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Downstairs, a chauffeur in leggings held his cap aloft as he opened the door of a long Mercedes. When we had rustled in he enveloped us in bearskin from the waist down. "You see?" the girls said, "High life!"
We soared through the liquid city and up into the wooded hills and alighted at a large villa of concrete and plate glass. Our host was a blond, heavy man with bloodshot eyes and a scar across his forehead. He hailed my companions with gallantry; me, much more guardedly. His dinner-jacket made me feel still more of a ra...
Except for the panorama of the lights of Stuttgart through the plate glass, the house was hideous—prosperous, brand new, shiny, and dispiriting. Pale woods and plastics were juggled together with stale and pretentious vorticism, and the chairs resembled satin boxing-gloves and nickel plumbing. Carved dwarfs with red no...
"At the Graf Zeppelin, please." I sensed a tremor of admiration on either side: even Lise couldn't have done better.
"Ach so?" His opinion of me went up. "And how do you like our best hotel?"
"Clean, comfortable and quiet."
"Tell the manager if you have any complaints. He's a good friend of mine."
"I will! And thanks very much."
We had to take care about conversation because of the chauffeur. A few minutes later, he was opening the car with a flourish of his cockaded cap before the door of the hotel and after fake farewells, I strolled about the hall of the Graf Zeppelin for a last puff at the ogre cigar. When the coast was clear I hared throu...
At half-past nine next morning, we were waving good-bye across a tide of Monday morning traffic. I kept looking upwards and back, flourishing my glittering wand and bumping into busy Stuttgarters until the diminishing torsos frantically signalling from the seventh-storey window were out of sight. I felt as Ulysses must...
I followed the banks of the Neckar, crossed it, and finally left it for good. Suddenly, when it was much too late, I remembered the Kitsch-Museum in Stuttgart; a museum, that is, of German and international bad taste, which the girls had said I mustn't miss. (The décor last night—for this was how the subject had croppe...
Now the track was running south-south-east across Swabia. Scattered conifers appeared, and woods sometimes overshadowed the road for many furlongs. They were random outposts, separated by leagues of pasture and ploughland, of the great mass, lying dark towards the south-west, of the Black Forest. Beyond it the land rip...
On straight stretches of road where the scenery changed slowly, singing often came to the rescue; and when songs ran short, poetry. At home, and at my various schools, and among the people who took me in after scholastic croppers, there had always been a lot of reading aloud. (My mother was marvellously gifted in this ...
The range is fairly predictable and all too revealing of the scope, the enthusiasms and the limitations, examined at the eighteenth milestone, of a particular kind of growing up. There was a great deal of Shakespeare, numerous speeches, most of the choruses of Henry V, long stretches of A Midsummer Night's Dream (drunk...
My bridgehead in French poetry didn't penetrate very far: a few nursery rhymes, one poem of Theodore de Banville, two of Baudelaire, part of one of Verlaine, Yeats's Ronsard sonnet in the original, and another of du Bellay; lastly, more than all the rest put together, large quantities of Villon (this was a very recent ...
Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte...
It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:
nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,
and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general's blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine—and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: "Ach so, Herr Major!" It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fou...
Hotfoot on Horace came Hadrian's lines to his soul—The Oxford Book of Latin Verse was about the only prize I carried away from school—and Petronius' ten counter-balancing verses, hinging on the marvellous line: 'sed sic, sic, sine fine feriati'; then some passages of the Pervigilium Veneris. After this, with a change o...
A give-away collection. It covers the thirteen years between five and eighteen, for in the months preceding my departure the swing of late nights and recovery had slowed the intake down to a standstill. Too much of it comes from the narrow confines of the Oxford Books. It is a mixture of a rather dog-eared romanticism ...
Back to the Swabian highroad.
Song is universal in Germany; it causes no dismay; Shuffle off to Buffalo; Bye, Bye, Blackbird; or Shenandoah; or The Raggle Taggle Gypsies sung as I moved along, evoked nothing but tolerant smiles. But verse was different. Murmuring on the highway caused raised eyebrows and a look of anxious pity. Passages, uttered wi...
So it was today. I was at this very moment of crescendo and climax, when an old woman tottered out of a wood where she had been gathering sticks. Dropping and scattering them, she took to her heels. I would have liked the earth to have swallowed me, or to have been plucked into the clouds.
Herrick would have been safer; Valéry, if I had known him, perfect: 'Calme...'
The rain had churned the snow into slush, then blasts from the mountains had frozen it into a pock-marked upheaval of rutted ice. Now, after a short warning drift, the wind was sending flakes along by the million. They blotted out the landscape, turning one side of a traveller's body into a snowdrift, thatching his hea...
When he set me down on the icy cobbles of Ulm, I knew I had reached an important landmark on my journey. For there, in the lee of the battlements, dark under the tumbling flakes and already discoloured with silt, flowed the Danube.
It was a momentous encounter. A great bridge spanned it, and the ice was advancing from either bank to meet and eventually join amidstream. Inland from the river-wall, the roofs that retreated in confusion were too steep for the snow; the flakes would collect, bank up, then slide into the lanes with a swish. In the hea...
A market day was ending. Snow was being banged from tarpaulins and basket was slotted into basket. Cataracts of vegetables rumbled on the bottoms of waggons and the carthorses, many of them with those beautiful flaxen manes and tails, were being backed with bad language between the shafts. Scarlet-cheeked women from a ...
A late mediaeval atmosphere filled the famous town. The vigorous Teutonic interpretation of the Renaissance burst out in the corbels and the mullions of jutting windows and proliferated round thresholds. At the end of each high civic building a zigzag isosceles rose and dormers and flat gables lifted their gills along ...
A flight of steps led to a lower part of the town. Here the storeys beetled and almost touched and in one of the wider lanes was a warren of carpenters and saddlers and smithies and cavernous workshops. Down the middle, visible through a few chopped holes, a river rushed ice-carapaced and snow-quilted under a successio...
This part of the town contained nothing later than the Middle Ages, or so it appeared. A kind crone outside a harness-maker's saw me peering down a hole in the ice. "It's full of Forellen!" she said. Trout? "Ja, Forellen! Voll, voll davon." How did they manage under that thick shell of ice? Hovering suspended in the da...
As soon as the Minster was open I toiled up the steeple-steps and halted, with heart pounding, above the loft where those bells were hung. Seen through the cusps of a cinque-foil and the flurry of jackdaws and a rook or two that my ascent had dislodged, the fore-shortened roofs of the town shrank to a grovelling maze. ...
It was an amazing vision. Few stretches of Central Europe have been the theatre for so much history. Beyond which watershed lay the pass where Hannibal's elephants had slithered downhill? Only a few miles away, the frontier of the Roman Empire had begun. Deep in those mythical forests that the river reflected for many ...
The first sight of the Danube! It was a tremendous vision. In Europe, only the Volga is longer. If one of the crows that were fidgeting among the crockets below had flown to my next meeting place with the river, it would have alighted two hundred miles east of this steeple. The blast was whistling louder through the pe...
The empty nave, lit only by the marvellous deep-hued gloom of the glass, was dark by contrast. An organist, rapt with improvisation, was fluting and rumbling in his high lamp-lit nest under a display of giant pan-pipes. The clustered piers, which looked slender for so huge a place, divided the nave into five aisles and...
The coloured windows died like fires going out. The clouds had closed over again and the sky presaged snow.
I was haunting cathedrals these days. Only a few hours later I was inside yet another, munching bread and cheese and an onion in one of the transepts. The day's march had been a repetition of yesterday's: I had crossed the Danube bridge; base clouds pursued me with their rotten smoke; the clouds broke and the east wind...
On these Augsburg choir-stalls, highly polished free-standing scenes of Biblical bloodshed ran riot. For realism and immediacy they left the carvings of Ulm far behind. On the first, Jael, with hanging sleeves and hatted like a margravine, gripped a coal-hammer and steadied an iron spike among the sleeping Sisera's cur...
