GERMAN IMPRESSIONS
7
waters of the Rhine frothing into swirling white around them. They
looked like machines of speed diving into the river,
t~eir
beautiful
lines emphasizing the sense of movement. Or where they do not
swoop like javelins or speedboats into the river, broken girders
hang from piers in ribbons, splinters and shreds, a dance of arrested
movement. In the destroyed German towns one often feels haunted by
the ghost of a tremendous noise. It is impossible not to imagine the
rocking explosions, the hammering of the sky upon the earth, which
must have caused all this.
The effect of these corpse-towns is a grave discouragement
which influences everyone living and working in Germany, the Oc–
cupying Forces as much as the Germans. The destruction is
serious
in more senses than one. It is a climax of deliberate effort, an achieve–
ment of our civilization, the most striking result of co-operation be–
tween nations in the twentieth century. It is the shape created by
our century as the Gothic cathedrals are the shape created by the
Middle Ages. Everything has stopped here, that fusion of the past
within the present, integrated into architecture, which forms the or–
ganic life of a city, a life quite distinct from that of the inhabitants
who are after all only using a city as a waiting room on their journey
through time: that long, gigantic life of a city has been killed. The
city is dead and the inhabitants only haunt the cellars and basements.
Without their city they are rats in the cellars, or bats wheeling around
the towers of the cathedral. The citizens go on existing with a base
mechanical kind of life like that of insects in the crannies of walls
who are too creepy and ignoble to be destroyed when the wall is torn
down. The destruction of the city itself with all its past as well as
its present, is like a reproach to the people who go on living there. The
sermons in the stones of Germany preach nihilism.
P R 0 F E S S 0 R C-
As
soon as I had arrived in Bonn, I called on Professor
C--.
Although half of Bonn is destroyed, his ground-floor flat was in an
almost untouched part of the city, and he and his wife were still
living there.
I had known
C--
very well before 1933. He lectured in
modem languages at Heidelberg and then at Bonn. He was one of
the foremost exponents of French literature in Germany under the
Weimar Republic and had written books on Balzac, the French Sym–
bolists and Proust.
