German Impressions
and Conversations
COLOGNE
STEPHEN SPENDER
A T HAGEN I had seen a good deal of damage, and again at
Hamm, where most of the centre of the town was destroyed. Also all
along the route from Oenhausen there were bridges destroyed, detours,
temporary wooden bridges touchingly named after some member of
the Royal Engineers- McMahon's Bridge, Piper's Bridge, Smith's
Bridge, etc.; but it was in Cologne that I realized what total des–
truction meant.
My first impression on passing through was of there not being
a single house left. There are plenty of walls, but these are a thin
mask in front of the damp, hollow, stinking emptiness of gutted in–
teriors. Whole streets with nothing but the walls left standing are
worse than streets flattened. They are more sinister and oppressive.
Actually, there are a few habitable buildings left in Cologne:
three hundred in all, I am told. One passes through street after street
of houses whose windows look hollow and blackened- like the opened
mouth of a charred corpse; behind these windows there is nothing
except floors, furniture, bits of rag, books, all dropped to the bottom
of the building to form there a sodden mass.
Through the streets of Cologne thousands of people trudge all
day long. These are crowds who a few years ago were shop-gazing in
their city, or waiting to go to the cinema or to the opera, or stopping
taxis. They are the same people who once were the ordinary in–
habitants of a great city when by what now seems an unbelievable
magical feat of reconstruction in time, this putrescent corpse-city
was the hub of the Rhineland, with a great shopping centre, acres
of plate glass, restaurants, a massive business street containing the
head offices of many banks and firms, an excellent opera, theatres,
cinema, lights in the streets at night.
Now it requires a real effort of the imagination to think back to
that Cologne which I knew well ten years ago. Everything has gone.
