Germany Turns to Play

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 300, 10 March 1928, Page 26

Germany Turns to Play

HE Germans’ national attitude toward pleasure fjVIVA has under S°ne sweeping changes during the past twenty—and more tMi LSa especially the recent three or four —years. Activity, all along the line, displaces the older ideal of passivity. Athletics and all forms of sport, entailing rigid self-discipline and dietary and aleo holic abstemiousness, are overturning former standards. Travel, always a German enthusiasm, is having a whole sale revival; new forms of transporta tion, including the motor-bus, open larger horizons even to workers in the cities. The result to-day of these years of change and conflict is a bewildering variety of cults and beliefs. A hundred strangely contrasting elements compose recreation —movies and Maypole dancing, embroidery and saxo phone playing, modern art and canoeing, football and horticulture, revolutionary hymns and rifle contests, drinking festivals under blossoming trees and Swedish calisthenics, duelling and dancing the Charleston. Everywhere is clash of times and tendencies, Bavarian, Prussian, Fascist, Socialist, Victorian, Baroque, Cubist, medieval, industrial, rural, urban. It seems, to a tourist at least, that modem Germany is almost as much divided over her pleasures as in her politics.

To-day the undreamed of has become fact. Only a mile or two, it may be, up a river’s bank “modern” amusement may be in full swing. Around a huge tent colony, set up under the trees, group the nature devotees, sun-bronzed and attired with more bravery than formality. Some are singing old folk songs, some are working the more up-to-date crossword puzzle, others playing basket ball or dancing hand-in-hand in circles. Between the two extremes of the cafe and the camp, it seems, a gap of centuries, rather than of years, is spread (says a writer in the New York “Times”).

The revolution is especially noticeable in the ideal of the young girl. Superseded is the wistful, blue-eyed maiden with long blond locks, to whom, in orthodox verse, "hearts in Heidelberg” were lost. Modern movies and novels create the image of a lean, fashionable, independent “sport girl,” who has bobbed her blond hair and put a monocle over one satiric blue eye. If wealthy, she drives her own car; at least, she paddles her own canoe. Even the marriage advertisements in newspapers carry indications of her prominence. No longer does “X 23” advertise herself merely as “blond, musically gifted and heiress to a sugar shop.” She proclaims herself also as “sport loving” and devoted to the "great outdoors.”