Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

Cinematographic entertainments which do not bear witness to the earnestness of the times; all horse-races and similar public sporting activities.

Gambling clubs are to close, and to remain closed also after the 16th until further notice.

There was no clause demanding that Germany fast or reduce her consumption of food to the minimum; she had long been showing that evidence of national sorrow without the necessity of a formal command.

VII
“GIVE US FOOD!”

Now then, having fortified ourselves for the ordeal, let us take a swift, running glance at the “food situation” in Berlin. That we have escaped the subject thus far is little short of miraculous, for it is almost impossible to spend an hour in the hungry capital without having that burning question come up in one form or another. The inhabitants of every class, particularly the well-to-do, talked food all the time, in and out of turn. No matter what topic one brought up, they were sure to drift back to that. Their best anecdotes were the stirring adventure of getting a pound of butter or (’Sh!) where they had found a half-pound of cocoa for sale. The women were always discussing some kind of Ersatz food, how it tasted or how nearly it comes to tasting, how to make it up in the least unappetizing manner, where (Now, keep this strictly to yourself!) one could get it for only a few times at a fair price. It is curious how one’s thoughts persist in sticking to food when one hasn’t enough of it. I soon found myself thinking of little else, and I am by no means a sybarite or an epicurean. Most of Germany was hungry, but Berlin was so in a superlative degree. No one seemed to escape comparative famine or to have strength of will enough to avoid discussion of the absorbing topic of the hour. When I called on Südermann at his comfortable residence in the suburb of Grunewald he could not confine his thoughts to drama or literature, or even to the “atrocious” peace terms for more than a sentence or two before he also drifted back to the subject of food—how hungry he had been for months; how he had suffered from lack of proper nourishment during a recent convalescence; how he had been forced to resort to Schleichhandel to keep himself and his sick daughter alive.

Loose-fitting clothing, thin, sallow faces, prominent cheekbones, were the rule among Berliners; the rosy complexions and the fine teeth of former days were conspicuous by their scarcity. The prevailing facial tint in the city was a grayish-yellow. “Why, how thin you are!” had become taboo in social circles. Old acquaintance meeting old friend was almost sure to find his collar grown too large for him. Old friend, perhaps, did not realize that sartorial change in his own appearance, his mirror pictured it so gradually, but he was quick to note a similar uncouthness in the garb of old acquaintance. In the schoolroom there were not red cheeks enough to make one pre-war pair, unless the face of a child recently returned from the country, shining like a new moon in a fog, trebled the pasty average. Every row included pitiful cases of arrested development, while watery eyes turned the solemn, listless gaze of premature old age on the visitor from every side. The newspapers of Berlin were full of complaints that pupils were still required to attend as many hours and otherwise strive to attain pre-war standards. It was “undemocratic,” protested many parents, for it gave the few children of those wealthy enough to indulge in Schleichhandel an unfair advantage over the underfed youngsters of the masses. Even adults condoled with one another that their desire and ability to work had sunk to an incredibly low level. “Three hours in my office,” moaned one contributor, “and my head is swirling so dizzily that I am forced to stretch out on my divan, dropping most pressing affairs. Yet before the war I worked twelve and fourteen hours a day at high pressure, and strode home laughing at the idea of fatigue.”

It was perfectly good form in Berlin for a man in evening dress to wrap up a crust of black bread and carry it away with him. Even in the best restaurants waiters in unimpeachable attire ate all the leavings—in the rare cases that there were any—on their way back to the kitchen. I have already mentioned the constant munching of wretched lunches by theater audiences. The pretense of a meal on the stage was sure to turn the most uproarious comedy into a tear-provoking melodrama. Playwrights avoided such scenes in recent works; managers were apt to “cut them out” when offering the older classics. The Berliner suffered far more from the cold than in the bygone days of plenitude. Two or three raw spells during the month of May, which I scarcely felt myself, found thousands buttoned up in one and even two overcoats, and wrapped to their noses in mufflers. The newspapers were constantly publishing “hunger sketches”; the jokesters found the prevailing theme an endless source of sad amusement. “There are many children of four who have never tasted butter,” remarked one paragrapher; “some hardly know what meat is; no one of that age has ever tasted real bread.” A current joke ran: “How old is your sister?” “I don’t know,” replied the foil, “but she can still remember how bananas taste.” A cartoonist showed a lean and hollow-eyed individual standing aghast before a friend whose waistcoat still bulged like a bay-window—where he found him in Berlin is a mystery—with the caption, “Mein lieber Karl, you must have been getting some of that famous American bacon!” Those food-supplies from America, so incessantly announced, were a constant source both of amusement and of wrath in Germany, not wholly without reason, as I shall show before I have done with this distressing subject.

There was a suggestion of the famine victims of India in many German faces, particularly among the poor of large cities and in factory districts. In a social stampede such as that surging through Germany for the past year or two those who get down under the hoofs of the herd are the chief sufferers. The poor, the sick, whether at home or in hospitals, the weak, the old, the less hardy women, and the little children showed the most definite evidence of the efficiency of the blockade and of the decrease in home production. On the streets, especially of the poorer districts, the majority of those one passed looked as if they ought to be in bed, though many a household included invalids never seen in public. Flocks of ragged, unsoaped, pasty-skinned children swarmed in the outskirts. Even such food as was to be had by those in moderate circumstances contained slight nourishment, next to none for weaklings and babies; while the most hardy found next morning that very little of it had been taken up by the body. Hasty visitors to Berlin, well supplied with funds, who spent a few days in the best hotels, often with the right to draw upon the American or Allied commissaries, or with supplies tucked away in their luggage, were wont to report upon their return that the hunger of Germany was “all propaganda.” Those who lived the unfavored life of the masses, even for as short a time, seldom, if ever, confirmed this complacent verdict. There were, of course, gradations in want, from the semi-starvation of the masses to the comparative plenty of the well-to-do; but the only ones who could be said to show no signs whatever of under-nourishment were foreigners, war profiteers, and those with a strangle-hold on the public purse.

The scarcity of food was everywhere in evidence. Almost no appetizing things were displayed to the public gaze. The windows of food-dealers were either empty or filled with laborious falsehoods about the taste and efficacy of the Ersatz wares in them. Slot-machines no longer yielded a return for the dropping of a pewter coin. Street venders of anything edible were almost never seen, except a rare hawker of turnips or asparagus—Spargel, for some reason, seemed to be nearly plentiful—who needed not even raise their voices to dispose of their stock in record time. It was no use dropping in on one’s friends, for even though the welcome were genuine, their larder was sure to be as scantily garnished as one’s own.

The distribution of such food as remained was carried on with the elaborate orderliness for which the German has long been noted. All Berlin bloomed with posters advising those entitled to them where they could get six ounces of marmalade on such a day, or four pounds of potatoes on another date. The newspapers gave up much of their space to the Lebensmittelkalender, or “food calendar,” of Berlin, the capital being divided into hundreds of sections, or “commissions,” for the purposes of distribution: