Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

“Militarism,” said a mason who had one crippled leg left, yet who chatted with me in an equally friendly manner both before and after he had learned my nationality, “was our national sport, as football is in England, and whatever you play most is in America. Now we have discovered that it is not a very pleasant sport. We have a nose full of it! Yet we cannot sign this peace. If a man has a thousand marks left and a footpad says to him: ‘I am going to take this away from you. Kindly sign this statement to the effect that you are giving it to me freely. I shall take it, anyway, but we will both be better off if I have your consent,’ what would you expect the man to do? Let the Allies come to Berlin! We cannot go to war again, but—the people must stand behind the government!”

Just what he meant by the last assertion was not entirely clear; but at least the first half of the assertion was frequently borne out by little hints that all but escaped the eye. Thus, a large bookstore in Berlin bore the meaningful placard, “War Literature at Half Price!”

“From this date” (May 8th), gasped an important Berlin daily, “we drop to a fourth-rate power, along with Spain.” (There were, to be sure, some Spanish suggestions in the uncleanliness, the apathy, the run-down condition of buildings that had suffered five years of disrepair, in the emaciated beggars one occasionally saw in the Germany of 1919.) “With this ‘peace’ we are down and out; we can never get on our feet again. There is not wealth enough in all Germany to pay this indemnity and still save ourselves. We can never recover because we can never buy the raw materials we must have to do so. There is nothing left in the country with which to pay for these raw stuffs except our labor, and we cannot set to work because we have no raw stuffs to work with. We are caught in the whirlpool! It is a fallacy to think that we shall save money on our army. The army we have to-day costs us far more than the one we had when the armistice was signed. If we are required to have an army of volunteers only and pay them as good wages as they now require ... to-day one soldier costs us more than thirty did under the old system! And what soldiers! We shall not be able to compete with the world, first of all because the exchange on the mark will make our raw materials cost us three times what they do our rivals, and then we have these new eight-hour laws and all the rest of the advance socialistic program, which they do not have in other countries. The Allies should have hunted out the guilty individuals, not punish us all as a nation, as an incompetent captain punishes his entire company because he is too lazy or too stupid to catch the actual wrong-doers. In twenty years Germany will have been completely destroyed. All the best men will have emigrated. If we try to spend anything for Kultur—that excellent heritage of the old régime which our enemies so falsified and garbled—for working-men’s insurance, new schools, municipal theaters, even for public baths, the Allies will say, ‘No, we want that money ourselves; you owe us that on the old war game you lost.’ In that case all we can do is to resort to passive resistance”—a strange German occupation indeed!

The little blond German “ace of aces,” credited with bringing down some twoscore Allied airmen, hoped to come to America and play in a circus. He put little faith in the rumor that he might not be received there, and thought that if there really was any opposition it could easily be overcome by getting one of our large “trusts” to take a financial interest in his case. In fact, the chief worry of many Germans seemed to be whether or not and how soon they would be allowed to come to America—North or South. “Rats desert a sinking ship.” One man whose intelligence and experience warranted attention to his words assured me that he belonged to a party that had been working for some time in favor of, and that they found a strong sentiment for—making Germany an American colony! I regret the inability to report any personal evidence to support his statements.

But if the general tone was lacrymose, notes of a more threatening timbre were by no means lacking. “With this ‘peace,’” was one assertion, “we shall have another Thirty Years’ War and all Europe will go over the brink into the abyss.” “We Germans got too high,” mused a philosophic old innkeeper accustomed to take advantage of his profession as a listening-post. “He who does is due for a fall, and we got it. But France is the haughty one now, and she is riding to a cropper. She will rue her overbearing manner, for the revanche is here already—on our side this time. And if French and Germans ever go to war again there will be no prisoners taken!” “If the Germans are forced to sign this ‘peace,’” cried a fat Hollander who had lived much in Germany, “there will be another war within ten years, and all Europe will be destroyed, Holland with the rest, France certainly, for she is tottering already. If they do not sign, we shall all be plunged into anarchy.” “We had looked to Wilson to bring an end to a century-old situation that had grown intolerable,” moaned a Berlin merchant. “Now we must drill hatred into our children from their earliest age, so that in thirty years, when the time is ripe....”

