Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

All classes of the Polish population were represented in the new army from the bulking countryman who ran after me to say that the photograph I had just taken of him would not be a success because he had not been looking at the lens during the operation to the major who granted me special permission to use my kodak in spite of military rules. This officer had been late in reaching his office, and I passed the time in his anteroom in conversation with his sergeant-major. When he entered at last the entire office force sprang to its feet with what in an older army would have been an exaggeration of discipline. The sergeant-major, his middle finger glued to the seams of his trousers, explained my presence and request. The major asked several questions in Polish, which the sergeant repeated to me in German, relaying my replies back to the major in his native tongue. When the latter had nodded his approval and disappeared, and the office force had relaxed into mere human beings, I expressed my surprise that an officer of such high rank knew no German.

“Knows no German!” cried the sergeant-major, bursting into laughter. “The major was for nine years a captain in the German army. He is a graduate of the War College in Berlin and was a member of Hindenburg’s staff. But he never lets a word of the accursed tongue pass his lips if he can possibly avoid it.”

The new Polish government had established a conscription act as drastic as if it had been taken bodily from the old German statute-books. All males between the ages of seventeen and forty-five were liable to service. Those between eighteen and thirty had already been called to the colors, though thus far German residents had been tacitly exempted. Every afternoon of my stay in Poznan a hundred or two of recruits, flower-bedecked and carrying each his carton of travel rations, marched in column of squads from the railway station to what had once been the Kaiser’s barracks, singing as they went some rousing Polish song of the olden days. At least half of them wore more or less complete German uniforms. Some were so under-sized that a rifle in their hands would have resembled a machine-gun. But with few exceptions their military bearing testified to previous training under the exacting drill-sergeants of their former rulers. Watching this new addition each day to the hordes in uniform that already crowded the city, one could not but wonder whether the new Poland was not giving refuge, perhaps unconsciously, to the discredited spirit of militarism that had so recently been expelled from its German Fatherland.

The “revolution,” or “Putsch,” as the Poles call it, that brought about all this new state of affairs had been brief and to the point. Paderewski, relying, perhaps, on Germany’s promise to help re-establish the ancient Polish Kingdom, had come to Posen for the Christmas holidays. The hotel he occupied had been decorated with the flags of the Allies. It is scarcely surprising that the Germans proceeded to tear them down in spite of the armistice that had recently been concluded. According to several observers, they might even have “got away with” this had they not persisted in their Prussian aggressiveness. On December 27th a Polish youth paused to ask another for a light from his cigarette. Matches had long been precious things in Posen. A German officer pounced upon the pair and demanded to know what conspiracy they were hatching together. The Polish youths quite properly knocked him down. Their companions joined in the fracas. The Polish turnvereins had long had everything prepared for just such an eventuality. Word swept like prairie fire through the city. French and Italian prisoners of war sprang to such arms as they could lay hands on and added their assistance. The soldiers of the garrison, being chiefly Poles or of Polish sympathies, walked out almost in a body and joined the revolt. It raged for twenty-four hours. In the words of the sergeant-major already introduced: “It was a busy day from four in the morning until the following dawn. At least sixty ribs were broken—mostly German ones.” There have been bloodier revolutions, however, for the number killed is set at ten. The Polish leaders were soon masters of the situation. In three days they had established order. Their search for arms was thorough and included Polish as well as German houses. The government they had already established in secret soon tautened the reins that had been struck from the hands of the Germans, and by New Year’s Day Poznan had already settled down to peace and to a contentment it had not known in more than a century.

