Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

He took his time in coming and greeted me coldly, a trifle sharply. One felt the German official in his attitude, with its scorn for the mere petitioner, the law’s underling, the subject class. Had I reported my arrival in town in the regulation manner, he would have kept that attitude. I should have been treated as something between a mild criminal and an unimportant citizen whom the law had required to submit himself to the Bürgermeister’s good pleasure. Instead, I assumed the upper caste myself. I drew forth a visiting-card and handed it to him with a regal gesture, at the same time addressing him in my most haughty, university-circles German. He glanced at my unapologetic countenance, stared at the card, then back into my stern face, his official manner oozing slowly but steadily away, like the rotundity of a lightly punctured tire. By the time I began to speak again he had shrunk to his natural place in society, that of a simple, hard-working peasant whom chance had given an official standing.

The assertion that I was a traveling correspondent meant little more to him than did the card which he was still turning over and over in his stubby fingers like some child’s puzzle. The Germans are not accustomed to the go-and-hunt method of gathering information to satisfy popular curiosity concerning the ways of foreign lands. I must find a better excuse for coming to Hohenkammer or I should leave him as puzzled as the card had. A brilliant idea struck me. On the strength of the “Hoover crowd” letter in my pocket, I informed him that I was walking through Germany to study food conditions, wording the statement in a way that caused him to assume that I had been officially sent on such a mission. He fell into the trap at once. From the rather neutral, unofficial, yet unresponsive attitude to which my unexpected introduction had reduced him he changed quickly to a bland, eager manner that showed genuine interest. Here was an American studying food conditions; Germany was anxiously awaiting food from America; it was up to him, as the ruler of Hohenkammer, to put his best foot forward and give me all the information I desired.

Here in the country, he began, people had never actually suffered for want of food. They had lived better than he had during his four years at the front. Fats were the only substance of which there was any serious want. Milk was also needed, but they could get along. They did not suffer much for lack of meat; there were tickets for it here in the country also, but they were issued only after the meat each family got by slaughtering its own animals had been reckoned out. Some families got no food-tickets whatever, unless it was for bread. They were what Germans call Selbstversorger (“self-providers”)—that is, the great majority of the peasants and all the village residents except the shopkeepers who cultivated no land, the priest, the schoolmaster, and so on. No, they had not received any American bacon or any other Lebensmittel; every one took that to be a joke, something the Allies were dangling before their eyes to keep them good-natured. He had never actually believed before I turned up on this official mission for studying the food situation that America actually meant to send food. Yes, he had been on the western front the entire war, fifty-two months in the trenches, and never once wounded. His first Americans he had seen at St.-Mihiel; as soldiers they seemed to be pretty good, but of course I must not forget that the German army was far different in 1918 from what it was in 1914. He very much doubted whether Americans could have driven them back in those days. More likely it would have been the opposite.

As I turned to go he took his leave with a mixture of deference and friendliness. He had not asked to see the papers bearing out all these statements I had been making, but there was a hint in the depth of his eyes that he felt it his duty to do so, if only he could venture to make such a demand of so highly placed a personage. I went far enough away to make sure he would not have the courage to demand them—which would have been his first act had I approached him as a mere traveler—then turned back, drawing the documents from a pocket as if I had just thought of them. He glanced at them in a most apologetic manner, protesting the while that of course he had never for an instant doubted my word, and returned them with a deferential bow.

All in all, this plan of posing as an official scout of the “Amerikanische Lebensmittel Kommission” had been a brilliant idea, marked with a success that moved me to use the same innocent ruse a score of times when any other means of gathering information might have been frustrated. One must have a reasonable excuse for traveling on foot in Germany. To pretend to be doing so for lack of funds would be absurd, since fourth-class fare costs an infinitesimal sum, much less than the least amount of food one could live on for the same distance. The only weakness in my simple little trick was the frequent question as to why the Americans who had sent me out on my important mission had not furnished me a bicycle. The German roads were so good; one could cover so much more ground on a Fahrrad.... Driven into that corner, there was no other defense but to mumble something about how much more closely the foot traveler can get in touch with the plain people, or to take advantage of some fork in the conversation to change the subject.

When I returned to the inn, the “guest-room” was crowded. Stocky, sun-browned countrymen of all ages, rather slow of wit, chatting of the simple topics of the farm in their misshapen Bavarian dialect, were crowded around the half-dozen plain wooden tables that held their immense beer-mugs, while the air was opaque with the smoke from their long-stemmed porcelain pipes. The entrance of a total stranger was evidently an event to the circle. The rare guests who spent the night in Hohenkammer were nearly always teamsters or peddlers who traveled the same route so constantly that their faces were as familiar as those of the village residents. As each table in turn caught sight of me, the conversation died down like a motor that had slowly been shut off, until the most absolute silence reigned. How long it might have lasted would be hard to guess. It had already grown decidedly oppressive when I turned to my nearest neighbor and broke the ice with some commonplace remark. He answered with extreme brevity and an evidence of something between bashfulness and a deference tinged with suspicion. Several times I broke the silence which followed each reply before these reached the dignity of full sentences. It was like starting a motor on a cold morning. Bit by bit, however, we got under way; others joined in, and in something less than a half-hour we were buzzing along full speed ahead, the entire roomful adding their voices to the steady hum of conversation which my appearance had interrupted.

