Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

The city itself was as astonishingly placid in the midst of what an outsider would have supposed to be exciting times. Being not only in a state of siege, but having just heard that it was soon to transfer its allegiance to another race, one was justified in expecting a town as large as Trenton or San Antonio to show at least some ripples on its surface. I looked for them in vain. It was Sunday, just the day for popular demonstrations in Germany, yet not only was there no sign whatever of rejoicing among the Polish population, but nothing even suggesting the uprising of protest among the German residents which had been so loudly prophesied. The place resembled some New England factory town on the same day of the week. Groups of Polish-looking young men, somewhat uncomfortable and stiff in their Sunday best, lounged on the street-corners, ogling the plump Polish girls on their way to church. Strollers seemed interested only in keeping to the shaded side of the street, youths and children only in their games. Tramways rumbled slowly along as usual—and, before I forget it, their female conductors wore breeches; such shops as were habitually open on Sunday seemed to be doing their customary amount of business. The whole town was as staid, heavy, and unenthusiastic as the German character.

In the face of a wide divergence of opinion among its own inhabitants it was hard for a stranger to decide which of the two races predominated in Bromberg. The Germans asserted that only 40 per cent. of the population were Poles, and that many of them preferred to see things remain as they were. The Poles defied any one to find more than twenty Germans among every hundred inhabitants, or to point out a single member of their race who sincerely wished to keep his allegiance to the Fatherland. Street and shop signs were nearly all in German, but that may have been due to legal requirement. The rank and file of the populace had a Polish look, yet they seemed to speak German by choice. Moreover, there is but scant difference of appearance between Teutons and Poles, particularly when they have lived their entire lives together in the same environment. On the wall of a church I dropped into during morning service there were five columns of names, forty-five each, of the men who had “Patriotically sacrificed their lives for a grateful Fatherland.” At least one half of them ended in “ski,” and in one column alone I counted thirty unquestionably Polish names. But then, it was a Catholic church, so there you are again. Perhaps the most unbiased testimony of all was the fact that the little children playing in the park virtually all spoke Polish.

I drifted into conversation with an intelligent young mechanic taking his Sunday ease in a Bierhalle. He turned out to be a Pole. As soon as he was convinced of my identity he shed his mask of commonplace remarks and fell to talking frankly and sincerely. I do not speak Polish, hence the rulers of Bromberg might have been startled to hear the statements that were poured into my ear in their own tongue. Yet my companion discussed their shortcomings and the war they had waged, quite openly, with far less circumspection than a similar criticism of the powers that be would have required in France or the United States at the same date.

“You don’t hear much Polish on the streets, do you?” he began. “But if I could take you into the homes you would find that the street-door is the dividing line between the two tongues. In the family circle we all stick to the old language, and the memory of the ancient nation that is just being resurrected has never been obscured. We are not exactly forbidden to speak Polish in public, but if we do we are quite likely to be thumped on the head, or kicked in the back, or called “dirty Polacks.” Besides, it is never to our advantage to admit that we are Poles. You never know, when you meet a man, whether he is one or not. I feel sure the waiter there is one, for instance, yet you see he carefully pretends to understand nothing but German. We are treated with unfair discrimination from the cradle to the grave. When I first went to public school I could not speak German, and there was hardly a day that a gang of little Deutschen did not beat me to tears. I used to go home regularly with lumps as big as walnuts on my head. Even the teacher whipped us for speaking Polish. When it came time to go to work we could only get the hardest and most poorly paid jobs. The railways, the government offices, all the better trades were closed to us. If we applied for work at a German factory, the first thing they asked was whether we were Catholics and Poles. In the courts a “ski” on the end of a name means a double sentence. Our taxes were figured far more strictly than those of the Germans. In the army we are given the dirtiest jobs and most of the punishments. At the front we were thrown into the most dangerous positions.

“The Germans could have won the Poles over if they had done away with these unfair differences and treated us as equals. They are an efficient people and some of their ways are better than our ways, but they cannot get rid of their arrogance and their selfishness. They are short-sighted. I spent four years at the front, yet I never once fired at the enemy, but into the air or into the ground. The majority of Poles did the same thing. You can imagine the ammunition that was wasted. There is not much work at home, yet you will not find one Pole in a hundred of military age in the German volunteer army. You see many of them in uniform on the streets here—all those redheaded young fellows are Poles—but that is because they are still illegally held under the old conscription act. Shortsightedness again, for if trouble ever starts, the garrison will eat itself up without any one outside bothering with it. No Pole of military age can get into the province of Posen, not even if he was born there. In Berlin there are thousands of young Poles wandering around in uniform, half starved, with nothing to do, yet who are not allowed to come home.

