Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

Business in the market-gardening line had fallen off chiefly because of the scarcity of seeds and fertilizers. Then there was the ever more serious question of labor. Old women who had gladly accepted three marks for toiling from dawn until dark ten years before received eleven now for scratching languidly about the gardens a bare eight hours with their hoes and rakes. Male help had begun to drift back since the armistice, but it was by no means equal to the former standard in numbers, strength, or willingness. On top of all this came a crushing burden of taxation. When all the demands of the government were reckoned up they equaled 40 per cent. of the ever-decreasing income. The war had brought one advantage, though it was as nothing compared to the misfortunes. For generations two or three members of the family had spent six mornings a week, all summer long, at the market-place in the heart of town. Since the fall of 1914 not a sprig of produce had been carried there for sale; clamoring women now besieged the gate of the establishment itself in far greater numbers than the gardens could supply.

The hardship of the past four years was not the prevailing topic of conversation in the household, however, nor when the subject was forced upon them was it treated in a whining spirit. Most of the family, like their neighbors, adroitly avoided it, as a proud prize-fighter might sidestep references to the bruises of a recent beating. Only the mother could now and then be drawn into specifying details of the disaster.

“Do you see the staging around our church there?” she asked, drawing me to a window one morning after I had persisted some time in my questions. “They are replacing with an Ersatz metal the copper that was taken from the steeple and the eaves. Even the bells went to the cannon-foundries, six of them, all but the one that is ringing now. I never hear it without thinking of an orphan child crying in the woods after all the rest of its family has been eaten by wolves. Ach! What we have not sacrificed in this fight to save the Fatherland from our wolfish enemies! We gave up our gold and our silver, then our nickel and our copper, even our smallest pots and pans, our aluminum and our lead, our leather and our rubber, down to the last bicycle tire. The horses and the cows are gone, too—I have only goats to milk now. Then the struggles I have had to keep the family clothed! Cloth that used to cost fifty pfennigs a meter has gone up to fifteen marks, and we can scarcely find any of that. Even thread is sold only against tickets, and we are lucky to get a spool a month. We are far better off than the poor people, too, who can only afford the miserable stuff made of paper or nettles. America also wants to destroy us; she will not even send us cotton. And the wicked Schleichhandel and profiteering that go on! Every city has a hotel or two where you can get anything you want to eat—if you can pay for it. Yet our honest tickets are often of no use because rascals have bought up everything at wicked prices. If we do not get food soon even this Handarbeiter government will recommence war against France, surely as you are sitting there. The young men are all ready to get up and follow our generals. The new volunteer corps are taking on thousands every day. Ach! The sufferings of these last years! And now our cruel enemies expect our poor brave prisoners to rebuild Europe. But then, I have no right to complain. At least my dear own boy was not taken from me.”

The son, whom we will call Heinrich, I had last seen as a child in knickerbockers. Now he was a powerful, two-fisted fellow of twenty-one, with a man’s outlook on life. Having enlisted as a Freiwilliger on his sixteenth birthday, at the outbreak of the war, he had seen constant service in Russia, Rumania, and in all the hottest sectors of the western front, had been twice wounded, twice decorated with those baubles with which princes coax men to die for them, and had returned home with the highest non-commissioned rank in the German army. What struck one most forcibly was the lack of opportunity offered such men as he by their beloved Fatherland. In contrast with the positions that would have been open to so promising a youngster, with long experience in the command of men, in America, he had found nothing better than an apprenticeship in the hardware trade, paying forty marks for the privilege and bound to serve three long years without pay. Like nearly all the young men in town, from grocery clerks to bankers’ sons, he still wore his uniform, stripped of its marks of rank, not out of pride, but because civilian clothing was too great a luxury to be indulged, except on Sundays. I was surprised, too, at the lack of haughtiness which I had fancied every soldier of Germany felt for his calling. When I made some casual remark about the gorgeous spiked helmet he had worn, with its Prussian and Mechlenburger cockades, which I took for granted he would set great store by to the ends of his days, he tossed it toward me with: “Here, take the thing along, if you want it. It will make a nice souvenir of your visit.” When I coaxed him outdoors to be photographed in his two iron crosses, he would not put them on until we had reached a secluded corner of the garden, because, as he explained, the neighbors might think he was boastful.

“I should gladly have died for the Fatherland,” he remarked, as he tossed the trinkets back into the drawer full of miscellaneous junk from which he had fished them, “if only Germany had won the war. But not for this! Not I, with no other satisfaction than the poor fellows we buried out there would feel if they could sit up in their graves and look about them.”

There were startling changes in the solemn, patriarchal attitude toward life which I had found so amusing, yet so charming, in the simple people of rural Germany at the time of my first visit. The war seemed to have given a sad jolt to the conservative old customs of former days, particularly among the young people. Perhaps the most tangible evidence of this fact was to see the daughters calmly light cigarettes, while the sternly religious father of ten years before, who would then have flayed them for sneezing in church, looked idly on without a sign of protest. They were still at bottom the proper German Fräuleins of the rural middle class—though as much could not be said of all the sex even in respectable old Schwerin—but on the surface there were many of these little tendencies toward the Leichtsinnig.

When it came to discussions of the war and Germany’s conduct of it, I found no way in which we could get together. We might have argued until doomsday, were it fitting for a guest to badger his hosts, without coming to a single point of agreement. Every one of the old fallacies was still swallowed, hook and line. If I had expected national disaster to bring a change of heart, I should have been grievously disappointed. To be sure, Mechlenburg is one of the remotest backwaters of the Empire, and these laborious, unimaginative tillers of the soil one of its most conservative elements. They would have considered it unseemly to make a business of thinking for themselves in political matters, something akin to accepting a position for which they had no previous training. There was that to arouse pity in the success with which the governing class had made use of this simple, unquestioning attitude for its own ends. One felt certain that these honest, straightforward victims of premeditated official lies would never have lent a helping hand had they known that the Fatherland was engaged in a war of conquest and not a war of defense.

Here again it was the mother who was most outspoken toward what she called “the wicked wrecking of poor, innocent Germany.” The father and the children expressed themselves more calmly, if at all, though it was evident that their convictions were the same. Apparently they had reached the point where further defense of what they regarded as the plain facts of the situation seemed a waste of words.

“I cried when the armistice was signed,” the mother confided to me one day, “for it meant that our enemies had done what they set out to do many years ago. They deliberately planned to destroy us, and they succeeded. But they were never able to defeat our wonderful armies in the field. England starved us, otherwise she would never have won. Then she fostered this Bolshevismus and Spartakismus and the wicked revolution that undermined us at the rear. But our brave soldiers at the front never gave way: they would never have retreated a yard but for the breakdown at home.”

She was a veritable mine of stories of atrocities by the English, the French, and especially the Russians, but she insisted there had never been one committed by the Germans.