Thus far I had not mentioned my nationality at the inn, being in doubt whether the result would be to increase our conversational speed or bring it to a grating and sudden halt. When I did, it was ludicrously like the shifting of gears. The talk slowed down for a minute or more, while the information I had vouchsafed passed from table to table in half-audible whispers, then sped ahead more noisily, if less swiftly, than before. On the whole, curiosity was chiefly in evidence. There was perhaps a bit of wonder and certainly some incredulity in the simple, gaping faces, but quite as surely no signs of enmity or resentment. Before long the table at which I sat was doubly crowded and questions as to America and her ways were pouring down upon me in a flood which it was quite beyond the power of a single voice to stem. Friendly questions they certainly were, without even a suggestion of the sarcasm one sometimes caught a hint of in more haughty German circles. Yet in the gathering were at least a score of men who had been more or less injured for life in a struggle which they themselves admitted the nation I represented had turned against them. I have been so long absent from my native land that I cannot quite picture to myself what would happen to the man who thus walked in upon a gathering of American farmers, boldly announcing himself a German just out of the army, but something tells me he would not have passed so perfectly agreeable an evening as I did in the village inn of Hohenkammer.

With my third mug of beer the landlord himself sat down beside me. Not, of course—prohibition forbid!—that I had ordered a third pint of beer in addition to the two that the plump matron had served me with a very satisfying supper. In fact, I had not once mentioned the subject of beverages. Merely to take one’s seat at any inn table in Bavaria is equivalent to shouting, “Glas Bier!” No questions were asked, but mine host—so far more often mine hostess—is as certain to set a foaming mug before the new arrival as he—or she—is to abhor the habit of drinking water; and woe betide the man who drains what he hopes is his last mug without rising instantly to his feet, for some sharp-eyed member of the innkeeper’s family circle is sure to thrust another dripping beaker under his chin before he can catch his breath to protest. On the other hand, no one is forced to gage his thirst by that of his neighbors, as in many a less placid land. The treating habit is slightly developed in rural Bavaria. On very special occasions some one may “set ’em up” for the friend beside him, or even for three or four of his cronies, but it is the almost invariable rule that each client call for his own reckoning at the end of the evening.

The innkeeper had returned at late dusk from tilling his fields several miles away. Like his fellows throughout Bavaria, he was a peasant except by night and on holidays. During the working-day the burden, if it could be called one, of his urban establishment fell upon his wife and children. It was natural, therefore, that the topic with which he wedged his way into the conversation should have been that of husbandry. Seeds, he asserted, were still fairly good, fortunately, though in a few species the war had left them sadly inferior. But the harvest would be poor this year. The coldest spring in as far back as he could remember had lasted much later than ever before. Then, instead of the rain they should have had, scarcely a drop had fallen and things were already beginning to shrivel. As if they had not troubles enough as it was! With beer gone up to sixteen pfennigs a pint instead of the ten of the good old days before the war! And such beer! Hardly 3 per cent. alcohol in it now instead of 11! The old peasants had stopped drinking it entirely—the very men who had been his best customers. They distilled a home-made Schnapps now, and stayed at home to drink it. Naturally such weak stuff as this—he held up his half-empty mug with an expression of disgust on his face—could not satisfy the old-fashioned Bavarian taste. Before the war he had served an average of a thousand beers a day. Now he drew barely two hundred. And as fast as business fell off taxes increased. He would give a good deal to know where they were going to end. Especially now, with these ridiculous terms the Allies were asking Germany to sign. How could they sign? It would scarcely leave them their shirt and trousers. And they, the peasants and country people, would have to pay for it, they and the factory hands; not the bigwigs in Berlin and Essen who were so ready to accept England’s challenge. No, it would not pay Bavaria to assert her independence. They did not love the northern German, but when all was said and done it would be better to stick with him.

Suddenly the brain-racking dialect in which the Wirt and his cronies had been sharing their views on this and other subjects halted and died down to utter silence, with that same curious similarity to a shut-off motor that my entrance had caused. I looked about me, wondering what I had done to bring on this new stillness. Every man in the room had removed his hat and all but two their porcelain pipes. Except for the latter, who puffed faintly and noiselessly now and then, the whole assembly sat perfectly motionless. For a moment or more I was puzzled; then a light suddenly broke upon me. The bell of the village church was tolling the end of evening vespers.