An Ex-Enemy in Berlin to-Day

I

IT is unfortunate that the opinion of the world at large on the conditions obtaining to-day in Berlin should so often be derived from persons falling into one of two classes.

The one class consists of those persons who put up at the most expensive hotels; eat at the most expensive restaurants; look in at the most expensive places of entertainment; and then, having naturally enjoyed, at comparatively low cost (for the mark stands at only about one twelfth of its pre-war value), much obsequious and by no means disinterested attention, rush away with the impression that the Germans are gay, charming, forgiving creatures, who are perhaps drinking too much (German) champagne for a supposedly bankrupt nation, but are simply delighted to welcome all their ex-enemies back in their midst.

The second class is made up of those over-earnest travelers who, coming out to the country with their minds already made up, fall a facile prey to the propaganda of those Germans whose mission it is to convince the world of the utter ruin, material and intellectual, of the Fatherland.

From neither of these classes is it possible to get that true picture of an ex-enemy’s life in Berlin to-day which can be given only after a long stay here, and after one has mingled with all classes of society. Even so, it is extremely hard for any one individual to paint a satisfactory picture, because the attitude of the German is not the same toward the American that it is toward the Englishman or the Frenchman; and this attitude again is apt to vary according as you are being dealt with in a private, a business, or an official capacity.

Of course, if one is asked simply, as I sometimes am on my rare visits back in England, whether things are made deliberately unpleasant for the ex-enemv private individual now resident in Germany, or whether it is safe to speak French or English in a restaurant, the reply is astonishingly simple. I say advisedly ‘astonishingly simple,’ because, as one who had spent some time in Germany before the war, I was fully prepared to meet with a considerable amount of passive ill-will, if not of active hostility, even in everyday life. Many of my German friends of those days had adopted toward me much the same attitude that the Walrus and the Carpenter adopted toward the oysters; and, upon the actual outbreak of war, this latent hostility, as we all know, was developed into a rabid yet calculated animosity, to which there was, at any rate at the outset, no true parallel on the side of the Entente.

In spite, however, of the result and length of the war, exhibitions of private ill-will are not very much more marked than they were before 1914. Very possibly, indeed, the result and length of the struggle have had their effect. A defeated Germany does not feel very safe in giving way to a too-unbridled exhibition of her true sentiments.

It may be, too, that the very length of the war has had its effect, quite apart from the result. Even if a short war, such as that upon which Germany had reckoned, would have been over before the ingrained hatred marking the middle stages of the struggle had taken root, in all our minds, the long-drawn-out hardships of four and one-half years of unintermittent fighting reacted upon the feelings of all but the most ferocious fire-eaters. Anyway, whatever the reasons may be, it is only the bare truth to say that, so long as the private individual of an ex-enemy nation behaves himself with ordinary restraint, he is very unlikely to have cause to complain of his treatment in the everyday affairs of existence, and may even be agreeably surprised.

I will give two personal experiences in support of this statement. The Armistice was not, very many weeks old when I happened to be traveling in Germany on a very crowded train, the bulk of the passengers being soldiers from the notorious Ehrhardt brigade. Every seat in the train had long before been occupied, and I was compelled to clamber, with my valises and wraps, on to the couplings between two carriages, and to travel in this manner in the midst of a bunch of similarly adhesive soldiers. After we had gone a short distance, one of the soldiers who had been eyeing me curiously, inquired if I was a foreigner. I answered with a simple affirmative. He then inquired my nationality. I replied that I was an Englishman. For a moment there was a profound silence all round, and I was beginning to think that I should be accidentally shoved off the moving train, when a voice asked, ‘Have you got any English cigarettes? ’ As it happened I had a couple of packets of a brand that I very much disliked, and I distributed the contents of one all round. This sop to Cerberus had the happiest results. When at the next junction I had to change trains, two or three of the soldiers climbed down with me and insisted upon carrying my very portable luggage for me to the farther platform.