As far, at least, as outward appearances go, there was nothing particularly oppressive about the new rule. Civilians were not permitted on the streets after midnight, but those with any legitimate excuse for night-hawking were granted special passes. The Poles showed a tendency to meet half-way their next-door neighbor and late oppressor. With the exception of a few “Polen-fresser,” German residents were not driven out, as in Metz and Strassburg. Boche merchants continued to do business at the old stand. Newspapers published in Germany were refused admittance, but that was a fair retaliation for similar action by the new authorities of the late Empire. Even the detested statues were not overthrown until March, when the Germans declined to give the Poles port facilities at Danzig. The language of the schools, as well as of government offices, was changed to Polish; but as soon as Berlin consented to a reciprocal arrangement, German was restored to the curriculum, though it was taught only a few hours a week, as a foreign tongue. In short, the conditions of Bromberg had been nicely reversed in Poznan. It must, to be sure, have been rather a tough life for the town braggart who had always espoused the German cause; but there was apparently nothing to be feared by those who know how to hold their tongues and confine their attention to their own affairs—and the German is a past-master at lying low when it is to his interest to do so. His native tongue was almost never heard on the streets, such arrogance as existed was confined now to the Poles, and the just-let-us-alone-and-we’ll-be-good rôle had been assumed by the Teutons.

There were suggestions, however, that the Poles were not yet adepts at governing, nor likely soon to establish a modern Utopia. Already they had succeeded in encumbering themselves with fully as much red-tape as the French. A musician as national leader and rallying-point seemed to be in keeping with the Polish temperament. There was a lack of practical directness in their methods, a tendency toward the erratic, at the expense of orderly progress. One of their foremost business men turned high official, to whom I applied for a signature and the imprint of a government stamp, received me with a protest that he was “too busy to breathe”—and spent two hours reciting Polish poetry to me and demonstrating how he had succeeded in photographing every secret document that had reached Posen during the war without being once suspected by the Germans. “I am not experienced in this business of government,” he apologized, when I succeeded at last in taking my leave, “but I am ready to sacrifice myself and all I have to the new Poland.”

The statement rang true in his case, but there were others whose repetition of it would have raised grave suspicions that they were putting the cart before the horse. The rush for government jobs under the new régime had in it something of the attitude of the faithful henchmen toward the periodical return to power of their beloved Tammany. There were tender reminiscences of the A. E. F. in the flocks of incompetent pretty girls who encumbered government offices, dipping their charming noses into everything except that which concerned them, as there was in the tendency on the part of both sexes to consider government transportation synonymous with opportunity for “joy-riding.” It will be strange if the Polish servant-girls and factory hands who come to us in the future bring with them the accept-anything spirit of the past, at least after the period of orientation to their new environment is over. They are “feeling their oats” at home now and will be apt to set their worth and their rights to full equality correspondingly higher.

The Poles, evidently, are not by nature a frolicsome people, but they seemed to have thrown away the “lid” in Poznan and given free play to all the joy within them. Pianos were more in evidence than they had been during all the twenty months I had spent in war-torn Europe. Children appeared to have taken on a new gaiety. Night life was almost Parisian, except in the more reprehensible features of the “City of Light.” It may have been due only to a temporary difference of mood in the two races, but Polish Poznan struck me as a far more livable place than German Berlin. Evidently the people of the provinces were not letting this new attractiveness of the restored city escape them; the newspapers bristled with offers of reward for any one giving information of apartments or houses for rent. Underneath their merriness, however, the religious current of the race still ran strong and swift. The churches discharged multitudes daily at the end of morning mass; no male, be he coachman, policeman, soldier, or newsboy, ever passed the crucifix at the end of the principal bridge without reverently raising his hat. There are Protestant Poles, but they apparently do not live in Poznan. Now and again, too, there were episodes quite the opposite of gay to give the city pause in the midst of its revelry—the drunken sots in uniform, for instance, who canvassed the shops demanding alms and prophesying the firing-squad for those who declined to contribute. Were they not perhaps the outposts of Bolshevism? But all this was immersed in the general gaiety, tinged with a mild Orientalism that showed itself not only in the architecture, but in such leisurely customs as closing shops and offices from one to three, in defiance of nearly a century and a half of the sterner German influence.

