Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

Hohenkammer, like the majority of Bavarian towns, was a strictly Catholic community. The women, from the barefoot kitchen servant to the highest lady of the village, had slipped quietly off to church while their husbands gathered in the Gasthaus, and the latter were now showing their respect for the ceremony they had attended by proxy. They sat erect, without a bowed head among them, but in the motionless silence of “living statues,” except that toward the end, as if in protest that their good crony, the village priest, should take undue advantage of his position and prolong their pose beyond reason with his persistent tolling, several squirmed in their seats, and two, possibly the free-thinkers of the community, hawked and spat noisily and what seemed a bit ostentatiously. As the ringing ceased, each clumsily crossed himself rather hastily, slapped his hat back upon his head, and the buzz of conversation rapidly rose again to its previous volume.

XIII
INNS AND BYWAYS

A brilliant, almost tropical sun, staring in upon me through flimsy white cotton curtains, awoke me soon after five. Country people the world over have small patience with late risers, and make no provision for guests who may have contracted that bad habit. My companions of the night before had long since scattered to their fields when I descended to the Gastzimmer, veritably gleaming with the sand-and-water polish it had just received. The calmly busy landlady solicitously inquired how I had slept, and while I forced down my “breakfast” of Ersatz coffee and dull-brown peasant bread she laid before me the inn register, a small, flat ledger plainly bearing the marks of its profession in the form of beer and grease stains on its cover and first pages. I had been mistaken in supposing that Bavaria’s change to a republic had dispensed with that once important formality. In fact, I recall but one public lodging on my German journey where my personal history was not called for before my departure. But there was nothing to have hindered me from assuming a fictitious identity. When I had scrawled across the page under the hieroglyphics of previous guests the half-dozen items required by the police, the hostess laid the book away without so much as looking at the new entry. My bill for supper, lodging, “breakfast,” and four pints of beer was five marks and seventy-two pfennigs, and the order-loving Frau insisted on scooping out of her satchel the last tiny copper to make the exact change before she wished me good day and a pleasant journey.

The single village street, which was also the main highway, was thronged with small boys slowly going to school when I stepped out into the flooding sunshine soon after seven. One of the most striking sights in Germany is the flocks of children everywhere, in spite of the wastage of more than four years of war and food scarcity. Certainly none of these plump little “square-heads” showed any evidence of having suffered from hunger; compared with the pale, anemic urchins of large cities they were indeed pictures of health. They resembled the latter as ripe tomatoes resemble gnarled and half-grown green apples. At least half of them wore some portion of army uniform, cut down from the war-time garb of their elders, no doubt, the round, red-banded cap covered nearly every head, and many carried their books and coarse lunches in the hairy cowhide knapsacks of the trenches, usually with a cracked slate and the soiled rag with which they wiped their exercises off it swinging from a strap at the rear. They showed as much curiosity at the sight of a stranger in town as their fathers had the night before, but when I stealthily opened my kodak and strolled slowly toward them they stampeded in a body and disappeared pellmell within the schoolhouse door.

The sun was already high in the cloudless sky. It would have been hard to imagine more perfect weather. The landscape, too, was entrancing; gently rolling fields deep-green with spring alternating with almost black patches of evergreen forests, through which the broad, light-gray highroad wound and undulated as soothingly as an immense ocean-liner on a slowly pulsating sea. Every few miles a small town rose above the horizon, now astride the highway, now gazing down upon it from a sloping hillside. Wonderfully clean towns they were, speckless from their scrubbed floors to their whitewashed church steeples, all framed in velvety green meadows or the fertile fields in which their inhabitants of both sexes plodded diligently but never hurriedly through the labors of the day. It was difficult to imagine how these simple, gentle-spoken folk could have won a world-wide reputation as the most savage and brutal warriors in modern history.

Toward noon appeared the first of Bavaria’s great hop-fields, the plants that would climb house-high by August now barely visible. In many of them the hop-frames were still being set up—vast networks of poles taller than the telegraph lines along the way, crisscrossed with more slender crosspieces from which hung thousands of thin strings ready for the climbing vines. The war had affected even this bucolic industry. Twine, complained a peasant with whom I paused to chat, had more than quadrupled in price, and one was lucky at that not to find the stuff made of paper when the time came to use it. In many a field the erection of the frames had not yet begun, and the poles still stood in clusters strikingly resembling Indian wigwams, where they had been stacked after the harvest of the September before.

At Pfaffenhofen, still posing as a “food controller,” I dropped in on a general merchant. The ruse served as an opening to extended conversation here even better than it had in the smaller town behind. The Kaufmann was almost too eager to impress me, and through me America, with the necessity of replenishing his shrunken stock. He reiterated that fats, soap, rice, soup materials, milk, cocoa and sugar were most lacking, and in the order named. Then there was tobacco, more scarce than any of these, except perhaps fats. If only America would send them tobacco! In other lines? Well, all sorts of clothing materials were needed, of course they had been hoping ever since the armistice that America would send them cotton. People were wearing all manner of Ersatz cloth. He took from his show-window what looked like a very coarse cotton shirt, but which had a brittle feel, and spread it out before me. It was made of nettles. Sometimes the lengthwise threads were cotton and the cross threads nettle, which made a bit more durable stuff, but he could not say much even for that. As to the nettle shirt before me, he sold it for fourteen marks because he refused to accept profit on such stuff. But what good was such a shirt to the peasants? They wore it a few days, washed it once and—kaput, finished, it crumpled together like burnt paper. Many children could no longer go to school; their clothes had been patched out of existence. During the war there had been few marriages in the rural districts because, the boys being away at war, a fair division of the inheritances could not be made even when the girls found matches. Now many wanted to marry, but most of them found it impossible because they could not get any bed-linen or many of the other things that are necessary to establish a household. No, he did not think there had been any great increase in irregularities between the sexes because of war conditions, at least not in such well-to-do farming communities as the one about Pfaffenhofen. He had heard, however, that in the large cities....

The Bavarians are not merely great lovers of flowers; they have no hesitancy in showing that fondness, as is so often the case with less simple people. The house window, be it only that of the humblest little crossroads inn, which was not gay with blossoms of a half-dozen species was a curiosity. About every house, in every yard were great bushes of lilac, hydrangea, and several other flowering shrubs; add to this the fact that all fruit-trees were just then in full bloom and it will be less difficult to picture the veritable flower-garden through which I was tramping. Nor were the inhabitants satisfied to let inanimate nature alone decorate herself with spring. The sourest-looking old peasant was almost sure to have a cluster of flowers tucked into a shirt buttonhole or the lapel of his well-worn jacket; girls and women decked themselves out no more universally than did the males of all ages, from the tottering urchin not yet old enough to go to school to the doddering grandfather leaning his gnarled hands on his home-made cane in the shade of the projecting house eaves. Men and boys wore them most often in the bands of their curious slouch-hats, beside the turkey feather or the shaving-brush with which the Bavarian headgear is frequently embellished the year round.

In each village a new May-pole towered above everything else, often visible when the hamlet itself was quite out of sight. On the first day of the month that of the year before had been cut down and the tallest pine-tree available, trimmed of its branches except for a little tuft at the top, had been set up before the chief Gasthaus, amid celebrations that included the emptying of many kegs of beer. Its upper half encircled with wreaths, streamers, and winding, flower-woven lianas, and decorated with a dozen flags, it suggested at a distance the totem-pole of some childlike tropical tribe rather than the plaything of a plodding and laborious people of western Europe.

I set my pace in a way to bring me into the larger towns at noon and to some quaint and quiet village at nightfall. In the latter, one was surer to find homelike accommodations and simpler, more naïve people with whom to chat through the evening. The cities, even of only a few thousand inhabitants, too nearly resembled Berlin or Munich to prove of continued interest. The constant traveler, too, comes to abhor the world-wide sameness of city hotels. Moreover, the larger the town the scantier was the food in the Germany of 1919. The guest who sat down to an excellently cooked dinner of a thick peasant soup, a man’s size portion of beef, veal, or pork, potatoes in unlimited quantity, bread that was almost white and made of real wheat, and a few other vegetables thrown in, all for a cost of two marks, might easily have imagined that all this talk of food shortage was mere pretense. Surely this last month before the beginning of harvest, in the last year of the war, with the question of signing or not signing the peace terms throbbing through all Germany, was the time of all times to find a certain answer to the query of the outside world as to the truth of the German’s cry of starvation. But the answer one found in the smaller villages of Bavaria would have been far from the true one of the nation at large.