The Sunday Gentleman (31 page)

It was not surprising that Goering owned a set of Baedeker guidebooks. Up to the outbreak of war, over two million other persons residing in every civilized nation of the world had bought the eighty-seven different titles of the famous peacetime guidebooks published in Leipzig. Most of these readers, however, used their Baedekers for more constructive purposes.

Unlike Goering, the mass of Baedeker owners were ordinary tourists, who reverently regarded the guidebook as their sightseeing bible. They relied upon its pioneer system of rating sights by stars to save them time in travel (Two stars, “must see,” the Louvre, the Kremlin, Niagara Falls; one star, “see, if possible,” the Jungfrau, Yale University, street scenes of Cairo; no stars, Tolstoi’s home, the Chicago stockyards, the Albert Memorial). Tourists counted upon Baedeker for capsule culture (“China’s Great Wall, completed towards the end of the 3rd century B.C. as a protection against inroads by Huns. Constructed mainly of bricks and is in a ruinous condition. No stars”). Readers drew heavily on its practical advice (In Naples, “Iron bedsteads should if possible be selected as being less infested by the enemies of repose”).

But above all, sightseers depended almost fanatically on Baedeker’s accuracy. Their faith was mirrored, some years ago, in a German cartoon depicting a father and his family studying a castle and a waterfall. In the father’s hand, a copy of Baedeker shows the scene reversed, waterfall and then castle. And the father is complaining, “Why, this scenery is all wrong!”

In a century and a quarter, Baedeker’s hypnotic influence over readers grew so strong that its subjects often took Baedeker’s descriptions as seriously as did the sightseers. Once, when Kaiser Wilhelm was in a critical conference with his ministers in Potsdam’s palace, the wall clock struck noon and the palace band began forming outside for its daily concert. Immediately, the Kaiser rose. “With your kind forbearance, gentlemen,” he said, “I must excuse myself now to appear in the window. You see, it says in Baedeker that at this hour I always do.”

More recently, an innkeeper located in the Black Forest, a mile north of the main highway, was horrified to learn a new edition of Baedeker had mistakenly placed his inn a mile south of the highway. When his business began to fall off, he filled the highway with signs pointing out the right direction to his inn. But tourists ignored his signs and stuck to their Baedekers. At last, in desperation, the innkeeper uprooted his entire establishment, moved it from its position north of the highway, to a mile south, exactly where Baedeker had located it.

Such devotion by readers, and submission by sites, to the judgment of a travel volume—the first to make a fetish of infallibility—soon made the name Baedeker an international synonym for guidebook. Nothing in the travel field, published before or since, has ever attained the renown of Baedeker—with its thirty volumes in English and fifty-seven in French and German.

Yet, despite its historic popularity, it appeared for a time that Baedeker might not survive World War II. For Goering, by perverting the guidebook’s use, almost caused its downfall.

The British, enraged by “the Baedeker raids” and determined to destroy Baedeker’s presses and great store of maps, retaliated. In 1943, the RAF struck at Leipzig, unloading tons of bombs on the Baedeker printing plant, reducing a century and a half of painstakingly prepared records, maps, plates to rubble.

As if that were not enough, Baedeker was beset by an even greater menace in postwar Europe and America. While Baedeker, trying to replenish its records, trying to raise financing, wavered between continuing or quitting, the world’s tourists were suddenly bombarded by a new type of guidebook. The new guides, written or edited by Fielding, Sutton, Joseph, Ogrizek, Clark, Fodor, were, for the most, “modern”—i.e., casual, cute, wisecracking, bright. Often, facts were smothered under personal opinion and prejudice. In some, photographs and art had completely replaced scholarship. Several were insensitive to culture and history. While all strove for accuracy, and a few attained it, still, it was not the dogged, detailed, checked and rechecked Teutonic accuracy provided by the old Leipzig plant.

That was enough for the elders of the Baedeker clan—old Hans and Dr. Dietrich Baedeker, grandsons of the founder. No one, they felt, had yet successfully replaced them. No one, they decided, had yet given their vast footsore public what it most desired. They made their decision. Baedeker bounced back into the postwar battle for the world’s sightseers.