It is quite possible that the increased liveliness of the Poznanians was as much due to the fact that they had plenty to eat as to their release from Teutonic bondage. The two things had come together. Being perhaps the richest agricultural district of the late Empire, the province of Posen was quick to recover its alimentary footing, once its frontiers had been closed against the all-devouring German. With the exception of potatoes, of which the supply was well in excess of local needs, the exportation of foodstuffs toward the hungry West had absolutely ceased. The result was more than noticeable in Poznan; it was conspicuous, all but overpowering, particularly to those arriving from famished Germany. Street after street was lined with a constant tantalization to the new-comer from the West, arousing his resentment at the appetite that was so easily satisfied after its constant vociferations in days gone by—and still to come. Butcher shops displayed an abundance of everything from frankfurters to sides of beef. Cheese, butter, eggs by the bushel, candy, sugar, sweetmeats were heaped high behind glass fronts that would have been slight protection for them in Berlin. In what were now known as “restauracya” one might order a breakfast of eggs, bacon, milk, butter, and all the other things the mere mention of which would have turned a German Wirt livid with rage, without so much as exciting a ripple on the waiter’s brow. At the rathskeller of Poznan’s artistic old city hall a “steak and everything,” such a steak as not even a war-profiteer could command anywhere in Germany, cost a mere seven marks, including the inevitable mug of beer and the “10 per cent. for service” that was exacted here also by the Kellners’ union. With the low rate of exchange—for Poznan was still using German money—the price was considerably less than it would have been in New York at the same date. Far from being short of fats, the Poles were overgenerous with their grease and gravies. Bacon could be had in any quantity at six marks a pound; eggs at thirty pfennigs each. Bread, brown but excellent, was unlimited. Food-tickets, unknown in hotels and restaurants, were theoretically required for a few of the principal articles in the shops, but there was little difficulty in purchasing without them, at least with the payment of a slight “premium.” On market-days the immense square allotted to them was densely crowded from corner to corner by curiously garbed female hawkers and countrymen offering every conceivable product of their farms and gardens. Poznan still consumed a few things that do not appear on the American bill of fare, such as doves, gull eggs, and various species of weeds and grasses; but the fact remains that the well-to-do could get anything their appetites craved, and the poor were immensely better off than in any city of Germany. There was only one shortage that irked the popular soul. Expression of it rang incessantly in my ears—“Please tell America to send us tobacco!” The queues before tobacconists’ shops were as long and as persistent as in Germany. Ragged men of the street eagerly parted with a precious fifty-pfennig “shin-plaster” for a miserable “cigarette” filled for only half its length with an unsuccessful imitation of tobacco. The principal café, having husbanded its supply of the genuine article, placed a thousand of them on sale each evening at eight, “as a special favor to our clients.” By that hour entrance was quite impossible, and though only two were allowed each purchaser, there was nothing but the empty box left five minutes later.

Unselfishness is not one of mankind’s chief virtues, particularly in that chaos of conflicting interests known to the world as central Europe. In view of all they had won in so short a time, and amid the German shrieks of protest, it was disconcerting to find that the Poles were far from satisfied with what had been granted them by the Peace Conference. From high government officials to the man in the street they deluged me with their complaints, often naïvely implying that I had personally had some hand in framing the terms of the proposed treaty, or at least the power to have them altered before it was too late. They were dissatisfied with the western frontier that had been set for them, especially in West Prussia; they were particularly disgruntled because they had not been given Danzig outright. A nation of thirty million people should have a harbor of its own. Danzig was essentially Polish in its sympathies, in spite of the deliberate Germanization that had been practised upon it. Strangely enough they accused America of having blocked their aspirations in that particular. They blamed Wilson personally for having shut them out of Danzig, as well as for the annoying delay in drawing up the treaty. The Germans had “got at him” through the Jews. The latter had far too much power in the American government, as well as in American finances. The impression was wide-spread in Poznan that Mrs. Wilson is Jewish. The Germans and the Jews had always stuck together. Poland had always been far too lenient with the Jews. She had let them in too easily; had granted them citizenship too readily. As they spoke either Yiddish, an offshoot of German, or Russian, they had always lined up with the enemies of Poland. Half the German spies, every one of the Russian spies with whom Polish territory had been flooded during the war, had been Jews. The Poles in America had gathered money for the alleviation of suffering in their home-land, and had given it to Jews, Germans, and Poles, irrespective of race. The Jews in America had collected similar funds and had expended them only among the Jews. From whatever point of view one approached him, the resident of Poznan had nothing good to say of the Chosen People.