Germany and the Germans from an American Point of ViewCollier, Price
History
Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View
Collier, Price
Germany; National characteristics, German
One should read Hazlitt's "Essay on the Cockney" to find phrases for
these Berliners. It is a gazing, gaping crowd that straggles along
over the broad sidewalks. Half a dozen to a dozen will stop and stare
at people entering or leaving vehicles, at a shop, or hotel door. I
have seen a knot of men stop and stare at the ladies entering a motor-car,
and on one occasion one of them wiped off the glass with his hand
that he might see the better. It is not impertinence, it is merely
bucolic naivete. The city in the evening is like a country fair, with
its awkward gallantries, its brute curiosity, its unabashed
expressions of affection by hands and lips, its ogling, coughing, and
other peasant forms of flirtation. It should be remembered that this
people as a race show somewhat less of reticence in matters amatory
than we are accustomed to. In the foyer of the theatre you may see a
young officer walking round and round, his arm under that of his
fiancee or bride, and her hand fondly clasped in his. It is a
commentary, not a criticism, on international manners that the German
royal princess, a particularly sweet and simple maiden, just engaged
to marry the heir of the house of Cumberland, is photographed walking
in the streets of Berlin, her hand clasped in that of her betrothed,
and both he, and her brother who accompanies them, smoking! Gentlemen
do not smoke when walking or driving with ladies, with us, though I am
not claiming that it is a moral disaster to do so. It is a difference
in the gradations of respect worth noting, but nothing more. I have
even seen kissing, as a couple walked up the stairs from one part of
the theatre to another. In the spring and summer the paths of the
Tiergarten of a morning are strewn with hair-pins, a curious, but none
the less accurate, indication of the rather fumbling affection of the
night before.
To live in a fashionable hotel, in a land whose people you wish to
study, is as valueless an experience as to go to a zooelogical garden
to learn to track a mountain sheep or to ride down a wild boar. You
must go about among the people themselves, to their restaurants, to
their houses, if they are good enough to ask you, and to the resorts
of all kinds that they frequent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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