Stark mementoes. But, in compensation, four ravishing scenes from the life of the Virgin hung behind side-altars. 'Hans Holbein,' the brass plate said; but they were more like Memling in costume and feeling; much earlier in date than the royalties and ambassadors and magnates we all know. They turned out to be by the f...
I must resist the temptation to enlarge on the fascinating city outside: its abundance of magnificent buildings, the frescoed façade of the Fugger house, the wells canopied with wrought iron. I was pursuing a more general quarry as I munched: no less than the whole feeling and character of pre-baroque German towns. We ...
The characteristics I have in mind, though of course I didn't know the details, stretch further afield than South Germany: they advance down the Danube, through Austria and into Bohemia, across the mountains of the Tyrol to the edge of Lombardy and through the Swiss Alps and across the Upper Rhine into Alsace; and the ...
I had been fumbling for a symbol that might hit off this idio-syncracy and suddenly I found it! In the girls' flat in Stuttgart, turning over a picture book of German history, I stopped at a colour plate depicting three arresting figures. 'Landsknechts in the time of the Emperor Maximilian I,' was the caption. They wer...
They were swashbuckling, exuberant and preposterous outfits, yet there was nothing foppish about the wearers: under the flutter of this blinding haberdashery, they were grim Teutonic soldiers, and mediaeval still. All this slashing which caught on everywhere, was a Teutonic thing. It began in the late fifteenth century...
Once I had got hold of the Landsknecht formula—mediaeval solidity adorned with a jungle of inorganic Renaissance detail—there was no holding me! It came into play wherever I looked: not only in gables, bell-hampers, well-heads, oriels, and arcades—in the woodland giants that wrestled in coloured tempera over fifty feet...
We have all invented a half-bogus golden age to embower us when we eat and drink away from home. Judging by pubs, this is represented in England by the reign of Elizabeth, with the Regency following close. France's dream dining-land is Rabelais' Thélème and the chicken-in-the-pot world of Henry IV; and South Germany's ...
No. It's the bearded guzzler in his harlequin haberdashery, recruited in Swabia, twirling his whiskers and shouting for another bottle. He is the walking epitome and his influence is everywhere: in the tapering coloured globes that form the stems of the wine-glasses, in the labels on the green and amber bottles, in the...
Dreamland for me, too, for a while. It was snug among these impedimenta, with sawdust underfoot and hidden in the shag and cheroot smoke that I poured such ideas into my diary. The Landsknecht touch-stone! (Stale news, I suppose. These discoveries nearly always are.) But it was in the transept of the cathedral that the...
[ WINTERREISE ]
Nipping and eager, the air bites shrewdly and the snow and the wind have obliterated all the details of the journey to Munich. Snow is still falling hard when the scene clears in the late afternoon.
At the Poste Restante counter of the Hauptpost, they handed over a registered envelope crossed with blue chalk; inside, stiff and new, were four pound notes. Just in time! In high spirits I headed for the Jugendherberge—one of the very few Youth Hostels that still survived—where the magic word 'student' secured me a be...
I soon found myself battling down an avenue of enormous width that seemed to stretch to infinity across the draughtiest city in the world. A triumphal arch loomed mistily through the flakes, drew slowly alongside and faded away again behind me while the cold bit to the bone, and when at last a welcoming row of bars app...
I had expected a different kind of town, more like Nuremberg, perhaps, or Rothenburg. The neo-classical architecture in this boreal and boisterous weather, the giant boulevards, the unleavened pomp—everything struck chill to the heart. The proportion of Storm Troopers and S.S. in the streets was unusually high and stil...
I was back in beer-territory. Halfway up the vaulted stairs a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika'd arm, was unloosing, in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours. Love's labour lost. Each new storey radiated great halls given over to ingestion. In one chamber a table of S.A. men ...
One must travel east for a hundred and eighty miles from the Upper Rhine and seventy north from the Alpine watershed to form an idea of the transformation that beer, in collusion with almost nonstop eating—meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking that there is hardly an interprandial moment—...
