Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

This was still manned by a German crew. For every car that left their territory, however, the Poles required that one of the same class and condition be delivered to them in exchange. Several long freight-trains, loaded from end to end with potatoes, rumbled past us on the parallel track. Two hundred thousand tons of tubers were sent to Germany each month in exchange for coal. It was at that date the only commercial intercourse between the two countries, and explained why potatoes were the one foodstuff of comparative abundance even in Berlin. At Biala the station guards were Polish, but there was little indeed to distinguish them from those of Kreuz and Bromberg. Their uniforms, their rifles, every detail of their equipment, were German, except that some of them wore the square and rather clumsy-looking Polish cap or had decorated their round, red-banded fatigue bonnets with the silver double-eagle of the resurrected empire. Many were without even this insignia of their new allegiance, and only the absence of oak-leaves on their collars showed that they were no longer soldiers of the Fatherland.

We halted at Wronki for two hours, which made our departure three hours later, for clocks and watches were turned ahead to correspond with Polish time. Frontier formalities were even more leisurely and disorganized than they had been in Kreuz. The Poles seemed to have something of the amiable but headless temperament of the French. Their officers, too, in their impressive new uniforms with broad red or yellow bands, and their rattling sabers, bore a certain resemblance to children on Christmas morning that did not help to expedite matters under their jurisdiction. They were a bit less “snappy” than the more experienced Germans, somewhat inclined to strut and to flirt, and there were suggestions in their manner that they might not have been horrified at the offer of a tip. When at length my turn had come they found my credentials unsatisfactory. Why had they not been viséed by the Polish consul in Berlin, as well as by the Germans at Frankfurt? I had never dreamed that Berlin boasted a Polish consul. Indeed! Who, then, did I suppose handled the interests of their nation there? However, it was all right. As an American and a fellow-Ally they would let me pass. But I must promise to report at a certain office in Posen within twenty-four hours of my arrival.

Barefoot boys were selling huge slabs of bread and generous lengths of sausage through the car windows. All things are relative, and to the travelers from Germany these “ticket-free” viands of doubtful origin seemed a kingly repast. With every mile forward now it was easier to understand why the loss of the province of Posen had been so serious a blow to the hungry Empire. Here were no arid, sandy stretches, but an endless expanse of rich black loam, capable of feeding many times its rather sparse population. If it had been “pumped dry” by the former oppressors, it was already well on the road to recovery. Wheat, corn, and potatoes covered the flat plains to the horizons on either hand. Cattle and sheep were by no means rare; pigs, goats, ducks, and chickens flocked about every village and farm-house, evidently living in democratic equality with the human inhabitants. There were other suggestions that we were approaching the easy-going East. Men in high Russian boots sauntered behind their draft animals with the leisureliness of those who know the world was not built in a day, nor yet in a year. Churches of Oriental aspect, with steep roofs that were still not Gothic, broke the sameness of the prevailing German architecture. There was something softly un-Occidental in the atmosphere of the great city into which we rumbled at sunset, a city which huge new sign-boards on the station platform stridently announced was no longer Posen, but “Poznan.”

XI
AN AMPUTATED MEMBER

(Posen under the Poles)

The same spirit that had led the Poles to impress so forcibly upon the traveler the fact that the city in which he had just arrived was now called Poznan (pronounced Poznánya) had manifested itself in a thousand other changes. In so far as time had permitted, every official signboard had already been rendered into Polish and the detested German ones cast into outer darkness. Only those familiar with the Slavic tongue of the new rulers could have guessed what all those glitteringly new enameled placards that adorned the still Boche-featured station were commanding them to do or not to do. Every street in town had been baptized into the new faith and gaily boasted that fact on every corner. For a time the names had been announced in both languages, as in Metz; but a month or so before my arrival the radicals had prevailed and the older placards had been abolished. True, in most cases the new ones were merely translations of the old. But what did it help the German resident who had neglected to learn Polish to know that the “Alte Markt” was still the “Old Market” so long as he could not recognize it under the new designation of “Stary Rynek”? Imagine, if you can, the sensation of waking up some morning to find that Main Street has become Ulica Glòwna, or to discover that the street-car you had always taken no longer runs to Forest Park but to Ogrott Lass.

