MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
SHAKESPEARE, in Henry IV, compared rumour to a pipe or flute " blown by surmises" and so easy to m.anipulate:— " That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it ..."
But even Shakespeare, with his far-seeing imagination, hardly con- ceived of the vast orchestra of rumour which modern communica- tions have created—an orchestra in which each instrumentalist plays a different tune. It must be admitted in fairness to our present generation that rumour has in this war played a far less agitating part than it did in 1914-1918. It may be that the Press and the public have each acquired in the interval a sense of graver responsi- bility ; it may be that our publicity and information services have been more scientifically conducted. For if it be true that rumour is the hot, dry air which fills the vacuum between expectation and knowledge, then those responsible for our information services during this war have been wise enough to plug this vacuum by informing editors privately of what is really happening underneath. This assuredly is the correct method, and we in this country, at least, should be grateful for the self-imposed reticence and discretion which our newspapers have so patriotically observed. We have much to be proud of in this war ; but not the least of our many causes of self-congratulation is our success in combining security with a free Press ; and that success has been based almost entirely upon confidence, in the sense that the editors trusted the Govern- ment not to tell lies and the Government trusted the editors not to reveal secrets. The effectiveness of this admirable method can be tested by the method of contrast ; since we observe that once the element of confidence and contact between editors and the Govern- ment is either absent or interrupted, the resultant vacuum is at once filled with the rush of the heated air of rumour.
* * * *
Seldom in history can expectation have been so great or informa- tion so unreliable as during the past week. We may again pat our- selves and each other on the back in recognition of the fact that at a moment when rumour might have become epidemic the vast majority of our London and provincial newspapers kept their health. But it was not so at San Francisco. I admit that there are extenu- ating circumstances. A very large number of high-pressure journa- lists are gathered together in circumstances of acute personal incon- venience six thousand miles from the scene of action; it is not com- forting to a trained newspaper man, at a moment when a five-years' war is rushing towards its dramatic finish, to have to extract news value from an address delivered by a minor plenipotentiary to the third plenary session of the San Francisco Conference ; and even the picture of Mr. Attlee queueing up modestly in some cafeteria—bright as such a sketch might be in normal times—is for the expert feature- writer less exciting stuff than those other European queues, where Laval knocks at the gates of Lichtenstein and Frau von Ribbentrop at the gates of Switzerland. Inevitably, therefore, the high-pressure journalists of the Golden Gate are aware that, in terms of news value, their consignment is not as breathless as it might have been were they at Spandau or at Linz. And inevitably also, not being in Europe, they invent stories about Europe which the Europeans are too wise to believe, or too well-informed to disclose prematurely. We can blame no one for the rumours that have during the last ten days been unleashed from California ; not only were they exciting, but some of them were also true. Yet it is a curious reflection that when the action-stations of the world are in Venetia, Bavaria and on the Baltic the news-centre should be six thousand miles away at San Francisco. All of which will throw an additional cloud of un- reality over that inauspicious Conference.
* * *
It has often been observed that the capacity of the normal man or woman to absorb excitement is a very limited capacity. We are all shallow wine-glasses, and once we are filled to the brim, what follows merely slops outside. I have been assured by neutral observers that in 1940 and 1941, when unimagined victory followed upon unimagined victory, the German public, after the first bout of jubilation, became quickly satiated with delight. We ourselves, during the same period, became dumbly accustomed to disaster. Conversely, events which if taken in single doses would have appeared to us the very essence of victory, merely slop over the edges of our minds now that -the wine-glass of our excitement has been filled to its very brim. And I imagine that the Germans, on their side, can absorb into their consciousness no further measure of misery ; their mugs are full to the very brim with the clouded draft of disaster ; and if this or that town fall in future, if this or that hero dies or is arrested, the event scarcely pierces the cloud of opaque and sullen lethargy in which they have their being. Utter despair serves also, and perhaps mercifully, as a narcotic. Only slowly will the Germans recover from this nightmare of horror and remorse ; only slowly will they realise that some way or other they must create anew abetter form of life ; and it will be then that the ruin of their cities will rise before their agonised eyes as memorials of their insanity and as symbols of their doom.
* * * * I hope that we shall make it abundantly clear to the Germans that, had they not surrendered their souls and their bodies to a man who was quite demonstrably a paranoiac, they might have retained some of their cities undamaged. The destruction of Dresden, Munich and even Nuremberg is not merely a German disaster ; it is a European disaster. And but for the blind obstinacy of Hitler in continuing the struggle when it was not longer a sane operation of war, these cities might partially have been preserved. The de- struction, and, in fact, the elimination, of Berlin cannot be repre- sented as a European, or even a German,' misfortune, since no civilised capital was more ugly, more artificial, or more perverse. It seems strange to us today, who knew Berlin only as the vast stucco monster created after 1871, to read in the memoirs of a hundred years ago that it was regarded by English visitors as one of the fairest of all continental cities. Under William II, it is true, the Reich capital represented everything that was most osten- tatious, self-assertive and gross in the German nature. Under Hitler it became again an emphatic symbol of heavy and arrogant power. But under the Weimar Republic Berlin, in spite of its almost grotesque ugliness, possessed a certain charm. Superficially,
of course, it was an imitation of other continental capitals. I do not say that it was a bad imitation ; it was a good imitation. The Adlon was as excellent a hotel as could be found in New York or Paris ; Horcher's and Peltzer's restaurants were as good as anything in London or Brussels ; the elegance of such night-clubs as Bar- berina or Valencia was passable, if slightly stained. But there were other places far more authentically Berlin than any of these. There was the Romanische Café, where one would find people such as Bruno Cassirer or Alfred Flechtheim, the art-dealers, or the painter Max Slevogt, or the critic Alfred Kerr. There was Schwan- necke in the Rankestrasse, where one could see Carl Zuckmayer, or Pallenberg, or Fritzi Massary. There was Lutter and Wegner in the Charlottenstrasse, with its memories of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine. There were quiet wine restaurants, such as
the Schwarze Ferkel ; and there were the pubs of the under-world. such as the Keller vom Hundegustav and the Linienkeller. All these places were as real as the Cock Tavern or Whitechapel.
* * * * Musty they were these various lokals, often disreputable and sometimes dull, pervaded all of them by that thick smell of stale anthracite, old cigar smoke and plush which is the smell of Berlin. And what has happened to all those people who swarmed round the Gedichtniskirche? Most of the decent ones are either exiled or dead. Their ghosts must haunt the ruins' of Schwannecke, where under heaps of rubble lie buried many ash trays and many beer mugs, much laughter ; and something better than all this.
Previous page