“No, there has been very little mixture of the two races. Intermarriage is rare. I know only one case of it among my own acquaintances. It is not the German government that is opposed to it—on the contrary—but the Church, and Polish sentiment. The Catholics are against the old order of things and want a republic; it is the Protestants who want the Kaiser restored”—here one detected a religious bias that perhaps somewhat obscured the truth. “The old-German party wants to fight to the end. If they had their say Poland would never get the territory that has been awarded her. Sign? Of course they will sign. They are merely stalling, in the hope of having the blow softened. Nor will the government that accepts the treaty be overthrown. The Social Democrats are strong, very strong; they will sign and still live. The Poles? With very few exceptions they are eager to join the new empire. Paderewski has become a national hero. Especially are the peasants strong for the change. For one thing, it will fatten their pocketbooks. The Germans pumped them dry of everything. They had to deliver so many eggs per hen, buying them if the fowls did not lay enough. Or the guilty hen had to be turned over for slaughter. It usually went into the officers’ messes. Each farmer was allowed only one rooster. The same exactions ruled among all the flocks and herds. Thousands of girls were sent into the pine forests to gather pitch for turpentine. No, I do not believe they were mistreated against their will, except perhaps in a few individual cases, no more than would happen anywhere under similar circumstances. Nor do I think the Germans wantonly destroyed trees by ‘ringing’ them. What they did, probably, was tap them too carelessly and too deep.

“All this talk about Bolshevism overspreading Germany is nonsense. The Bolshevists are poor, simple fellows who have nothing to lose and perhaps something to gain, many of them Chinese laborers brought to Russia in the time of the Czar, fatalists who think nothing of throwing their lives away—or of taking those of others. The other day the Bolshevists decreed in one of the cities they have captured that the bourgeois should move out into the outskirts and the proletariat take all the fine houses. Then they named a ‘poor day’ during which any one who had no shoes could go into all the houses and take a pair wherever he found two pairs. Can you imagine the orderly, plodding Germans subscribing to any such doctrine as that? I certainly cannot, for I have lived all my life among them and I know how they worship Ordnung and Gemütlichkeit.

“Yes, we have several Polish newspapers published here in Bromberg. But even if you could read them it would not be worth your while, for they do not mean what they say. They are doctored and padded and censored by the German authorities until the only reason we read them is for the local gossip of our friends and acquaintances. If it were not Sunday I would take you to meet the editor of one of them, and you would find that he speaks quite differently from what he writes in his paper, once he is sure he is not talking to a German spy.”

The mechanic told me all this without once showing the slightest evidence of prejudice or bitterness against the oppressors of his race. He treated the matter with that academic aloofness, that absence of personal feeling, which I had so often been astounded to see the Germans themselves display toward the woes that had come upon them. Perhaps a lifelong grievance grows numb with years, perhaps it is less painful when swaddled in calm detachment, perhaps, the temperamental Polish character takes on a phlegmatic coating in a German environment. At any rate, all those groups of youths that lounged on the street-corners, ogling the girls as they passed on their way homeward from church, had a get-along-with-as-little-trouble-as-possible-seeing-we-can’t-avoid-it manner toward the still somewhat arrogant Germans that made Bromberg outwardly a picture of peace and contentment.

The half-dozen Teuton residents with whom I talked seemed rather apathetic toward the sudden change in their fortunes. The shopkeepers, with one exception, announced their intention of continuing business in Bromberg, even if it became necessary to adopt Polish citizenship. The exception was of the impression that they would be driven out, and was not yet making any plans for the future. A station guard, on the other hand, denounced the decision of Paris with a genuine Prussian wrath. “Every railway employee is armed,” he asserted, “and die Polacken will not get anything that belongs to the Fatherland without a struggle. It is absurd,” he vociferated, “to expect that we will surrender a genuine German city like Bromberg to a lot of improvident wastrels. Let them keep the part about Posen and south of it; there the Poles are in the majority. But here”—as usual, it seemed, the section to which they were entitled was somewhere else.