Out of the Parties and Societies run by Jews! Elect no Jews! Elect also no baptized Jews! Elect also none of the so-called “confessionless” Jews! Give your votes only to men of genuine German blood!
DOWN WITH JEWRY!
Though it is violating the chronological order of my tale, it may be as well to sum up at once the attitude of Berlin upon receipt of the peace terms. Four separate times during my stay in Germany I visited the capital, by combinations of choice and necessity. On the day the terms of the proposed treaty were made public apathy seemed to be the chief characteristic of the populace. If one must base conclusions on visible indications, the masses were far less interested in the news from Versailles than in their individual struggles for existence. The talk one heard was not of treaty terms, but of food. Not more than a dozen at a time gathered before the windows of the Lokal Anzeiger on Unter den Linden. They read the bulletins deliberately, some shaking their heads, and strolled on about their business as if they had been Americans scanning the latest baseball scores, a trifle disappointed, perhaps, that the home team had not won. There was no resemblance whatever to the excited throngs of Teuton colonists who had surged about the war maps in Rio de Janeiro during August, 1914. One could not but wonder whether this apathy had reigned in Berlin at that date. Scenes of popular excitement and violence had been prophesied, but for two days I wandered the streets of the capital, mingling with every variety of group, questioning every class of inhabitant, without once hearing a violent word. A few individuals asserted that their opinion of America had been sadly shocked; one or two secretaries of Allied correspondents haughtily resigned their positions. But the afternoon tea at the Adlon showed the same gathering of sleek, well-dressed Germans of both sexes, by no means averse to genial chats with enemy guests in or out of uniform. There was no means of forming definite conclusions as to whether the nation had been stunned with the immensity of the tragedy that had befallen it or whether these taciturn beings had some secret cause for satisfaction hidden away in their labyrinthine minds.
Later I was assured that many had stayed up all night, waiting for the first draft of the terms. Südermann explained the apparent apathy with, “We Germans are not like the French; we mourn in the privacy of our homes, but we do not show our sorrow in public.” Certainly the Boche has none of the Frenchman’s sense of the dramatic, nor his tendency to hysteria. An observer reported that the “epoch-making first meeting of the National Assembly at Weimar opened like the unfinished business of a butchers’ lodge.” Once, during my absence from the capital, there was a flurry of excitement, but nothing to cause me to regret my presence elsewhere. The “demonstration” against the Ally-housing Adlon proved upon my return to have been serious chiefly in the foreign press. At the most genuinely German restaurant the head waiter had on the same date informed an American woman that her guests would no longer be welcome if they came in Allied uniforms, and that English would not be spoken—then took her whispered order in that language behind a concealing palm. Dodgers were dropped from airplanes on the capital one day, protesting against a half-dozen articles of the treaty, demanding the immediate return of German prisoners, and ending with the query, “Shall noble Germans be judged by Serb murderers, Negro states, Japs, Chinese, Siamese?...” Billboards blossomed out with highly colored maps showing the territory that was being “stolen” from the Empire. But the populace seemed to give little attention to these appeals. Ludendorff called the Allied correspondents together and broke the record for short interviews with, “If this is what they mean by Wilson’s Fourteen Points, our enemies can go to hell.” Up to date they have not fully complied with the general’s proposal. Haughty Richard Strauss declined to waste words on his Allied fellow-guests at the Adlon. On May 9th several of the Berlin dailies admitted at last, “We are conquered.” Had their staffs been more efficient they might have shared that news with their readers several months earlier. On the third Sunday in May, when the subject would long since have grown cold among less phlegmatic peoples, I attended a dozen meetings of protest against the peace terms in as many parts of the city. Nothing could have been more ladylike, silent, orderly, and funereal, with the possible exception of the processions that formed after the meetings were over and plodded noiselessly down the shaded length of Unter den Linden.
In the first heat of despair a Trauerwoche, or week of mourning, was decreed throughout the Empire, with the cast-iron fist of dreaded Noske to enforce it, but the nation took it less seriously than its forcible language warranted:
In the time between May 10th and 16th, inclusive, must be postponed:
All public theater and musical representations, plays and similar jovialities, so long as there is not in them a higher interest for art or for science, and unless they bear a serious character. Especially are forbidden:
Representations in music-halls, cabarets, and circuses, musical and similar entertainments in inns and taverns.
All joyful public dances (Tanzlustbarkeiten), as well as social and private dance entertainments in public places or taverns.
All dramatic representations and gaieties in the public streets, roads, squares, and other public places.