Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

In many districts of Germany the traveler’s eye was frequently drawn, during the hectic spring of 1919, to a large colored poster. It showed two men; the one cold, gaunt, and hungry, huddled in the rags of his old uniform, was shuffling through the snow, with a large, dismally gray city in the background; the other, looking well nourished and cheerful, wearing a comfortable new civilian suit, was emerging from a smoke-belching factory and waving gaily in the air a handful of twenty-mark notes. Under the picture ran the device: “Don’t go to Berlin! There every one is hungry and you will find no work. Instead, go to the nearest government employment office”—the address of the most convenient being added.

Despite this and many similar efforts on the part of the authorities and private agencies, people kept crowding into the capital. Not even a personal appeal from his new “Reichspräsident” Ebert to the ordinarily laborious and persistent German to remain at home and keep at work, rather than to try to better his lot by this vain pilgrimage, succeeded in shutting off the Berlinward stream of discontented humanity. War and social disorders seem always to bring this influx into the national metropolis, the world over. It is man’s nature to wander in search of happiness when he is not happy, seldom recognizing that he is carrying his unhappiness with him and that it is but slightly dependent upon the particular spot he inhabits. In this case the general misery was largely due to the gnawings of hunger, and surely Berlin, in the year of grace 1919, was the last place in all Germany in which to seek alleviation from that particular misfortune. Yet the quest of the rainbow end went hopefully on, until the tenements of the capital were gorged with famished provincials and her newspapers teemed with offers of substantial rewards to any one who would furnish information of rooms, apartments, or dwelling-houses for rent.

That Berlin was hungry was all too evident, so patent, in fact, that I feel it my duty to set down in a place apart the gruesome details of famine and warn the reader to peruse them only in the presence of a full-course dinner. But the overcrowding was at first glance less apparent. Indeed, a superficial glimpse of the heart of Prussianism showed it surprisingly like what it had been a decade before. The great outdoor essentials were virtually unaltered. Only as one amassed bit by bit into a convincing whole the minor evidences of change, as an experienced lawyer pieces together the scattered threads of circumstantial proof, did one reach the conclusion that Berlin was no longer what she used to be. Her great arteries of suburban railways, her elevated and underground, pulsated regularly, without even that clogging of circulation that threatened the civic health of her great temperamental rival to the west. Her shops and business houses seemed, except in one particular, well stocked and prosperous; her sources of amusement were many and well patronized. Her street throngs certainly were not shabby in appearance and they showed no outward signs of leading a hampered existence. True, they were unusually gaunt-featured—but here we are encroaching on ground to be explored under more propitious alimentary circumstances.

Of the revolution, real or feigned, through which it had recently passed, the city bore surprisingly few scars. Three or four government buildings were pockmarked with bullet-holes that carried the mind back to “election” days in the capitals of tropical America; over in Alexanderplatz the bricks and stones flaunted a goodly number of shrapnel and machine-gun wounds. But that was all, or almost all, the proof of violence that remained. The palaces of the late Kaiser stood like abandoned warehouses; the Reichstag building was cold and silent, testifying to a change of venue for the government on trial, if not of régime. Yet it could not, after all, have been much of a “revolution” that had left unscathed those thirty-two immense and sometimes potbellied images of the noble Hohenzollerns, elaborately carved in stone, which still oppressed the stroller along the Sieges Allee in the otherwise pleasant Tiergarten. The massive wooden Hindenburg at the end of it, a veritable personification of brute strength from cropped head to well-planted feet, stared down upon puny mankind as of yore, though, to be sure, he looked rather neglected; the nailing had never been completed and the rare visitors passed him by now without any attempt to hammer home their homage. Farther on that other man of iron gazed away across the esplanade as if he saw nothing in this temporary abandonment of his principles to cause serious misgivings.

But perhaps all this will in time be swept away, for there were signs pointing in that direction. The city council of Berlin had already decreed that all pictures and statues of the Hohenzollerns, “especially those of the deposed Kaiser,” must be removed from the public halls and schoolrooms. That of itself would constitute a decided change in the capital. In these first days of May several hundred busts and countless likenesses of Wilhelm II and his family had been banished to the cellars of municipal buildings, not, be it noted, far enough away to make restoration difficult. “Among the busts,” said one of the local papers, “are some of real artistic value”—I cannot, of course, vouch for the esthetic sense of the editor—“as for example the marble ones of Kaiser Wilhelm I and of Kaiser Friedrich III, which for many years have adorned the meeting-place of the Municipal Council itself.” For all this there was no lack of graven images of the discredited War Lord and his tribe still on exhibition; the portraits “adorning” private residences alone could have filled many more cellars. It would be difficult to eradicate in a few brief months a trade-mark which had been stamped into every article of common or uncommon use.

In return for these artistic losses the city was taking on new decorations, in the form of placards and posters unknown in kaiserly days. To begin with, there were the violent representations in color of what the Bolshevists were alleged to perpetrate on the civil population that fell under their bloody misrule, which stared from every conspicuous wall unprotected by the stern announcement that bill-posting was verboten. These all ended with an appeal for volunteers and money to halt “the menace that is already knocking at the eastern gates of the Fatherland.” Then there were the more direct enticements to recruits for newly formed Freicorps—“the protective home guard,” their authors called it—usually named for the officer whose signature as commander appeared at the bottom of the poster. Even the newspapers carried full-page advertisements setting forth the advantages of enrolling in the independent battalion of Major B—— or the splendid regiment of Colonel S——, a far cry indeed from the days of universal compulsory service. “If you will join my company,” ran these glowing promises, after long-winded appeals to patriotism, “you will be commanded by experienced officers, such as the undersigned, and you will be lodged, fed, and well paid by the government. What better occupation can you find?” These were the freiwillige bands that composed the German army of 1919, semi-independent groups, loosely disciplined, and bearing the name of some officer of the old régime. They may not constitute an overpowering force, but there is always the possibility that some man of magnetism and Napoleonic ambition may gather them all together and become a military dictator. Besides, there is still the trickery of militaristic Germany to be reckoned with, genius for subterfuge that will cover up real training under the pretense of police forces, of turnvereins and of “athletic unions.”

Thus far these omnipresent appeals did not seem to have met with overwhelming success. The soldiers guarding Berlin were virtually all boys of twenty or under; the older men were probably “fed up with it.” Nor did the insolent Prussian officer of former days any longer lord it over the civilian population. He had laid aside his saber and in most cases his uniform, and perhaps felt safer in his semi-disguise of “civies” as he mingled with the throng. Military automobiles carrying stiff-necked generals or haughty civilians in silk hats still occasionally blasted their way down Unter den Linden as commandingly as ever did the Kaiser, but they were wont to halt and grow very quiet when the plebeian herd became dense enough to demand its right of way.

Before we leave the subject of posters, however, let us take a glimpse at those appealing for aid to the Kriegs und Zivilgefangenen which inundated the city. The picture showed a group of German prisoners, still in their red-banded caps and in full uniform—as if the ravages of time and their captors had not so much as spotted a shoulder-strap—peering sadly out through a wire barricade. It was plain to see that some German at home had posed for the artist, the beings he depicted were so pitifully gaunt and hungry in appearance. I have seen many thousand German prisoners in France, and I cannot recall one who did not look far better nourished than his fellow-countrymen beyond the Rhine, more full of health, in fact, than the civilian population about the detention camps. They may regret leaving comparative abundance for their hungry Fatherland, when the day of exodus finally comes. But the Germans at home were greatly wrought up about their eight hundred thousand prisoners. Many had convinced themselves that they would never be returned; the general impression of their sad lot brought continuous contributions to the boys and girls who rattled money-cans in the faces of passers-by, even those who wore an Allied uniform, all over Berlin. Stories of the mistreatment of prisoners were quite as current and fully as heartrending in Germany as they were on the other side of the battle-line. Apparently captives are always mishandled—by the enemy, and too well treated on the side of the speaker, a phenomenon even of our own Civil War. I have no personal knowledge of the lot of Allied prisoners of war in Germany, but this much is certain of those wearing the field gray—that the French neglected them both as to food and work; that the British treated them fairly in both matters, and that the Americans overfed and underworked them. But it was a hopeless task to try to convince their fellow-countrymen that they were not one and all suffering daily the tortures of the damned.

Perhaps the greatest surprise that Berlin had in store for me was the complete safety which her recent enemies enjoyed there. With German delegates to the Peace Conference closely guarded behind barbed wire in Versailles, and German correspondents forbidden even to talk to the incensed crowds that gathered along those barriers, it was astounding to find that American and Allied officers and men, in full uniform, wandered freely about the Prussian capital at all hours. Doughboys were quite as much at home along Unter den Linden as if they had been strolling down Main Street in Des Moines. Young Germans in iron hats guarded the entrance to the princely Adlon, housing the various enemy missions, but any one who chose passed freely in or out, whatever his nationality, his business or lack thereof, or his garb. Olive drab attracted no more attention in Berlin than it did in Coblenz. German chauffeurs drove poilus and their officers about the streets as nonchalantly as if they had been taxi-drivers in Paris. To be sure, most uniformed visitors stuck rather closely to the center of town, but that was due either to false impressions of danger or to lack of curiosity—and perhaps also to the dread of getting out of touch with their own food-supply. For as a matter of experience they were fully as safe in Berlin as in Paris or New York—possibly a trifle more so—they seemed to run less risk of being separated, legally or forcibly, from their possessions. The hair-raising tales which correspondents poured out over the wires via Copenhagen were chiefly instigated by their clamoring editors and readers at home. Let a few random shots be fired somewhere in the city and the scribes were at ease for another day—and the world gasped once more at the bloody anarchy reigning in Berlin, while the stodgy Berliner went on about his business, totally oblivious of the battle that was supposed to be seething about him.

In January, 1919, a group of American officers entered one of the principal restaurants of Berlin and ordered dinner. At that date our olive drab was rare enough in the capital to attract general attention. A civilian at a neighboring table, somewhat the worse for bottled animosity, gave vent to his wrath at sight of the visitors. Having no desire to precipitate a scene, they rose to leave. Several German officers sprang to their feet and begged them to remain, assuring them that the disturber would be silenced or ejected. The Americans declined to stay, whereupon the ranking German apologized for the unseemly conduct of an ill-bred fellow-countryman and invited the group to be his guests there the following evening.