Heidelberg, April 9

Sitting here on a soft spring afternoon by the side of the Neckar I could pretend that nothing had changed since I was here fifteen years ago; Heidelberg, like Marburg, Bamberg, and several other smaller cities in Germany remained almost untouched by the mass destruction of the allied armed forces. But it could only be pretending.

Of the cities over 100,000 none is less than 40 percent destroyed-some as much as 85 percent. To drive through miles and miles of rubble in what were once some of the world's most beautiful cities would be bad enough if there were some reason for it, but quite customarily the destroyed sections were miles from any industrial areas-and almost as often as not these industrial areas were untouched.

The smashed cathedrals are being rebuilt about as they were originally constructed-by a handful of aged craftsmen, hardly able to continue their work for lack of food, slowly and carefully chipping at large blocks of stone with hand chisels. As to the time it would take, one hoary stonecutter, working in the ruins of a Nurnberg cathedral, calmly said, "Oh, maybe 25 years."

And as the people, living under appalling conditions, went to church during Easter week, they listened to music, not as the bourgeois Swiss or Americans listen to it, but as a source of escape from squalor and misery into the beauty that only music under such conditions can provide. All over Germany last week hungry, tired, confused little people were listening to the Passions according to Matthew and John of Bach crowding into unheated churches and into dark cathedrals with boarded windows. They began during mid-afternoon (so people could get home before the subways closed at 9:30) and continued as night fell with everything finally pitch dark but the candles for the musicians to see by.

But, although moved by such an experience, one can't overlook the presence of the upper classes in Germany; Americans like their music better when they can sit with a cigarette in one hand and a highball in the other. When I heard Walter Gieseking in Wiesbaden he was in the act of prostituting himself before such an audience. After ham-fisting his way through Debussey, he concluded (either as a culmination of his own bad taste or a reprimand to that of his listeners) with a beer garden style arrangement of Strauss waltz themes.