I have travelled through Germany, 'Hindenburg's country', and seen it with the unclouded eyes of a visitor from the country of workers and peasants, Lenin's country. You have castles and museums, government palaces where ministers sit, victory avenues and victory monuments, madhouses, war memorials, barracks, schools, prisons and factories -- millions of people sucked dry and a bourgeoisie with culture, technology and all the comforts of a good life.
But I did not merely wish to learn about German streets and who was begging, starving, strolling, motoring or parading in them, but rather to see the places from where it is all being invisibly ruled and where the millions of threads and cables come together: the power centres of public opinion and the industrial workshops of the German spirit, German culture and German guns.
Wings Over Europe Cold War Gone Hot Download
Download Zip 🔥 https://bltlly.com/2yGBew 🔥
The cities of the Ruhr with their streets, plants and pits are marked with the name of Krupp just like the teaspoons and pillowslips of a propertied family. Essen is but a hereditary estate, a family possession passed down from generation to generation. The family, as if in its own home, casually puts up memorials to its deceased members in the public squares and gardens. Grandma orders one monument, the cousins or sons or grandsons who have tastes and pleasures of their own, another. At every junction, a bronze Friedrich-Albrecht, an Albrecht-Franz or a Franz Friedrich. The buildings, tramlines, people and vehicles meekly give way to their iron masters. The cult of ancestors reigns over the greatest of Europe's industrial centres. The last male of the reigning family died long ago and the outrageous scandal that accompanied him to the grave has long since been forgotten. The daughters, widows unknown to anyone, have inherited thousands of millions by right of blood and become the autocratic sovereigns of hundreds of factories, pits, shipyards, railways and harbours; they are given husbands for the continuance of the line and petty officials turned prince-regents adopt their wives' name and multiply so that the great city of Essen shall not be left without thoroughbred masters, and hundreds of thousands of workers with millions of machines can quietly settle to work for real, pure-blooded little Krupps. Life, of course, has long since outgrown the patriarchal economic forms with which old Adolf started half a century ago; business is managed by the board of a joint-stock company instead of a monarchical lord and the Krupp colossus strides out in a direction fixed and ultimately guided by an army of expert officials rather than by the will of the brilliant organiser and builder that Krupp II had been.
On the site of the city of Essen thirty or forty years ago--where today the giants of metallurgy work so closely crowded together; where plants jostle each other and factory chimneys crane their necks so as not to lose sight of each other partitioning the soot-black sky with thick strips of smoke; where far beneath the city's feet pits gnaw at every piece of coal (between them black covered ways are stretched like cables: each colliery grabs them with a hundred hands and pulls them over to its side); where the great smelting furnaces that knit the Ruhr cities into the body of one gigantic plant are never extinguished -- on the site of this Essen were once open fields and scattered peasant farmsteads. You can still see today how the city has grown up from a mine. Concrete and asphalt have merely overlaid its age-old disorder. Streets have formalised the winding, crooked paths trodden by the first miners between pub and works. The city has reconciled itself to wild ungainly houses that will not recognise any discipline. Like tramps turned millionaires overnight they loaf around with pipes between their teeth, without gardens (or without trousers), with the wind blowing freely across their bare stone chests. The city, crushed down with wealth and overcome with the smell of money, rushes on its way pretending that there is nothing here and building bridges to avoid those feet in rough miner's boots stretched out across the street. Essen has from that time onwards retained a passion for reconstruction and large useless earthworks. It loves to sit down and sort through its bag of odds and ends, its old kit-bag. To pull forty-pound stones out of the road surface, dig over the soil so that the stench of bare earth that has not removed itsstone shirt for decades hangs over the city and then put everything back in place, open a tramline and light up street-lamps. The city, like the web of a goose's foot, lies mostly between the works. Its dwelling-houses are squeezed in between the factory blocks, huddling against the fences and afraid to be the first to take a single patch of vacant land without permission from the coal syndicate. Any narrow multi-familied back-street has only to take a run forward to find at its end a factory chimney standing like a watchman waving a smoky flag:
So the very smallest houses have such a cramped look and bulging eyes. Black, half-blind, round-shouldered and capped with tiny roofs they cling to the walls of banks, plants and commercial offices. They are pits full of people which creep upwards because the terrible pressure is forcing them up from the ground.
All the plants in Essen city belong to Krupp and all its housing is the property of Stinnes. The ineffable squalour of the latter was until recently still entered as an asset in that concern's fabulous accounts.