What does Germany plan to do with herself, or what is left of her, now? Does she wish to remain a republic, to return to the Hohenzollerns, or to establish a new monarchy under some other less sinister dynasty? As with so many of the world’s problems, the answer depends largely on the papers one, or those of whom one made inquiries, read. The replies ran the entire gamut. Some asserted that even the heads of the socialistic parties have lost only the symbols of kaiserism, that the masses still keep even those. A majority of the peasant class is probably monarchical, when they are not wholly indifferent to anything beyond their own acres and the price of beer. They seem to like the distant glamour of a glittering pageantry, a ruler to whom they can attribute superman or demigod qualities—so long as the cost thereof is not extracted too openly from their pockets. The Junkers, the old robber barons from Borussia, of course still want a monarchy, probably of Hohenzollern complexion, though the present heir to that bankrupt estate has not a visible friend in the Empire. “The majority still want the Kaiser, or at least a monarchy,” one heard the frequent assertion; “we are not ripe for a republic.”

If I were forced to answer definitely myself I should say that most educated Germans want nothing more to do with the Kaiser and his family. Their reply to a query on this point is most apt to be an energetic, “Ausgeschlossen!” On the question of no monarchy at all they are by no means so decided. Naturally there is still a monarchical class left; there still is even in France. “A vote would probably give a small majority for the monarchy to-day,” said a young psychologist. “I have no politics myself; a psychologist must keep his mind clear of those squabbles, as an engineer must his gears of sand, but at least the Hohenzollerns gave us peace and quiet, and while there were some unpleasant things about their system, they now seem slight in comparison with what the war has brought us.... The German people are really democratic (sic!), but they are also monarchical; they want a paternal government, such as they have been used to during all the living generations. But we shall probably remain a republic now.”

Said the peasant innkeeper already introduced: “The monarchy is probably the best system for us; it fits our mentality and training. But now that we have changed there is no use in changing back again. There is not enough difference between the two schemes of government. So we shall probably stay what we are. The great trouble with this king and prince business”—he lived in Saxe-Weimar, where every seventh man used to wear a crown—“was that it was so übertrieben, so overdone, with us. They demanded such swarms of Beamters, of employees, courtiers, uniforms. And all their petty little nobles! We peasants don’t mind supporting a few such decorations, but.... Now the Kaiser gets eighty thousand marks a year instead of twenty-four million, and I doubt if he is suffering from hunger—which is less than can be said for many of the people he left behind.”

Possibly the most frequently expressed opinion in the length and breadth of Germany was the frank, “It does not much matter what kind of a government we have so long as we can get wise and honest men at the top.” That, after all, is the final answer to the whole problem that has been teasing the world for centuries. “Remember,” smiled a Dutchman, “that this democracy you are shouting about is no new American discovery. We tried a republic centuries ago, and we still have it, though now under a hereditary president called a king—or just now a queen—and we find that works best of all.” “We are like birds just let out of a lifetime cage,” protested a Socialist. “Give us time to try our wings. We shall fly much better two years from now. There was a strong republican feeling in Germany long before the war, but the Kaiser and his crowd ruthlessly strangled it.” “How fair, how revolutionary, how socialistic is the ‘new’ Germany,” raged the Independent Socialists, “is shown by the acquittal of the assassins of Liebknecht and Luxembourg contrasted with the death-sentence of Leviné, who was no more a ‘traitor against the constituted authorities’ than was Hoffmann, who drove him out, or those who upset the monarchy and established the ‘republic.’”

But we must be careful not to let partizan rage, sour grapes, obscure the problem. There has certainly been a considerable change of feeling in Germany; whether a sufficient, a final change remains to be seen. The Germans, whatever their faults, are a foresighted and a deliberate people. They are scanning the horizon with unprejudiced eyes in quest of a well-tested theory of government that will fit their problem. Though they seem for the instant to be inclined to the left, they are really balancing on the ridge between republicanism and monarchy, perhaps a more responsible monarchy than the one they have just cast off, and it will probably not take much to tip them definitely to either side. In the offing, too, Bolshevism is always hovering; not so close, perhaps, as the Germans themselves fear, or are willing to have the world believe, but distinctly menacing, for all that. In things political at least the German is no idealist. Of the rival systems of government he has an eye chiefly to the material advantages. Which one will bring him the most Kultur, in the shape of all those things ranging from subsidized opera to municipal baths with which the Kaiser régime upholstered his slavery? Above all, which will give him the earliest and surest opportunity to get back to work and to capitalize undisturbed his world-famed diligence? Those are his chief questions. I never heard in all Germany the hint of a realization that a republic may be the best form of government because it gives every citizen more or less of a chance to climb to the topmost rung of the ladder. But I did now and then see encouraging signs that the masses are beginning to realize that a people is responsible for the actions of its government just as a business man is responsible for his clerk’s errors—and that is already a long step forward for Germany.