IN North Germany at that date the dominion of beer was still comparatively recent, dating from not more than two and a half centuries back. If we were to speak of an exclusive dominion, the period would be shorter still.
No doubt the early Teutons, like other barbarians such as the Thracians and the Scythians, drank beer; but they did not deify it, did not make of it a central feature of their lives, as the Hellenes and the Romans had done with wine. Still, beer in those early days played a fairly important role. This “beverage brewed from malted barley or wheat,” concerning which Tacitus disparagingly declared, “it somewhat resembles wine of an extremely bad quality,” moved the Roman historian, who was not usually critical, to remark of its use by the Teutons, “if we were to encourage them in their drunkenness, and to give them as much beer as they are inclined to swill, it would be easier, thanks to this vice of theirs, to overthrow them than it is to do so by force of arms.” But the beer drunk by the ancient Teutons must have been different from the beer known to us today, inasmuch as no hops were grown in Germany before the eighth century A.D., and the flowers of the hop-plant were not used as an ingredient of beer earlier than the year 1070. The early Scandinavians speak more of mead or metheglin (made from honey dissolved in water and fermented) than of beer.
Beer-drinking, however, steadily decreased among the Germans, along their frontiers, as they came into closer contact with Roman civilization. Where Roman legionaries, Roman traders, and Roman lawyers dwelt, beer was out of fashion. Bacchus quickly put an end to brewing in Spain and in Gaul—that is to say, on Roman territory. Pliny tells us that beer was in those days called “cerevisia,” that is to say, the “force of Ceres.” But Bacchus was stronger than Ceres, wine was stronger than beer. This was so even in the western and southern parts of Germany. Where the Romans colonized effectively, John Barleycorn has never become a supreme monarch even down to our own day.
The folk-migrations, bringing the Germans to the shores of the Mediterranean, convinced them of the superiority of wine over beer. Throughout the rise of German civilization during the Middle Ages, beer played a very small part. At the princely courts on the Danube, among the minnesingers of Zurich, on the Lake of Constance, on the Neckar, and on the Main, no one, in those days, drank beer. King Beer, as a great industrial power, did not extend his rule into South Germany until the close of the Middle Ages, his realm spreading from the north. He first ascended the throne in that proud city which, for five centuries, had flourished among the mists of the North Sea.
Beer was one of the main sources of wealth in Hamburg. About a century before, setting out from Mecca, coffee began the subjugation of the Ottoman Empire; beer, on the other hand, set forth from Hamburg upon its invasion of Holland and Jutland, Sweden and Russia. Through the Skagerrak and the Kattegat, by the waters of the Sound and the Belt, sailed the freighters of the Hamburgers. They were deeply laden with beer, and with tubs of another commodity, which goes so well with beer and increases the thirst for it, pickled herrings. Wherever these vessels came to port, there were promoted orgies of beer-drinking and herring-eating. Salted gullets had to be slaked with Hamburg beer. On the Zuider Zee and among the Frisian islands, in Bergen and Helsingborg, in Danzig and Riga and Königsberg, beer flowed abundantly, a yellow sea capped with white froth. At the masthead of the freighters fluttered the flag of the Hanseatic League.
There are documents to show that throughout the fourteenth century the cargo of the vessels that set sail from Rostock, another of the Hansa ports, was chiefly beer. Their usual destination was Bruges; but the thievish Danes often plundered them in the Sound, and carried off the beer-casks in triumph to Copenhagen. Shakespeare recorded the Danish fondness for beer in immortal verse. They drank deep at the court of King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, and when the monarch raised his tankard, cannon were fired:
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and tax’d of other nations;
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition; and indeed it takes
From our achievements, though perform’d at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
Hamlet would be greatly astonished, could he be resurrected today and read in the reports of the Brazilian Coffee Institute for the year 1932 that little Denmark had become the greatest coffee-importing country in the world—eleven and a half pounds per head of population!
