Europe: The Wayward Buss

In Communist East Europe, commissars and cops do it. In Rome and Madrid, moppets in dancing class do it. Frenchmen perform the ritual with sinuous grace, Spaniards smackingly, Germans with a click of the heels. However widely their techniques may vary, Europeans from Barcelona to Bialystok in recent years have taken to hand kissing with fervor and frequency unmatched in their history. After World War II, the custom seemed in decline. But today, men of virtually every class and calling on the Continent dive for distaff knuckles as assiduously, if not always so expertly, as do the courtiers in a Lehar operetta.

Telegraphed Admiration. Traditionalists deplore the trend and complain that it has vulgarized a stylish, patrician ritual. In the old days, no well-bred European kissed a woman’s hand before noon, or outdoors (except at garden parties or the race track), or if she wore gloves—andnot at all, in most countries, if she was unmarried. Nowadays, even in strait-laced Spain, girls who are barely old enough to hold up a strapless bra have their hands out. When it is enclosed in a glove, uninhibited males blithely peel it off or smooch the wrist instead. And now that the hand kiss has become democratic, it is bestowed alfresco, any time, any place, even when the recipient is on horseback or in church.

Notwithstanding the celebrated advice of Lorelei Lee (“A kiss on the hand may be quite Continental, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend”), most European women welcome the new wave of hand kissing, and to their men it has always seemed a more intriguing approach to a woman than the aseptic Anglo-Saxon handshake. As a Viennese satirist wrote in 1825:

To take your hand for a kiss

Is merely to ask this:

Will the mouth of the miss

Permit further bliss?

To speed the answer, ardent Latins, in particular, sometimes telegraph their admiration for an attractive woman by squeezing her fingers or locking on to them with both hands. After all, cracks Italian Moviemaker Vittorio De Sica: “You’ve got to start somewhere.”

Capitalist Hangover. Hand kissing got its start in Europe with the Roman emperors, who exported the gesture as a symbolic act of fealty. In Central Europe it ceased to be a pledge of loyalty to the sovereign in the late 18th century, when Austrian Emperor Joseph II snatched his hand from subjects’ lips with the cry: “It isn’t there for someone to wipe his nose on!” More recently Mussolini, who frowned on the custom in any form, tried to discourage il baciamano. He might as well have tried to suppress spaghetti. The Nazis also deplored the Handkuss— good Germans were meant to give the Hitler salute instead—but der Führer himself was often photographed with his forelock fanning some actress’ paw.

In Eastern Europe after World War II, the Communists denounced the practice as a “capitalist hangover,” but they soon despaired of curing it. After Hungarian males, who have been known to feast on a pretty finger for seeming minutes in a diplomatic receiving line, Poland boasts the Iron Curtain’s most insatiable hand kissers; Warsaw policemen routinely kiss policewomen’s hands, and have even been known to buss a comely speeder after handing her a ticket. Italy’s Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti is an accomplished finger-smoocher. As for Russia, tselovat ruku was outlawed by the Commissariat of Hygiene in 1924, but today it is considered so kulturny that an announcer who recently nuzzled a French actress’ hand on Soviet television did not even raise Pravda’s temperature.

Like Drops of Milk. Seasoned diplomatic hands give top honors to upper-crust Frenchmen and Italians. Manual training in both societies starts when a boy is four or so and emphasizes, as one social oracle puts it, that the kisser must be “natural and relaxed, never obsequious or stiff.” Its sound, declared a Roman gallant, “should be like that of a drop of milk in milady’s five o’clock tea.”

Such a hand kiss requires split-second timing as well as aplomb, since the overeager busser may find that the hand he is aiming for has humiliatingly withdrawn in midswoop or, worse, insists too late that it is to be shaken rather than kissed. This is a nervous failing particularly common among American girls. If the lady is willing, the man correctly raises her hand halfway to his lips, though when greeting an older or distinguished woman he is expected to bow down to hand level, if he can make it. Charles de Gaulle, who stands 6 ft. 4 in. and would have to bend almost double to make contact correctly, understandably does not indulge. Konrad Adenauer, on the other hand, unbends so readily that he has committed the diplomatic faux baiser of hand kissing Mme. de Gaulle, whose fingers, according to French bussing protocol, should be kissproof. If the De Gaulles are France’s most conspicuous abstainers, Premier Georges Pompidou on a receiving line resembles a one-man force de frappe.

In West Germany nowadays the practice is pursued so indefatigably that to Erica Pappritz, the Teutons’ Emily Post, it looks as though “everyone is trying to catch up with all the hand kissing they missed for the past 20 years.” West Germany’s new industrialists and a newly prosperous, socially ambitious middle class are trying to raise their own status by emulating the Kultur of princely, pre-Hitler society.

Wet v. Dry. Most German hand kissers either belong to the “dry” Berlin school or else practice the “wet” Viennese method. In the Berlin Handkuss, which was perfected at the Hohenzollern court, the man bows briskly from the waist, clicks his heels and, pursing his lips fleetingly, brushes the air a millimeter over the woman’s hand. By contrast, Vienna’s wayward buss, usually delivered with closed eyes, is a wet smack that starts voraciously at the knuckles, may work its way up the wrist, and sometimes lasts up to four seconds.

Unlike the Austrian, who is a born knuckle nuzzler and usually even prefaces a telephone call to a woman with a murmured Küss die Hand, the traditional German hand kisser seems hopelessly stiff to other Europeans. He somehow gives the impression that he is afraid of catching germs. To purists, the greatest danger is that the art, dry or wet, is becoming too popular. “When a man used to kiss your hand, and did it right,” mourns one venerable German baroness, “it meant he was well-bred. Now you can’t be sure any more.” Of course, she adds slyly, “I can still distinguish between a genuine antique and a fake. I can feel it in my fingertips.”