Chapter 4
And so, resuming that beeriad, it appears that we are once again in the Hoftheatre Café in the Residenzstrasse, and that Fräulein Sophie, that pleasing creature, has just arrived with two ewers of Spatenbräu--two ewers fresh from the wood--woody, nutty, incomparable! Ah, those elegantly manicured hands! Ah, that Mona Lisa smile! Ah, that so graceful waist! Ah, malt! Ah, hops! _Ach, München, wie bist du so schön!_
But even Paradise has its nuisances, its scandals, its lacks. The Hoftheatre Café, alas, is not the place to eat sauerkraut--not the place, at any rate, to eat sauerkraut _de luxe_, the supreme and singular masterpiece of the Bavarian uplands, the perfect grass embalmed to perfection. The place for that is the Pschorrbräu in the Neuhauserstrasse, a devious and confusing journey, down past the Pompeian post office, into the narrow Schrammerstrasse, around the old cathedral, and then due south to the Neuhauserstrasse. _Sapperment!_ The Neuhauserstrasse is here called the Kaufingerstrasse! Well, well, don't let it fool you. A bit further to the east it is called the Marienplatz, and further still the Thal, and then the Isarthorplatz, and then the Zweibrückenstrasse, and then the Isarbrücke, and then the Ludwigbrücke, and finally, beyond the river, the Gasteig or the Rosenheimerstrasse, according as one takes its left branch or its right.
But don't be dismayed by all that versatility. Munich streets, like London streets, change their names every two or three blocks. Once you arrive between the two mediæval arches of the Karlsthor and the Sparkasse, you are in the Neuhauserstrasse, whatever the name on the street sign, and if you move westward toward the Karlsthor you will come inevitably to the Pschorrbräu, and within you will find Fräulein Tilde (to whom my regards), who will laugh at your German with a fine show of pearly teeth and the extreme vibration of her 195 pounds. Tilde, in these godless states, would be called fat. But observe her in the Pschorrbräu, mellowed by that superb malt, glorified by that consummate kraut, and you will blush to think her more than plump.
I give you the Pschorrbräu as the one best eating bet in Munich--and not forgetting, by any means, the Luitpold, the Rathaus, the Odéon and all the other gilded hells of victualry to northward. Imagine it: every skein of sauerkraut is cooked three times before it reaches your plate! Once in plain water, once in Rhine wine and once in melted snow! A dish, in this benighted republic, for stevedores and yodlers, a coarse fee for violoncellists, barbers and reporters for the _Staats-Zeitung_--but the delight, at the Pschorrbräu, of diplomats, the literati and doctors of philosophy. I myself, eating it three times a day, to the accompaniment of _schweinersrippen_ and _bonensalat_, have composed triolets in the Norwegian language, a feat not matched by Björnstjerne Björnson himself. And I once met an American medical man, in Munich to sit under the learned Prof. Dr. Müller, who ate no less than five portions of it nightly, after his twelve long hours of clinical prodding and hacking. He found it more nourishing, he told me, than pure albumen, and more stimulating to the jaded nerves than laparotomy.
But to many Americans, of course, sauerkraut does not appeal. Prejudiced against the dish by ridicule and innuendo, they are unable to differentiate between good and bad, and so it's useless to send them to this or that _ausschank_. Well, let them then go to the Pschorrbräu and order bifstek from the grill, at M. 1.20 the ration. There may be tenderer and more savoury bifsteks in the world, bifsteks which sizzle more seductively upon red hot plates, bifsteks with more proteids and manganese in them, bifsteks more humane to ancient and hyperesthetic teeth, bifsteks from nobler cattle, more deftly cut, more passionately grilled, more romantically served--but not, believe me, for M. 1.20! Think of it: a cut of tenderloin for M. 1.20--say, 28.85364273x cents! For a side order of sauerkraut, forty pfennigs extra. For potatoes, twenty-five pfennigs. For a _mass_ of _dunkle_, thirty-two pfennigs. In all, M. 2.17--an odd mill or so more or less than fifty-two cents. A square meal, perfectly cooked, washed down with perfect beer and served perfectly by Fräulein Tilde--and all for the price of a shampoo!