The second experience occurred not many months ago, when I was coming up on a journey from Vienna to Berlin. When we got, into the German train at Tetschen, there was a young Englishman standing in the corridor who looked rather wistfully at my golf-clubs. The train was full, as usual, and he had failed to find a seat. After we had gone a short way, he opened the door of our Compartment and asked if there was a vacant seat. On being told that there was, he sat down, explaining to me that he had only a second-class ticket but would gladly pay the difference on to Berlin.

Presently came along the ticketcollector, to whom the Englishman handed his ticket, saying in very broken German that he wanted to pay the additional fare. The collector grunted, and went off and fetched an inspector, to whom, after the Englishman had vainly tried to explain the situation in German, he addressed himself in English. In the meantime I had explained matters to him in German; but, paying no attention to me, the inspector turned to the Englishman and said, ‘We don’t speak English here. You’re in Germany now, and if you have anything to say, you must say it in German.’ Then, looking round for applause, he continued in German: ‘ Who gave you permission to travel in a first-class compartment? You have broken the regulations and must pay twice the first-class fare for the whole distance.’

This rudeness and official punctilio, however, brought forth a storm of protest from my fellow voyagers. They all declared that they themselves were quite ignorant of the regulations in question; and how then should an Englishman, or any other foreigner, be expected to know them. The place was vacant, the Englishman had volunteered to pay the difference, and that was surely sufficient.

The official declined to listen to any expostulations. The Englishman thereupon said that he would willingly leave the compartment and asked for the return of his ticket, which, it turned out, was a through ticket to Hamburg. The inspector, however, declined to give it up until the sum claimed had been paid; and the more his own compatriots abused him for his scurvy behavior, the more violently and obstinately he stuck to the letter of the law. The matter was not settled until we got actually to Berlin, and, forming a small deputation, laid the full facts before a yet higher functionary, who, thank goodness, had some notions of elementary justice and reason.

Much capital was made last year, in the Franco-British press, out of an assault delivered by Prince Joachim of Prussia upon a party of French officers who were dining with their wives in the Hotel Adlon, Berlin. The episode was certainly disgraceful; but it must be admitted that Prince Joachim has long been notorious as a blustering bully, and that upon this occasion he had been gazing upon the champagne when it bubbled. In the ordinary course, a conversation in French provokes little or no comment; and, so far from the speaking of English being objected to, people are, on the contrary, only too eager to refurbish their acquaintance with that tongue, and to give you full particulars of where they have worked in England or America, where they were interned, and what they hope to do as soon as passports again become available to German citizens.

The last two incidents are, however, instructive, for they illustrate the intransigeance of the old German Junker and official classes of all grades, and they show the difficulties to be contended against by such Germans as have taken the lessons of the war to heart, and are struggling to make the disappearance of militarism coincide also with the spread of a more urbane and democratic spirit. The dice are, however, weighted against them, so long as the present generation of Junkers and officials survives.

II

When, however, it comes to business or official relations, one very soon realizes that the German is unable to resist the temptation to score off his late enemies as much as he can. One of the commonest illustrations of this propensity is the twenty-five-per-cent surtax which Germans try to impose upon foreigners. You can go into a shop, for example, and order a number of articles. As soon as the assistant finds out from your name or address (if you have not long before been betrayed by your accent) that you are a foreigner, down goes the twenty-five-per-cent Zuschlag on the bill. But for the wise, the remedy is simple. You begin by pointing out that, under the terms of the peace treaty, Germans are forbidden to differentiate against foreigners; and, it that produces no effect, you walk out with the intimation that to-morrow you will get the goods ordered, through a German friend — and at another shop.

Nothing, again, could be more courteous than the way in which my colleague and myself have been, in appearance, treated by the authorities, but we are fully aware that, as representatives of the bitterly hated ‘Northcliffe Press,’ whose alleged calumnies against Germany are almost a daily theme with the majority of newspapers, we are, nevertheless, quite cordially disliked, and that we are never likely to get any real favor shown to us. Quite the contrary. Coincidence is notoriously long in the arm, but was it altogether a coincidence, I wonder, that when, not long ago, we wanted to get a certain report over to London before it had appeared in the German press, our telephone, which had previously worked quite admirably, suddenly became gestört, and remained in that useless condition for an unaccountably long period?