In those days, drunkenness was prevalent throughout Northern Europe. A reeling giant, armed with battle-ax and sword, Beer sailed the seas. In their voyages through ice-encumbered waters, the Vikings kept themselves warm with copious potations. Their sails were sprayed with beer as well as with water. The smell of malted liquor accompanied them wherever they went; their beards were stained with it; and to replenish their tankards, the heady potion flowed freely out of the spigot.
The whole of the Northwest, the whole of the Northeast, became gigantic beer depositories. The eyes, the blood-vessels, the senses of the men of those days were soused in beer. It choked their livers, their voices, and their hearts. They thought, they felt, they reckoned in beer. In the budget of the war carried on by Hamburg against Denmark, payments for beer constituted the main item of expenditure. Two-thirds of Stralsund’s provision for its troops and sea-fighters was devoted to beer; of 2640 marks spent by Lübeck upon a naval campaign, 1140 marks were assigned to beer. We find it recorded in the Hansa account-books that twenty sailors consumed on an average per diem no less than fifty-seven gallons of beer. In a list of occupations in the town of Hamburg dating from the year 1400 and dealing with 1200 persons, we find mention of 460 brewers and more than 100 coopers, so that forty-five per cent of occupied persons were engaged in the beer industry.
The brewers were traders and monopolists as well. They did all they could to promote the sale of beer in Holland and Friesland, until at length, shortly before 1400, for the protection of the brewers of Haarlem, the import of beer from North Germany was prohibited. By now Flanders, too, had taken to brewing its own beer. Indeed, according to a local myth, Flanders and not Germany was the original homeland of beer. The name of “Gambrinus,” the deity who presides as a wooden image in many modern beer-halls, is said to be derived from Jan primus, or Jan I, Duke of Brabant in the thirteenth century. Jan may have been real enough, but Gambrinus is supposed to have been the Flemish inventor of beer. This worthy finds mention as a contemporary of Charlemagne. When, many centuries later, King Philip of Spain, a wine consuming land, occupied the Low Countries, Spanish vintages encountered the stubborn resistance of beer in street and market-place and guild-house.
At the close of the Middle Ages and the opening of the modern era, a new type of beauty began to be depicted in northern European art—the type of the man whose bones are thoroughly well covered. Gothic artistry knew nothing of this type. Neither in the stone statues of Naumburg cathedral, nor yet at Strasbourg, Bamberg, or Magdeburg, nor in the countless recumbent figures on the tombs of knights and dignitaries of the Church, do we see persons with a “corporation.” Since sculptors in the hey-day of cathedral building took nature as their model, and, despite an occasional inclination to carve grotesques, generally depicted what they saw around them, and since many of the figures on the tombs were indubitably portraits, we are justified in the inference that in northern Europe of those days obesity must have been extremely rare. The obese were exceptions; they were subjects for caricatures, like Sancho Panza in Spain; they were not typical. Such a type as John Bull, supposed to be a characteristic English country squire, was inconceivable in the Middle Ages.
At the opening of the humanist epoch, there was a sudden change of bodily type in northwestern and northeastern Europe. The Scots, the English, the Dutch, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Finns, and, above all, the Low Germans, began to put on flesh. Especially the leaders—princes, artists, men of learning, generals, priests, persons of taste or of musical genius—were fat folk. An amazing transformation! Never, since the world had been turning on its axis and since human beings had dwelt on its surface, was the belief prevalent that obesity was practically synonymous with health, power, genius, and dignity. Yet from 1400 to 1700 this belief, inconspicuously, gained predominance throughout northern Europe.
A large number of notables during that period were exceedingly stout: Gustavus Adolphus and Henry VIII, Georg von Frundsberg and Martin Luther, Pirckheimer and Johann von Staupitz, Peter Vischer and Hans Sachs, Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Christian IV of Denmark, and countless others, were amazingly corpulent.
