All titles may not be immediately available. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E_T A L K What are your favorite posh hotels? Put on the Ritz in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk. R E C E N T L Y Learning to love the abyss By Maria Dolan Snowboarding is a lot like life -- full of scary slopes, big spills and tiny triumphs (12/10/97) "How do you celebrate Christmas?" By Joshua Cohen A Jew in China: The travails of life in a land where Westerner equals Christian (12/09/97) Road Warrior By Dawn MacKeen Are airlines delivering sexist service in first class? (12/08/97) Mondo Weirdo By Lori Makabe When bed bugs attack! (12/05/97) Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Herbed olive oil holiday gifts (12/05/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A full list of all Wanderlust articles		FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPE | PAGE 2 OF 2 + + + + + + + + How they looked There used to be a specifically English look, too. I used to be able to recognize an Englishman anywhere in the world, not simply by his bearing or his manners, but actually by his face. Now I am never so confident. The English Gentleman, one of the most easily identifiable people on earth, is virtually extinct, and the rest of the nation has lost its distinctive appearances. This is partly biological. The English are no longer the homogenous Caucasian islanders who stood so complacently in island isolation, and hundreds of thousands of Asians, Africans and Latins have contributed their genes to the stock during my half-century. Turn on London television in the 1990s and you would get the impression that half the population were immigrants. Although this is partly the distortion of positive discrimination, still there are not many parts of England that do not have their immigrant residents, some of them as English as anyone in everything but look. But the changed appearance is not merely ethnic. Even the purest English face is different now. It is more blurred, less Northern-looking. Diet has contributed, and wider education, and the changing manner of speaking, and central heating (considered sissy fifty years ago, and still a bit wimpish to me), but I think it is chiefly a matter of history. Fifty years ago the English were enormously proud of themselves. They had won a fearful war in epic style, led by a statesman of charismatic genius, under the aegis of a royal house that was so universally admired and believed by 40 percent of the population, so surveys showed, to be divinely chosen. The English knew themselves to be special. When I went to London in the 1940s I felt I was visiting the heart of an immense historical organism, spread around the globe, to which hundreds of millions of people of every faith and color looked in something approaching reverence. When I was abroad, the grave sound of Big Ben on the BBC World Service, and the resonant, almost ecclesiastical way in which the announcer declaimed "This is London" over the often crackling and fluctuating airwaves, made me feel that England was somewhere permanently unique on the planet. London might be battered and impoverished, but it was still in most British minds the center of all things, the best, the biggest, the oldest, the eternal. No wonder the English face was so distinctive, and no wonder that in the half-century since then it has lost its edge. It was the face of confidence, whatever its class. One can imagine a citizen looking at it in a mirror in those days, when people still knew their Gilbert and Sullivan, and thinking with horror that it might have been the face of a Rooshian, a Frenchman or a Prooshian. Thank God he had resisted all temptations to look like other nations! It remained unmistakably the face of an Englishman. From A Stranger in Venice (1906), by Max Beerbohm Often, after passing through the streets of London, I have wondered what on earth the inhabitants would look like if they had no longer the thought of their preeminence to sustain them. + + + + + + + + City of Culture What a pleasure to stroll through the streets of Weimar, a little German city whose distinction has traditionally been elegantly cultural! In the late eighteenth century the young Duke Carl August made his capital a happy retreat for artistic geniuses, and ever since Weimar has basked in the memory of their names. There is a pleasant restaurant, you will be told, behind the Liszthaus. Turn right at the Goethehaus to get to the bus station. You want the Schillerhaus? That's easy: just go straight down Schillerstrasse from the Goethe and Schiller statue. And agreeable indeed it is to amble around the town among these illustrious shades, now and then taking an ice cream beneath its trees. The streets are mostly quiet and gentle. Small boys wade across the little river Ilm with fishing rods. Street musicians agreeably play. Delectable parks and gardens are everywhere. It is easy to imagine young Carl August promenading with lyricists on each arm, bowing right and left to his affectionate subjects. I know of no city so instinct with the idea of beauty as a political conception, as part of the established order -- and not the beauty of pomp and majesty, either, but an amiable, entertaining, chamber-music kind of beauty. But here's a terrible thing. As the literary capital of Germany, the repository of its immortal poetic spirit, a retreat of nature-worship and mythic dreams, Weimar became beloved of the Nazis, and it loved the Nazis in return. Its mixture of Hitler and Goethe, wrote Thomas Mann fastidiously in 1932, was "particularly disturbing." In the market square stands the Elephant Hotel, and all the waters of Ilm cannot wash the taint from this unfortunate hostelry. It is a handsome 1930s building, but redecorated inside in a glittery, chromy style that irresistibly suggests the imminent arrival of swaggering gauleiters and their women. This impression