to Paris. Later he came to America, made his way by degrees to Indiana, established a woolen-mill on the banks of the Wabash at Terre Haute and there, after marrying in Ohio, raised his large family. His first love was his home town, however, and Prussia, which he admired; and to his dying day he never ceased talking about it. On more than one occasion he told me he would like to go back, just to see how things were, but the Prussian regulations concerning deserters or those who avoided service were so drastic and the likelihood of his being recognized so great that he was afraid of being seized and at least thrown into prison if not shot, so he never ventured it. I fancy this danger of arrest and his feeling that he could not return cast an additional glamour over the place and the region which he could never revisit. Anyhow I was anxious to see Mayen and to discover if the family name still persisted there.
When I consulted with the Cook’s agent at Rome he had promptly announced, “There isn’t any such place as Mayen. You’re thinking of Mayence, near Frankfort, on the Rhine.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not. I’m thinking of Mayen—M-a-y-e-n. Now you look and see.”
“There isn’t any such place, I tell you,” he replied courteously. “It’s Mayence, not very far from Frankfort.”
“Let me see,” I argued, looking at his map. “It’s near the junction of the Rhine and the Moselle.”
“Mayence is the place. See, here it is. Here’s the Moselle and here’s Mayence.”
I looked, and sure enough they seemed reasonably close together. “All right,” I said, “give me a ticket to Berlin via Mayence.”
“I’ll book you to Frankfort. That’s only thirty minutes away. There’s nothing of interest at Mayence—not even a good hotel.”
Arrived at Frankfort, I decided not to send my trunks to the hotel as yet but to take one light bag, leaving the remainder “im Gepäck” and see what I could at Mayence. I might want to stay all night, wandering about my father’s old haunts, and I might want to go down the Rhine a little way—I was not sure.
The Mayence to which I was going was not the Mayen that I wanted, but I did not know that. You have heard of people weeping over the wrong tombstones. This was a case in point. Fortunately I was going in the direction of the real Mayen, though I did not know that either. I ran through a country which reminded me very much of the region in which Terre Haute is located and I said to myself quite wisely: “Now I can see why my father and so many other Germans from this region settled in southern Indiana. It is like their old home. The wide, flat fields are the same.”
When we reached Mayence and I had deposited my kit-bag, for the time being I strolled out into the principal streets wondering whether I should get the least impression of the city or town as it was when my father was here as a boy. It is curious and amusing how we can delude ourselves at times. Mayence I really knew, if I had stopped to consider, could not be the Mayen, where my father was born. The former was the city of that Bishop-Elector Albert of Brandenburg who in need of a large sum of money to pay Rome for the privilege of assuming the archbishopric, when he already held two other sees, made an arrangement with Pope Leo X—the Medici pope who was then trying to raise money to rebuild or enlarge St. Peter’s—to superintend the sale of indulgences in Germany (taking half the proceeds in reward for his services) and thus by arousing the ire of Luther helped to bring about the Reformation in Germany. This was the city also of that amiable Dominican Prior, John Tetzel, who, once appealing for ready purchasers for his sacerdotal wares declared:
“Do you not hear your dead parents crying out ‘Have mercy on us? We are in sore pain and you can set us free for a mere pittance. We have borne you, we have trained and educated you, we have left you all our property, and you are so hard-hearted and cruel that you leave us to roast in the flames when you could so easily release us.’”
I shall always remember Mayence by that ingenious advertisement. My father had described to me a small, walled town with frowning castles set down in a valley among hills. He had said over and over that it was located at the junction of the Rhine and the Moselle. I recalled afterward that he told me that the city of Coblenz was very near by, but in my brisk effort to find this place quickly I had forgotten that. Here I was in a region which contained not a glimpse of any hills from within the city, the Moselle was all of a hundred miles away, and no walls of any medieval stronghold were visible anywhere and yet I was reasonably satisfied that this was the place.
“Dear me,” I thought, “how Mayence has grown. My father wouldn’t know it.” (Baedeker gave its population at one hundred and ten thousand). “How Germany has grown in the sixty-five years since he was here. It used to be a town of three or four thousand. Now it is a large city.” I read about it assiduously in Baedeker and looked at the rather thriving streets of the business heart, trying to visualize it as it should have been in 1843. Until midnight I was wandering about in the dark and bright streets of Mayence, satisfying myself with the thought that I was really seeing the city in which my father was born.
For a city of so much historic import Mayence was very dull. It was built after the theories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with, however, many modern improvements. The Cathedral was a botch, ornamented with elaborate statues of stuffy bishops and electors. The houses were done in many places in that heavy scroll fashion common to medieval Germany. The streets were narrow and winding. I saw an awful imitation of our modern Coney Island in the shape of a moving circus which was camped on one of the public camping places. A dull heavy place, all told.
Coming into the breakfast-room of my hotel the next morning, I encountered a man who looked to me like a German traveling salesman. He had brought his grip down to the desk and was consuming his morning coffee and rolls with great gusto, the while he read his paper. I said to him, “Do you know of any place in this part of Germany that is called Mayen?—not Mayence.” I wanted to make sure of my location.
“Mayen? Mayen?” he replied. “Why, yes. I think there is such a place near Coblenz. It isn’t very large.”
“Coblenz! That’s it,” I replied, recalling now what my father had told me of Coblenz. “To be sure. How far is that?”
“Oh, that is all of three hours from here. It is at the juncture of the Moselle.”
“Do you know how the trains run?” I asked, getting up, a feeling of disgusted disappointment spreading over me.
“I think there is one around half-past nine or ten.”
“Damn!” I said, realizing what a dunce I had been. I had just forty-five minutes in which to pay my bill and make the train. Three hours more! I could have gone on the night before.
I hurried out, secured my bag, paid my bill and was off. On the way I had myself driven to the old “Juden-Gasse,” said to be full of picturesque medieval houses, for a look. I reached the depot in time to have a two-minute argument with my driver as to whether he was entitled to two marks or one—one being a fair reward—and then hurried into my train. In a half hour we were at Bingen-on-the-Rhine, and in three-quarters of an hour those lovely hills and ravines which make the Rhine so picturesque had begun, and they continued all the way to Coblenz and below that to Cologne.