Making History

MAKING NEWS

We Germans

Alois pushed his bicycle through the gates and into the lodge.

‘Grufi Gott!’

Klingermann’s cheeriness on these inspection visits always irritated him. The man was supposed to be nervous.

‘Gott,’ he mumbled, somewhere between a greeting and an oath.

‘All quiet this morning. Herr Sammer sent a message on the telephone machine to say he couldn’t come in today. A summer cold.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be a winter cold in July, would it, boy?’

‘No, sir!’ twinkled Klingermann, taking this to be a good joke, which irritated Alois more. And this fear of the telephone, calling it Das Telefon Ding, as though it were not the Future, but some demonic apparatus sent to perplex. Peasant attitude. Peasant attitudes were what held this country back.

Alois walked coldly past Klingermann, sat at the desk, took a newspaper and a bottle of schnapps from his knapsack and settled down to read.

‘I beg pardon, sir?’ said Klingermann.

Alois ignored him and threw the paper aside. He had only barked the one word: Scheiss. He took a good pull of schnapps and gazed out of the window across the border poles and into Bavaria, into Germany, he begged its fucking pardon. Germany, where in Mannheim even now they were perfecting horseless transportation. Where they were building telephone networks to stretch across the nation and where that swine Bismarck was going to get what was coming to him.

‘We Germans fear God and nothing else in the world,’ the Old Pig had blustered in the Reichstag, expecting the Russians and French to pee in their pants at the might of his fancy Triple Alliance. ‘We Germans!’ What the hell was that supposed to mean? Conniving bastard, with his Danish wars and his you-can’t-join-in tongue stuck out at Austria. ‘We Germans’ were only what the Old Pig decided. Prussians. Shit-faced junkers. They decided. Westphalians could be Germans, oh yes. Hessians, Hamburgers, Thuringians and Saxons could be Germans. Even fucking Bavarians could be Germans. But not Austrians. Oh no. They could slum it with the Czechs and the Slavs and the Magyars and the Serbs. I mean, wasn’t it obvious, obvious even to an Arschloch like Bismarck, that the Austrians and the Germans had…oh, what was the use? It didn’t matter now, the Old Pig was going to get his.

Piss-faced Wilhelm had been dead for weeks now, the mourning was over and Friedrich-Wilhelm was on the throne. Friedrich-Wilhelm and Bismarck detested each other, ha-ha! Goodbye Iron Chancellor! Good shitting riddance, Old Pig. Your days are numbered.

A cart was moving towards them. Alois rose and straightened his tunic. He hoped it was a Bavarian and not a returning Austrian. A German. Whenever he came out to inspect a frontier post he loved to give Germans a hard time.