Nothing but the few things that defied quick change, such as post-boxes or names deeply cut into stone façades, had escaped the all-embracing renovation. Indeed, many of these had been deliberately defaced. The cast-iron “Haltestelle der Strassenbahn” high up on the trolley-supports had been daubed with red paint, though they were still recognizable to motormen and would-be passengers. Many business houses had followed the official lead, and private signs were more apt than not to have the German words that had once called attention to the excellence of the wares within crudely effaced or changed to the new tongue. Sometimes it was not merely the language that had been altered, but the whole tenor of the proprietor’s allegiance. A popular underground beer-hall in the heart of town was no longer the “Bismarck Tunnel,” but the “Tunel Wilsona.” German trucks thundering by on their iron tires bore the white eagle of Poland instead of the black Prussian bird of prey. German newspapers were still published, but as the streets they mentioned were nowhere to be found in all Poznan, their advertisements and much of their news were rather pointless. It gave me a curiously helpless feeling to find myself for the first time in years unable to guess a word of the language about me. Fortunately all Poznan still spoke German. Only once during my stay there did I find myself hampered by my ignorance of Polish—when a theater-ticket office proved to be in charge of a pair recently arrived from Warsaw. On more than one occasion my advances were received coldly, sometimes with scowls. But a reply was always forthcoming, and whenever I announced myself an American, who spoke the less welcome of the two tongues by necessity rather than by choice, apology and friendly overtures immediately followed.

Having effaced the lingual reminders of their late oppressors, the Poznanians had proceeded to pay their respects to the bronze heroes they had left behind. The Germans, as is their custom, had littered the public squares with statues of their chief sword-brandishers, in gigantic size—tender reminders to the conquered people of the blessings that had been forced upon them. The downfall of these had been sudden and unceremonious. Some had descended so hastily that the allegorical figures at their feet had suffered the fate so often overtaking faithful henchmen of the fallen mighty. The stone image of an old woman representing “Sorrow” looked doubly sorrowful with broken nose, legs, and fingers. Kaiser Friedrich, Doctor Bismarck with his panacea of “blood and iron,” the world-famed Wilhelm, had all left behind them imposing pedestals, like university chairs awaiting exponents of newer and more lasting doctrines. Here and there a statue had remained, because it was Polish, but these were few and small and tucked away into the more obscure corners.

Next to its change of tongue the most striking feature of the new Poznan was its military aspect. The streets swarmed with soldiers even during the day; in the evening the chief gathering-places became pulsating seas of field gray. For it was still the garb of their former servitude that clothed the vast majority of these warriors of the reborn nation. The silver double-eagle on his service-faded cap was all that was needed to turn a wearer of the German uniform into a soldier of Poland. Many still wore their “Gott mit uns” belt-buckles and their Prussian buttons. A scattering minority, officers for the most part, were conspicuous in the full new Polish uniform—double-breasted, with a forest-green tinge. The high, square cap, distinctive only of the province of Poznan, was more widely in evidence; the less cumbersome headgear of military visitors from Warsaw or Galizia now and then broke the red-banded monotony. But the only universal sign of new fealty was the silver double-eagle. This gleamed everywhere. Men in civilian garb wore it on their hats or in their coat lapels; women adorned their bodices with it; boys and girls proudly displayed it in some conspicuous position. It fluttered on a thousand banners; it bedecked every Polish shop-front; it stared from the covers of newly appeared books, pamphlets, music-sheets in the popular tongue; the very church spires had replaced their crosses with it. One could buy the resurrected insignia, of any size or material, in almost any shop—providing one could produce “legitimation papers” or other proof that it would not be used to disguise a German as a Pole.

An over-abundance of swords tended to give the new army a comic-opera aspect, but this detail was offset by the genuine military bearing of all but a few of the multitude in uniform. The great majority, of course, had had German training. Now, however, they put the “pep” of a new game into the old forms of soldierly etiquette. Their two-finger salute was rendered with the precision of ambitious recruits and at the same time with the exactitude of “old-timers.” They sprang unfailingly to attention at sight of a superior officer and stood like automatons until he turned away. Yet there seemed to be an un-German comradeship between the rank and file and the commissioned personnel, a democracy of endeavor, a feeling that they were all embarked together on the same big new adventure. There were, to be sure, some officers and a few men whose sidewalk manners suggested that they had learned Prussian ways a bit too thoroughly, but they were lost in a mass that had something of the easy-going temperament of the East or the South.