I had an apartment for seven years in Munich and spent six or eight months alternately in that delightful city and traveling in Europe, passing a month or two in England, or returning for an equal length of time to my own country. During that long residence in Germany I naturally met many of its inhabitants, and of as many classes as possible. German women do not tell you the history of their lives the first time you meet them, not by any means; they are naturally secretive and the reverse of frank. But they are human, and when you have won their confidence they will tell you surprising things. The confidences I received were for the most part from girls, and one and all assured me they never should marry. Having grown up under one House Tyrant, for whom they were not responsible, why in heaven's name should they deliberately annex another? Far, far better bear with the one whose worst at least they knew (and who could not live forever), than marry some man who might be loathsome as well as tyrannical, and who, unless there happened to be a war, might outlive them?
The idea in my novel of the four Niebuhr girls and their initial rebellion was suggested to me by a family of Prussian junkerdom that I met at a watering place in Denmark. The baroness was a charming woman who used a moderate invalidism in a smiling imperturbable fashion to insure herself a certain immunity from the demands of her autocratic lord. The girls were lively, intelligent, splendidly educated. They were in love with society and court functions, but deeply rebellious at the attitude of the German male, and determined never to marry. That is to say the three younger girls; the oldest had married a tame puppy, and anything less like a tyrant I never beheld. No American husband could be more subservient. But there was no question that he belonged to a small exceptional class: while his wife, with all the dominating qualities of her father, was one of a rapidly increasing number of German women, silently but firmly rebellious.
The Herr baron was a typical Prussian aristocrat and autocrat. The girls could hardly have had less liberty in a convent. When they came from their hotel to mine he escorted them over and often came in. Luckily he liked me or I never should have had the opportunity to know them as well as I did. Nor should I have been able to continue the acquaintance after the day I wickedly induced them to run away with me to Copenhagen, where we shopped, promenaded all the principal streets, then took ices on the terrace of one of the restaurants. When we returned he was storming up and down the platform of the station, and he fairly raved at the girls. "And you dared, you dared, to go to Copenhagen, without permission, without your mother, without me!" The girls listened meekly, but whenever he wheeled laughed behind his military back. Then he turned on me, but I called him a tyrant and gave him my opinion of his nonsensical attitude generally. As I was not his daughter he gradually calmed down and seemed rather to relish the tirade. Finally they all came over to my hotel to tea.
"You see!" said one of the girls to me afterward. "I have not exaggerated. Do you think I want another like that?" And, so far as I know, they have never married.
I did not draw any of my characters on these four delightful girls, but took the episode as a foundation for the incidents and characters that grew under my hand after I got round to the story.
The episode of Georg Zottmyer was also told me by a German girl whom I got to know very well in Munich, and who distantly suggested the character of Gisela (that is to say in the very beginning. As Gisela developed she became more like her own legendary Brunhilda).[[1]]
This young woman was as independent in her life and in her ideas as any I ever met in England or the United States. But fortune had been kind to her. Her father died just after her education was finished, and as he left little money, she went to Brazil as governess in a wealthy family. She remained in South America for several years, gaining, of course, poise and experience. Then a relative died and left her a comfortable fortune. When I met her she was living in Munich from choice, like so many other Germans who were bored with routine and rigid class lines.
She was a beautiful young woman, with dark hair and eyes and a brilliant complexion, and dressed to perfection, although she wore no stays. This may have been a bit of vanity on her part, as the awful reformkleid was in vogue, and fat German women were displaying themselves in lumps and creases and billows and sections that rolled like the untrammelled waves of the sea. Her own figure was so firmly molded and so erect and supple that it was, for all her fashionable clothes, quite independent of the corset. She had charming manners combined with an imperturbable serenity, and always seemed faintly amused. On the other hand, she displayed none of the offensive German conceit and arrogance.
We spent several days together at Partenkirchen, one of the most picturesque spots in the Bavarian Alps, and as we were both good walkers, and there was no one else in the hotel who interested us, we became quite intimate. She was one of the first to talk to me about the deep discontent and disgust of the German women, and of her own utter contempt for the meek hausfrau type, and for the tyrannies, petty, coarse, often brutal, of the man in his home. Nothing, she was determined, would ever tempt her to marry, and she could name many others who were making an independent life for themselves, although, lacking fortune, often in secret. No matter how much she might fancy herself in love (and I imagine that she had had her enlightening experiences) she would not risk a lifelong clash of wills with a man who might turn out to be a medieval despot.
It was then that she told me of the tentative proposal of one of her beaux (she had many) "Georg Zottmyer," which I have recorded almost literally in the scene between this passing character and Gisela in the Café Luitpolt. My object in doing so was to give as realistic an impression as possible of what the German woman is up against in dealings with her male. I knew Zottmyer personally, and he interested me the more (as one is interested in a bug under a microscope) because he had less excuse for his conceit and arrogance than most German men: he was brought up in California, where his father is a successful doctor. But that only seemed to have made him worse. He returned to Germany as soon as he was of age, more German than the Germans, and despising Americans.