From the Pschorrbräu, if the winds be fair, the beeriad takes us westward along the Neuhauserstrasse a distance of eighty feet and six inches, and behold, we are at the Augustinerbräu. Good beer--a trifle pale, perhaps, and without much grip to it, but still good beer. After all, however, there is something lacking here. Or, to be more accurate, something jars. The orchestra plays Grieg and Moszkowski; a smell of chocolate is in the air; that tall, pink lieutenant over there, with his cropped head and his outstanding ears, his _backfisch_ waist and his mudscow feet--that military gargoyle, half lout and half fop, offends the roving eye. No doubt a handsome man, by German standards--even, perhaps a celebrated seducer, a soldier with a future--but the mere sight of him suffices to paralyse an American esophagus. Besides, there is the smell of chocolate, sweet, sickly, effeminate, and at two in the afternoon! Again, there is the music of Grieg, clammy, clinging, creepy. Away to the Mathäserbräu, two long blocks by taxi! From the Munich of Berlinish decadence and Prussian epaulettes to the Munich of honest Bavarians! From chocolate and macaroons to pretzels and white radishes! From Grieg to "Lachende Liebe!" From a boudoir to an inn yard! From pale beer in fragile glasses to red beer in earthen pots!
The Mathäserbräu is up a narrow alley, and that alley is always full of Müncheners going in. Follow the crowd, and one comes presently to a row of booths set up by radish sellers--ancient dames of incredible diameter, gnarled old peasants in tapestry waistcoats and country boots; veterans, one half ventures, of the Napoleonic wars, even of the wars of Frederick the Great. A ten-pfennig piece buys a noble white radish, and the seller slices it free of charge, slices it with a silver revolving blade into two score thin schnitzels, and puts salt between each adjacent pair. A radish so sliced and salted is the perfect complement of this dark Mathäser beer. One nibbles and drinks, drinks and nibbles, and so slides the lazy afternoon. The scene is an incredible, playhouse courtyard, with shrubs in tubs and tables painted scarlet; a fit setting for the first act of "Manon." But instead of choristers in short skirts, tripping, the whoop-la and boosting the landlord's wine, one feasts the eye upon Münchenese of a rhinocerous fatness, dropsical and gargantuan creatures, bisons in skirts, who pass laboriously among the bibuli, offering bunches of little pretzels strung upon red strings. Six pretzels for ten pfennigs. A five-pfennig tip for Frau Dickleibig, and she brings you the _Fliegende Blätter_, _Le Rire_, the Munich or Berlin papers, whatever you want. A drowsy, hedonistic, easy-going place. Not much talk, not much rattling of crockery, not much card playing. The mountain, one guesses, of Munich meditation. The incubator of Munich _gemütlichkeit_.
Upstairs there is the big Mathäser hall, with room for three thousand visitors of an evening, a great resort for Bavarian high privates and their best girls, the scene of honest and public courting. Between the Bavarian high private and the Bavarian lieutenant all the differences are in favour of the former. He wears no corsets, he is innocent of the monocle, he sticks to native beer. A man of amour like his officer, he disdains the elaborate winks, the complex _diableries_ of that superior being, and confines himself to open hugging. One sees him, in these great beer halls, with his arm around his Lizzie. Anon he arouses himself from his coma of love to offer her a sip from his _mass_ or to whisper some bovine nothing into her ear. Before they depart for the evening he escorts her to the huge sign, "_Für Damen_," and waits patiently while she goes in and fixes her mussed hair.
The Bavarians have no false pruderies, no nasty little nicenesses. There is, indeed, no race in Europe more innocent, more frank, more clean-minded. Postcards of a homely and harmless vulgarity are for sale in every Munich stationer's shop, but the connoisseur looks in vain for the studied indecencies of Paris, the appalling obscenities of the Swiss towns. Munich has little to show the American Sunday school superintendent on the loose. The ideal there is not a sharp and stinging deviltry, a swift massacre of all the commandments, but a liquid and tolerant geniality, a great forgiveness. Beer does not refine, perhaps, but at any rate it mellows. No Münchener ever threw a stone.
