Home Life In Germany Part 9

When our English journalists write column after column about the dangerous explosive energy and restlessness of modern Germany, I feel sure that they must be right, and yet I wish they could have come shopping with me a year or two ago in a small Black Forest town. One of us wanted a watch key and the other a piece of tape, and we set off light-heartedly to buy them, for we knew that there was a draper and a watchmaker in the main street. We knew, too, that in South Germany everyone is first dining and then asleep between twelve and two, so we waited till after two and then went to the watchmaker's. There was no shop window, and when, after ringing two or three times, we were let in we found there was no shop. We sat down in a big cool sitting-room, beautifully clean and tidy. The watchmaker's wife appeared in due course, looked at us with friendly interest, asked us where we came from, and how long we meant to stay, wondered if we knew her cousin Johannes Muller, a hairdresser in Islington, discussed the relative merits of emigration to England and America, offered us some cherries from a basketful on the table, and at last admitted unwillingly that her husband was not at home, and that she herself knew not whether he had watch keys. So we set off to buy our tape, and again found a private room, an amiable family, but no one who felt able to sell anything. It seemed an odd way of doing business we said to our landlord, but he saw nothing odd in it. Most people were busy with their hay, he explained. Towards the end of a week we caught our watchmaker, and obtained a key, but he would not let us pay for it. He said it was one of an old collection, and of no use to him. The etiquette of shopping in Germany seems to us rather topsy-turvy at first. In a small shop the proprietor is as likely as not to conduct business with a cigar in his mouth, even if you are a lady, but if you are a man he will think you a boor if you omit to remove your hat as you cross his threshold. Whether you are a man, woman, or child, you will wish him good-morning or good-evening before you ask for what you want, and he will answer you before he asks what your commands are. If you are a woman, about as ignorant as most women, and with a humble mind, you will probably have no fixed opinion about the question of free or fair trade. You may even, if you are very humble, recognise that it is not quite the simple question d.i.c.k, Tom, and Harry think it is. But you will know for certain that when you want ribbons for a hat you had better buy them in Kensington and not in Frankfurt, and that though there are plenty of cheap materials in Germany, the same quality would be cheaper still in London. Everything to do with women's clothing is dearer there than here. So is stationery, so are groceries, so are the better cla.s.s of fancy goods. But the Germans, say the Fair Traders, are a prosperous nation, and it is because their manufactures are protected. This may be so. I can only look at various quite small unimportant trifles, such as ribbons, for instance, or pewter vases or blotting-paper or peppermint drops. I know that a German woman either wears a common ribbon on her hat, or pays twice as much as I do for a good one; she is content with one pewter vase where your English suburban drawing-room packs twenty into one corner, with twenty silver frames and vases near them. A few years ago the one thing German blotting-paper refused to do was to absorb ink, and it was so dear that in all small country inns and in old-fashioned offices you were expected to use sand instead. The sand was kept beside the ink in a vessel that had a top like a pepper pot; and it was more amusing than blotting-paper, but not as efficacious. As for the peppermint drops, they used to be a regular export from families living in London to families living in Germany. They were probably needed after having goose and chestnuts for dinner, and ours were twice as large as the German ones and about six times as strong, so no doubt they were like our blotting-paper, and performed what they engaged to perform more thoroughly.

But shops of any kind are dull compared with an open market held in one of the many ancient market places of Germany. Photographs of Freiburg give a bird's-eye view of the town with the minster rising from the midst of its red roofs; but there is just a peep at the market which is being held at the foot of the minster. On the side hidden by the towering cathedral there are some of the oldest houses in Freiburg. It is a large crowded market on certain days of the week, and full of colour and movement. The peasants who come to it from the neighbouring valleys wear bright-coloured skirts and headgear, and in that part of Germany fruit is plentiful, so that all through the summer and autumn the market carts and barrows are heaped with cherries, wild strawberries, plums, apricots, peaches, and grapes in their season. The market place itself, and even the steps of the minster and of the surrounding houses, are crowded with the peasants and their produce, and with the leisurely servants and housewives bargaining for the day's supplies. From a view of the market place at Cottbus in Brandenburg you may get a better idea of the people at a German market; the servants with their umbrellas, their big baskets, their baggy blouses and no hats, the middle cla.s.s housewife with a hat or a bonnet, and a huge basket on her arm, a nursemaid in peasant costume stooping over her perambulator, other peasants in costume at the stalls, and two of the farm carts that are in some districts yoked oftener with oxen than with horses. There is naturally great variety in the size and character of markets, according to the needs they supply. In Hamburg the old names show you that there were separate markets for separate trades, so that you went to the Schweinemarkt when you wanted pigs, and to some other part of the city when you wanted flowers and fruit. In Berlin there are twelve covered markets besides the open ones, and they are all as admirably clean, tidy, and unpoetical as everything else is in that spick and span, swept and garnished Philistine city. The green gooseberries there are marked "unripe fruit" by order of the police, so that no one should think they were ripe and eat them uncooked; and you can buy rhubarb nowadays, a vegetable the modern Berliner eats without shuddering. But in a Berlin market you buy what you need as quickly as you can and come away. There is nothing to tempt you, nothing picturesque, nothing German, if German brings to your mind a queer mixture of poetry and music, gabled, tumbledown houses, storks' nests, toys, marvellous cakes and sweets and the kindliest of people. If you are so modern that German means nothing to you but drill and hustle, the roar of factories and the pride of monster munic.i.p.al ventures, then you may see the markets of Berlin and rest content with them. They will show you what you already know of this day's Germany. But my household treasures gathered here and there in German markets did not have one added to their number in Berlin.

"That!" said a German friend when I showed her a yellow pitcher dabbed with colour, and having a spout, a handle, and a lid,--"that! I would not have it in my kitchen."

It certainly only cost the third of a penny, but it lived with honour in my drawing-room till it shared the fate of all clay, and came in two in somebody's hands. The blue and grey bellied bottle, one of those in which the Thuringian peasants carry beer to the field, cost three halfpence, but the b.u.t.ter-dish with a lid of the same ware only cost a halfpenny. There is always an immense heap of this rough grey and blue pottery in a South German market, and it is much prettier than the more ornate Coblenz ware we import and sell at high prices.

So is the deep red earthenware glazed inside and rough outside and splashed with colours. You find plenty of it at the Leipziger Messe, that historical fair that used to be as important to Western Europe as Nijni Novgorod is to Russia and the East. To judge from modern German trade circulars, it is still of considerable importance, and the buildings in which merchants of all countries display their wares have recently been renovated and enlarged. Out of doors the various market-places are covered with little stalls selling cheap clothing, cheap toys, jewellery, sweets, and gingerbread; all the heterogeneous rubbish you have seen a thousand times at German fairs, and never tire of seeing if a fair delights you.

But better than the Leipziger Messe, better even than a summer market at Freiburg or at Heidelburg, is a Christmas market in any one of the old German cities in the hill country, when the streets and the open places are covered with crisp clean snow, and the mountains are white with it, and the moon shines on the ancient houses, and the tinkle of sledge bells reaches you when you escape from the din of the market, and look down at the bustle of it from some silent place, a high window perhaps, or the high empty steps leading into the cathedral.

The air is cold and still, and heavy with the scent of the Christmas trees brought from the forest for the pleasure of the children. Day by day you see the rows of them growing thinner, and if you go to the market on Christmas Eve itself you will find only a few trees left out in the cold. The market is empty, the peasants are harnessing their horses or their oxen, the women are packing up their unsold goods. In every home in the city one of the trees that scented the open air a week ago is shining now with lights and little gilded nuts and apples, and is helping to make that Christmas smell, all compact of the pine forest, wax candles, cakes, and painted toys, you must a.s.sociate so long as you live with Christmas in Germany.

