In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

18 ARRAYS
the American practice of providing each guest with a newspaper at
breakfast. American guests may take a certain interest in whether they
receive the Chicago Tribune or the New York Herald on their breakfast
tray, but the German traveler would quickly vent his displeasure at the
hotel if his newspaper did not precisely suit his political taste." For
Europeans, the simplicity of American world views is proverbial. Like a
contagious disease, it is seen as an immutable element in the character
even of those emigrants who, after making a fortune in the New World,
end up returning to their native country. Telling the saga of his respectable
bourgeois family, the Alsatian novelist Rene Schickele refuses to
take seriously such a repatriated ancestor: "In the course of the year,
every peasant of Rheinweiler came to sit next to him at some gathering
or other. Drinking in the village inn, he tried to explain to them what a
cowboy or a farmer was like. It was his dream to transform them all into
Americans, at least externally" (Schickele, 90). As a mass phenomenon,
American tourists inspire feelings-and even acts-of hatred among
Europeans. Especially in France, the money they spend evokes resentment
rather than opportunism or even gratitude. The author of an article
in the Berliner Morgenpost of July 25 clearly shares this view: "Around
midnight those heavy 'See-Paris-by-Night' buses approach. Montmartre
is their first destination. Up to the shining white church of Sacre Coeur,
there is not much of a problem. But further uphill, where the painters
and bohemians dwell as the last remnants of French culture, things
become precarious. Several hundred Frenchmen surround the bus with
threatening gestures: 'Stay home, you pork-dealers from Chicago! We
hate you! We've had it with your ways! Go home and tell the tale of our
sinful Babel, which you puritans are so scared of and which you don't
even want to pay for!' After a fierce scuffle, the police succeeded in
extricating the bus and restoring order."
Quite regularly, Europeans claim that nothing in North America appeals
to them but money. The Parisian journalist Jacques Laval finds
New York "a mass of banality, a city of abstinence and desolation,
boresome without being noble, a city for which no one could possibly
become homesick" (Heimer, 55). The voyages that Europeans undertake
to Latin America are primarily business-related, like the visit of the
former German chancellor Hans Luther to Argentina in November; but
this part of the New World is regarded enthusiastically as the future: "I