-
The Art of Sinking
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The Art of Sinking Sink a little! Try to sink a little! When it comes to the art of sinking then there are worse and better artists. In Germany there are bad practitioners who keep themselves alive only by the thought that since they have so little to live for they have even less to die for. But there are surprisingly many who are willing to accept anything merely to survive. On Sundays outside the Zoo Station in Berlin a ragged and blind old man sits playing shrill psalmtunes on a little portable organ. He sits bare-headed in the cold and listens sorrowfully down in the direction of his shabby cap on the pavement, but the German coins make a faint dull clink and only rarely do they fall in the caps of the blind. It would of course be a little better for him if he did not play the organ and above all if he did not play psalms. On weekday afternoons when the people of Berlin draw past with their small creaking hand-carts after yet another day of hunting for potatoes or firewood in the less harrowed suburbs the blind man has exchanged his harmonium for a barrel-organ, and the coins drop more frequently,but on Sunday he insists with quite uneconomic idealism on using his squeaky 43 harmonium. On Sundays he cannot accept his hurdygurdy . He still has a little bit further to sink. But in the stations it is possible to meet people who have passed most of the stages. The big German railway stations, once the scene for mannequin shows and adventures, contain between their scarred walls and beneath their cracked roofs a high percentage of the sum of hopelessness. In rainy weather the stranger is always surprised to see and hear the rain pattering down through the waiting-room roof and forming lakes on the floor between the benches. It seems like a tiny revolution in this disciplined chaos. At night the stranger will start as he stumbles against refugees in the concrete tunnels, refugees from the east or from the south, lying stretched out on the naked floor along the naked walls and either sleeping heavily or sitting crouched among their poor bundles and waiting all too wide awake for a train that will take them to a new station, just as hopeless as this one. The underground stations in the big cities have come through in better shape. They are rundown but unscathed. Berlin's Untergrundbahnstationen smell of wetness and poverty, but the trains run promptly as in peacetime. One does not turn to stare at the foreign soldiers walking the platforms with well-dressed but badly painted German girls who are already speaking perfectly whiny American or quick conciliatory English . Many of these girls stand leaning against the sides of the train-doors trying to catch as many eyes as possible with their provocative glances and telling their English soldier that the people here have no sense; others prop up their drunk American friend and make eyes that say: 'What can a poor girl do?' 44 [44.223.5.218] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:01 GMT) The smoke from their Allied cigarettes blends inside the compartments with the smoke of the German cigarettes, which tastes sour and stifling, and gives the underground trains their persistent smell of dirt and destitution. But when the underground trains come up into the sharp light of day these girls too have faces with the shadows ofhunger. Andit happens - rarely, no doubt, but it does happen - that someone says: 'That's what the future of Germany looks like! A drunk pimply American and a whore of a German girl!' It happens rarely because sheer necessity wears down the habit of moralizing on behalf of others. It is not true to claim, as a well-fed army chaplain from California said over his steak on the Northern Express, that Germany is a country quite without morality. It is just that in this country of privation morality has acquired quite a new dimension, whose very existence unaccustomed eyes simply do not notice. This new morality postulates that there are conditions in which it is not immoral to steal since in these circumstances theft means not depriving someone of his property but a more just distribution of available goods; likewise black-marketing and prostitution are not immoral when they have become the only means of survival.This does not of course mean that...