CHAPTER XVII

EXPENSES OF LIFE

A few years ago a German economist reckoned that there were only 250,000 families in the empire whose incomes exceeded 450, a year.

There were nearly three million households living on incomes ranging from 135 to 450, and nearly four millions with more than 90 but less than 135. But there were upwards of five millions whose incomes fell below 45. Since that estimate was made, Germany has grown in wealth and prosperity; and in the big cities there is great expenditure and luxury amongst some cla.s.ses, especially amongst the Jews who can afford it, and amongst the officers of the army who as a rule cannot. But the bulk of the nation is poor, and cla.s.s for cla.s.s lives on less than people do in England. For instance, the headmaster of a school gets about 100 a year in a small town, and from 200 to 300 in a big one. A lieutenant gets about 65 a year, and an additional 12 if he has no private means. His uniform and mess expenses are deducted from this. He is not allowed to marry on his official income, unless he or his wife has an income of 125 in addition to his pay, as even in Germany an army man can hardly keep up appearances and support a wife and family on less than 190 a year. It is quite common to hear of a clerk living on 40 or 50, or of a doctor who knows his work and yet can only make 150. The official posts so eagerly sought after are poorly paid; so are servants, agricultural labourers, and artisans. When you are in Germany, if you are interested in questions of income and expenditure, you are always trying to make up your mind why a German family can live as successfully on 400 as an English family on 700, for you know that rent and taxes are high and food and clothing dear. If you are a woman and think about it a great deal, and look at family life in as many places and cla.s.ses as you can, you finally decide that there are three chief reasons for the great difference between the cost of life in England and Germany. In the first place, labour is cheaper there; in the second place, the standard of luxury and even of comfort is lower; in the third place, the women are thriftier and more industrious than Englishwomen. This, too, leaves out of account the most important fact, that the State educates a man's children for next to nothing; and drills the male ones into shape when they serve in the army.

Servants, we have seen, get lower wages than they do here, but the real economy is in the smaller number kept. Where we pay and maintain half a dozen a German family will be content with two, and the typical small English household that cannot face life without its plain cook in the kitchen and its parlour-maid in her black gown at the front door, will throughout the German Empire get along quite serenely with one young woman to cook and clean and do everything else required. If she is a "pearl" she probably makes the young ladies' frocks and irons the master's shirts to fill in her time. Germans do not trouble about the black frock and the white ap.r.o.n at the front door. They will even open the door to you themselves if the "girl" is washing or cooking.

A female servant is always a "girl" in Germany. I once heard a young Englishwoman who had not been long in Germany ask an elderly acquaintance to recommend a dressmaker.

"The best one in ---- is Fraulein Muller," said the elderly acquaintance.

"But she is too expensive," said the Englishwoman, and she glanced across the room at the lady's nieces, who were neatly and plainly dressed. "Do girls go to Fraulein Muller?"

"Girls! Certainly not," said the lady, with the expression Germans keep for the insane English it is their fate to encounter occasionally.

"But that is what I want to know, ... a dressmaker girls go to ...

girls with a small allowance."

"I am afraid I cannot help you," said the lady stiffly. "I know nothing about the dressmakers girls employ."

"Perhaps Miss Brown means 'young girls,'" said one of the nieces, who was not as slow in the uptake as her aunt, and it turned out that this was what Miss Brown did mean; but she had not known that in everyday life _Madchen_ without an adjective usually means a servant. She had heard of _Das Madchen aus der Fremde_ and _Der Tod und das Madchen_, and blundered.

I once made a German exceedingly angry by saying that the standard of comfort was higher in England than in Germany. She said it was lower.

