KREUTZBERG.—A PRUSSIAN SUPPER AND CAROUSE.
Herr Kupferkram the elder, I have done thee wrong. I have set thee down as a mere vender of sausages, and lo! thou holdest tavern and eating-house; dispensing prandial portions of savoury delicacies in flesh and vegetable, at the charge of six silver groschens the meal. I beg a thousand pardons; and as a sincere mark of contrition, will consent to swallow thy dinners for a while.
“Will the Herrn Tourniquet and Tuci,” said the Frau Kupferkram one morning, with a duck and a smirk, “do us the honour of supping with us this evening? There will be a few friends, for this is the ‘nahmenstag’ of our dear Gottlob, now in England.”
“Liebe Frau Kupferkram, we shall be delighted!”
I ought, perhaps, to observe, that in Prussia, although a Protestant country, the Catholic custom of commemorating the “saint” rather than the “birth-day,” is almost universal. The former is called the “nahmenstag,” or name-day.
But the day is yet “so young,” that nothing short of the most inveterate gluttony could bend the mind at present upon the evening’s festivity; and moreover, the Berlin races have called us from the workshop and the cares of labour, and our very souls are in the stirrups, eagerly panting for the sport. My dear reader, how can I describe what I never saw? Did we not expend two silver groschens in a programme of the races, and gloat over the spirited engraving of a “flying” something, which was its appropriate heading, and which you would swear was executed somewhere in the neighbourhood of Holywell Street, Strand? Did we not grow hotter than even the hot sun could make us, in ploughing through the sand, and commit some careless uncivilities in struggling among the crowd that hemmed the course as with a wall? See? Of course not! Nobody at the Berlin races ever does see anything but the mounted police and the dust. Yes, sir, lay out two dollars in a “card” for the grand stand, and fix it in your hat-band like a turnpike ticket, and you may saunter through the whole police-military cordon; but be one of the crowd, and trust to no other aid than is afforded by your own eyes, and the said cordon will be the extent of your vision.
A fig for the races! we will go and see the Kreutzberg instead. Our way lies through the Halle gate—Halle, a town that belonged to the Saxons before the French invasion, but lost through their adherence to Napoleon, is now the seat of a Prussian university—and by the Place of the Belle Alliance. What “alliance?” The alliance of sovereigns against destruction, or of people against tyranny? One and both; but while the union of the former has triumphed over the common leveller, the latter, by whose aid it was effected, still drag their unrelenting chains. The Kreutzberg is consecrated to the same magniloquent union, and bears upon its head a military monument illustrative of the triumph of a roused and indignant people against a great oppression; but alas! it does not record the emancipation of that same people from intestine slavery. But that is their business and not ours.