To us, these worthies look unpleasantly fat. They themselves regarded their pot-bellies as so natural that they would be puzzled to learn that we find it necessary, for æsthetic reasons, to tone down their outlines. No sculptor today, modelling a memorial statue of Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant hero who fell at Lützen, would dream of giving his image the huge belly which the king really possessed. To the sentiment of their day, they seemed all that could be desired. Leanness was then looked upon as morbid. It is true that Erasmus of Rotterdam, Prince Eugene, and Frederick the Great were by no means healthy persons, but of the morbidly asthenic type. Nevertheless, if we were to meet them today in a dinner-jacket or a lounge suit, we should regard them, precisely because of their leanness, as much healthier persons than, say Philipp Emanuel Bach or George Frederick Handel.
But it was only in northern Europe that this “monstrous regiment” of the fat prevailed. Southern Europe clung to its lean and sinewy type. The men of the wine-drinking countries, the Spanish, the dwellers in central and southern France, the Italians and the Greeks, the Hungarians and Danubian vintners, did not share, or shared very little, in the inflation of bodily type. For the inflation was the outcome of a new mode of nutrition, the outcome of beer-swilling.
Whereas wine is mainly a beverage that washes out the intestines and the tissues, and that (except for the heavier wines) exerts its magical influence almost exclusively upon the central nervous system, beer is a food. In addition to alcohol and water, it contains albumin, dextrin, nutritive salts, and sugar. A litre of good beer contains five grammes (one part in two hundred) of albumin, and fifty grammes (one part in twenty) of carbohydrates. The fact that these nutritive substances are introduced into the organism in a fluid and readily assimilable form, accompanied by effervescent carbonic acid, probably accounts for the revolution in the aspect of the human figure that had never been observed before beer became a popular beverage.
At the time when the consumption of beer reached its climax, which was in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, this beverage was not, as most commonly today, drunk in public-houses or saloons. It was drunk at home; and therein lay the danger, for it was brewed where it was drunk. Whoever was granted the freedom of the city had the right to brew what beer he needed for his own use. The authorities had no objection, since every beverage was taxable. The consumption was recorded, but a tax edict promulgated by Elector John George in 1661 shows that in the countryside illicit brewing was common. This edict expressly forbade that home-brewed beer should “on any account be sold or publicly provided.” Still, no one bothered about the edict. All got their beer wherever they pleased.
The vital importance of any comestible can best be realized from the shadow it casts upon legal life. Julius Bernhard von Rohr, who, in 1719, made a compendium of the laws relating to the necessary and useful supplies of a German household, in a work of one thousand pages devoted more than twenty to “matters that concern the brewing of beer.” This gives plain proof how great a part beer had come to play in the economic and domestic life of the Germans. Beer-drinking likewise left many traces among German family names. In the fifteenth century began the lines of Biermer, Biermann, Bierschwale, Bierhals, Bierfreund. Bierwagen, Biertümpel, Biersack—waggish names to begin with, conferred upon persons whose potations of beer were especially copious.
The citizen’s day began and ended with beer. A good draught to wet your whistle at the start. At the noonday meal there was a beer soup; and at supper, of course, there must be egg-flip made with beer. Raisin-beer and sugar-beer, fish and sausages boiled in beer, beer in all conceivable forms, to say nothing of abundant draughts of plain beer when paying visits, talking business, at baptisms, and at funerals. Thus the body was deluged with carbohydrates, which were transmogrified into fat as already described. When we remember that the main purpose of the process of respiration is to rid our blood of carbonic acid, we can see that the unceasing supersaturation of the human organism with H2CO3 cannot fail to have remarkable effects both on the individual and on the community. Whereas wine makes people bold and lively, beer makes them maudlin and bad-tempered.
In twentieth-century Scandinavia there has been a very effective temperance movement, and the Nordic slimness and persistent youthfulness of the inhabitants of the peninsula bear witness to the fact. Goethe longed for a similar movement among the Germans. Of all the enemies of excessive beer-drinking, no one had keener insight than he. Writing to Knebel, tutor to the princes at the court of Weimar, he said that beer dulled the nerves and thickened the blood. “If our people go on swilling beer and smoking as they now do for another three generations, woe to Germany! The effect will first become noticeable in the stupidity and poverty of our literature, and our descendants will declare themselves greatly astonished thereat!”