That amusing Dickens creation, Mr. Joseph Bagstock, used, if I remember right, to be fond of referring to himself in the following terms: ‘Tough, sir, tough is Joey B. Tough and de-vilish sly.’ Well, Joey B. was as tender as spring lamb and as angelically simple as Amelia Sedley, in comparison with many Germans whom I could name. One cannot, perhaps, blame them too severely. The under dog is never enamored of his situation, and when that under dog has been accustomed for half a century to be the top dog and to have his enemy by the throat, he is doubly infuriated when the positions suddenly become reversed. If, then, the Germans can put spokes in some of our wheels, they naturally do so, and it is ‘up to us’ to see that we give them back as good as they give.

Besides, it is not only we civilians who suffer from these more or less impotent struggles. Germany has never ceased to regard and proclaim the Treaty of Versailles as an outrageous swindle, into which she was lured by the hypocritical protestations and fourteen points of President Wilson; by reliance upon the published war-aims of the Allies; by anything, in short, rather than by military defeat in the field; and between the ratification of the Peace and the advent of the insecure Wirth Cabinet, she has striven unceasingly to carry out as few of the conditions as she possibly can. She has wriggled (and Bavaria is still wriggling) over the disarmament question; she has called to Heaven in evidence of her inability to pay the compensations and reparations demanded of her; she has reduced the trials of the ‘war criminals’ to a farce. Her much-boasted revolution of 1918 swept away, indeed, the Hohenzollerns, but left behind the bureaucrats, who were indispensable because they knew where to find the blotting-paper and sealing-wax, and who have not yet learned that the old verbose and truculent notes, which may have suited the temper of a people bristling with bayonets, do not come well from a people which, after plunging more than half the civilized world into misery and shying at nothing, however barbarous, in its struggle for supremacy, has now had its fangs drawn.

III

So much may be said to be more or less the common experience of all Germany’s former enemies. But this superficial equality of treatment does not mean that Germany, in her heart of hearts, makes no distinction between her foes. If President Wilson shares with the late King Edward and M. Clemenceau the distinction of being bitterly hated, the American people as a whole is more popular here than any of the others. This is only natural for the following reasons.

There are, in the first place, so many

Germans and friendly neutrals in the United States, that a German can hardly work up a permanent hatred of the American people as a whole. In the second place, he realizes that the interests of the United States and of Germany were never in serious conflict before the war; and thinks that, if his leaders had not bungled their diplomacy and their moral conduct of the war so idiotically, there would have been a sporting chance that the United States would never have taken up arms at all. Thirdly, the comparatively late arrival of the American troops on the scene of action naturally meant that there was relatively little fighting between the two nations — though the gallant action of the Americans round ChâteauThierry in the summer of 1918 probably discouraged any German desire for a full-dress campaign on a large scale. Fourthly, America alone among the greater belligerents has sought no territorial or monetary advantage at Germany’s expense. And, fifthly, the charitable endeavors of Mr. Hoover’s mission and other relief organizations (duly advertised in the press) have produced a sentiment of sincere gratitude, which has further reinforced the pleasure felt at reported American impatience with what, apparently, is sometimes regarded by you ‘over there’ as our meticulous determination to enforce the Treaty of Versailles. This attitude, of course, delighted the Germans, and encouraged them to hope that, when once the Harding administration was firmly in the saddle, Germany might look to the United States as to the first great nation which would break down the tabu by which she is now surrounded; which would lend her money; and which would enable her to recover from her present prostration.

