The Sunday Gentleman (33 page)

As Karl, Otto, and Hans carefully prepare their new Baedekers on Paris, Switzerland, and Italy, they continue to adhere rigidly to the formula laid down by the founder. While they are not sure that they like the old star system, they are maintaining it. “This star system is a sore point with us,” Otto Baedeker says. “Too many tourists, in a hurry, feel they must see anything with two stars, even if it bores them. Once bored, they blame us. But why go to an art museum, if you hate art, simply because it has two stars? Why not, if you love science, go to a science museum, though it has no stars at all?”

In the new Baedeker on London, such old standbys as the Tower of London, the Rosetta stone, Windsor Castle, all continue to hold their two-star rating. In future volumes, Rome’s Colosseum, St. Peter’s, and the Louvre are promised two stars. But the Baedeker family insists that stars are something that can only be added or removed after a few decades of reflection. In the guidebook on Germany, in 1861, the Amalienburg, outside Munich, wasn’t even mentioned. Ten years later, it was not only mentioned but awarded two stars. The Austrian Army Museum, in 1896, had a star; by 1929, it was starless. And Vienna’s Maria-Theresa Memorial, in 1888, had a star; by 1918, that star was gone, too.

The present Baedekers are also following the firm’s historic policy of criticizing by omission. “It is not our business to criticize man’s work or God’s work,” says Otto. “Nothing is really all bad. If we don’t like something, we speak of it mildly. More often, we don’t mention it at all.” Actually, this policy was made a firm house rule shortly after the publication of Baedeker’s
Palestine and Syria
. In that volume, referring to a restaurant that proved to be a clip joint, Fritz Baedeker wrote, “Proprietor Arab; fix prices beforehand.” Filled with indignation, the Proprietor Arab sued Baedeker for defamation and libel. He won a large settlement. Baedeker then set its new policy of omission, and dropped the Arab’s restaurant from its next guidebook. The Arab was stunned by the omission. As his clientele dwindled, he finally forced himself to write Fritz. He offered to repay all the money that he had won in the lawsuit if he could be reinstated in Baedeker. Fritz refused.

Actually, what causes the biggest headache for the Baedeker family is not criticism but fact-gathering. The pitfalls are countless. “After all,” says Otto, “what is a fact? It’s all in the point of view. Who won Waterloo? It depends on what you read and where you live. The English say Wellington. The Germans say von Bluecher. It was over a point of view that we fought our biggest lawsuit when two Belgian cities sued us in 1933.”

This famous lawsuit was provoked by two historical statements in the 1930 edition of Baedeker’s
Belgium
. First, Baedeker remarked that citizens of Aarschot had killed a German colonel who was commanding the forces occupying the town in 1914, and in retaliation the Germans had executed 158 Belgians and burned the town. Second, Baedeker remarked that inhabitants of Dinant had fired upon German troops entering the city, and in return the Germans had executed 669 citizens. Enraged by what they regarded as falsification of facts, the municipalities of Aarschot and Dinant pooled funds, hired two former Belgian Ministers of Justice to represent them, and sued Baedeker.

The case was fought out before the Tribunal of Brussels. The Belgians argued that the German colonel in Aarschot was murdered, not by their citizens, but by his own men, and that the Germans entering Dinant were fired upon, not by Belgians, but by retreating uniformed French. Baedeker replied that the guidebook accounts were based on war archives in the Reich, that there had been guerrilla warfare in the Lowlands, that the firm was only interested in promoting understanding between nations. The judgment was against Baedeker, which was forced to pay the costs of the suit plus the costs of printing the verdict in ten European newspapers. Baedeker protested to
The Times
of London and the League of Nations, but finally submitted to the Belgian decision.

Ever since, Baedeker editors have been wary of two-faced facts.

