Immorality and Obscenity
GARD now descended unwittingly into one of the darkest regions of German life, and one which foreign publics had persistently missed or voluntarily overlooked in their chorus of approbation of the race.
It is a familiar dictum that one can judge of a nation pretty fairly by the position and treatment of its women. Kirtley had never, in America, heard anything about Deutschland in this light. But he soon found in Saxony that this was only one of the numerous German topics on which little publicity was shed in his homeland in spite of the general emphasis laid on German preëminence. This emphasis was mainly a diffusion, through mere books of information, about achievements and an extraordinary condition of learned mentality. Of the actual inhabitants beyond the Rhine, ignorance was kept widespread. German femininity was assumed to be of a predominating excellence to match that of German masculinity.
No study of a people is indeed complete without an unglossed inquiry into its conduct toward its women and children. To say that the German's business traits are the same and as reputable as those of other races, is below the mark. In this secular domain he is compelled to deal and to act within the accepted formulæ of trade. To do otherwise would be to ostracize himself.
But he is in no such competition or is subject to no such exactions in his attitude toward his own women and children. With them he does as he pleases and his real nature stands forth. These truly vital matters have been passed over as if unnoticed by the world, as has been said, and still it wonders why it cannot learn what the German is—does not understand him. He is, perhaps more than anyone, what he is toward his own inferiors—toward those who are weaker and dependent.
The question of German womanhood and girlhood should not therefore be blinked by the earnest contemplator. It was not long before Gard was saying to himself that if Americans could be made to realize the status of womankind in Deutschland, they would not be so lured by the idea of sending their young folk thither for education. There would be a marked decline in their generous enthusiasm for all things German. In what civilized land does woman lead less in lofty, sublimated power or put a fainter stamp on the talents of the race? German art, music, poetry, language, politics, education, all are distinctively masculine. The Teuton woman merely partakes of the life of man, the ideal. She does not assume to lead him. She would seem so far below par that, as Gard had seen, even flirtation scarcely exists in Deutschland. Flirtation is particularly a custom among equals.
When he returned Friedrich's visits as promised, he found him sharing the room of his friend Karl Messer. Messer was a successful architect who had already secured a Government commission while the equally youthful Kirtley—may it be repeated—had not begun real life and, according to the American plan, could do nothing very well. Those two room-mates and cronies were leading the typical Teuton existence of youths who combined proficient work with a frank sensuality accompanied, of course, by much imbibing in the German way. And it may be preliminarily noted that what explorations Gard afterward made in this great and seamy side of Teuton nature, likewise ended in a downward direction toward depths that he had scarcely thought possible in the educated human.
Von Tielitz and Messer had been at an uproarious ball the night before and were idling about, recuperating. They had accomplished the ruin there of two girls, which they looked upon as truly manly sport. Assuming that Kirtley, as must be the case with all young men, was equally interested with them in being satyrs, they lost no time in trying to entertain him with their adventures.
The pursuit of woman! In Germany this is not very difficult, as she is not visibly unhappy to consider herself the legitimate prey of the lordly sex. This idea runs naturally and powerfully throughout the Teuton scheme. It is not merely that the female is considered to have a price, but the price must be low, if not a cypher. To German women the triumphant male is a splendid creature. His acts are noble. To be hungry, thirsty, sensual are proper, and therefore candid, attributes in man. In order to subdue the earth, the race must be prolific, and to be prolific, desires must not be limited or weakened by pale Puritanisms. That men are normally uncleansed sewers from which the face need not be averted, was a conception Kirtley's senses had fallen somewhat foul of in the Bucher home. To what point this aspect was carried logically outside Villa Elsa, he was to realize in skirting the openly sensual sides.
The two Germans told of the various girls who had lived with them when in college. For the frank amatory life of the Teuton student begins early. Von Tielitz and Messer also boasted of their present-day mistresses who were so often changed for reasons of economy. The hilarious game, as Gard learned, was to obtain favors in exchange for nothing as far as possible. Trickery, lies, abuse, kicks, were employed to this purpose. Female chastity? A fable for the impotent. Consequently all was fair.
Sisters of their respected fellows were inferentially appraised and colloquially "hefted" as articles of social commerce ready to be knocked off matrimonially to the best bidder under the material rules of the German Mitgift system. Through the garish films of innuendo and braggadocio that day Kirtley was led to behold images of these daughters as if they were languishing to become mates and beating their breasts in their longing to become mothers. He had by no means now forgotten Friedrich's equivocal remarks about Elsa.
Before Gard was to leave Deutschland he had to conclude that the German puts himself in the attitude of thinking of his women as sluttish and accordingly acting in that scale toward them. There is no great gilding to these fancies. Girls are small inspiration to him compared with what the petites dames are to the amorous Frenchman. Idealization of love in its ultimate fulfillment, the poetizing of the ardent flesh crying out for its craving mate, are characteristically ignored by the Teuton who seeks the baser gratifications without illuminations of loveliness or hesitations of delicate refinement.
Kirtley thought he knew young men, yet this revolting capacity in them in Germany was proven to him to be not unnormal by its openness and by the dearth of any loud voices in rebuke. The German is conspicuously full of animal spirits. He affects the mighty in physique. Exudations and emanations are frank and prominent functions.
Under the Kaiser the Berlin dame who rented rooms to the foreign student, offering them "with" or "without," meaning sometimes her own daughter in the bargain, considered herself respectable enough. More than this she acted in line with what appeared to be the purpose of acquiring a sympathetic control of the morals as well as the minds of the alien sojourner, the one being accompanied by a pandering to his lower nature with the doors of vice flagrantly ajar while the other armed his mentality with a Teutonized equipment and outlook. To sap the will, to galvanize the mind as from a German electric battery, palsied resistance to aggressive Germania. It was of a piece with that propaganda which the world was not to wake up to until almost too late.
These downright animal phases pointed the way logically, in Gard's mind, to that obscenity which is interwoven in the German civilization. He had first come across such evidence in leading comic journals. The drawings and jests that did not leave much to be filled out, adorned many a German page with an Adamic candor. It divorced him from Simplicissimus and Ulk, not that he was squeamish or a Miss Priscilla, but he saw no fun in that sort of thing.
He talked of it later with Anderson. Though there were pleasant delusions in Anderson's mind about Germany before he arrived, it was not his fault if few seemed to be left after his seven years. He bluntly defined the limited German wit and humor as characteristically born of the latrine.
Gard's two young friends did not refrain from talk in the key of indecency. Their complacent revelation of the extent to which the pornographic enters into the German scene, suggested an unclosed Priapean volume whose companion in America is as a sealed book. Kirtley heard that stores filled with obscene objects publicly for sale were to be found on frequented thoroughfares in German cities.
He saw that Frau Bucher's insistence on a chaperone, which he had regarded a silly, outworn conventionality, appeared most wise. Germany was a poor place for an unguarded German girl.
This ran through his mind:
"Great Guns! What a country for me to study for the ministry, study morality, best fit myself for life, as advised by Rebner and, it seems—everybody!"