And so, passing swiftly over the Burgerbräu in the Kaufingerstrasse, the Hackerbräu, the Kreuzbräu, and the Kochelbräu, all hospitable _lokale_, selling pure beer in honest measures; and over the various Pilsener fountains and the agency for Vienna beer--dish-watery stuff!--in the Maximilianstrasse; and over the various summer _keller_ on the heights of Au and Haidhausen across the river, with their spacious terraces and their ancient traditions--passing over all these tempting sanctuaries of _mass_ and _kellnerin_, we arrive finally at the Löwenbräukeller and the Hofbräuhaus, which is quite a feat of arriving, it must be granted, for the one is in the Nymphenburgerstrasse, in Northwest Munich, and the other is in the Platzl, not two blocks from the royal palace, and the distance from the one to the other is a good mile and a half.
The Löwenbräu first--a rococo castle sprawling over a whole city block, and with accommodations in its "halls, galleries, loges, verandas, terraces, outlying garden promenades and beer rooms" (I quote the official guide) for eight thousand drinkers. A lordly and impressive establishment is this Löwenbräu, an edifice of countless towers, buttresses, minarets and dungeons. It was designed by the learned Prof. Albert Schmidt, one of the creators of modern Munich, and when it was opened, on June 14, 1883, all the military bands in Munich played at once in the great hall, and the royal family of Bavaria turned out in state coaches, and 100,000 eager Müncheners tried to fight their way in.
How large that great hall may be I don't know, but I venture to guess that it seats four thousand people--not huddled together, as a theatre seats them, but comfortably, loosely, spaciously, with plenty of room between the tables for the 250 _kellnerinen_ to navigate safely with their cargoes of Löwenbräu. Four nights a week a military band plays in this hall or a _männerchor_ rowels the air with song, and there is an admission fee of thirty pfennigs (7-1/5 cents). One night I heard the band of the second Bavarian (Crown Prince's) Regiment, playing as an orchestra, go through a programme that would have done credit to the New York philharmonic. A young violinist in corporal's stripes lifted the crowd to its feet with the slow movement of the Tschaikowsky concerto; the band itself began with Wagner's "Siegfried Idyl" and ended with Strauss's "Rosen aus dem Süden," a superb waltz, magnificently performed. Three hours of first-rate music for 7-1/5 cents! And a _mass_ of Löwenbräu, twice the size of the seidel sold in this country at twenty cents, for forty pfennigs (9-1/2 cents)! An inviting and appetizing spot, believe me. A place to stretch your legs. A temple of Lethe. There, when my days of moneylust are over, I go to chew my memories and dream my dreams and listen to my arteries hardening.
By taxicab down the wide Briennerstrasse, past the Luitpold and the Odéon, to the Ludwigstrasse, gay with its after-the-opera crowds, and then to the left into the Residenzstrasse, past the Hoftheatre and its café (ah, Sophie, thou angel!), and so to the Maximilianstrasse, to the Neuthurmstrasse, and at last, with a sharp turn, into the Platzl.
The Hofbräuhaus! One hears it from afar; a loud buzzing, the rattle of _mass_ lids, the sputter of the released _dunkle_, the sharp cries of pretzel and radish sellers, the scratching of matches, the shuffling of feet, the eternal gurgling of the plain people. No palace this, for all its towering battlements and the frescos by Ferdinand Wagner in the great hall upstairs, but drinking butts for them that labour and are heavy laden: station porter, teamsters, servant girls, soldiers, bricklayers, blacksmiths, tinners, sweeps.
There sits the fair lady who gathers cigar stumps from the platz in front of the Bayerischer Hof, still in her green hat of labour, but now with an earthen cylinder of Hofbräu in her hands. The gentleman beside her, obviously wooing her, is third fireman at the same hotel. At the next table, a squad of yokels just in from the oberland, in their short jackets and their hobnailed boots. Beyond, a noisy meeting of Socialists, a rehearsal of some _liedertafel_, a family reunion of four generations, a beer party of gay young bloods from the gas works, a conference of the executive committee of the horse butchers' union. Every second drinker has brought his lunch wrapped in newspaper; half a _blutwurst_, two radishes, an onion, a heel of rye bread. The débris of such lunches covers the floor. One wades through escaped beer, among floating islands of radish top and newspaper. Children go overboard and are succoured with shouts. Leviathans of this underground lake, _Lusitanias_ of beer, Pantagruels of the Hofbräuhaus, collide, draw off, collide again and are wrecked in the narrow channels.... A great puffing and blowing. Stranded craft on every bench.... Noses like cigar bands.
