Home Life In Germany Part 12

As rents are high in Germany, it is usual for people of small means to let off one or two rooms, either furnished or unfurnished. But it is not usual to supply a lodger with any meal except his coffee and rolls in the morning. If you wish to take lodgings in a German town, and work through the long list of them in a local paper, you will probably find no one willing to provide for you in the English fashion.

"Cooking!" they say with horror,--"cooking! You want to eat in your room. No. That can we not undertake. Coffee in the morning, yes; and rolls with it and b.u.t.ter and even two eggs, but nothing further. Just round the corner in the _Konigstra.s.se_ are two very fine restaurants, where the _Herrschaften_ can eat what they will at any hour of the day, and for moderate prices."

If you insist, the most they will promise, and that not willingly, is to provide you with a knife and fork and a tablecloth for a pyramid of courses sent hot from one of the very fine adjacent restaurants for 1 mark or 1 mark 20 pf. Supper in Germany is the easiest meal in the day to provide, as you buy the substantial part of it at a _Delikatessenhandlung_, and find that even a German landlady will condescend to get you rolls and b.u.t.ter and beer. This sounds like the Simple Life, to be sure; but if you are in German lodgings for any length of time you probably desire for one reason or the other to lead it. The plan of having your dinner sent piping hot from a restaurant in nice clean white dishes rather like monster souffle dishes is not a bad one if the restaurant keeps faith with you. It is rather amusing to begin at the top with soup and work through the various surprises and temptations of the pyramid till you get to _Biskuit-Pudding mit Vanille Sauce_ at the bottom. But in nine cases out of ten the restaurant fails you, sends uneatable food, is absurdly unpunctual or says plainly it can't be bothered. Then you have to wander about and out of doors for your food in all weathers and all states of health. This is amusing for a time, but not in the long run. It is astonishing how tired you can get of the "very fine" restaurants within reach, of their waitresses, their furniture, their menus, and their daily guests. At least, this is so in a small town where the best restaurant is not "very fine,"

although both food and service will be better than in an English town of the same size. If you are in Berlin and can go to the good restaurants, there you will be in danger of becoming a gourmet and losing your natural affection for cold mutton.

In a university or a big commercial town it is easy to get rooms for less than we pay in England; but in a small _Residenz_ I have found it difficult. There were rooms to let, but no one wanted us, because we were not officers with soldier servants to wait on us; nor did we want to engage rooms as the officers did for at least six months. In fact, we found ourselves as unpopular as ladies are in a London suburb where all the lodging-house keepers want "gentlemen in the city" who are away all day and give no trouble. At last, after searching through every likely street in the town, we found a dentist with exuberant manners, who said he would overlook our shortcomings, and allow us to inhabit his rooms at a high price on condition we gave no trouble. We said we never gave trouble anywhere, and left both hotels and lodging-houses with an excellent character, so the bargain was concluded. I saw that his wife was not a party to it, but he overruled her, and as he was a big red-faced noisy man, and she was a small rat of a woman, I thought he would continue to do so. One is always making these stupid elementary mistakes about one's fellow-creatures. But a little later in the day I had occasion to call at the rooms to complete some arrangement about luggage, and then the wife received me alone. I asked her if she could put a small table into a room that only had a big one. I forget why I wanted it.

"Table!" she said rudely. "What can you want another table for? Isn't that one enough?"

"I should like another," I said,--"any little one would do."

"I don't keep tables up my sleeve," said she. "You see what you can have, ... just what is there. If it doesn't suit you...."

"But it does suit me," I said hurriedly, for the search had been long and exhausting, and the rooms were pleasant enough. I thought we need not deal much with the woman.

"No meals except coffee in the morning; you understand that?" she said in a truculent tone.

"Oh yes, I understand. We shall go out at midday and at night.

Afternoon tea I always make myself with a spirit lamp...."

Never in my life have I been so startled. I thought the woman was going to behave like a rat in a corner, and fly at me. She shook her fist and shouted so loud that she brought the dentist on the scene.

"_Spiritus_," she screamed. "_Spiritus--Spiritus leid' ich nicht._"

"Bless us!" I said in English. "What's the matter?"

"_Was ist's?_" said the dentist, and he looked downright frightened.

"_Sie will kochen_," said his wife, shaking her fist at me again. "She has a spirit lamp. She wants to turn my beautiful _bestes Zimmer_ into a kitchen. She will take all the polish off my furniture, just as the last people did when they cooked for themselves."