is all too true. Hitler and his crew were particularly fond of the hotel, and more than once the Führer spoke from its balcony to enthusiastic crowds in the square outside. So enamoured were the Nazis of Weimar, in fact, that they erected there one of their most celebrated and characteristic monuments. The site they chose was on the lovely hill of Ettersberg, just outside the city, which Goethe himself had long before made famous -- he loved to sit and meditate beneath an oak tree there. One evening I paid a reluctant visit to this place, now a popular tourist site well-publicized in the town. My taxi-driver, a gregarious soul, chatted cheerfully to me all the way. Had I enjoyed my stay in Weimar? Did I visit the Goethehaus? What did I think of the food? Did I know that Weimar was to be the European City of Culture in 1999, at the end of the millennium? Congratulations, I said. Recognition once more for the city of Goethe and Schiller. "Exactly," said the taxi-driver, and just then we turned up the side road to Buchenwald. + + + + + + + + Country style In the days of the Communists, East Germany seemed to me one of the most terrible places of all, and the legacy of industrial pollution was to linger for years and years. On the other hand, the Communists having been less than advanced in their agricultural methods, the wide plains of the Brandenburg countryside were mercifully unsterilized by chemicals, which left them wonderfully fresh and natural -- unkempt, since half the fields had gone to seed, and half the trees needed trimming, but still gloriously organic. All day long the skylarks sang above my head, when I traveled among those lovely landscapes, and there were meadows full of poppies, and long avenues of fruit-laden cherry trees, and now and then storks' nests, those fairytale emblems of old Europe, comfortably on chimneys above cobbled hamlets. Once I saw three storks flying high and majestically over Berlin itself: I suspect mine is the last generation ever to see such a sight. + + + + + + + + Ashamed Once in the 1980s I found myself a trifle lost when driving through Rostock, on Germany's Baltic coast, and I faltered and swerved as I tried to find my way on the street map. Immediately there was an irritable blast of the horn from the car behind. Rostock was notorious at that time for recent racist attacks upon Turkish immigrants, and my blood boiled. "Damned Germans," I found myself saying, "They never change. Can't the brute see I'm a stranger here?" -- and I turned around in my seat prepared to give him that rude gesture of the Welch archers, as in Vienna. Gott in Himmel, he was a very intemperate Asian. I blushed, even to myself, especially as I have experienced almost nothing but kindness from Germans of all kinds, under communism as under capitalism, during my fifty years of Europe. I am a child of the wars, though, and have not always been so generous in return. With a pang I remember still the young Germans I met at a party in Baden-Baden in the early 1950s, when the nation was still sunk in shame and disillusion. They were about my own age, bred by Hitler Youth out of defeat, and our conversation was wary. We skirted around recent history, we evaded questions of morality, but even so I found, when we parted company at last, that one woman was in tears -- tears of mortification, to compare her self-doubts, her guilt and her sense of undeserved bad luck with the unabashed pride of nation which in those days I could not help displaying. Thirty years later I made a television film with a German television crew, traveling through several European countries. Strangers often asked us what we were up to, and I always made a point of saying that while the director and his crew were German, I was from Wales. "You are ashamed to be thought one of us," the director accused me mournfully one day: and though I declined to admit it, so I was. These are people of God, too. More than any other European people they have been the instrument of the most divine of the arts, music, perhaps because of the special rhythms of their language, perhaps because Martin Luther, their greatest prophet, made music intrinsic to his religion. Even at their most degraded they have honored this spark within themselves -- even sadistic officers at concentration camps felt the necessity, whether in truth or in charade, to show themselves lovers of music. Out of this tormented and often cruel national psyche have come the glories of Bach and Beethoven -- a cliché indeed, but still a mystery. Nothing moves me more than to enter one of the great German cathedrals, very likely in its day a positive cauldron of racialism, and to hear one of the tremendous Bach chorales thundering down the nave -- an ultimate expression, to my mind, of human aspiration, and a supreme glory of Europe. I went to Berlin in 1991 for the two hundredth anniversary of the Brandenburg Gate, an anniversary of awful possibility. The gate was a triumph of Prussian vainglory, undeniably an arch of hubris. It had been restored at last after the mutilations of war, and its shining quadriga was once again equipped with the Iron Cross and Prussian Eagle pointedly absent during the Communist years. Through it overblown victory parades had passed, and the plumed pageantries of state visits, and the railway coach from Compiègne towed in vindictive triumph. The long anniversary celebrations ended with a perfomance of "Deutschland Über Alles," and what a nightmare that might have been! I prepared to scowl. But it was played by a string quartet, in Haydn's delicate last version of the melody: and its gentle cadences, drifting over the silent crowd, through the lights of the great reviving city, were enough to melt a Junker's heart. SALON | Dec. 11, 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Jan Morris. Used by permission of Villard. Visit Europe using our online travel agent at Wanderlust Marketplace.