The Baedekers admit that in preparing their new guides they try to be sensitive to changes in tourists’ tastes. Each generation looks upon a historic monument with different eyes. Usually, there is agreement between sightseers of the past and those of the present. But when there is not, Baedeker feels this must be detected and recorded. Members of the firm cite the Albert Memorial in London as the perfect example of tourist fickleness. In Baedeker’s
London and Environs
, 1878, the Albert Memorial was given a half page, leading off with “To the S. of Kensington Gardens, between Queen’s Gate and Prince’s Gate, near the site of the Exhibition of 1851, rises the Albert Memorial [one star], a magnificent monument to Albert, the late Prince Consort (d. 1861), erected by the English nation at a cost of 120,000 pounds.”

By 1930, the Albert Memorial was reduced to one-quarter of a page, and was no longer “a magnificent monument” but only “a gorgeous monument.” By 1951, the Albert Memorial was cut to five curt lines, stripped of its one star, and, though still “gorgeous,” Baedeker had to confess, “it does not arouse universal admiration.”

But though the living Baedekers agree that they are changing with the times, trying to catch the modem temper in their little red books, they remain inflexible about one tradition. They insist that each new Baedeker guidebook must be as accurate as those published by old Karl over a century ago. They quite agree with A. P. Herbert’s lyrics written for a Paris tourist scene, in an English musical comedy called
La Vie Parisienne
:

For kings and governments may err But never Mr. Baedeker.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

I had always been tantalized by the Baedeker legend. Early in 1953, when I suggested to
Reader’s Digest
that I do a story about the founder of the firm, his family, and their guidebooks, I was immediately given the assignment. In the summer of 1953, I traveled to England to visit with Otto Baedeker, one of the three great-grandsons of the founder. Otto, who was then twenty-eight years old, was on temporary leave in London, working in the editorial department of Allen & Unwin, the publishing firm. He was there mainly to improve his English and increase his knowledge of publishing techniques in England and the United States, and since Sir Stanley Unwin, one of the heads of the company, was an old friend of the Baedeker family, Otto was being generously instructed.

I ransacked many sources on the Continent for the material in the preceding article, but it was Otto Baedeker in London who proved to be my most valuable source. The story that I wrote for Readers Digest was well received by its staff. Yet it appeared only in their German edition, because Germany was the one country in Europe in which Baedeker guidebooks had already made a full comeback in the postwar years up to 1953.

My affection for the Baedeker legend never waned, and when I decided to include my Baedeker story in this book, which would be its first appearance in English, I began to wonder what changes had taken place in the old German firm during the passage of years since 1953. In 1964, I located Otto Baedeker, who had returned to his native Germany, and in 1965, I carried on an interview by correspondence with him. What I learned was that my original story was still valid and accurate, and that the only significant changes concerned some members of the family, the location of the firm, and the expansion of the publishing house.

In 1953, ten years after the destruction of the main plant in Leipzig, the eldest of the three great-grandsons, Karl Baedeker, was doing business out of a house owned by his wife’s parents in Malente, a health resort in Schleswig-Holstein. When it became apparent that the Baedeker guidebooks were as much in demand as ever, and when the first of the postwar revised editions began to sell, Karl decided to put the firm back in business in a big way. In 1956, he established the publishing house—Karl Baedeker Verlag—in the university city of Freiburg, in southwest Germany, where it is flourishing today. While Karl, now fifty-six years old, presides over this plant and its subsidiaries, he has delegated to his forty-year-old cousin, Otto Baedeker, control of both editorial content and production of the English language editions.

The third of the present-day Baedekers, thirty-five-year-old Hans Baedeker, is editorial and technical supervisor in a Stuttgart branch of the firm known as Baedekers Autoführer-Verlag. This enterprise is the result of a partnership that the Baedekers formed with Dr. Volkmar Mair, who had been the foremost European publisher of automobile maps and atlases. The Baedekers control the editorial policy of this subsidiary, which brings out Baedeker’s
Touring Guides
. According to Otto Baedeker, “This new venture has proved very successful. The
Touring Guides
are, in a way, streamlined guidebooks, intended mainly for motorists and for travellers who do not stay very long in one place, but rather undertake a quick tour of a whole country.”