"Cooked!" I said. "Who speaks of cooking?--I spoke of a cup of tea."

"_Spiritus leid' ich nicht_," shrieked the woman.

"No," said the dentist, "we can't have cooking here."

"_Spiritus leid'_...."

But I fled. Luckily, we had not paid any rent in advance. I made up my mind that I would never confess to my small harmless Etna in German lodgings again, and would bolt the door while I boiled water for tea in it. We found rooms after another weary search, but they were extremely noisy and uncomfortable. We had to take them for six weeks, and could only endure them for a fortnight, and though we paid them the full six weeks' rent when we left, they charged us for every jug of hot water we had used, and added a _Trinkgeld_ for the servant.

"We did not engage to pay extra either for hot water or for _Trinkgeld_," we said, turning, as worms will even in a _Residenz_, where everyone is a worm who is not _Militar_.

"But _Englander_ never give a _Trinkgeld_. That is why we have put it in the bill. The girl expects it, and has earned it."

"The girl will have it," we said; "but we shall give it her ourselves.

And what have you to say about the hot water?"

"Without coal it is impossible to have hot water. We let you our rooms, but we did not let you our coal. It is quite simple. Have you any other complaint to make?"

We had, but we did not make them. We went to one of the big cities, where the civilian is still a worm, but where he has a large number and variety of other worms to keep him company. In Berlin or Hamburg or Leipzig there are always furnished rooms delighted to receive you.

There may be a difficulty, however, if you are a musician. The police come in with their regulations; or your fellow-lodgers may be students of medicine or philosophy, and driven wild by your harmonies. I knew a young musician who always took rooms in the noisiest street in Berlin, and practised with his windows open. He said the din of electric trams, overhead trains, motor cars, and heavy lorries helped his landlady and her family to suffer a Beethoven sonata quite gladly.

One of the insoluble mysteries of German life is the cheapness of furnished lodgings as compared with the high rent and rates. To be sure, the landlady does not cook for you, and the bed-sitting-room is not considered sordid in Germany. In fact, the separate sitting-room is almost unknown, though it is easy to arrange one by shifting some furniture. The pattern of the room and its appointments hardly vary in any part of Germany, though of course the size and quality vary with the price. If you take a small room you have one straight window, and if you take a large one you have several. Or you may have a broad balcony window opening on to a balcony. You have the parqueted or painted floor, the porcelain stove, the sofa, the table, the wooden bedstead, and the wooden hanging cupboard wherever you are. It is always sensible, comfortable furniture, and usually plain. When people over there know no better they buy themselves tawdry horrors, just as they do here. The German manufacturers flood the world with such things. But people who let lodgings put their treasures in a sacred room they call _das beste Zimmer_, and only use on festive occasions.

They fob you off with old-fashioned stuff they do not value, a roomy solid cupboard, a family sofa, a chest of drawers black with age, and a hanging mirror framed in old elm-wood; and if it were not for a bright green rep tablecloth, snuff-coloured curtains, and a wall paper with a brown background and yellow snakes on it, you would like your quarters very well indeed. Rooms are usually let by the month, except in watering-places, where weekly prices prevail. In Leipzig you can get a room for 10s. a month. It will be a parterre or a fourth-floor room, rather gloomy and rather shabby, but a possible room for a student who happens to be hard up. For 1 a month you can get a room on a higher floor, and better furnished, while for 1, 10s. a month in Hamburg I myself have had two well-furnished rooms commanding a fine view of the Alster, and one of them so large that in winter it was nearly impossible to keep warm. Then my Hamburg friends told me I was paying too much, and that they could have got better lodgings for less money. They were nearer the sky than I should like in these days, but the old German system of letting the higher flats in a good house for a low rent benefits people who care about a "select" neighbourhood and yet cannot pay very much. The modern system of lifts will gradually make it impossible to get a flat or lodgings in a good street without paying as much for the fifth floors as for the first.

You do not see much of a German landlady, as she does not cater for you. She is often a widow, and when you know the rent of a flat you wonder how she squeezes a living out of what her lodgers pay her. She cannot even nourish herself with their sc.r.a.ps, or warm herself at a kitchen fire for which they pay. Some of them perform prodigies of thrift, especially when they have children to feed and educate. At the end of a long severe winter, when the Alster had been frozen for months, I found out by chance that my landlady, a sad aged widow with one little boy, had never lighted herself a fire. She let every room of her large flat, except a kitchen and a _Kammer_ opening out of it.

