Katherine Mansfield’s Germany: “these pine trees provide most suitable accompaniment for a trombone!”

As the Herr Professor produces a bag of cherries from his tail pocket and proceeds to demonstrate his skill in spitting the stones great distances, Katherine Mansfield conducts a satirical scrutiny of German cultural pretensions, and perhaps implicitly also of German Romanticism, through the Herr Professor’s combined account of his woodland trombone playing and bodily processes: ‘There is nothing like cherries for producing free saliva after trombone playing, especially after Grieg’s “Ich Liebe Dich”. Those sustained blasts on “liebe” make my throat as dry as a railway tunnel’ (1:214). The comic upstaging of the Professor’s Romantic posturings by his cherry-spitting parallels a moment in ‘Germans at Meat’ when the Herr Rat’s boasts about the Wagner festival, Mozart and Japanese pictures of Munchen, the ‘Art and Soul’ of Germany, modulate into a peon of praise for the city’s beer (1:166).