But how was coffee to wage war successfully against this titan? The combat was too unequal. Especially so at a time when beer was routing wine, so that in certain parts of Germany viticulture was coming to an end.
Prior to the victory of beer, the vine had gained a strong footing in Germany. During the Middle Ages, vineyards were successfully established in the northern and eastern parts of the country. If they have now disappeared, the ignorant are likely to suppose that the disappearance is due to a change of climate. There are, however, no reasons for such an assumption. It is far more probable that the Germans, fatigued by the wars of religion, were prone to abandon the more difficult culture of the vine and the more delicate processes of preparing wine for the much easier preparation of beer.
German viticulture receded southward and westward, into the valleys of the Rhine, the Main, and the Danube. Everywhere else, King Beer was victorious. This took place, more especially, after Gambrinus, at a comparatively late date and helped by the invasion of master-brewers from Brunswick, had occupied the Munich plateau. How could coffee be expected to advance from Vienna and Ratisbon into this beer country? No one felt the need for a beverage that was looked upon as un-German.
Liselotte of the Palatinate, wife of Philip Duke of Orléans, and therefore obliged to live in Paris, is a signal example of this trend. In her letters, she is perpetually railing against coffee. Thus, in 1712, at Christmas, she writes: “I cannot endure coffee, tea, or chocolate, nor am I able to understand why anyone likes to drink them. Give me a beer-soup; that is what I should like best. But you can’t get it here, for French beer is no good.” On October 22, 1714: “I am always amazed that people here are so fond of coffee, tea, and chocolate. To my way of thinking sauerkraut and smoked sausages make a meal fit for a king . . . I like cabbage-soup with bacon in it better than all the dainties people prize so much in Paris.” On February 26, 1716: “I seldom take any breakfast; and when I do, it is only a roll and butter. I loathe all these foreign spices. I never drink either coffee, tea, or chocolate, for I detest them. I have remained thoroughly German in my tastes, and like to eat and drink what my forefathers used to.”
This conservatism in national habits certainly has its seamy side. If coffee made its way more slowly in central Europe than in the West, so that it did not become a popular beverage in High Germany until eighty years after it had been generally esteemed in England and France, the upshot was that in Central Europe the drinking of heavy liquors continued far longer than elsewhere. As I have said, at the beginning of the modern age the Germans were heavy drinkers, and during the Thirty Years War all classes were intemperate. Excessive consumption of brandy and beer, and of wine likewise where this was not too expensive, seemed to be the only way in which, throughout those terrible decades, people could drown their sorrows. Whereas the English, who, as we shall see, were also heavy drinkers, had begun to detoxicate themselves at this period, the Germans, in general, had no knowledge of anti-Bacchic beverages.
In Germany, during those times, alcohol became a part of life. It was used not merely to satisfy thirst, but to create more thirst, so that drinkers positively wallowed in their potations. Princes, sovereigns, handicraftsmen, men of learning, peasants, soldiers, and the nobility drank to excess. The effects of such universal drunkenness were worse than would have been those of a second Thirty Years War.
At some of the courts “unchristian and bestial drinking” was prohibited, but few bothered about these prohibitions. In a fit of self-criticism, the Elector of Saxony hung upon the wall of his dining-room a picture showing swine and dogs engaged in deep potations.
Sophia Charlotte of Hanover relates that on one occasion the Duke of Holstein drank from so mighty a tankard that his stomach rejected its contents, whereon he drank his vomit once more. “Et il l’avala une seconde fois pour marquer la passion, qu’il avait pour moy.” Only in those parts where wine-growing was still in fashion, on the Italian border, in Tyrol, and in Styria, were the courts better behaved. At the Kaiserhof in Vienna, where Burgundian and Spanish manners prevailed, such swinish drunkenness was, of course, out of the question—at least in theory, for there were exceptions!
