Further upriver, at Oberwesel, we come across an infamous blood-libel story against the Jews, though Murray of course is not taken in: ‘In some period of the dark ages a boy named Werner is said to have been most impiously crucified and put to death by the Jews in this place. A similar story is told in many other parts of the world; even in England, at Gloucester and Lincoln (vide Chaucer). It is probable that the whole was a fabrication, to serve as a pretext for persecuting the Jews and extorting money from them’, which is perhaps as balanced an account as you could get in the nineteenth century. The Church of St Werner, erected to commemorate his canonization, gets an asterisk in Baedeker, the story being put down to tradition, as it is also in Thomas Cook’s Traveller’s Handbook The Rhine and the Black Forest (1912). In Ernest Benn’s Blue Guide, 1933, it is said to have been a legend, but the calumny is rightly omitted altogether from the Guide Bleu, 1939.
Should our traveller get off the boat at Worms his Murray will tell him that the synagogue ‘is said to be more than 800 years old, and certainly displays in its structure the style of the 11th century … The Jews have been established in this spot from a very early period, and enjoyed privileges denied them in most other parts of Germany.’ This is more or less true, though they were forced out by the Guilds in 1615, upon which the synagogue was destroyed and the cemetery laid waste; a year later an Imperial Decree ordered them to be readmitted. They also suffered three massacres during the times of the Crusades in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Frankfurt, we are told, is the cradle of the Rothschild family, and Murray goes on to say, ‘The Jews, who form no inconsiderable portion of the community here, have till very lately been treated with great illiberality by the Free Town. The gates of the quarter to which they were exclusively confined were closed upon them at an early hour every night, after which ingress and egress were alike denied. This arbitrary municipal regulation was enforced, until Marshal Jourdan, in bombarding the town (1796), knocked down the gate of the Jews’ quarter, along with many houses near it, and they have not been replaced since. Another law, not repealed until 1834, restricted the number of marriages among the Hebrews in the town to 13 yearly. The Synagogue, an old and curious Gothic building, is situated in the Judengasse. The Jews are no longer compelled to live in this street, but may hire or purchase houses in other quarters.’
An excursion to Saarlouis would reveal the curious fact that its 7000 inhabitants ‘are partly descended from English prisoners placed here by Louis XIV’. The town was a frontier fortress of Prussia, ‘with a long stone bridge over the Saar, which flows half round the town, and sometimes during the winter lays part of it under water’, a circumstance which may have made the English feel very much at home.
Between Frankfurt and Cassel lies the village of Butzbach, which prompts the story from Murray that ‘German vagrants, known in London as Bavarian broom-girls, come from this neighbourhood’. Several villages were said to have sent forth, for the last twenty years, ‘crowds of them annually. At first they were taken over by the broom-makers, ready to sell their brooms; but in a short time they discovered other and less moral modes of earning money. The speculators, perceiving this, enticed from their homes many young girls, under pretence of hiring them as servants. Some of these poor creatures have never been heard of by their parents; others have returned ruined and broken in constitution; and innumberable actions have been brought against the planners of this disgraceful traffic. The magistrates of these towns have at length interfered, and any person discovered taking away a child, or any female but a wife, is subject to heavy penalties.’
Towns along the Rhine led a precarious existence over the centuries due to the proximity of France. Speyer, one of the oldest cities of Germany, on the left bank of the river, had a particularly violent history. In the Middle Ages its citizens were ‘as well versed in the use of arms as in the arts of trade. At one time they were called upon to issue from their walls in order to chastise the lawless rapacity of some feudal baron, who had waylaid their merchants and pillaged their property, by having his castle burnt about his ears and levelled with the ground.’
Such incidents were as nothing compared to its fate in the seventeenth century, when the greatest injury was inflicted on it by the French. After its capture by them in 1689 a proclamation was issued to its citizens ‘commanding them to quit it, with their wives and children, within the space of 6 days, and to betake themselves into Alsace, Lorraine, or Burgundy, but upon pain of death not to cross the Rhine. To carry into execution this tyrannic edict, a provost-marshal, at the head of 40 assistant executioners, marched into the town; they bore about them the emblems of their profession, in the shape of a gallows and wheel, embroidered on their dress. On the appointed day the miserable inhabitants were driven out by the beat of drums, like a flock of sheep. The French soldiers followed them, after having plundered everything in the deserted town, which was then left to the tender mercies of executioners and incendiaries. In obedience to the commands of the French commander, trains of combustibles were laid in the houses and lighted, and in a few hours the seven-and-forty streets of Speyer were in a blaze. The conflagration lasted 3 days and 3 nights; but the destruction of the town did not cease even with this. Miners were incessantly employed in blowing up the houses, walls, fountains, and convents, so that the whole might be levelled with the dust and rendered uninhabitable. The Cathedral was dismantled, the graves of the Emperors burst open and their remains scattered. For many years Speyer lay a desolate heap of rubbish, until at last the impoverished inhabitants returned gradually to seek out the sites of their ancient dwellings.’
Such a taste of ‘history’ should have lasted till the end of Time, but a hundred years later the Revolutionary army under Custine captured the town after six assaults, and repeated ‘all the wanton acts of atrocity and cruelty which their predecessors had enacted a century before’.
If our traveller is rich (and on this journey he needs to be) he will want to experience the various spas and bathing establishments in the Rhineland and the Black Forest, paying particular attention to those described in his handbook, which tells him that for the Germans ‘an excursion to a watering-place in the summer is essential to existence, and the necessity of such a visit is confined to no one class in particular, but pervades all, from emperors and princes down to tradesmen and citizens’ wives.’
The number of bathing-places and mineral springs in Germany alone now amounts to several hundred: and every year adds to the list names which, though seldom heard in England, are not without their little sets and coteries. The royal and imperial guests repair to them not merely to get rid of the trammels and pomp of sovereignty, though it is universally the case that they move about with no more show than private individuals, but they also seek such occasions for holding private congresses, for forming secret treaties, alliances etc.; family arrangements and matrimonial connections are also not unfrequently there concocted. The minister repairs thither to refresh himself from the toils of office, but usually brings his portfolio in his travelling carriage, nor does he altogether even here bid adieu to intrigue and politics. The invalid comes to recruit his strength — the debauchee to wash himself inside and out, and string his nerves for a fresh campaign of dissipation — the shopkeeper and the merchant come to spend their money and gaze on their betters — and the sharper and black-leg, who swarm at all the baths, to enrich themselves at the gaming-tables at the expense of their fellow guests.