If you’re looking for quiet, national characteristics, idylls — you will look up the small resorts of Sellin, Baabe, Göhren, Thiessow, Putbus, or Lauterbach. Here the waiters wear less rigidly starched shirtfronts and the hosts speak Plattdeutsch. Hens peck about on the streets, and a beautiful woman may walk through the little town in a bathrobe. The village-like quiet is disturbed only by the occasional marching band. No jazz stirs the wrath of Neptune and his fellow sea-gods. And if you’re in luck, you’ll see some of the old Mönchgut residents dancing in their traditional costume. They wear homespun clothes, black robes, colourful waistcoats, golden chains and short, baggy white pantaloons, billowing round short rubber boots, looking like bells. Their legs are like thin clappers — even with the boots. They are the last of the dancers. The young farmers have given up weaving, and don’t dance any more. A whole way of life is coming to an end.
Visitors eager to avoid politics should seek out Baabe, which is one of the quietest and cheapest of the Baltic resorts and which is run by its clever, efficient and modern mayor, Thormann.* But in other places too the locals have not had their heads turned by swastikas, and what there is by way of nationalist propaganda is imported by the visitors.
The sea, meanwhile, is as it always is, clean and untouched by the childish and violent games of men. You gaze at the infinity of water and sky, and forget. The wind that billows out the swastika banner does so in all innocence. The wave in which it is reflected isn’t to blame for its own desecration. So foolish are people that even in sight of these eternal things, they do not shrink in awe.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 July 1924
* Politics: there is a late shadow cast over this enthusiastic piece by the phenomenon of “Bäder-Antisemitismus”, the anti-Semitism prevalent in some North German resorts from about 1890. Roth handles it discreetly and a little disdainfully, but it’s very evidently there
8. Melancholy of a Tram Car in the Ruhr
A thin, persistent rain. The tram leaves at twelve-fifteen. At one-forty-five it will be in the next town. The stop is outside a bar. I sip kirsch, and peer out at the street through the ornaments in the net curtains. Rain like this stifles sounds as much as snow does. Yes, if these curtains had no ornaments, if this bar had no curtains — why curtains? — then I could probably have seen the tram approach. I shudder at the thought of it leaving without me, and at the same time I wish it would. Then I might take the quicker, more comfortable, reliable train instead. But I am under the spell of a freely chosen torment. The more time, patience, chill, kirsch and loathing I sink into this endeavour, the more difficult it is for me to give it up. Time flows, rain flows.
Quite punctually, no reason it should, the tram comes. Its running board is high and sodden; the floor on the inside is damp too. An old man is smoking a pipe, a woman sits with a covered basket on her lap, schoolgirls clamber aboard, with rough, ugly satchels on their backs that the rain has darkened — like soldiers’ knapsacks with dangling sponge attached. Two workingmen lean on the back platform, keeping the conductor company. There is a country maid as well, with gold-rimmed spectacles and bare feet. She puts me in mind of a plough pulled by a locomotive. No one speaks. All are preparing themselves for the ordeal of a long ride. Such concentration demands complete silence. The hard seats of shiny polished wood are not only short; they also have a downward slope. Sitting on them means: continually and hopelessly shuffling back up.
We go along a long road with dark buildings and dark spaces between them; plots with boards and fences that make no sense, no hope of ever becoming a garden, a field, or a house. The dead bodies of plots. The town refuses to end. If it ever does, though, you can be sure the next one will begin immediately. The towns hand the streets on. Each time, we stop in front of brown shelters of creosoted wood that look like the primal forms of stations in the wilder parts of America. Next come allotments, little hutments of roofing cardboard, the summer castles of the little man and the little rabbit. Jugs, pots and bowls have been spiked on fence-posts like so many severed heads. A red-brick factory, an iron fence, a little white stone gate-house with a visible clock-punch, behind it big puffing chimneys, four, five, six of them, ready to reproduce at a moment’s notice.
