Volume 152 — THE PURIFIED PRUSSIAN.
Reading edition
[Writing in Die Woche a well-known Baroness, a leader of Berlin society, discusses the transformation and purification of Berlin conviviality by the War. Social functions accompanied by eating have altogether ceased and given way to more refined gatherings—æsthetic afternoon teas and elegant evening parties—at which the conversation reaches heights of brilliancy unheard of in the old carnivorous days. Unhappily snobbery still prevails, "every class pretending to be richer and better than they are—small officials, officers, landowners, all pretending to be millionaires, and doing their pretension shabbily."]
One of the leading Prussian social stars Opines that War, although it makes for leanness, Not only banishes discordant jars And purifies Berlin of all uncleanness, But places her, beatified by Mars, Upon a pinnacle of mental keenness, Changing the cult of trencher and of bowl To feasts of reason and o'erflows of soul. The gross carnivorous orgies of the past Have gone, and in their place is something finer; Emotions of a transcendental cast Preoccupy the luncher and the diner; The Hun, in short, by being forced to fast, Has grown ethereal, more alert, diviner; And, purged of all incentive to frivolity, His speech has almost lost its guttural quality. His talk, of old to stodginess inclined, Now sparkles with consistent coruscation, Attaining heights of mirth and wit combined Unknown to any previous generation, But always exquisitely pure, refined And spiritual, as befits the nation In which the nicer touch was never missing Down from great FREDERICK to blameless BISSING. 'Tis easy, though the writer does not tell, To guess the themes which prompt the brightest sallies; Louvain; the Lusitania; Nurse CAVELL— With these Hun wit most delicately dallies; The wreck of Reims; the Prussic acid shell; The desolation of Armenia's valleys; The toll of Belgian infants slain ere birth— All these excite Berlin's ecstatic mirth. And yet a slight amari aliquid Is mingled with this lady's honeyed phrases; Berlin society is not yet rid Of one of its less admirable phases; There is, in other words, one fly amid The precious ointment of the writer's praises; In every class are those who ape the airs Of the superior nobs and millionaires. But still, when all reserves are duly made For negligible faults in tact or breeding, The picture by this noble scribe displayed Of high-browed Hundom makes impressive reading; For homage to convivial needs is paid Without the faintest risk of over-feeding, And, braced by frugal fare, the Prussian brain Soars to a perfectly celestial plane.