But still it was not easy. On resuming publication, seventy-three-year-old Hans Baedeker, because of lack of funds and backlog of material, decided to stick close to home with his first book. Working in Communist-controlled Leipzig, he obtained Russian approval for a guidebook on that city. He was forced to let the Communist mayor of Leipzig write the preface, and forced to publish it through a Communist printing plant. But he would not compromise on detail or accuracy. Because all Germans, at one time or another, had to visit the Russian Kommandatura Building, Hans plainly located the building on one of his maps. The moment Baedeker’s
Leipzig
was released, the Soviets saw the map and arrested Hans for committing a breach of security. He got off with his life, but had his publishing license revoked. In despair, Hans quit, and disappeared into the anonymity of the Russian zone with his brother, Dr. Dietrich Baedeker.

But old Hans had a nephew, Karl, and Dr. Dietrich had two sons, Hans and Otto, all three dwelling outside of Leipzig. These young Baedekers, physically free of Russian restrictions, fired by the popular reception to the family’s first postwar guidebook, pledged themselves to keep the firm alive. Karl Baedeker, a handsome, forty-four-year-old army veteran, established new headquarters in the British zone, outside Hamburg, using his father-in-law’s thatch-roofed cottage for a publishing office. Young Hans set up shop in Stuttgart, while aristocratic, twenty-eight-year-old Otto went to work in London.

Slowly, steadily, in the seven years since, the dry, factual, oddity-crammed, red-covered books, still stressing accuracy, have crowded their way back into the world’s bookstores. After Baedeker’s
Leipzig
came a whole series of German travel guides on Munich, Frankfurt, Northern Bavaria, and Schleswig-Holstein—and, finally breaking out of Germany, Baedeker’s
London
, which had first been issued in 1862, and was now republished simultaneously in Hamburg, London, and New York City.

Although the
Saturday Review
detected in the Northern Bavaria guidebook, an “undercurrent of nationalism”—because the Baedekers, though never pro-Nazi, harped on the Allied bombings of Germany—the general reception was enthusiastic.
The New York Times
spoke of Baedeker’s “enviable standard of scholarship,” and the Cincinnati
Enquirer
admitted, “when you come right down to it, there is no more satisfactory guidebook than the Baedeker type.”

Encouraged, the three Baedeker great-grandsons are today preparing more popular volumes on Paris, Switzerland, and Italy. But they agree even guidebook makers must have a guide. Theirs is the original Karl Baedeker, who founded the firm 126 years ago. The great-grandsons speak of him as if he were still alive, their active senior partner, as well he might be—since it is his name that continues to appear as author of the books, even though he died in 1859.

While researching for their most recent editions, the three young Baedekers like to remember that the original Karl, one April night and morning in 1854, spent thirteen and a half hours alone in the Père Lachaise cemetery of Paris, searching out famous gravestones and noting their inscriptions and positions. The modern Baedekers like to remember, too, the old man’s honest admission, in a guide on Austria, that he could not describe a certain stretch of countryside because he had “traveled over it by night only.” Above all, they like to remember the founder’s warning, “A good guidebook is always in the making and never made.”

Karl Baedeker the First, a printer’s son born in Essen during 1801, entered Heidelberg University at the age of sixteen to major in philosophy and history, and later, went to Berlin to study bookmaking. The most important part of his schooling, however, took place outside the classroom. Fellow students regarded Baedeker as an eccentric because he constantly wandered off on lone sightseeing hikes, during which he filled dozens of notebooks with historical facts, statistics, impressions. At twenty-six, facing the necessity of earning a livelihood, he opened a bookstore in bustling Coblenz, capital of the Rhine Province of Prussia, a city which harbored the first Rhine steamship line, already heavily used by English vacationists en route to Switzerland.

Bored with his bookstore, intrigued by the Rhine, Baedeker began to spend more and more of his time exploring its banks, jotting down notations of the sights. One afternoon in 1827, when neglect had brought his bookstore to the verge of bankruptcy, Baedeker was rowing a dinghy along the river. Suddenly, he saw a small dog tumble into the water. The dog’s master stood helplessly on shore, calling for help, as the animal floundered. Baedeker rowed to the dog’s aid and rescued it. The grateful owner of the animal, a Dr. Wilhelm Klein, explained that he was author of a new guidebook, Klein’s
Rheinreise—The Rhine Journey; A Handbook for Travellers in a Hurry
—prepared for rushed tourists using the new river steamboat service. Dr. Klein presented Baedeker with a copy of the guide, and later, Baedeker was able to tell him, “I only saved your dog—but you saved my future with that little book.”