The country keeps being on the point of taking over, and making country again — and then it can’t. There are no buildings. The road could turn into a country road at this point. There are even trees at either side, preparing to speak up for it. But our tram needs its overhead wires, and the wires need long, bare, wooden poles, with a couple of china pots flowering at the top end, for purposes of electricity. A caricature of a snowdrop.
In the far distance, on the very horizon, nature is at pains to produce a wood. But there is no wood. There is a kind of beginning vegetative bald patch with comb-over fronds of pine. Next come the inns, one after the other, and each one announcing “picturesque garden location”. What can they mean, what is picturesque here? I imagine a restaurant with painted orange trees and laurel in flower pots; or a bit of a cabbage patch with a veranda; four fences festooned with wild Virginia creeper. There are no limits to the imagination.
Next comes a completely unscheduled stop. The driver gets out, the conductor follows suit, they meet somewhere in the middle. We listen to the rain. There are no signs anywhere. Chimneys, some stout, some slender, puff away in unrelieved torment. The rain shreds the thick smoke, pulverizes it, evenly, without rancour. The rain pulls curtains in front of the scene, curtains without ornaments. There is no landscape, just a kind of extended townscape, industrial-scape — punctuated with picturesque garden locations.
Then, barely visible through the rain, we catch a glimmering of an undertaker on one side, and on the opposite side Persil, the epitome of life. No one speaks. Each time the door opens, someone slams it shut. It’s cold. When we stop, it’s colder. We feel like pulling our feet up on to the seats, but that’s almost certainly forbidden. We have leisure to read the notices: twenty seats; no spitting. I have half a mind to.
Now we’re on the move again. And here is the beginning of the next conurbation. We reach our destination. It looks like where we began from. It’s as though there are no spatial destinations here, only temporal ones, like the certain, final and irrevocable death of the last patch of native earth.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 March 1926
9. Smoke Joins up the Towns
Here the whole sky is smoke. It connects all the towns. It hangs in a grey pall over the land that has made it and that continues to make more of it. The wind that might scatter it is choked and buried under it. The sun that might tunnel through it is deflected and buried in thick clouds. Like something not earthborn and ephemeral, it ascends, conquers celestial regions, acquires mass, spins substance out of nothing, bundles its shadow into a body and incessantly increases its specific weight. It draws new sustenance from massive chimneys. It rises voluminously into the air. It is sacrifice, god and priest all at once. Billions of specks of dust are exhaled by it. By the mere fact of producing it, we worship it. We create it with an industry that is more than reverence. We are filled with it.
Also filled with it is the metropolis that is made up of all the towns of the Ruhrgebiet. An unholy expanse of greater and lesser conurbations, linked by rails, wires, interests and surrounded by smoke, cut off from the rest of the country. If it was just one single, great, gruesome city, it would still be a fantastic place, but not so menacingly ghostly. A big city has centres, rows of streets joined up by the sense of a structure, it has history, and its checkable expansion is somehow calming. It has a periphery, a limit, a line where it stops and goes over into country. Here, though, are a dozen beginnings; and it ends a dozen times. Land wants to resume, poor, smoke-pregnant land, but along comes a wire and says: not here you don’t. Great cubes of brick factory advance unceremoniously, stand there, more firmly set than mountains or hills, more naturally decreed than woods. Every small town has its focus, its edges, its development. But since they are all to be united by smoke to a single city, the separate forms and histories lose credibility, certainly function. Why? Why? Why is Essen here? Why are Duisburg, Hamborn, Oberhausen, Mülheim, Bottrop, Elberfeld, Barmen there? Why so many names, why so many mayors, so many officials for a single town? And as if all that weren’t enough, a provincial border runs through the middle of things. The inhabitants have the delusion of being Westphalians on the right, Rhinelanders on the left. But what are they really? Inhabitants of the smokeland, smoke worshippers, smoke makers, children of smoke.