No waitresses here. Each drinker for himself! You go to the long shelf, select your _mass_, wash it at the spouting faucet and fall into line. Behind the rail the _zahlmeister_ takes your twenty-eight pfennigs and pushes your _mass_ along the counter. Then the perspiring _bierbischof_ fills it from the naked keg, and you carry it to the table of your choice, or drink it standing up and at one suffocating gulp, or take it out into the yard, to wrestle with it beneath the open sky. Roughnecks enter eternally with fresh kegs; the thud of the mallet never ceases; the rude clamour of the bung-starter is as the rattle of departing time itself. Huge damsels in dirty aprons--retired _kellnerinen_, too bulky, even, for that trade of human battleships--go among the tables rescuing empty _mässe_. Each _mass_ returns to the shelf and begins another circuit of faucet, counter and table. A dame so fat that she must remain permanently at anchor--the venerable _Constitution_ of this fleet!--bawls postcards and matches. A man in _pinçe-nez_, a decadent doctor of philosophy, sells pale German cigars at three for ten pfennigs. Here we are among the plain people. They believe in Karl Marx, _blutwurst_ and the Hofbräuhaus. They speak a German that is half speech and half grunt. One passes them to windward and enters the yard.
A brighter scene. A cleaner, greener land. In the centre a circular fountain; on four sides the mediæval gables of the old beerhouse; here and there a barrel on end, to serve as table. The yard is most gay on a Sunday morning, when thousands stop on their way to church--not only Socialists and servant girls, remember, but also solemn gentlemen in plug hats and frock coats, students in their polychrome caps and in all the glory of their astounding duelling scars, citizens' wives in holiday finery. The fountain is a great place for gossip. One rests one's _mass_ on the stone coping and engages one's nearest neighbour. He has a cousin who is brewmaster of the largest brewery in Zanesville, Ohio. Is it true that all the policemen in America are convicts? That some of the skyscrapers have more than twenty stories? What a country! And those millionaire Socialists! Imagine a rich man denouncing riches! And then, "_Grüss' Gott!_"--and the pots clink. A kindly, hospitable, tolerant folk, these Bavarians! "_Grüss' Gott!_"--"the compliments of God." What other land has such a greeting for strangers?
On May day all Munich goes to the Hofbräuhaus to "prove" the new bock. I was there last May in company with a Virginian weighing 190 pounds. He wept with joy when he smelled that heavenly brew. It had the coppery glint of old Falernian, the pungent bouquet of good port, the acrid grip of English ale, and the bubble and bounce of good champagne. A beer to drink reverently and silently, as if in the presence of something transcendental, ineffable--but not too slowly, for the supply is limited! One year it ran out in thirty hours and there were riots from the Max-Joseph-Platz to the Isar. But last May day there was enough and to spare--enough, at all events, to last until the Virginian and I gave up, at high noon of May 3. The Virginian went to bed at the Bayerischer Hof at 12:30, leaving a call for 4 P.M. of May 5.
Ah, the Hofbräuhaus! A massive and majestic shrine, the Parthenon of beer drinking, seductive to virtuosi, fascinating to the connoisseur, but a bit too strenuous, a trifle too cruel, perhaps, for the dilettante. The Müncheners love it as hillmen love the hills. There every one of them returns, soon or late. There he takes his children, to teach them his hereditary art. There he takes his old grandfather, to say farewell to the world. There, when he has passed out himself, his pallbearers in their gauds of grief will stop to refresh themselves, and to praise him in speech and song, and to weep unashamed for the loss of so _gemüthlich_ a fellow.
But, as I have said, the Hofbräuhaus is no playroom for amateurs. My advice to you, if you would sip the cream of Munich and leave the hot acids and lye, is that you have yourself hauled forthwith to the Hoftheatre Café, and that you there tackle a modest seidel of Spatenbräu--first one, and then another, and so on until you master the science.
