January 1934, 18-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor, walking from Rotterdam to Constantinople, passes through Munich:
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 appeared, I hurled myself into the first, threw a glass of schnapps
through chattering teeth and asked: "How much further to the Hofbräuhaus?"
A pitying laugh broke out in the bar: I had come two miles in the wrong
direction: this was a suburb called Schwabing. Swallowing two more schnapps, I
retraced my way along the Friedrichstrasse by tram and got off it near a
monument where a Bavarian king was riding on a metal horse in front of another
colossal and traffic-straddling gateway.
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
still mounting and the Nazi salute flickered about the pavement like a tic
douloureux. Outside the Feldherrnhalle, with its memorial to the sixteen
Nazis killed in a 1923 street fight nearby, two S.S. sentries with fixed
bayonets and black helmets mounted guard like figures of cast-iron and the right
arms of all passers-by shot up as though in reflex to an electric beam. It was
perilous to withhold this homage. One heard tales of uninitiated strangers being
physically set-upon by zealots. Then the thoroughfares began to shrink. I caught
a glimpse down a lane of Gothic masonry and lancets and buttresses and further
on copper domes hung in convolutions of baroque. A Virgin on a column presided
over a slanting piazza, one side of which was formed by a tall, Victorian-Gothic
building whose great arched undercroft led to a confusion of lesser streets. In
the heart of them stood a massive building; my objective, the Hofbräuhaus. A
heavy arched door was pouring a raucous and lurching party of Brownshirts onto
the trampled snow.
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 were grinding out Lore, Lore, Lore, scanning the slow beat
with the butts of their mugs, then running the syllables in double time, like
the carriages of an express: "UND—KOMMT—DER—FRÜHLingindastal! GRÜSS
—MIR—DIE—LORenocheinmal".
But
it was certain civilian figures seated at meat that drew the glance and held it.
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 non-stop
eating — meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking
that there is hardly an interprandial moment — can wreak on the human frame.
Intestine strife and the truceless clash of intake and digestion wrecks many
German tempers, twists brows into scowls and breaks out in harsh words and deeds.
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 often-year-olds and
arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and
chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its
three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their
knobbly scalps. Except when five o'clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces as
polished as ostriches' eggs reflected the lamplight. The frizzy hair of their
wives was wrenched up from scarlet necks and pinned under slides and then hatted
with green Bavarian trilbys and round one pair of elephantine shoulders a little
fox stole was clasped. The youngest of this group, resembling a matinee idol
under some cruel spell, was the bulkiest. Under tumbling blond curls his china
blue eyes protruded from cheeks that might have been blown up with a bicycle
pump, and cherry lips laid bare the sort of teeth that make children squeal.
There was nothing bleary or stunned about their eyes. The setting may have
reduced their size, but it keyed their glances to a sharper focus. Hands like
bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami,
frankfurter, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long
swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on check and brow.
They might have been competing with stop watches, and their voices, only partly
gagged by the cheekfuls of good things they were grinding down, grew louder
while their unmodulated laughter jarred the air in frequent claps. Pumpernickel
and aniseed rolls and bretzels bridged all the slack moments but supplies
always came through before a
true lull threatened. Huge oval dishes, laden with Schweinebraten, potatoes,
Sauerkraut, red cabbage and dumplings were laid in front of each diner. They
were followed by colossal joints of meat — unclassifiable helpings which, when
they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calves' pelvises or
the bones of elephants. Waitresses with the build of weight-lifters and all-in
wrestlers whirled this provender along and features dripped and glittered like
faces at an ogre's banquet. But all too soon the table was an empty bone-yard
once more, sound faltered, a look of bereavement clouded those small eyes and
there was a brief hint of sorrow in the air. But succour was always at hand;
beldames barged to the rescue at full gallop with new clutches of mugs and fresh
plate-loads of consumer goods; and the damp Laestrygonian brows unpuckered again
in a happy renewal of clamour and intake. 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 last a noise like
the rush of a river guided me downstairs again to my journey's end.
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 heavier than a
brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvellous, a
brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth. This was the fuel that had turned
the berserk feeders upstairs into Zeppelins and floated them so far from heart's
desire. The gunmetal-coloured cylinders were stamped with a blue HB conjoined
under the Bavarian crown, like the foundry-mark on cannon. The tables, in my
mind's eye, were becoming batteries where each gunner served a silent and
recoil-less piece of ordnance which, trained on himself, pounded away in steady
siege. Mass-gunfire! Here and there on the tables, with their heads in puddles
of beer, isolated bombardiers had been mown down in their emplacements. The
vaults reverberated with the thunder of a creeping barrage. There must have been
over a thousand pieces engaged! — Big Berthas, Krupp's pale brood, battery on
battery crashing at random or in salvoes as hands adjusted the elevation and
traverse and then tightened on the stone trigger-guard. Supported by comrades,
the walking wounded reeled through the battle smoke and a fresh gunner leaped
into each place as it fell empty.
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, fanning out in vistas of poles planted
pyramidally with the hops gadding over them heavy with poppy-sombre flowers.
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 falling over his collar from the back of his cap, round the
front of which, in gold letters, was written Unterseeboot. What was this
Hanseatic submariner doing here, so far inland from Kiel and the Baltic? My
tablemates were from the country, big, horny-handed men, with a wife or two
among them. Some of the older men wore green and grey loden jackets with bone buttons
and badgers' brushes or blackcocks' feathers in the back of their hatbands. The
bone mouthpieces of long cherrywood pipes were lost in their whiskers and on
their glazed china bowls, painted castles and pine-glades and chamois glowed
cheerfully while shag-smoke poured through the perforations of their metal lids.
Some of them, gnarled and mummified, puffed at cheroots through which straws
were threaded to make them draw better. They gave me one and I added a choking
tribute to the enveloping cloud. The accent had changed again, and I could only
grasp the meaning of the simplest sentences. Many words were docked of their
final consonants; 'Bursch'—'a chap'—for instance, became 'bua'; 'A'
was rolled over into 'O', 'Ö' became 'E', and every O and U seemed to have a
final A appended, turning it into a disyllable. All this set up a universal
moo-ing note, wildly distorted by resonance and echo; for these millions of
vowels, prolonged and bent into boomerangs, sailed ricochetting up through the
fog to swell the tidal thunder. This echoing and fluid feeling, the bouncing of
sounds and syllables and the hogsheads of pungent liquid that sloshed about the
tables and blotted the sawdust underfoot, must have been responsible for the
name of this enormous hall. It was called the Schwemme, or horse-pond.
The hollowness of those tall mugs augmented the volume of noise like the
amphorae which the Greeks embedded in masonry to add resonance to their chants.
My own note, as the mug emptied, was sliding down to middle C.
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 clouding glance, into the scenery for some terrible Germanic saga,
where snow vanished under the breath of dragons whose red-hot blood thawed
sword-blades like icicles. It was a place for battle-axes and bloodshed and the
last pages of the Nibelungenlied when the capital of Hunland is in flames
and everybody in the castle is hacked to bits. Things grew quickly darker and
more fluid; the echo, the splash, the boom and the roar of fast currents sunk
this beer-hall under the Rhine-bed; it became a cavern full of more dragons,
misshapen guardians of gross treasure; or the fearful abode, perhaps, where
Beowulf, after tearing the Grendel's arm out of its socket, tracked him over the
snow by the bloodstains and, reaching the mere's edge, dived in to swim many s
fathoms down and slay his loathsome water-hag of a mother in darkening spirals
of gore.
Or
so it seemed, when the third mug arrived.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts, John
Murray 1977 (paperback edition 2004 pp. 89 – 94)
THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE