Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

Now I must take issue with most American travelers in Germany during the armistice that the general attitude of courtesy was either pretense, bidding for favor, or “propaganda” directed by those higher up. In the first place, a great many Germans did not at that date admit that the upstarts who had suddenly risen to power were capable of directing their personal conduct. Moreover, I have met scores of persons who were neither astute enough nor closely enough in touch with those outlining national policies to take part in any concerted plan to curry favor with their conquerors. I have, furthermore, often successfully posed as a German or as the subject of a friendly or neutral power, and have found the attitude toward their enemies not one whit different under those circumstances than when they were knowingly speaking to an enemy.

There were undoubtedly many who deliberately sought to gain advantage by wearing a mask of friendliness; but there were fully as many who declined to depart from their customary politeness, whatever the provocation.

Two national characteristics which revolution had not greatly altered were the habit of commanding rather than requesting and of looking to the government to take a paternal attitude toward its subjects. The stern Verboten still stared down upon the masses at every corner and angle. It reminded one of the sign in some of our rougher Western towns bearing the information that “Gentlemen will not spit on the floor; others must not,” and carrying the implication that the populace cannot be intrusted to its own instincts for decency. If only the German could learn the value of moral suasion, the often greater effectiveness of a “Please” than of an iron-fisted “Don’t”! Perhaps it would require a new viewpoint toward life to give full strength to the gentler form among a people long trained to listen only to the sterner admonition. The great trouble with the verboten attitude is that if those in command accidentally overlook verboting something, people are almost certain to do it. Their atrophied sense of right and wrong gives them no gage of personal conduct. Then there is always the man to be reckoned with who does a thing simply because it is verboten—though he is rarely a German.

It is in keeping with this commanding manner that the ruling class fails to give the rank and file credit for common horse sense. Instead of the Anglo-Saxon custom of trusting the individual to take care of himself, German paternalism flashes constantly in his face signs and placards proffering officious advice on every conceivable subject. He is warned to stamp his letters before mailing them, to avoid draughts if he would keep his health; he is verboten to step off a tramcar in motion, lest he break his precious neck, and so on through all the possibilities of earthly existence, until any but a German would feel like the victim of one of those motherly women whose extreme solicitude becomes in practice a constant nagging. The Teuton, however, seems to like it, and he grows so accustomed to receiving or imparting information by means of placards that his very shop-windows are ridiculously littered with them. Here an engraved card solemnly announces, “This is a suit of clothes”; there another asserts—more or less truthfully—“Cigars—to smoke.” One comes to the point of wondering whether the German does not need most of all to be let alone until he learns to take care of himself and to behave of his own free will. Then he might in time recognize that liberty is objective as well as subjective; that there is true philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon contention that “every man’s home is his castle.” Perhaps he is already on his way to that goal. There were promising signs that Germany is growing less streng than she used to be, more easy-going, more human—unless what seemed to be that was the merely temporary apathy of under-nourishment.

The war had made fewer changes in the public and business world of the Fatherland than in Allied countries. Pariserplatz and Französischestrasse retained their names. Down in Munich the finest park was still the Englische Garten. Most American stocks were quoted in the newspapers. One might still get one’s mail—if any arrived—through the American Express Company, though its banking business was in abeyance. The repertoire of the once Royal Opera included the works of Allied composers, given only in German, to be sure, but that was the custom even before the war. Shopkeepers of the tourist-baiting class spoke English or French on the slightest provocation—often with provoking insistence. I found myself suddenly in need of business cards with which to impress the natives, and the first printing-shop furnished them within three hours. When I returned to the capital from one of my jaunts into the provinces with a batch of films that must be developed and delivered that same evening, the seemingly impossible was accomplished. I suggested that I carry them off wet, directly after the hypo bath, washing and drying them in my hotel room in time to catch a train at dawn. Where a Frenchman or an Italian would have thrown up his hands in horror at so unprecedented an arrangement, the amenable Teuton agreed at once to the feasibility of the scheme. Thus commerce strode aggressively on, irrespective of the customer’s nationality, and with the customary German adaptability.

Some lines of business had, of course, been hard hit by the war. There was that, for instance, of individual transportation, public or private. Now and then an iron-tired automobile screamed by along Unter den Linden, but though the government was offering machines as cheaply as two thousand marks each, the scarcity and prohibitive price of “benzine” made purchasers rare. In the collections of dilapidated outfits waiting for fares at railway stations and public squares it was a question whether horse, coachman, or carriage was nearest to the brink of starvation. The animals were miserable runts that were of no military use even before the scarcity of fodder reduced them to their resemblance to museum skeletons. The sallow-faced drivers seemed to envy the beasts the handful of bran they were forced to grant them daily. Their vagabond garb was sadly in keeping with the junk on wheels in which they rattled languidly away when a new victim succumbed to their hollow-eyed pleading. Most of Berlin seemed to prefer to walk, and that not merely because the legal fares had recently been doubled. Taxis might have one or two real rubber tires, aged and patched, but still pumpable; the others were almost sure to be some astonishing substitute which gave the machine a resemblance to a war victim with one leg—or, more exactly, to a three-legged dog. The most nearly successful Ersatz tires were iron rims with a score of little steel springs within them, yet even those did not make joy-riding popular.

On this subject of Ersatz, or far-fetched substitutes for the real thing, many pages might be written, even without trespassing for the moment on the forbidden territory of food. The department stores were veritable museums of Ersatz articles. With real shoes costing about sixty dollars, and real clothing running them a close race, it was essential that the salesman should be able to appease the wrathful customer by offering him “something else—er—almost as good.” The shoe substitutes alone made the shop-windows a constant source of amazement and interest. Those with frankly wooden soles and cloth tops were offered for as little as seven marks. The more ambitious contraptions, ranging from these simple corn-torturers improved with a half-dozen iron hinges in the sole to those laboriously pieced together out of scraps of leather that suggested the ultimate fate of the window-straps missing from railway carriages, ran the whole gamut of prices, up to within a few dollars of the genuine article. Personally, I have never seen a German in Ersatz footwear, with the exception of a few working in their gardens. But on the theory of no smoke without some fire the immense stocks displayed all over the country were prima-facie evidence of a considerable demand. Possibly the substitutes were reserved for interior domestic use—fetching styles of carpet slippers. On the street the German still succeeded somehow in holding his sartorial own, perhaps by the zealous husbanding of his pre-war wardrobe.

Look where you would you were sure to find some new Ersatz brazenly staring you in the face. Clothing, furniture, toys, pictures, drugs, tapestries, bicycles, tools, hand-bags, string, galoshes, the very money in your pocket, were but imitations of the real thing. Examine the box of matches you acquired at last with much patience and diplomacy and you found it marked, “Without sulphur and without phosphorus”—a sad fact that would soon have made itself apparent without formal announcement. The wood was still genuine; thanks to their scientific forestry, the Germans have not yet run out of that. But many of their great forests are thinned out like the hair of the middle-aged male—and the loss as cleverly concealed. There has been much Teutonic boasting on this subject of Ersatz, but since the armistice, at least, it had changed to wailing, for even if he ever seriously believed otherwise the German had discovered that the vast majority of his laborious substitutes did not substitute.

As we are carefully avoiding the mention of food, the most grievous source of annoyance to the rank and file of which we can speak here is the lack of tobacco. In contrast with the rest of the country there were plenty of cigars in Berlin—apparently, until one found that the heaps of boxes adorning tobacconists’ windows were placarded “Nur leere Kisten,” or at best were filled with rolls of some species of weed that could not claim the most distant relationship to the fragrant leaf of Virginia. I indulged one day, before I had found the open sesame to the American commissary, in one of the most promising of those mysterious vegetables, at two marks a throw. The taste is with me yet. American officers at the Adlon sometimes ventured to leave food-supplies in the drawers of their desks, but their cigars they locked in the safe, along with their secret papers and real money. In the highest-priced restaurant of Berlin the shout of, “Waiter, bring two cigarettes!” was sure to focus all eyes on the prosperous individual who could still subject his fortune to such extravagance. Here and there along Friedrichstrasse hawkers assailed passers-by with raucous cries of “English and American tobacco!” Which proved not only that the German had lost all national feeling on this painful subject, but that the British Tommy and the American doughboy had brought with them some of the tricks they had learned in France.

These street-corner venders, not merely of the only real tobacco to be publicly had in Berlin, but of newspapers, post-cards, and the like, were more apt than not to be ex-soldiers in field gray, sometimes as high in rank as Feldwebels. Many others struggled for livelihood by wandering like gipsies from one cheap café to another, playing some form of musical instrument and taking up collections from the clients, often with abashed faces. Which brings us to the question of gaiety in Berlin. Newspapers, posters, and blazing electric signs called constant attention to countless café, cabaret, cinema, and theater entertainments. Every one of them I visited was well filled, if not overcrowded. On the whole they were distinctly immoral in tone or suggestion. Berlin seems to be running more and more to this sort of thing. There is something amiss in the country whose chief newspaper carries the conspicuous announcement: “Nakedness! Fine artistic postals now ready to be delivered to the trade,” or with the city where scores of street-corners are adorned by crowds of men huddled around a sneaking vender of indecent pictures. Similar scenes offend the eye in most large cities the world over, of course, but something seemed to suggest that Berlin was unusually given to this traffic. The French claim that theirs is at heart the moral race and that the Boche is a leader in immorality, and they cite many instances of prisoners found in possession of disgusting photographs as one of the proofs of their contention. Peephole shows were not the least popular of the Berliner’s evening amusements. His streets, however, were far freer of the painted stalkers by night than those of Paris, and the outcasts less aggressive in their tactics. Gambling, and with it the police corruption that seems to batten best under the democratic form of government, was reported to be growing apace, with new “clubs” springing up nightly. Under the monarchy these were by no means lacking, but they were more “select,” more exclusive—in other words, less democratic. Even the government had taken on a Spanish characteristic in this respect and countenanced a public lottery, ostensibly, at least, for the benefit of “sucklings.”