The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a sin...
I strayed by mistake into a room full of S.S. officers, Gruppen- and Sturmbannführers, black from their lightning-flash-collars to the forest of tall boots underneath the table. The window embrasure was piled high with their skull-and-crossbones caps. I still hadn't found the part of this Bastille I was seeking, but at...
The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavie...
My own gun had fired its last shot, and I wanted to change to a darker-hued explosive. A new Mass was soon banged down on the board. In harmony with its colour, it struck a darker note at once, a long Wagnerian chord of black-letter semibreves: Nacht und Nebel! Rolling Bavarian acres formed in the inscape of the mind, ...
The peasants and farmers and the Munich artisans that filled the tables were much nicer than the civic swallowers overhead. Compared to the trim, drilled figures of the few soldiers there, the Storm Troopers looked like brown-paper parcels badly tied with string. There was even a sailor with two black silk streamers fa...
Mammoth columns were rooted in the flagstones and the sawdust. Arches flew in broad hoops from capital to capital; crossing in diagonals, they groined the barrel-vaults that hung dimly above the smoke. The place should have been lit by pine-torches in stanchions. It was beginning to change, turning now, under my cloudi...
Or so it seemed, when the third mug arrived.
Surely I had never seen that oleograph before? Haloed with stars, the Blessed Virgin was sailing skywards through hoops of pink cloud and cherubim, and at the bottom, in gold lettering, ran the words: Mariä Himmelfahrt. And those trusses of chair-legs, the tabby cat in a nest of shavings and the bench fitted with clamp...
A Katzenjammer is a hangover. I had learnt the word from those girls in Stuttgart.
As I drank the coffee and listened, their features slowly came back to me. At some point, unwillingly emulous of the casualties I had noticed with scorn, I had slumped forward over the Hofbräuhaus table in unwakeable stupor. There has been no vomiting, thank God; nothing worse than total insensibility; and the hefty Sa...
I felt terrible. I had often been drunk, and high spirits had led to rash doings; but never to this hoggish catalepsy.
In the Jugendherberge my rucksack had been tidied away from my unslept-in bed. The caretaker looked in a cupboard in vain and called for the charwoman. No, she said, the only rucksack in the building had departed first thing on the back of their only over-night lodger... What! Was he a spotty young man? I eked out my i...
I was aghast. The implications were too much to take in at first. Momentarily, the loss of the diary ousted all other thoughts. Those thousands of lines, the flowery descriptions, the pensées, the philosophic flights, the sketches and verses! All gone. Infected by my distress, the caretaker and the charwoman accompanie...
The clerk at the Consulate knew all about it. The Hauptpolizeiamt had telephoned.
The Consul, seated at a huge desk in a comfortable office under photographs of King George V and Queen Mary, was an austere and scholarly-looking figure in horn-rimmed spectacles. He asked me in a tired voice what all the fuss was about.
Perched on the edge of a leather armchair, I told him, and roughly outlined my Constantinople plan and my idea of writing a book. Then caught up in a fit of volubility, I launched myself on a sort of rambling, prudently censored autobiography. When I finished, he asked me where my father was. In India, I told him. He n...
"Do you know anyone in Munich?" Mr. Gainer said, getting up. I said I did—that is, not exactly, but I'd got an introduction to a family. "Get in touch with them," he said. "Try and keep out of trouble, and I should avoid beer and schnapps on an empty stomach next time. I'll look out for the book."
I walked out into the snowy Prannerstrasse like a reprieved malefactor.
Luckily, the letter of introduction had been posted a few days before. But I remembered the name—Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff—so I telephoned, and was asked to stay; and that same evening, in Gräfelfing, a little way out of Munich, I found myself at a lamp-lit table with a family of the utmost charm and kindnes...
The Lipharts were a White Russian family: more specifically, they were from Esthonia and, like many Baltic landowners, they had taken flight through Sweden and Denmark after the loss of their estates at the end of the war. The castle they lived in—was it called Ratshoff?—became a national museum in Esthonia, and the fa...