When you have lived in both countries and with both peoples you arrive in the end at having your opinions, and knowing that each one you hold will be disputed on one side or the other. "Find out what means _Gemutlichkeit_, and do it without fail," says Hans Breitmann, but _Gemutlichkeit_ and comfort are not quite interchangeable words. Our word is more material. When we talk of English comfort we are thinking of our open fires, our solid food, our thick carpets, and our well-drilled smart-looking servants. The German is thinking of the spiritual atmosphere in his own house, the absence, as he says, of ceremony and the freedom of ideas. He talks of a man being _gemutlich_ in his disposition, kindly, that is, and easy going. We talk of a house being comfortable, and when we do use the word for a person usually mean that she is rather stout. When both you and the German have decided that "comfort" for the moment shall mean material comfort, you will disagree about what is necessary to yours. You must have your bathroom, your bacon for breakfast, your table laid precisely, your meals served to the moment, your young women in black or your staid men to give them to you, and your glowing fires in as many rooms as possible. The German cares for none of these things. He would rather have his half-pound of odds and ends from the provision shop than your boiled cod, roast mutton, and apple-tart; he wants his stove, his double windows, his good coffee, his _kraftige Kost_, and freedom to smoke in every corner of his house. He is never tired of telling you that, though you have more political freedom in England, you are groaning under a degree of social tyranny that he could not endure for a day. The Idealist, quoted in a former chapter, is for ever talking of the "hypocrisy" of English life, and her burning anxiety is to save the children of certain Russian and German exiles from contact with it. Another German tells you that our system of collegiate life for women would not suit her countryfolk, because they are more "individual." Each one likes to choose her own rooms, and live as she pleases. The next German has suffered torments in London because he had to sit down to certain meals at certain hours instead of eating anything he fancied at any time he felt hungry, and I suppose it is only your British _Heuchelei_ that leads you to smile politely instead of adding, "As the beasts of the field do." But I am always mazed, as the Cornish say, when Germans talk of their freedom from convention. In Hamburg I was once seriously rebuked by an old friend for carrying a book through the streets that was not wrapped up in paper. In Hamburg that is one of the things people don't do. In Mainz and in many other German towns there are certain streets where one side, for reasons no one can explain, is taboo at certain hours of the day; not of the night, but of the day. You may go to a music shop at midday to buy a sonata, and find, if you are a girl, that you have committed a crime. The intercourse between young people outside their homes is hedged round with convention. German t.i.tles of address are so absurdly formal that Germans laugh at them themselves. Their ceremonies in connection with anniversaries and family events bristle with convention, and offer pitfalls at every step to the stranger or the blunderer. It is true that men do not dress for dinner every day, and wax indignant over the necessity of doing so for the theatre in England; but there are various occasions when they wear evening dress in broad daylight, and an Englishman considers that an uncomfortable convention. The truth is, that these questions of comfort and ceremonial are not questions that should be discussed in the hostile dogmatic tone adopted in both countries by those who only know their own. The ceremonies that are foreign to you impress you, while those you have been used to all your life have become a second nature. An Englishwoman feels downright uncomfortable in her high stuff gown at night, and a German lady brought up at one of the great German Courts told me that when she stayed in an English country house and put on what she called a ball dress for dinner every night, she felt like a fool.

To come back to questions of expenditure so intimately related to questions of comfort, it must be remembered that in an English household there are two dinners a day: one early for the servants and children, and one late for the grown-ups; and solid dinners cost money even in England, where at present there is no meat famine. When Germans dine late they don't also dine early, even where there are children; while the kitchen dinner, that meal of supreme importance here, is eaten when the family has finished theirs, and is as informal as the meal a bird makes of berries. In a German household, living on a small income, nothing is wasted,--not fuel, not food, not cleaning materials, as far as possible not time. The _tuchtige Hausfrau_ would be made miserable by having to pay and feed a woman who put on gala clothes at midday, and did no work to soil them after that.

"Two girls," I once heard a German say to an Englishwoman who had just described her own modest household which she ran, she said, with two maids. "Two girls ... for you and your husband. But what, I ask you, does the second one do?"

"She cleans the rooms and waits at table and opens the door," said the Englishwoman.

