Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

“We Germans lifted the Poles out of their semi-savagery. We brought them Kultur. Do not be deceived by what you see in Posen. It is a magnificent city, is it not?—finer, perhaps, than you Americans found Coblenz? Yet everything that gives it magnificence was built by the Germans—the well-paved streets, the big, wide boulevards, the splendid parks, all the government buildings and the best of the private ones, the street-cars, the electric lights, even the higher state of civilization you find among the masses. There is not a Pole in the province of Posen who cannot read and write. Do not make the mistake of thinking all these things are Polish because the Poles have stolen them. Before you leave, go and compare Posen with the Polish cities outside Germany. That will tell the story. In non-German Poland you will be struck by the appalling lack of schools, roads, doctors, hospitals, education, culture, by the sad condition of the workmen and the peasants—all those things that are included in the German word Kultur. In Galizia, where Austria virtually allowed the Poles to run themselves, the houses are only six feet high, and you could walk all day without finding a man who can read and write, or who can even speak German. Their cities are sunk in a degradation of the Middle Ages. Posen will fall into the same state, if the present Municipal Council continues in power. There are already frontier troubles between German and Russian Poland, and quarrels between the different sections that confirm what we Germans have always known—that the Poles cannot govern themselves. Warsaw does not wish to keep up our splendid system of workmen and old-age insurance because there is none in Russian Poland. Galizia complains that farm land is several times higher in price in the province of Posen, without admitting that it is German railroads and German settlers that have made it so. That advantage will soon disappear. The Poles will make a mess of the whole province and will have it sunk into the degradation in which we found it by the time a real ruling nation takes charge of it again.”

Just how much truth there was mixed in with the considerable amount of patent nonsense in the ex-chairman’s declamation only a long stay in Poznan, or time itself, would show. The fact that the Poles allowed many of these statements, particularly the protests against the sudden change of language, to be published in the local German newspaper speaks at least for their spirit of tolerance. Though the new government was visibly making mistakes, and had not yet settled down to the orderliness that should come from experience, no one but a prejudiced critic could have discovered immediate evidence that it was making any such complete “mess” of matters as the German Volksrat testified. Even if it had been, at least the mass of the population showed itself happy and contented with the change, and contentment, after all, may in time result in more genuine and lasting progress than that which comes from the forcible feeding of German Kultur.

I dropped in at the Teatro Apollo one evening, chiefly to find out how it feels to see a play without understanding a word of it. An immense barnlike building, that looked as if it had once been a skating-rink or a dancing-pavilion, was crowded to suffocation with Poles of every class and variety, from servant-girls in their curious leg-of-mutton sleeves to colonels in the latest cut of Polish uniform. The actors—if they could have been dignified with that title—had recently been imported from Warsaw, and the alleged play they perpetrated could scarcely have been equaled by our silliest rough-and-tumble “comedians.” The herd-like roar with which their inane sallies were unfailingly greeted testified that the audience found them entertaining. But it may be that Poznan was in a particularly simple-minded mood during its first months of relief from a century of bitter oppression. I hope so, for I should regret to find that the startling contrast between this Polish audience and the German one at the artistic Stadttheater the following evening fairly represented the difference between the two races. I believe I am not prejudiced by the fact that the Volksrat presented me with a free ticket when I say that the latter performance was one of which any manager might have been justly proud. The audience, too, resembled the other about as a gathering of college professors resembles a collection of factory hands. There was a well-bred solemnity about it that could not, in this case, have been due merely to hunger, for there was no munching whatever between the acts, none even under cover of the darkened house, except here and there of candy, a luxury so long since forgotten in Berlin that the happy possessor would never have dreamed of giving his attention at the same time to the merely esthetic appeal of the theater. There may have been Poles in the house, but at least the new army was conspicuous by its absence. Not a uniform was to be seen, with the exception of three scattered through the “peanut gallery.” Two crown boxes, destined only for Hohenzollern royalty or its representatives, sat empty, with something of the solemn demeanor of the vacant chair at the head of the table the day after the funeral. Who would occupy them when the Poles had taken over the playhouse? What, moreover, would they do toward maintaining the high standards of the stage before us? For the most indefatigable enemy of the Germans must have admitted that here was something that could ill be spared. If only they had been contented with bringing the masses these genuine benefits, without militarism, with more open competition, without so much appeal to the doctrine of force—but it has ever been Germany’s contention that only by force can the mass of mankind be lifted to higher levels; that only an army can protect the self-appointed missionaries of a loftier civilization.

