No one knows, because in waterside dives, in shady bars haunted by desperate people, sailors who have missed their ships, criminals hunted by the police forces of various cities and countries — in these sinister breeding-grounds of international crime, what has been on the agenda for the last few months is politics. A curious kind of politics. People who were left cold by the European economy or the constitutional arrangements of the German Reich, for whom swastika and red star are emblems of foreign worlds, not for outsiders, for people outside of society, these same people now spend all their evenings in smoke-filled rooms — not because they’re interested in the speeches, but because they are given food there, and schnapps and — money. The Hamburg Gold Mark, as they say, rolls almost as well as the Soviet rouble, and a lot better than the old Czarist one. It appears that forces unknown are competing over the lumpenproletariat of port cities. Nowhere is the propaganda of left and right more virulent than in Hamburg and Bremen. Odd that these are two cities with a particularly conservative middle class. One might have supposed that looking out every day at so much water would have broadened their intellectual horizons and their sense of the political necessities of the fatherland. But it is in these places that social progress encounters the toughest resistance. The contradictions are unbridgeable. Nationalist propaganda appeals to the irate middle class, which one wouldn’t have thought so absurdly susceptible. Communist propaganda is favoured by the stiff necks of the merely rich middle class. In no German city is there such fierce hatred of the poor. Nowhere is the obstinacy of the propertied classes stronger.
For the time being, the Hamburg Gold Mark has calmed people down. In the long run, though, no unemployed man can take comfort from the fact that his fellow in work can now afford to buy butter. Without the free food he gets in assembly halls he would starve to death. And in these assembly halls, where people used to go to smooch and drink, they are now daubing swastikas and Soviet stars on the grimy walls.
Prager Tagblatt, 6 January 1924
7. Baltic Tour
The “season”—it’s a technical term — has begun very auspiciously on the Baltic coast. Here too, as in watering places the world over, there is early, late and high season. High is just beginning now, in July, late won’t start till the end of August. Both have so many subscribers already that most hotels, villas and B&Bs are booked up. This summer promises to be exceptionally profitable for the leisure industry and the local inhabitants of the Baltic beaches. They deserve it. The summer visitor, who only sees the sea and the coast by sunshine, or at worst, in wretched squalls lasting several days, has of course no notion of the difficulties faced by the locals in autumn, winter and early spring. The Baltic is not always as clement as it is during the “season”. When tourists are a distant twinkle, the coast often plays host to a primal struggle between inhabitants and elements. What these not overly well-off little communities spend a deal of money and patience building, in the way of bridges, beach huts and little wooden towers, can quite easily be destroyed by a storm in the course of one spring night. The first and most important prerequisite for living here is a basic toughness. I have talked to locals, they have told me about the harsh, white, unending winters, winters in which no one goes out of doors, in which the snow buries the buildings, the electricity and gas don’t work, water freezes in the wells, and the onshore gale blows with such merciless force that no living being can stand up to it. Summer means more to the residents than recovery, or getting well or resurrection. In the course of those cruel winters they have learned to be tight-lipped, tough, suspicious, stubborn. Even so, a generous humanity stirs in them, their hospitality is sincere, their expressions simple, their greetings curt but friendly. In our many-faceted, tribal Germany this is one of the most interesting populations. Their songs are as simple as the rhythm of the sea; their language is rich in foursquare consonants that resist the prevailing wind, to make themselves heard. One can’t hold it against these people that they charge such relatively high prices, higher for the moment than in the South of France. The beauties of the Baltic coast are worth it. Further, the baths are closer than foreign resorts, and then — they are ours. We go there and do well for ourselves. A room and board costs between seven and ten marks per visitor per day. The early season is three marks less.
The Baltic sea baths have a greater array of natural beauties than most European spas. They are characterized by an almost improbable combination of rural variety and the eternal monotony of the sea. One can walk for days with the sea on one side, and a landscape of the most variable composition on the other. Hills, dales, woods and sea, sea, sea. One rises early and hears the surf beat on the shore, a swelling and ebbing crash. There is the kiss of the wave which combines coming and going, arrival and departure, greeting with the pain of separation — and at the same time there is the song of myriad wood-birds, an almost exotic choir, so that you would think yourself somewhere far in the south. You come here expecting only sea and screaming seagulls. But here is the melodious variety of a continental broad-leaved forest, opposing the water’s monotony with dedication and energy. It’s so unexpected to hear bird-twitter and surf-crash at once that you think you must be dreaming and it takes a while to gradually get used to the fairy-tale pairing of contrasting melodies.
The leading resorts, Swinemünde, Heringsdorf, Bansin, Ahlbeck, are well known; the island of Rügen less well. Most landlubbers come over all awestruck at the idea of an island; places like that must be wildly inaccessible. And so, even though, or perhaps just because it’s so self-evident, you say it again: the sea-bathing on Rügen is as comfortable, as European, and as civilized as anywhere on the European coast. They have electricity, gas, running water, telephone, hairdressers, baths, hotels. And they have more, too: namely that smidgeon of intact nature that serves to guarantee the civilized townie respite from civilization. You can get a shave, send a telegram, listen to the band, and yet still go on a solitary ramble through charmed scenery, and run into a fisherman who might have lurched from the pages of Grimm. In Binz, the largest of the Rügen resorts, it’s difficult to avoid the jazz. Poetically inclined natures and canny admen have dubbed it “the Sorrento of the north”. It has twenty hotels and two hundred villas to let, a two-mile seafront promenade, is stuffed with make-up, powder, atropine, tennis racquets and sharp pleats, cocktail bars and tipsy customers; a spa hotel with dancing opportunities for black tie and evening gowns; and even some swastika flags. In Sassnitz you can be one of 26,000 visitors, and still do something for your immortal soul, and visit an Evangelical and Catholic Mass. It lies in a dip, protected to the north by beech-clad hills, and not far, a two-hour walk, is Stubbenkammer. Here the sand and clay soil is relieved by chalk. This is the terrain of the old pirate legends. The chalk cliffs are extraordinary, at night they have a ghostly glow, they seem predestined for pirate tales. The chalk bluffs have faces and eerie formations, and there’s a very strange contradiction between the deathly pallor of the material and its lively, grimacing forms.