"All that can one girl do just as well. I a.s.sure you it is so. There cannot possibly be work in your household for two girls. You have told me how quietly you live, and I know what English cooking is, if you can call it cooking."

"You see, there must be someone to open the door."

"Why could one girl not answer the door, ... unless she was washing.

Then you would naturally go yourself."

"But it wouldn't be natural in England," said the Englishwoman. "It would be odd. Besides, if you only have one servant, she can't dress for lunch."

"Why should she dress for lunch?" asked the German. "My Auguste is a pearl, but she only dresses when we have _Gesellschaft_. Then she wears a plaid blouse and a garnet brooch that I gave her last Christmas, and she looks very well in them. But every day ... and for lunch, when half the work of the day is still to be done.... What, then, does your second girl do in the afternoons?"

"She brings tea and answers the door."

"Always the door. But your husband is not a doctor or a dentist. Why do so many people come to your door that you need a whole girl to attend to them?"

"Oh! They don't," said the Englishwoman, getting rather worn. "There are very few, really. It's the custom."

"Ah!" said the German, with a long deep breath of satisfaction. "So are you English ... such slaves to custom. _Gott sei Dank_ that I do not live in a country where I should have to keep a girl in idleness for the sake of the door. With us a door is a door. Anyone who happens to be near opens it."

"I know they do," said the Englishwoman, "and when a servant comes she expects you to say _Guten Tag_ before you ask whether her mistress is at home?"

"Certainly. It is a politeness. We are a polite nation."

"And once, when I had just come back from Germany, I said Good-morning to an English butler before I asked if his mistress was at home, and he thought I was mad. We each have our own conventions. That's the truth of the matter."

"Not at all," said the German. "The truth of the matter is, that the English are extremely conventional, and follow each other as sheep do; but the German does what pleases him, without asking first whether his neighbour does likewise."

This is what the German really believes, and you agree or disagree with him according to the phase of life you look at when he is speaking. You find that when he comes to England he honestly feels checked at every turn by our unwritten laws, while when you go to Germany you wonder how he can submit so patiently to the pettiness and multiplicity of his written ones. He vaguely feels the pressure and criticism of your indefinite code of manners; you think his elaborate system of t.i.tles, introductions, and celebrations rather childish and extremely troublesome. If you have what the English call manners you will take the greatest care not to let him find this out, and in course of time, however much you like him on the whole, you will lose your patience a little with the individual you are bound to meet, the individual who has England on his nerves, and exhausts his energy and eloquence in informing you of your country's shortcomings. They are legion, and indeed leave no room for the smallest virtue, so that in the end you can only wonder solemnly why such a nation ever came to be a nation at all.

"That is easily answered," says your Anglophobe. "England has arrived where she is by seizing everything she can lay hands on. Now it is going to be our turn."

You express your interest in the future of Germany as seen by your friend, and he shows you a map of Europe which he has himself marked with red ink all round the empire as it will be a few years hence.

There is not much Europe outside the red line.

"But you haven't taken Great Britain," you say, rather hurt at being left out in this way.

"We don't want it ... otherwise, ... but India ... possibly Australia." He waves his hands.

You look at him pensively, and suddenly see one of the great everyday distances between your countryfolk and his. You think of a French novel that has amused you lately, because the parents of the heroine objected to her marriage with the hero on grounds you were quite incapable of understanding. The young man's work was in Cochin-China, and the young lady's father and mother did not wish her to go so far.

Never in your life have you heard anyone raise such a trivial difficulty. You live in a dull sober street mostly inhabited by dull sober people, but there is not one house in it that is not linked by interest or affection, often doubly linked, with some uttermost end of the earth. You can hardly find an English family that has not one member or more in far countries, and so the common talk of English people in all cla.s.ses travels the width of the world in the wake of those dear to them. But in 1900 only 22,309 Germans out of a population of 60,400,000 emigrated from Germany, and these, says Mr.

