The following is extracted from George F. Kennan's book, Sketches from a Life. It was written in Rheinfelden, a town on the Swiss side of the Rhine on 18 September 1959. -- Editor
One afternoon just before departure I took my passport along and crossed the bridge to the German side. I was overwhelmed by the contrast. Here, more clearly than anywhere I had ever been, one saw the difference between a country that had involved itself in two world wars and one that had not.
On the Swiss side one had in every way this wonderful feeling of intactness, both in space and in time. One felt that the generations had merged imperceptibly into one another, that values of the present had been erected carefully and reverently on the foundations of the values of the past, that families had remained families. On one old house in the Swiss part of the city I had noticed, in fact, an inscription:
Lasset uns am Alten, So es gut ist, halten.
Where the old is good,
Let us hold to it.
And the fact that the tail end of a late-model Mercedes protruded from a garage in the same building somehow failed to destroy the force of the motto.
On the German side, all was different. Whether or not there had been physical destruction by bombing, I do not know; but the place had the air of a town that had been torn to pieces and was being reconstructed: no harmony, no center, little beauty. And the people were as different as night from day.
There was, compared to the prim Swiss, a ravaged, desperate and brutal quality to their faces. One saw at once that here was a place which had been through moments of something like a breakdown of civilization. There was still a little of wolfishness in the way people viewed each other: the memory of a time (the final years of war and Nazidom) when man was enemy of man, as in the Russian civil war. On the other hand, there was, as compared with Switzerland, a certain wide-flung, careless energy on the German side.
The Swiss, too, were energetic, but with them this force was contained, well-bred, bourgeois to the core. In Germany, these middle class values had disappeared, so that one had, along with the sense of coarseness and brutal competition, a sense of greater scope and power and greater ruthlessness of action.
Curiously enough, the women on the German side had also been in some way affected by the disintegration and looseness of values. They had the sheer, coarse, sexual attractiveness of primitive women, which again contrasted strongly with their prim and repressed sisters across the Rhine.
Surely, one thought, this cannot be just the force of environment: this must reflect the fact that in Switzerland, over the course of generations, the discreet influence of parents, interested less in the girl's physical attractiveness than in her qualities as a person and a member of society, has been important in shaping marriages; whereas in Germany the children of this age are the products of the catch-as-catch-can sexual mores that have prevailed in that country for the past forty years. Here, by consequence, the sultry belle of the streets has taken a prominent share in motherhood. Her children show it.