The little food she needed she cooked on an oil stove, at night she had a lamp, and of course she never by any chance opened a window. She said she could not afford coals, and that her son and she managed to keep warm. The miracle is that they both kept alive and well. Another German landlady was of a different type, a big buxom bustling creature, who spent most of the day in her husband's coal sheds, helping him with his books and taking orders. Although she was so busy she undertook to cook for me, and kept her promise honourably; and she cooked for herself, her husband, and their work-people. She used sometimes to show me the huge dishes of food they were about to consume, food that was cheap to buy and nourishing to eat, but troublesome to prepare. She did all her own washing too, and dried it in the narrow slip of a room her husband and she used for all purposes. I discovered this by going in to see her when she was ill one day, and finding rows of wet clothes hung on strings right across her bed. I made no comment, for nothing that is an outrage of the first laws of hygiene will surprise you if you have gone here and there in the byways of Germany. An English girl told me that when she was recovering from a slight attack of cholera in a Rhenish _Pension_, they were quite hurt because she refused stewed cranberries. "_Das schadet nichts, das ist gesund_," they said. I could hear them say it.

Only the summer before a kindly hotel-keeper had brought me a ragout of _Schweinefleisch_ and vanilla ice under similar circ.u.mstances. The German const.i.tution seems able to survive anything, even roast goose at night at the age of three.

A _Pension_ in Germany costs from 3 a month upwards. That is to say, you will get offers of a room and full board for this sum, but I must admit that I never tried one at so low a rate, and should not expect it to be comfortable. Rent and food are too dear in the big towns to make a reasonable profit possible on such terms, unless the household is managed on starvation lines. To have a comfortable room and sufficient food, you must pay from 5 to 7 a month, and then if you choose carefully you will be satisfied. The society is usually cosmopolitan in these establishments, and the German spoken is a warning rather than a lesson. It is not really German life that you see in this way, though the proprietress and her a.s.sistants may be German. In most of the university towns some private families take "paying guests," and when they are agreeable people this is a pleasanter way of life than any _Pension_.

Before you have been in Germany a fortnight the police expects to know all about you. You have to give them your father's Christian and surname, and tell them how he earned his living, and where he was born; also your mother's Christian and maiden name, and where she was born. You must declare your religion, and if you are married give your husband's Christian and surname; also where he was born, and what he does for a living. If you happen to do anything yourself, though, you need not mention it. They do not expect a woman to be anything further than married or single. But you must say when and where you were last in Germany, and how often you have been, and why you have come now, and what you are doing, and how long you propose to stay. They tell you in London you do not need a pa.s.sport in Germany, and they tell you in Berlin that you must either produce one or be handed over for inquiry to your Emba.s.sy. Last year when I was there I produced one twenty-three years old. I had not troubled to get a new one, but I came across this, quite yellow with age, and I thought it might serve to make some official happy; for I had once seen my husband get himself, me, and our bicycles over the German frontier and into Switzerland, and next morning back into Germany, by showing the gendarmes on the bridge his C.T.C. ticket. I cannot say that my ancient pa.s.sport made my official exactly happy. Twenty-three years ago he was certainly in a _Steckkissen_, and no doubt he felt that in those days, in a world without him to set it right, anything might happen.

"Twenty-three years," he bellowed at the top of his voice, for he saw that I was _fremd_, and wished to make himself clear. We are not the only people who scream at foreigners that they may understand.

"Twenty-three years. But it is a lifetime."

It was for him no doubt. I admitted that twenty-three years was--well, twenty-three years, and explained that I had been told at a _Reisebureau_ that a pa.s.sport was unnecessary.

"They know nothing in England," he said gloomily. "With us a pa.s.sport is necessary; but what is a pa.s.sport twenty-three years old?"

I admitted that, from the official point of view, it was not much, and he made no further difficulties. As a rule you need not go to the police bureau at all. The people you are with will get the necessary papers, and fill them in for you; but I wanted to see whether the German jack-in-office was as bad as his reputation makes him. Germans themselves often complain bitterly of the treatment they receive at the hands of these lower cla.s.s officials.