Armed with what those who read Polish assured me was permission to do so, I set out on foot one morning to the eastward. Beyond the last group of guards wearing the silver double-eagle on their threadbare German uniforms, I fell in with three barefooted Polish peasant women. They were barely thirty, yet all three were already well-nigh toothless, and their hardy forms and faces were plainly marked with the signs that testify to grueling labor and the constant bearing of children. The German they spoke was far superior to the dialects of many regions of purely Teutonic population. Their demeanor was cheerful, yet behind it one caught frequent glimpses of that background of patient, unquestioning acceptance of life as it is which distinguishes the country people of Europe.

The most energetic of the trio showed a willingness to enter into conversation; the others confined themselves to an occasional nod of approval, as if the exertion of keeping pace with us left them no strength to expend in mere words. It was plain from the beginning that they were not enthusiastic on the subject then uppermost in the city behind us. They greeted my first reference to it with expressions that might have been called indifferent, had they not been tinged with evidence of a mild resentment.

“What does it matter to us people of the fields,” retorted the less taciturn of the group, “whether Poles or Germans sit in the comfort of government offices, so long as they let us alone? Things were all right as they were, before the war came. Why trouble us with all these changes? Now they are breaking our backs with new burdens, as if we had not had enough of them for five years. First they take our men and leave us to do their work. I have not a male relative left, except my husband, and he is so sickly that he is no longer a man. He is paid twelve marks for eight hours’ work; fifteen for ten. But what help is that when he cannot work ten hours, or even eight? They offered him the iron cross. He told them he would rather have something to feed his family with at home. They asked him if he was not already getting forty marks a month for the support of his family. How could I feed four children, even after the other two had died, with forty marks a month? For three winters I had nothing but dried potatoes and salt. I could not have bread for myself because the flour for the children took all the tickets. Now the war is over, yet they are still taking away what we have left. The same soldiers come and drive off our horses—for the silver eagle on their caps has not changed their natures. Pay for them? Ach, what is eight hundred marks for a horse that is worth six thousand? And how can we cultivate our fields without them? Who started the war? Ach, they are all arguing. What does it matter, so long as they stop it? Will the Germans sign? They should, and have done with it. If they don’t, all the men over fifty, including the Germans and even the Jews”—there was a sneer in this last word, even in the country—“will be at it again. We have had enough of it. Yet if the soldiers come and tell my husband to go he must go, sick though he is.”

The basket each of the trio carried contained the midday lunch of her husband in the fields. I turned aside to the grassy slope on which two of the couples assembled. The men insisted that I share their meal with them. It was more nourishing than a ten-mark repast in a Berlin restaurant, but the absence of bread was significant. When I gave the men each a pinch of tobacco crumbs they announced themselves delighted at the exchange, and mumbled halting words about the well-known generosity of Americans. As I turned my kodak upon them they greeted it with a laughing “Oh, là là!” There was no need to ask where they had picked up that expression. It oriented their war experiences as definitely as it will distinguish for years to come the Americans, in whatever garb one finds them, who were members of the A. E. F. in France.

The men were less indifferent to the recent change of government than their wives, but even they could not have been called enthusiastic. What struck one most was the wider outlook on life the Germans had been forced to give them in spite of themselves. Had they been left to till their farms, these plodding peasants would probably still have swallowed whole the specious propaganda of their erstwhile rulers. Now, after four years of military service that had carried them through all central Europe, they had developed the habit of forming their own opinions on all questions; they took any unverified statement, from whatever source, with more than a grain of salt. It would be a mistake nowadays to think of the European peasant as the prejudiced conservative, the plaything of deliberate misinformation, which he was five years ago. In the light of his new experiences he is in many cases doing more individual thinking than the average city resident.

Yet, I must admit, the conclusions of this well-traveled pair did not boil down into anything very different from the consensus of opinion, even though they reached them by their own peculiar trains of thought. Germany, they were convinced, had the full guilt of the war; not the Kaiser particularly—they call him “Wilhelm” in Posen province now, and even there one detects now and again a tendency toward the old idolatry he seems personally to have enjoyed throughout the whole Empire—but the military crowd, “and the capitalists.” They disclaimed any hatred of the Germans, “until they wanted to rule the earth” and sought to make the peasants the instruments of their ambition. They, too, charged Wilson personally with delaying the conclusion of peace—on the fate of Danzig they seemed to be supremely indifferent.

“It’s all politics, anyway,” concluded one of them. “They are all playing politics. If the Germans don’t sign they will be divided up as Poland was a hundred and forty years ago. But this new government in Posen is no better than the old. What we need is something entirely new—a government of the peasants and of the working-classes.”