And all that I ask in payment for that tip--the most valuable, perhaps, you have ever got from a book--is that you make polite inquiry of the Herr Wirt regarding Fräulein Sophie, and that you present to her, when she comes tripping to your table, the respects and compliments of one who forgets not her cerulean eyes, her swanlike glide, her Mona Lisa smile and her leucemic and superbly manicured hands!
BERLIN
BERLIN
I am back again, back again in New York. My rooms are littered with battered bags and down-at-the-heel walking sticks and still-damp steamer rugs, lying where they dropped from the hands of maudlin bellboys. My trunks are creaking their way down the hall, urged on by a perspiring, muttering porter. The windows, still locked and gone blue-grey with the August heat, rattle to the echo of the "L" trains a block away, trains rankling up to Harlem with a sweating, struggling people, the people of the Republic, their day's grind over, jamming their one way to a thousand flat houses, there to await, in an all unconscious poverty, the sunrise of still such another day. The last crack of a triphammer, peckering at a giant pile of iron down the block, dies out on the dead air. A taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the street below, grunts its horn. A newsboy, in neuralgic yowl, bawls out a sporting extra. Another "L" train and the panes rattle again. A momentary quiet ... and from somewhere in a nearby street I hear a grind-organ. What is the tune it is playing? I've heard it, I know--somewhere; but--no, I can't remember. I try--I try to follow the air--but no use. And then, presently, one of the notes whispers into my puckering lips a single word--"_Mariechen_." Then other notes whisper others--"_du süsses Viehchen_"; and then others still others--"_du bist mein alles, bist mein Traum_." And the battered bags and the down-at-the-heel walking sticks and the still-damp steamer rugs and the trunks creaking down the hallway and the rattle of the "L" trains fade out of my eyes and ears and again dear little Hulda is with me under the Linden trees--poor dear little Hulda who ever in the years to come shall bring back to me the starlit romance of youth--and again I feel her so soft hand in mine and again I hear her whisper the _auf wiederseh'n_ that was to be our last good-bye--and I am three thousand miles over the seas. For it's night for me again in Berlin--_kronprinzessin_ of the cities of the world.
I am again on the hitherward shore of the Hundekehlensee, flashing back its diamond smiles at the setting sun. I am sitting again near the water's edge in the moist shade of the Grunewald, and the trees sing for me the poetry that they once sang to the palette of Leistikow. My nose cools itself in the recesses of a translucent _schoppen_ of Johannisberger, proud beverage in whose every topaz drop lies imprisoned the kiss of a peasant girl of Prussia. From the southward side of the Grunewaldsee the horn of a distant hunting lodge seems to call a welcome to the timid stars; and then I seem to hear another--or is it just an echo?--from somewhere out the spur of the Havelberge beyond. Or is just the Johannesberger, soul of the most imaginative grape in Christendom? Or--woe is me--am I really back again across the seas in New York, and is what I hear only the horn of the taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the street below?
But I open my too-dreaming eyes--and yes; I am in the Grunewald. And the summer sun is saffron in the waters of the lake. And about me, at a thousand tables under the Grunewald trees, are a thousand people and more, the people of the Kaiserland, their day's work over, clinking a thousand _wohlseins_ in a great twilight peace and awaiting, in all unconscious opulence, the sunrise of yet such another day. And a great band, swung into the measures by a firm-bellied _kapellmeister_ as gorgeous in his pounds of gold braid as a peafowl, sets sail into "Parsifal" against a spray of salivary brass. And the air about me is full of "_Kellner!_" and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and "_Wiener Roastbraten und Stangenspargel mit geschlagener Butter!_" and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and "_Junge Kohlrabi mit gebratenen Sardellenklopsen!_" and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and "_Sahnenfilets mit Schwenkkartoffeln!_" and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and a thousand _schmeckt's guts_ and a thousand _prosits_ and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" And no outrage upon the ear is in all this guttural B minor, no rape of exotic tympani, but a sense rather of superb languor and wholesome tranquillity, of harmonious stomachic socialism, an orchestration of honest ovens and a diapason of honest _bräus_ and _brunners_, with their balmy wealth of nostril arpeggios and roulades.