These condensed guides for automobile tourists are the Baedeker family’s major recent concession to the jet age. As a Baedeker brochure explains, “When the first Baedeker was published, travellers went by stagecoach, averaging 50 or 60 miles a day. Now you can fly with your car to the heart of Europe in a few hours.” These special guidebooks for the automobile tourists tend heavily toward maps, routes, distances, lists of recommended wayside hotels. Since 1953, there have been English editions of these guides for France, the Low Countries, Italy, Scandinavia, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. The most popular of these English editions are the guides to France and Spain. The most popular German editions are those to France and northern Italy.

Wondering what the elder Baedekers, who thought a train was a daring adventure, would have said about all this, I asked Otto what had happened to the elders. I recalled learning in 1953 of the father of the present-day Karl, seventy-three-year-old Hans Baedeker, and the father of the present-day Otto and Hans, Dr. Dietrich Baedeker. Together they had tried to revive the firm in Leipzig after World War II, had suffered seeing their publishing license revoked by the Russians after an editorial faux pas, and, as I had written, they had “disappeared into the anonymity of the Russian zone.” I now learned that the senior member, Hans Baedeker, had died at the age of seventy-nine in 1959. I also learned that Dietrich Baedeker was still alive, but retired.

I wondered how actively the sons were publishing since they had taken over the firm and moved its headquarters to Freiburg. I remembered that between 1827 and 1953, there had been thirty Baedeker guidebooks published in English and fifty-seven published in French and German. What had happened since?

“Since the firm started up again after the last war,” said Otto Baedeker, “thirty-eight German and eighteen English titles have been issued, most of them running into several editions. From 1827 until 1964, ninety-two German, thirty-three French, and forty-five English titles have been published. This may not seem a large number, but it must be remembered that each title runs to a certain number of editions—some of them well over forty editions—and that each new edition is completely revised, and more or less constitutes a new book. The number of these editions may therefore be more relevant: 740 German editions, 268 French editions, and 311 English editions—1,319 editions in all. If you further take into account that all new titles and most new editions have passed through the hands of a Baedeker, this must give you some idea of the work accomplished by four generations.”

Using the same exhaustive research techniques that I had described in my original article—except, as Otto stated, “the ever-quickening pace of this post-war world has made a greater amount of research necessary”—the younger Baedekers have recently published, in English alone, new guidebooks on Italy, France and Corsica, Southern Bavaria, Yugoslavia, Scandinavia, as well as others devoted to such special cities as Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Salzburg, Berlin.

Karl Baedeker the First, one imagines, would have had no criticism of the guidebooks produced by his great-grandsons. Few concessions have been made to tourists interested in speed and condensation. The New York
Herald Tribune
praised the Baedekers’ “traditional accuracy and thoroughness” and considered the new products “a model of what the guidebook of today ought to be.” When Baedeker’s
Italy
appeared in 1963,
The Listener
of London called it “still the best, and, ultimately, the most economical…the most lavish and scholarly of guides.” And in New York, the
Saturday Review
added, “The first, and apparently still the last, word in guidebooks…leaves no sight unseen, no church uncharted, no fact unfathomed in its relentless pursuit of everything,” objecting only that “its mass of information makes it somewhat difficult to curl up with in front of a fire on a cold winter’s night.”

While two recent English-language Baedeker guides to Yugoslavia and Scandinavia, have had only—according to the American publisher—“a modest success in this country,” reader resistance could be attributed as much to the fact that Yugoslavia and Scandinavia are not favorite tramping grounds for American travelers as to an American impatience with Germanic thoroughness.

Elsewhere around the world, and especially in Europe, the sale of Baedeker guidebooks is booming once more. The latest success is Baedeker’s
Berlin
, published in German text early in 1964. So detailed was its exploration of Germany’s greatest city that the president of the House of Representatives in Berlin gave a copy to each and every member. “Within one year of publication,” said Otto Baedeker, “over ten thousand copies were sold, a great part actually to Berliners. The latter illustrates the two tasks which the handbooks have to perform: firstly, to aid the tourist; secondly, to serve as works of reference.”

Today, Baedeker is going all out to capture the eyes, minds, and dollars of American tourists. In the next decade, there will be Baedeker guidebooks in English on Great Britain, and on the cities of London, Paris, and Rome. And supplementing these, there will be automobile guides to Germany, Turkey, and “the whole of Europe” in English.