They bring some custom to
the innkeeper, but drunkenness and disorder are almost unknown. In
fact, all the cases of drunkenness I have seen in Germany have been
in the Munich comic papers. You never by any chance hear of it as you
do in England amongst people you know, and you may spend hours at the
Berlin Zoo on a Whit-Monday and see no one who is not sober.
University students get drunk and have fights with innkeepers and
policemen, but that is etiquette rather than vice. Next day they
suffer from _Katzenjammer_, but feel that they are upholding ancient
tradition. Real intemperance is found almost entirely amongst the
dregs of the big cities and the lowest class of peasants.
In Berlin the better class of artisans and small tradespeople escape
from their flats on Sundays to their allotment gardens. You see whole
tracts of these gardens on the outskirts of the city, and many of them
have some kind of summer house or rough shelter. Here the family
spends the whole day in fresher air, and presumably finds out how to
grow the simpler kinds of flowers and vegetables. Those who have no
garden and can afford a few pence for fares go farther afield. They
carry food for the day in tin satchels, or rolls that look as if they
ought to accompany butterfly nets and contain entomological specimens.
But they are usually in the hands of a stout alpaca-clad middle-class
mater-familias, who looks rather anxious and flustered while she herds
her flock and hunts for a garden with the announcement, "Hier können
Familien Kaffee kochen." There for a trifling indemnity she can be
accommodated with seats, cups and saucers, and hot water; just as
people can in an English tea-garden. Provisions she has with her in
her _Pickenick Rolle_. If fate takes you to Potsdam on a fine summer
Sunday, you will think that the whole bourgeoisie of Berlin has
elected to come by the same train and steamer, and that everyone but
you has brought food for the day in a green tin. You need not expect
to find a seat either in the train or the steamer at certain hours of
the day, and as you stand wedged in the crowd on the dangerously
overladen boat, and look about you as best you can at the chain of
wooded lakes, you wonder how it is that such overcrowding is permitted
in a police-governed land. At home we take such things for granted as
part of our system or want of system. But in Germany the moment you
cross the frontier a thousand trifles make you feel that you are a
unit in an army, drilled and kept under by the bureaucracy and the
police. It surprises you to see an unmanageable crowd in a train or on
a steamer, much as it would surprise you to see soldiers swarm at will
into a troopship. You expect them to march precisely, each man to his
place. And in Germany this nearly always happens in civil life; while
even on a Sunday or a public holiday the mob behaves itself. At the
Berlin Zoo, for instance, there are such masses of people every Sunday
that you see nothing but people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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