Summer with Tucholsky – Monument to the German Eck

It was still important on the Moselle. We slowly sog down the river, we drove down from Trier to Bulley with the drinking chicken, and at every third station we got out and looked at what it would be with. It was. If we had noticed this, we got back in: the train led a wagon that looked like a salon car, from here you could have been very conveniently war, with a phone on the table, with thick cigars and: “His Majesty was just reported.” But we did not wage war, but pressed the waitress, and then a sound button appeared, and then and then appeared. You could drink a natural Moselle on the long table and play cubes. And the games arose during these hours: “Lotter Dick”, “Spix is proud” and: “Georgine, the ordinary flower” as well as: “Karlchen and the Rehlein” – the latter game to memory of Karlchen his love adventures in free, fresh, pious Walde, where the little roarin had once watched him. I lost the most gray and always had to pay. But that’s how everything is.

Bernkastel, Traben-Trarbach, Bulley … But then we sat on a reputable train and drove to Kolbenz. (This pronunciation was adopted if Jakopp had an artificial bit: it is easier.) In Kolbenz we drank a Rhine wine for the sake of geography, and he could say dad and mom, but we no longer. The next morning – a Sunday was bright and clear – we went for a walk.

I didn’t know Kolbenz. The first thing that struck me was a wide and loud citizen audience of travelers who strangled strangely. Just like black -haired women, once they are in Paris, succumb to the magic of the word ›Paris‹ and behave as they would never do at home, the blonde women tipped out of the pantines here; The Rhine, Father Rhine, the German Rhine rang in the glasses, and it was pretty hideous to look at. The second, which noticed at the time, was the “Schmachch”. We spoke the floor with two ch, and we meant the French by which “black disgrace” we had seen so much in the visual cinemas. There was only white Schmachch here, and we didn’t like them. And not because we don’t like the French, but because we don’t like the military. We are just not as stupid as the Kölbenzer “General-Anzeiger”, who, after the withdrawal of the Schmachch, Murder and Death, now shouted behind them, without even examining for a moment: how the Germans in Belgium and France have behaved what the military is actually and for whom it is, and how on this whole nameless misfortune, war and its consequences, Europe is blame and its national tattering. Instead, the newspaper crowed behind a few thousand soldiers in a really petty bourgeois anger because of the constricting attacks, whose youthful strength is abused as unproductive as this is done with soldiers in all countries – also in Germany.

So we walked along the Rhine, I had not learned my geography again and let Jakopp explain the area. There was the honorary pier; On the burned to the Gaudium of all the Rheinkadetten a French flag – really, the flag burned high on the flagstock, glued again, shone again … I am not interested in the military, and I don’t know what they croked there. It is indifferent, as indifferent as everything that these uniformed brothers do. And there was the Rhine, the kitsch crushed, and, as with Goethe, large ships were about to be here on this river … and suddenly I got the greatest shock on this trip. I still know exactly:

We went on the wide, tree -passed avenue; At the front of the corner there was a photographer, they had exhibited pictures, they were brown like old daguerotypes, then there were no more trees, a free place, I saw up … and almost fell over.

It said – Tschingbumm! – A huge monument of Kaiser Wilhelm of the first: a punch out of stone. At first the breath remained away.

If you looked closer, you discovered that it was a wonderful, a Wilhelmine, an artistic work of art. The thing looked like a gigantic cake attachment and represented the Germany that was to blame for the war – now we want to thresh it! In Holland.

First of all, there is no empty spot to discover on this monster. It has the ornament masers.

Above that, on a horse, what: horse! On a horse, what: Ross! On a huge battle stallion like from a Wagneroper, Hoihotoho! The old gentleman sits there and does something that he has not done all of his life: he drains into the country, the horse also drain, and if I remember right, some woman’s person around him and prey to him. But my memory can be deceived … maybe it only gives the giant horse a sugar. And ornaments and trees trees and cheated snakes and eagles and coat of arms and flourishes and vomit lilies and what do I know … it was very great. I was silent and looked at Jakoppn.

“Yes,” said Jakopp, “this is the Kaiser Wilhelm monument at the German Eck.”

Right: There was a second river into the first river, and if you ward off the factory chimneys, it was a pretty area, much too pretty for this stone blump, for this trub, this trubas from a memorial. “What … how …” I stammered. Then I heard a quiet voice on my left, a boy was suddenly enjoyed, he had probably noticed my perplexity, and he said: “Should I explain the memorial to you-?” Rapidly grasp the war situation, and I said: “Explain the memorial.”

Then the boy looked everywhere, just not on the cake attachment, he slept while standing, his eyes had the expression of a peacefully grazing cow, I had never seen anything like that in a person. He spoke with a modulation without modulation. And because this poor child did not do this alone, but four or five of his colleagues, as I later saw, practiced the same thing for the whole Sunday morning, in front of the memorial and below, in front of the hotel and everywhere, I can hear what the boys had been unable to tackle several times. After administering several glasses of good wine to refresh the memory, this can be used as follows:

»This monument was founded in 1897; It represents the mounted Kaiser Wilhelm the first, as well as a goddess of victory, stamps the defeated enemies. The goddess of victory is a peace angel after lost wars and has a wing covering of five meters into the width. The monument weighs five million kilograms and has an area of 1200 square meters, so it is a large work of art. The base on which the monument is built on the basic base rises; The right base stands on this base, and on this the undershock, whereupon the monument base rises. The artists who are to blame for the monument are called Schmitz and Hundrieser. The saying that is embedded in the monument says: ‘The empire will never be destroyed if you are unique and loyal.’ The heads of the seaside snakes mean Germany’s enemies, the granite of the Söckel is from the Black Forest. The Moselle flows behind the monument, its current is particularly quick here because it has to pass the monument. The monument was opened in the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm of the second and therefore cost two million marks. That is the monument on the German corner. «(Big break break.)

As I read in the newspaper, the speeches they kept after the Schmachch had been deducted were just like the monument. But can you think that a government has ever been willing to remove such a frozen manure? On the contrary: you will soon build a new time: the imperial honor. When it is built, snot branches will go there and explain it to us: the inns will be full all around, and in the mass graves to northern France, a meager will be raised:

“For what? For that.”

The text appeared in the »Weltbühne« in January 1930.