But even where factories are compelled to move aside to let streets and tramlines through the fissures they still remain masters; the alleyways are so narrow that women could dry their washing on lines thrown across from one window to another. But instead, the works has stretched its own cables, pipes and bridges across the pavements. It strides over the roofs and blocks of flats like a giant across Lilliputian cottages. Quite unashamed, this lord and master: it ejects its waste directly on to the street, spitting steam, ash, water and grime on to the heads of passers-by. Every one rushing past the wide-open windows can see it beating its constant wife, pliant but unyielding steel, with a hammer. Children in their beds are awakened by her screeching and shrieking. Day and night the dormitories that hug the factories hear iron crying out like an infant in pain. Every object in workers' homes shudderslike an anvil -- even though the blows are falling far away -- and adjusts its breathing to those sighs borne on the wind. The worker unconsciously puts his heart and his watch-- a silver miner's watch like an onion and with a fat black hand like a finger -- forward or back so as to be right by the works' hooter. Everything keeps the same time. Hundreds of thousands, an army of miners and metalworkers, move about, sleep, work, wake up and have their dinner without missing the pace, falling out of the column or breaking their march and never, even in the moments of deepest oblivion, cease to hear that martial music of labour issuing from the factories on to the city, its outskirts and the whole workpeople.
In all Essen there is only one spot where deep solemn stillness reigns. And that is not by any means the so-called'estates for the works long ago caught them up, swallowing them whole with their flower-beds and the bees that died from the coal-dust. Nor is it the country club where a speck of nature with grass, leaves and a fishing-pond has been specially set aside for loyal office workers and their children. (This club looks at everything with one eye, screwing the other tightly up and turning away so as not to see the factory chimneys that waft their dirty clouds of smoke even here, to this garden of delights for sixth-grade officials.) No, real stillness, one so deep that not even the best lift gliding down past every floor can plumb its depths, stillness insulated and shut off from the outside world by glass walls of silence, is in the main office and board room of the Krupp works. Not an office but, strictly speaking, a ministry. Not a board but a government. Oak, leather and halls as if for coronations. The portraits of kings are only incidental. In places of far greater honour are guns with their wives and godmothers; samples of steel and certificates awarded at international exhibitions. Something about the whole of it -- those expanses of officialdom, the deep pools of secrecy and staid respectability -- is more appropriate to both the Quai d'Orsay and the Foreign Office, or, in Petersburg, the old embankment or the gloomy house by the canal where the Reichswehr mission is today. Applicants who have gulped that atmosphere fall lifeless into thearmchairs. Nearly everyone, even specialist technicians with top references, go away without achieving anything. Krupp has a crisis so Krupp has the pick. The firm's internal life is known to very few. Even his own people make mistakes.
They continue to move up the ladder of ranks that is not supposed to have existed after 9 November. They walk in single file or overtake each other in the slow promotion race while in the shadows someone shifts its faithful servants from one step to the next. Second lieutenants become lieutenants; lieutenants, captains; captains, majors. Quite young men take up the vacant posts in this force without fighting men, this army without lower ranks.
His own General Staff so, naturally, his own diplomatic corps. Over recent years it has shrivelled in size and been sharply reduced. The cannon king recalled his ambassadors long ago. Today they sit around the small houses built by Madame Krupp for her old domestic retinue, receiving tiny salaries and eating herring-tails with the daintiest family silver, while in drawing rooms where the crown prince's horsey face with its pair of bubbles under the eyes looks on they reminisce about the days when one word from the Krupp representative in Peking meant more than all the assurances of official envoys. Yuan Shih-kai would pay regular trips to a little Chinese house far from the hated European quarter where he would purchase advice and order guns. Then came the war -- and all was lost! Yet to this day what sources of information and what contacts Krupp has! In the Essener Zeitung brief items on foreign and, particularly, eastern affairs are indicative of a vast operation that is quietly in hand. While the Foreign Ministry gropes to find a route for German exports, here in Essen they have long understood what a Chinese market can mean for German industry. Her revolutionary struggle is followed with the closestattention, prices offered, relations renewed; they watch and they wait. I happened to get into an argument about China with one of the Krupp managers. To add the final telling weight to his argument he snatched open a desk drawer with an impatient motion, unfolded a fresh report and revealed first odd lines and then odd pages -- it was a resume of every movement and every word of Comrade Karakhan in Peking! 152ee80cbc
full time magister season 6 download
average household download speed