This was the strange epoch when Jacob Balde, a Jesuit father and a famous preacher, founded the “Congregado Macilentorum,” the Society of the Lean. For in 1638, a slim and upright German figure had become a rarity among the well-to-do; one and all of them were pot-bellied. Somewhat prematurely, G. W. Leibniz, returning in 1690 from his Italian tour, wrote that people were no longer so “crazy and full of beer” in the north. That is was premature was shown by the fact that he went on to write, concerning the vice of drunkenness: “If our forefathers could come back to life and rub shoulders with us, we should regard them as impoverished peasants.” We gather from this that the men of the seventeenth century were much harder drinkers than their ancestors had been!
On the forty-eighth birthday of King Augustus the Strong of Saxony and Poland, Countess Dönhoff gave a banquet. It was in the year 1718. We are told that the Elbgarten was illuminated, and that the ladies were dressed as shepherdesses. There were parrots, monkeys, and blackamoors on show—every conceivable ornament suitable to a wealthy court of the Baroque era. Now there happened something which could never have taken place at a contemporary Italian court. “People drank deep where the king was,” relates Johann Michael von Loen, “and of a sudden there were issued strict orders that no one was to leave the garden. The Saxon courtiers had resolved to drink their Warsaw guests under the table, to show that they had stronger heads than the Polish magnates who, although there was a personal union of the crowns of Saxony and Poland, were regarded as rivals. The Poles, unused to such deep potations, were already pale as death, their heads waggling on their shoulders, their gait unsteady, so that they reeled as they walked before the king.”
The underlings naturally followed the bad example set by their “betters.” The general idea, in other countries, therefore, was that a German must be an obese beer-swiller. When the Saxon Count Dohna, a man of culture and of refined aspect, went abroad, he aroused widespread astonishment. King Henry IV, presenting this Count Dohna to Marie de’ Medici said: “Le voilà! Le prendriez-vous bien pour un Allemand?”
At that date civilization and morals in central Europe were indeed mightily debased. Armin Vambery (1832–1913), the Hungarian traveller and orientalist, inquired in all seriousness whether the Turks, though they appeared at the gates of Vienna as invaders and devastators, were not, at that time, a more highly civilized people than the Germans.
Of course there were German courts at which the rulers would not allow such excesses. Frederick William of Brandenburg was a monarch of this order, so that early in these licentious times Berlin acquired a good reputation.
This Frederick William, styled the Great Elector, had many of the best characteristics of a Western sovereign. At his accession, the Thirty Years War was still in progress, and his dominions had been greatly wasted thereby. Contemplating his neighbours with an outlet on the Atlantic, he saw that, while Germany was squandering its energies in fratricidal strife, they were expanding across the seas. Holland, too, was winning a colonial empire and prospering. During the Pomeranian war between Brandenburg and Sweden, Raulé, a Dutchman, equipped a navy for Frederick William. When the war was over, the Elector retained the little armada, and sent it to the Guinea coast to found a colony on African soil. Von der Groeben, the navigator, established the Gross-Friedrichsburg port, and hoisted the Brandenburg flag upon the Gold Coast. A deputation of Negro chiefs came to Berlin to pay honour to the Elector of Brandenburg. In Senegal, likewise, a settlement was established, and was held for a few decades until the jealousy of Amsterdam nipped this early German colonial empire in the bud.
What had induced Frederick William, a petty territorial prince, to found these distant settlements? Not merely the will-to-power, but in addition the belief that, in days when ships laden with spices were returning across the seas, he would be able to secure supplies for his own country without paying tariffs. West Africa furnished gold and sugar, timber, palm-oil and other fats, ground-nuts, ostrich feathers, and ivory.