"I went to the police station," said a German lady who lived in England, and was in her own country on a visit. "I went to _anmelden_ myself, but not one of the men in the office troubled to look up. When I had stood there till I was tired I said that I wished someone to attend to me. Every pen stopped, every head was raised, astounded by my impertinence. But no one took any notice of my request. I waited a little longer, and then fetched myself a chair that someone had left unoccupied. I did not do it to make a sensation. I was tired. But every pen again stopped, and one in authority asked in a voice like thunder what I made here. I said that I had come to _anmelden_ myself, and he began to ask the usual questions with an air of suspicion that was highly offensive. You can see for yourself that I do not look like an anarchist or anything but what I am, a respectable married woman of middle age. I told the man everything he wanted to know, and at every item he grunted as if he knew it was a lie. In the end he asked me very rudely how long a stay I meant to make in Germany.

"Not a day longer than I can help," I said; "for your manners do not please me."

All the pens stopped again till I left the office, and when I got back to my mother she wept bitterly; for she said that I should be prosecuted for _Beamtenbeleidigung_ and put in prison.

"But the really interesting fact about the system is that it doesn't work," said a German to me; "when I wanted my papers a little while ago I could not get them. Nothing about me could be discovered.

Officially I did not exist."

Yet he had inherited a name famous all over the world, was a distinguished scientific man himself, and had been born in the city where his existence was not known to the police.

"Take care you don't go in at an _Ausgang_ or out at an _Eingang_,"

said an Englishman who had just come back from Berlin. "Take care you don't try to buy stamps at the Post Office out of your turn. Remember that you can't choose your cab when you arrive. A policeman gives you a number, and you have to hunt amongst a crowd of cabs for that number, even if it is pouring with rain. Remember that the police decides that you must buy your opera tickets on a Sunday morning, and stand _queue_ for hours till you get them. If you have a cold in your head, stay at home. Last winter a man was arrested for sneezing loudly. It was considered _Beamtenbeleidigung_. The Englishwoman who walked on the gra.s.s in the Tiergarten was not arrested, because the official who saw her died of shock at the sight, and could not perform his duty."

Wherever you go in Germany you hear stories of police interference and petty tyranny, and it is mere luck if you do not innocently transgress some of their fussy pedantic regulations. In South Germany I once put a cream jug on my window-sill to keep a little milk cool for the afternoon. The jug was so small and the window so high that it can hardly have been visible from the street, but my landlady came to me excitedly and said the police would be on her before the day was out if the jug was left there. The police allowed nothing on a window-sill in that town, lest it should fall on a citizen's head. Each town or district has its own restrictions, its own crimes. In one you will hear that a butcher boy is not allowed on the side-path carrying his tray of meat. If a policeman catches him at it, he, or his employer, is fined. In another town the awning from a shop window must not exceed a certain length, and you are told of a poor widow, who, having just had a new one put up at great expense, was compelled by the police to take the whole thing down, because the flounce was a quarter of an inch longer than the regulations prescribed. You hear of a poor man laboriously building a toy brick wall round the garden in his _Hof_, and having to pull it to pieces because "building" is not allowed except with police permission. In some towns the length of a woman's gown is decided in the _Polizeibureau_, and the officers fine any woman whose skirt touches the ground. In one town you may take a dog out without a muzzle; in another it is a crime. A merchant on his way to his office, in a city where there was a muzzling order, found to his annoyance, one morning, that his mother's dog had followed him unmuzzled. He had no string with him, he could not persuade the dog to return, and he could not go back with it, because he had an important appointment. So he risked it and went on. Before long, however, he met a policeman. The usual questions were asked, his name and address were taken, and he was told that he would be fined. Hardly had he got to the end of the street when he met a second policeman. He explained that the matter was settled, but this was not the opinion of the policeman. Was the dog not at large, unmuzzled, on his the policeman's beat? With other policemen he had nothing to do. The dog was his discovery, the name and address of the owner were required, and there was no doubt, in the policeman's mind, that the owner would have to pay a second fine. The merchant went his ways, still followed by an unmuzzled unled dog. Before long he met a third policeman, gave his name and address a third time, and was a.s.sured that he would have to pay a third time.

"_Dann war es mir zu bunt_," said the merchant, and he picked up the dog and carried it the rest of the way to his office. When he got there he sent it home in a cab.

CHAPTER XXIII

SUMMER RESORTS