Reading the Rhine guide, Baedeker saw that it was useful, but incomplete. He felt that he could improve upon it a hundredfold. And at once, he knew what he wanted to do—combine his knowledge of bookmaking with his love for sightseeing and fact-gathering. Learning that the ailing Dr. Klein was prepared to liquidate his business, Baedeker set about raising money. He got rid of his bookstore, borrowed money from his father, and took over Klein’s guidebook. He rewrote it completely, drawing heavily upon the notes he had made during his Rhine excursions, and adding detailed maps. He retained Dr. Klein’s name on the new edition, had it published, and waited. He didn’t wait long. It was a sensational sellout within three weeks. Baedeker was ecstatic. He had found his vocation. He looked about for new worlds to conquer.

Baedeker realized that while guidebooks were nothing new (pilgrims had used them in the Middle Ages), there was a desperate need for the special kind of volumes he had in mind. The Napoleonic Wars were over, and ordinary citizens, so long locked in, were eager to travel. There was only one Continental guide available, a handbook to the Lowlands and Germany, brought out by John Murray, the English publisher. But this guide, like the lesser ones, was designed to serve travelers who possessed money, leisure, and education. It was taken for granted by these guidebooks that those who traveled had available luxurious carriages, previous knowledge of Europe’s capitals, and socially prominent friends abroad.

But what about the middle-class tourist? The shopkeeper who had only four weeks? The student with limited means? The eldest daughter who’d never been outside her home and didn’t know a soul? For them, nearby foreign countries were as impenetrable as the African jingles. Toward travelers without money or contacts, every hotel porter, every restaurant owner, every guide acted like a beast of prey. There were no big travel agencies to arrange protective group excursions. There were no newspaper columns or magazine articles offering handy advice and tips. If these travelers dared venture forth, they were bedeviled, exploited. It was this growing army of the world’s timid tourists that Karl Baedeker determined to help. He would make each and every one of them, he decided, “independent of hotel keepers, commissionaires, and guides.”

But he realized that, to accomplish this, he must learn firsthand if it was really possible to travel quickly, cheaply, comfortably—and yet see everything of importance, and understand what had been seen. Immediately, he embarked upon his first swing through Europe. Thereafter, unceasingly for thirty-two years—leaving his wife, Emilie, four sons, and two daughters behind—he moved about Europe, observing, experiencing, recording. He traveled by foot, on bicycle, on horseback, and in stagecoach. He even took the first railroad journey across Belgium, covering a whirlwind six miles in three-quarters of an hour, and excitedly reported to his father, “What a thrill! Objects near the track seem to merge!”

Throughout the Continent, his serious round face, with its wide forehead, piercing eyes, full lips, set atop a barrel of a body, became a familiar sight. On the road, he usually wore a shawl over flannel shirt, rough breeches, old boots, and he always carried a knapsack. On hot days, he would open an umbrella or shield his eyes from the sun with green crepe paper. In cities, he often changed to long black coat and black cravat. His prejudices became as renowned as his appearance. He liked rooms with a southern exposure, beer, horse racing, mountain views, Paris by night, and Honesty.

In his guidebooks, he placed Honesty next to Cleanliness. He went to great lengths to ferret out all who conspired against tourists, and tourists appreciated this and consequently trusted him. Assuming shabby, frayed attire, and a country-cousin manner, he would often register in some swank Zurich hotel. If the management proved snobbish, relegated him to an overpriced room, treated him to the companionship of bedbugs, he would promptly remove the hotel’s star from the Baedeker guidebook. At various recommended restaurants in Vienna, he would sit down to dinner incognito. If he received watered soup, another star fell.

Although essentially a kindly man, he could be exceedingly blunt. In the beginning, he severely censured slipshod hotels. When France retaliated by banning his books for a brief period, he changed his policy to one of criticism by omission, remarking drily, “Hotels which cannot be accurately characterized without exposing the editor to the risk of legal proceedings are left unmentioned.” Sometimes, how—ever, he was unable to contain himself, as in his comment on a Belgian restaurant, “The waiter’s arithmetic is occasionally at fault.”