Recent events have greatly dashed these hopes. The unwavering loyalty of America to her associates over reparations, and the clearly inspired telegrams of the Washington correspondent of the Times, indicating that Mr. Harding would welcome an agreement between the English-speaking peoples, have been gall and wormwood to a Germany determined to play off the members of the Entente against one another. The press has not ventured to give a free rein to its indignation; but the feeling is there, and is embittered by a dawning perception that Mr. Lloyd George’s outburst on Upper Silesia is not likely to end in anything substantial. The methodical German, then, while pushing back his nascent exuberance for the United States, is concentrating simply upon the material and practical aspects of future relations. Realizing that, for the moment, the situation is not ripe, Germany is devoting her attention more immediately to Russia and nearer markets; but she never lets the United States out of her sight; and speeches made at meetings of the Hamburg-Amerika line and similar large concerns show, not only that the restoration of prewar relations with the United States remains the cardinal object of German policy, but that, judged by the statistics of shipping, it is beginning to be realized. With this success Germany is momentarily content, and that is why American business men, journalists, and others find doors open to them which are closed to men of French or British nationality.

Not, I think, that the individual Englishman is personally disliked. It is generally admitted that the British occupation of the Cologne area has been marked by tact and forbearance, and the British missions in Berlin have frequently been praised to me for the quiet, unobtrusive manner in which they go about their business. The innate reluctance of the Englishman to make himself conspicuous has stood him here in good stead. Except on special occasions, the British officers are almost always in mufti. When one recollects the outburst against Great Britain with which the war opened, and the immense popularity of Herr Lissauer’s ‘Hymn of Hate,’ it is really astonishing to find so little overt trace of anti-British feeling. There are, of course, the recognized Anglophobes, headed by Herr G. Bernhardt of the Vossische Zeitung; but it is certainly curious how little the average German reflects that it was, after all, to the British that the German navy had ultimately to surrender in such dramatic fashion; that it was the British Empire which took over the bulk of Germany’s colonial possessions; and that it is to the British Empire that Germany must look again for many of her indispensable raw materials and for customers for her finished products. As a matter of fact, Great Britain stands more than ever before in the sunshine of the German Michael. But the average German does not apparently look so deeply as this, and merely notices that Great Britain is showing a readiness to resume trade-relations with him, and to this end is prepared — within the limits of the Treaty of Versailles — to give him an opportunity to avoid national bankruptcy.

This is not, of course, to say that the British — or even the Americans — are positively popular or fêted here. Whatever may be the faults of the Germans, they have, at least, a spirit of national pride, which is sometimes lamentably lacking among the Austrians and Hungarians. During the many months which I spent in Austria and Hungary during 1916 and 1920, I heard many of the Allies declare that they found the friendliness and hospitality of the inhabitants almost too embarrassing. This criticism is not without justification. But neither A ustria nor Hungary ever seriously regarded herself as at war with Great Britain, France, or the United States. The troops of these nations practically never came into conflict with one another, and the pre-war personal relations between the wealthier and betterclass families in Great Britain, for example, and Austria-Hungary had been in many cases very cordial and intimate. It was, then, often very awkward for an Englishman, Frenchman, or American to find himself being invited to luncheons and dinners and dances with unfeigned friendliness, during a time when the Allied representatives in Paris were preparing — in the treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon — settlements infinitely more disastrous to Austria and to Hungary than was the Treaty of Versailles to Germany. Sometimes, in fact, the situation became intolerable, and some virulent outburst against our newest European allies compelled one to remind one’s very hosts that, after all, they had begun the war by their ultimatum to Serbia.

There is no fear of any of the Allies being similarly embarrassed in Germany. Not long ago some of the Berlin correspondents gave prominence to a ‘house law’ of the von der Golz family, the members of which bound themselves to enter into no friendly relations with their ex-enemies, but to confine their dealings with them to strictly official matters. There was, as a matter of fact, nothing remarkable about this. A German baron to whom I mentioned this ‘house law,’ and with whom, as another old Cambridge man, I had fancied myself on tolerably good terms, bluntly told me that there was nothing extraordinary in this family pact, which was being observed in many houses. His avowal confirmed my own observations and experience. Exceptions may be made, for reasons of policy, in the case of recognized Germanophiles of influence; but the ordinary ex-enemy will have no opportunity, even if he has the desire, to mingle in the intimate home life of any German family of good extraction. This may be bad Christianity, but it is understandable amour propre, and human nature.