The Great Elector was by no means satisfied with the limited produce of his own narrow territories. Remarkable to tell, at his court in Berlin, though only in restricted circles, coffee was being drunk in the sixteen seventies. Supplies for the Elector and his lady came from Holland. There can be little or no doubt that the Elector, a man eager for new knowledge, was made acquainted with coffee by his Dutch physician-in-ordinary, Cornelius Buntekuh. This scientist, who would have attained wide celebrity had he not died prematurely, aimed at the reformation of dietetics. His real name was Cornelius Decker. In Alkmar, where he was born, his father kept an inn, at the sign of the “Bunte Kuh,” the mottled cow. His fellow-citizens therefore nicknamed him “Bontekoe.” This pseudonym was used by Cornelius as signature to his scientific publications. Having studied the writings of Descartes, he went to Amsterdam and then to Hamburg; wrote a book containing new chemical outlooks upon the nature of acids and bases; and was ultimately appointed by Frederick William as professor at the University of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder.
René Descartes came to regard human thought as a mode of motion, summing up his views in the pithy phrase, “Cogito, ergo sum.” The most noteworthy physiological analogy to this psychological notion was provided by William Harvey, in 1619, when he announced the discovery of the circulation of the blood. Decker was never weary of telling his students that Harvey’s discovery of the circulation had been the greatest discovery, not only of the century, but of many centuries. No one before Harvey had been able to establish the fact of this perpetual flow of the blood through all the organs of the body, irrigating them and nourishing them as the Nile irrigates and nourishes the soil of Egypt. One of the most marvellous features of the process was the elliptical course of the circulation, akin to the elliptical orbits of the planets, which begin and end their movements at the same spot. The blood pumped by the left ventricle into the aortic arch, returns into the heart through the right auricle twenty-three seconds later. One who has acquired a vivid impression of this unceasing circulation of the blood, gains thereby a new outlook upon the nature of man—so much more active and mobile than the nature of any plant; be-pinioned, as it were. One of the cravings of the period was connected with this discovery of the circulation of the blood: the craving to circumnavigate the globe. All parts of the earth were to be interconnected and fertilized by an ellipse of traffic. It was only to be expected that the bold outlook of his physician should encourage a sovereign to engage in navigation and foreign trade. From the macrocosm, however, Buntekuh came back to the microcosm; since he knew that blood was not healthy and useful unless it was in lively motion, he was inclined to think well of anything that could accelerate the circulation.
Above all he recognized that tea and coffee were able to overcome the inertia of the blood. They could stimulate the working of the vital machine (Descartes’ view was that men and the lower animals were vital machines) by promoting the circulation of the blood. Coffee released the wheel-work from the brakes.
Buntekuh went too far in his recommendation of the use of tea. In his Medizinischen Elementarlehre, he writes: “We advise tea for the whole nation and for every nation. We advise men and women to drink tea daily; hour by hour if possible; beginning with ten cups a day, and increasing the dose to the utmost quantity the stomach can contain and the kidneys eliminate.” Since he informs us that he prescribed for his patients as many as fifty cups per diem, it can hardly be doubted that, at the court of Berlin, Buntekuh helped a good many sick people out of the world. All the same, an epoch in which notables were, as a rule, hurried to an early death by carbonic acid, alcohol, and apoplexy, could find admirable use for such a man as Buntekuh.
He himself was only thirty-eight when he died. He was not a very satisfactory advertisement for his treatise on the prolongation of life by the use of tea, coffee, and chocolate (Traktat von het excellentie kruyt thee, coffi, schokolate). Still, it would be wrong to leave the reader under the impression that Buntekuh died through taking too much of his own medicine. He perished by an accident. On January 10, 1685, he was carrying books downstairs for the Elector. The staircase was dark, he stumbled, and broke his neck.
Thus, the internal ellipse of his circulation was brought to a standstill, and there was ended all too soon a life that might have taught much more to his contemporaries. With the death of Buntekuh, caffeine disappeared for the time from Berlin.
This was only two years after Kolshitsky had discovered the beverage for Vienna and the Viennese.