Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

I had intended to let my fellow-pedestrians break the ice first, out of curiosity to know how far from the city they would begin to do so. But the continued silence grew a bit oppressive, and in mid-afternoon I fell into step with a curiously mated couple who had quenched their thirst in the same Gasthaus as I a few minutes before. The woman was a more than buxom Frau of some forty summers, intelligent, educated, and of decided personality. She was bareheaded, her full-moon face sunburnt to a rich brown, her massive, muscular form visibly in perspiration, an empty rucksack on her back. Her husband, at least sixty, scrawny, sallow-faced under the cap of a forest-ranger, hobbled in her wake, leading two rather work-broken horses. He was what one might call a faint individual, one of those insignificant characters that fade quickly from the memory, a creature of scanty mentality, and a veritable cesspool of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition thrown into relief by the virility of his forceful spouse.

The man had set out that morning from Munich to deliver the horses to a purchaser a hundred miles away in the Bavarian hills. Poor as they were, the animals had been sold for seven thousand marks. A first-class horse was worth six to ten thousand nowadays, he asserted. Times had indeed changed. A few years ago only an insane man would have paid as many hundred. It was a hot day for the middle of May, a quick change from the long, unusual cold spell. The crops would suffer. He didn’t mind walking, if only beer were not so expensive when one got thirsty. Having exhausted his scant mental reservoir with these and a few as commonplace remarks, he fell into the rear conversationally as well as physically, and abandoned the field to his sharp-witted spouse.

She, having more than her share of all too solid flesh to carry, had left the afternoon before and passed the night at a wayside inn. It was not that she was fond of such excursions nor that she could not trust her husband away from home. While he was delivering the horses she would go “hamstering,” buying up a ruck-sackful of food among the peasants of that region, if any could be coaxed out of them, and they would return by train. Fortunately, fourth-class was still cheap. Before the war she had never dreamed of going anything but second. I broke my usual rule of the road and mentioned my scribbling proclivities. A moment later we were deeply engrossed in a discussion of German novelists and dramatists. The placid, bourgeois-looking Frau had read everything of importance her literary fellow-countrymen had produced; she was by no means ignorant of the best things in that line in the outside world. Thrown into the crucible of her forceful mentality, the characters of fiction had emerged as far more living beings than the men and women who passed us now and then on the road—immensely more so, it was evident, though she did not say so, than the husband who plodded behind us, frankly admitting by his very attitude that we had entered waters hopelessly beyond his depth. Of all the restrictions the war had brought, none had struck her quite so directly as the decrease in quality and number of the plays at Munich’s municipal theater. Luckily they were now improving. But she always had to go alone. He—with a toss of her head to the rear—didn’t care for anything but the movies. He laughed himself sick over those. As to opera, her greatest pleasure in life, he hadn’t the faintest conception of what it was all about. He liked American ragtime (she pronounced it “rhakteam”), however. Still, America had opera also, nicht wahr? Had not many of Germany’s best singers gone to my country? There was Slézak, for instance, and Schumann-Heink and Farrar....

I might have questioned her notion of the nationality of some of the names she mentioned, but what did it matter?

Obviously it was a waste of breath to ask whether she was pleased with the change of events that had given Germany universal suffrage for both sexes. She had voted, of course, at the first opportunity, dragging him along with her; he had so little interest in those matters. Her political opinions were no less decided than her artistic. Ludwig? She had often seen him. He was rather a harmless individual, but his position had not been harmless. It was a relief to be rid of him and all his clan. He would have made a much better stable-boy than king. He had wanted war just as much as had the Kaiser, whose robber-knight blood had shown up in him. But the Kaiser had not personally been so guilty as some others, Ludendorff, for instance ... and so on. The Crown Prince! A clown, a disgrace to Germany. Nobody had ever loved the Crown Prince—except the women of a certain class.

Bavaria would be much better off separated from the Empire. She was of the opinion that the majority of Bavarians preferred it. At least they did in her circle, though the strict Catholics—she glanced half-way over her shoulder—perhaps did not. Republican, Sparticist, or Bolshevik—it didn’t matter which, so long as they could get good, efficient rulers. So far they had been deplorably weak—no real leaders. The recent uprising in Munich had been something of a nuisance, to be sure. They were rather glad the government troops had come. But the soldiers were mostly Prussians, and once a Prussian gets in you can never pry him out again.

We had reached the village of Hohenkammer, thirty-five kilometers out, which I had chosen as my first stopping-place. My companion of an hour shook hands with what I flattered myself was a gesture of regret that our conversation had been so brief, fell back into step with her movie-and-ragtime-minded husband, and the pair disappeared around the inn that bulged into a sharp turn of the highway.

I entered the invitingly cool and homelike Gasthaus prepared to be coldly turned away. Innkeepers had often been exacting in their demands for credentials during my earlier journeys in Germany. With the first mug of beer, however, the portly landlady gave me permission—one can scarcely use a stronger expression than that for the casual way in which guests are accepted in Bavarian public-houses—to spend the night, and that without so much as referring to registration or proofs of identity. Then, after expressing her placid astonishment that I wanted to see it before bedtime, she sent a muscular, barefoot, but well-scrubbed kitchen-maid to show me into room No. 1 above. It was plainly furnished with two small wooden bedsteads and the prime necessities, looked out on the broad highway and a patch of rolling fields beyond, and was as specklessly clean as are most Bavarian inns.

Rumor had it that any stranger stopping overnight in a German village courted trouble if he neglected to report his presence to the Bürgermeister, as he is expected to do to the police in the cities. I had been omitting the latter formality on the strength of my Wilhelmstrasse pass. These literal countrymen, however, might not see the matter in the same light. Moreover, being probably the only stranger spending the night in Hohenkammer, my presence was certain to be common knowledge an hour after my arrival. I decided to forestall pertinent inquiries by taking the lead in making them.

The building a few yards down the highway bearing the placard “Wohnung des Bürgermeisters” was a simple, one-story, whitewashed cottage, possibly the least imposing dwelling in town. These village rulers, being chosen by popular vote within the community, are apt to be its least pompous citizens, both because the latter do not care to accept an unpaid office and because the “plain people” hold the voting majority. The woman who tried in vain to silence a howling child and a barking dog before she came to the door in answer to my knock was just a shade better than the servant class. The husband she summoned at my request was a peasant slightly above the general level.