IV

But if, in the case of the other Allies, there has been a certain German external correctness, there has been, and is to-day, one great exception. If Great Britain was the most hated enemy during the war, France is now loathed with a deadly hatred of which no secret is made. Before the war Germany certainly did not hate France so much as France hated Germany; and even during the war the German press often expressed its admiration for the bravery of the French poilus. All such admiration has long vanished. Not long ago an American to whom I was speaking of this bitter hatred had a simple yet striking example of the truth of these words. He was inclined to be skeptical, so I rang the bell for the waiter and asked him what he thought of the French. The man’s eyes literally blazed, as he declared that he would willingly march against the French again to-morrow because, he said, ‘they wish to make a nation of slaves of us.’ When he had gone out of the room, I rang for the chambermaid, and she was equally outspoken in her detestation of the French.

People in railway-carriages speak quite openly about this hatred, and canvass the time — it may be twentyfive years, it may be longer — when the final reckoning with France is to come. ‘We want,’ the Germans say, ‘no allies. We ask only to be left alone with the French, and we are sure that the next time France will not have England and America on her side.’ Such remarks I have heard literally scores of times, and they undoubtedly represent the average German’s views and wishes. Time will, of course, do something toward softening down these feelings; but it is an undeniable fact that many Germans of my personal acquaintance are systematically training up their children to hate France, and, above all, are teaching them that they must avenge the alleged wrongs done to German women by the French black troops in the occupied area.

Meanwhile, such is the actual hatred for France that, no matter how distinctly the Allied press proclaims that this or that decision was a joint decision of the Allies, the whole blame is invariably put upon France. Every rebuff administered to Germany is due to French cruelty and revenge. The inculcation of this spirit of hatred against France is, of course, the more easy since France is the country in whose name the Allied Missions here act, and thus the French have the perhaps not always congenial task of pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for their partners.

At the same time, the French appear hardly to have grown accustomed to their victory, and scarcely to realize that after forty-four years of shivering under the German menace, they have won for themselves a freedom which, if rightly used, will enable them to pursue, as long as one can reasonably foresee, a policy of national dignity commensurate with the position to which France is entitled by the valor, charm, industry, and intelligence of her population.

The temptation to repay all at once the many indignities from which they suffered after 1871 has been too strong for many Frenchmen. Not only are the professional journalists too often unbridled in their remarks, but men such as M. Poincaré are losing no opportunity of keeping French feeling against Germany at white heat.

The still dangerous question of Upper Silesia is exceptionally deplorable. The French representatives on the InterAllied Mission have made virtually no pretense of impartiality, and their attitude is resented the more in that Silesia is so closely bound up with the traditions of Frederick the Great; while the Poles are not only despised by the Germans for their lack of business capacity, but are hated by them with the hatred that the oppressor always feels for his victim. Not even the loss of AlsaceLorraine could move Germany to such fierce hatred for France as the surrender of Upper Silesia to the Poles, after what would be eternally proclaimed as tampering with the results of a gerrymandered plebiscite.

The next few years are going to be critical for the future of Europe. France above all is walking to-day per ignes

Suppositos cineri doloso, and, no less than Germany, has temporarily forgotten the wise old dictum of Bismarck, that in politics there is no room for either hatred or love. Mankind, it is to be hoped, will eventually achieve a higher level than these words connote. But to-day we are not even on that humble plane, and the superficial observer, who eats his dinner in Berlin to the strains of the latest English or American musical comedy, is making a great mistake if he thinks that the German will-to-power has been finally crushed, and that there is no longer a steady, relentless national purpose behind the cheap veneer of the neo-Teutonic republicanism.