Eltzbacher, whose figures I am quoting, were more than counterbalanced by immigration into Germany from Austria, Russia, and Italy. It is true that the population of Germany is increasing with immense rapidity, and that the question of expansion is becoming a burning one; but it is a question quite outside the strictly home politics of this unpretending chronicle. We are only concerned with the obvious fact that Germans settle in far countries in much smaller numbers than we do, and that those who go abroad mostly choose the British flag and avoid their own. It does not occur as easily to a German as to an Englishman that he may better his fortunes in another part of the world, or if he is an official that he will apply for a post in Asia or Africa. He wants to stay near the Rhine or the Spree where he was born, and to bring up his children there; and with the help of the State and his wife he contrives to do this on an extraordinary small income. The State, as we have seen, almost takes his children off his hands from the time they are six years old. It brings them up for nothing, or next to nothing; in cases of need it partially feeds and clothes them, it even washes them. Some English humorist has said that a German need only give himself the trouble to be born; his government does the rest. But first his mother and then his wife do a good deal.

They are like the woman in Proverbs who worked willingly with her hands, rose while it was night, saw well to the ways of her household, and ate not the bread of idleness.

I have before me the household accounts of several German families living on what we should call small incomes; and they show more exactly than any vague praise can do the prodigies of thrift accomplished by people obliged to economise, and at the same time to present a respectable appearance. The first one is the budget of a small official living with a wife and two children in a little town where a flat on the fourth or fifth floor can be had at a low rent:--

s. d.

Rent 20 0 0 Fuel 3 10 0 Light 1 10 0 Clothes for the man 3 0 0 Clothes for the wife 2 0 0 Clothes for the children 1 0 0 Boots for the man 1 0 0 Boots for the wife and children 1 5 0 Repairs to boots 0 17 6 Washing and house repairs 3 0 0 Doctor 2 0 0 Newspaper 0 12 0 Charwoman 3 0 0 Taxes 2 10 0 Postage 1 4 0 Insurances 2 10 0 Amus.e.m.e.nts 3 0 0 Housekeeping 45 0 0 Sundries 3 1 0 ----------- 100 0 0 ===========

The fuel allowed in this budget consists of 30 cwt. of _Steinkohlen_ at 1 mark 15 pf. the cwt., 30 cwt. of _Braunkohlen_ at 70 pf. the cwt., and 4 cwt. of kindling at 1 mark 10 pf. the cwt. This quant.i.ty, 3 tons without the kindling, would have to be used most sparingly to last through a long rigorous German winter, as well as for cooking and washing in summer. The amount set apart for lights allows for one lamp in the living room and two small ones in the pa.s.sage and kitchen. The man may have a new suit every year, one year in winter and the next year in summer, and his suit may cost 2, 10s. His great-coat also is to cost 2, 10s., but he can't have a new suit the year he buys one, and it should last him at least four years. The ten shillings left is for all his other clothes except boots, and presumably for all his personal expenses, including tobacco, so he had better not spend it all at once. His wife performs greater miracles still, for she has to buy a winter gown and a summer gown, a hat and gloves, for her 2.

These are not fancy figures. The miracle is performed by tens of thousands of German women every year. They buy a few yards of cheap stuff and get in a sewing-woman to make it up, for as a rule they are not nearly as clever and capable as Englishwomen about making things for themselves. Your English maid-servant will buy a blouse length at a sale for a few pence, make it up smartly, and wear it out in a month of Sundays. Your German she-official will have a blouse made for her, and it will probably be hideous; but she will wear it so carefully that it lasts her two years. Under-raiment she will never want to buy, as she will have brought a life-long supply to her home at marriage.

You easily figure the children who are dressed on twenty marks a year, the girl in a shoddy tartan made in a fashion of fifty years ago with the "waist" hooked behind, and the boy in some snuff-coloured mixture floridly braided. But the interesting revelation of this small official budget is in its carefully planned fare made out for a fortnight in summer and a fortnight in winter. In winter the _Hausfrau_ may spend about 17s. a week on her food and in summer 19s.