Karl, the eldest son, was a painter, about fifteen years older than me, and as he was short of a sitter for the few days of my stay, I came in handy. We went into Munich every morning and spent peaceful hours of chat in his studio. I listened to anecdotes and scandals and funny stories about Bavaria while the snow pile...
Their parents were captivating survivals of the decades when Paris and the South of France and Rome and Venice were full of northern grandees seeking refuge there from the birch trees and conifers and the frozen lakes of their white and innumerable acres. I could see them, in imagination, lit by the clustering globes o...
I stayed five days. When leaving-time came, I might have been a son of the house setting forth. The Baron spread maps and pointed out towns and mountains and monasteries and the country houses of friends he would write to, so that I could have a comfortable night now and then, and a bath. "There we are! Nando Arco at S...
The evenings were conversation and books. The Baron enlarged on the influence of Don Juan on Evgenye Oniegin and the decay of German literature and the changes of taste in France: was Paul Bourget read a great deal? Henri de Regnier? Maurice Barrès? I wish I could have answered. Saved from the general loss by its prese...
All these kindnesses were crowned with a dazzling consummation. I had said that my books, after the lost diary, were what I missed most. I ought to have known by now that mention of loss had only one result under this roof... What books? I had named them; when the time came for farewells, the Baron said: "We can't do m...
This book became a fetish. I noticed, during the next few days, that it filled everyone with feelings of wonder akin to my own. On the second evening—Rosenheim was the first—placed alongside the resolutely broached new diary on the inn-table of Hohenaschau, it immediately made me seem more exalted than the tramp that I...
Remembering the advice the mayor of Bruchsal had given me, the moment I had arrived in this little village, I had sought out the Bürgermeister. I found him in the Gemeindeamt, where he filled out a slip of paper. I presented it at the inn: it entitled me to supper and a mug of beer, a bed for the night and bread and a ...
The Gastwirtschaft was a beetling chalet with cut logs piled to the eaves. An elaborate balcony ran all the way round it; carved and fretted woodwork frilled it at every point and a layer of snow two feet thick, like the cotton-wool packing for a fragile treasure, muffled the shallow tilt of the enormous wide-eaved roo...
Of the village in the snowy dark outside, nothing has stuck. But unlike the three overnight halts that follow—Riedering, Söllhuben and Röttau, that is to say—it is at least marked on maps.
Each of these little unmarked hamlets seems smaller in retrospect than the other two, and remoter, and more deeply embedded in hills and snow and dialect. They have left an impression of women scattering grain in their yards to a rush of poultry, and of hooded children returning from school with hairy satchels and muff...
All was frozen. There was a particular delight in treading across the hard puddles. The grey discs and pods of ice creaked under hobnails and clogs with a mysterious sigh of captive air: then they split into stars and whitened as the spiders-web fissures expanded. Outside the villages the telegraph wire was a single ca...
Otherwise, except for birds, most of these white landscapes were empty, and I would crunch along adding the track of my hobnails to their criss-cross of little tridents. Fired by the Baron's example, I tried to get by heart, from Schlegel and Tieck's pocket translation, the passages of Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark which ...
Ob's edler im Gemüt, die Pfeil' und Schleudern
Des wütenden Geschicks erdulden, oder,
Sich waffnend gegen eine See von Plagen,
Durch Widerstand sie enden
until I got to 'It is a fear of something after death/that undiscovered country from whose bourne/no traveller returns':
Nur dass die Furcht vor etwas nach dem Tod—
Das unentdeckte Land, von des Bezirk
Kein Wandrer wiederkehrt
Again, anyone bumping into me unawares, like the crone on the Ulm road, would have taken me for drunk; in a literary sense they would have been right.
Every mile or so wooden calvaries, hewn and painted with rustic velleities of baroque, stood askew beside the path. Streaming wounds mangled the gaunt figures and exposure had warped or split them along the grain. Haloes of tarnished brass put out spikes behind the heads; the brows were clumsily hooped already with pla...

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