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.