The justly criticized features of our saloons are quite unknown in the Bavarian Gasthäuser. In the first place, they are patronized by both sexes and all classes, with the consequent improvement in character. On Sunday evening, after his sermon, the village priest or pastor, the latter accompanied by his wife, drops in for a pint before retiring to his well-earned rest. Rowdyism, foul language, obscenity either of word or act are as rare as in the family circle. Never having been branded society’s black sheep, the Bavarian beer-hall is quite as respected and self-respecting a member of the community as any other business house. It is the village club for both sexes, with an atmosphere quite as ladylike as, if somewhat less effeminate, than, a sewing-circle; and it is certainly a boon to the thirsty traveler tramping the sun-flooded highways. All of which is not a plea for beer-drinking by those who do not care for the dreadful stuff, but merely a warning that personally I propose to continue the wicked habit as long—whenever, at least, I am tramping the roads of Bavaria.
These village inns are all of the same type. A quaint and placid building with the mellowed atmosphere that comes with respectable old age, usually of two stories, always with an exceedingly steep roof from which peer a few dormer-windows, like wondering urchins perched in some place of vantage, is pierced through the center by a long, low, cool passageway that leads to the family garden or back yard. Just inside the street entrance this hallway is flanked by two doors, on one of which, in old Gothic letters, is the word “Gastzimmer” (guest-room). Thus the new-comer is spared the embarrassment of bursting in upon the intimacies of the family circle that would result from his entering the opposite door. The world has few public places as homelike as the cool and cozy room to which the placarded door gives admittance. Unpainted wooden tables, polished gleaming white with sand and water, fill the room without any suggestion of crowding. At one side sits a porcelain stove, square-faced and high, its surface broken into small square plaques, the whole shining intensely with its blue, blue-gray, or greenish tint. Beyond this, in a corner, a tall, old-time clock with weights tick-tacks with the dignified, placid serenity of quiet old age. Three or four pairs of antlers protrude from the walls; several small mirrors, and a number of framed pictures, most of them painful to the artistic sense that has reached the first stage of development, break the soothingly tinted surfaces between them. In the corner behind the door is a small glass-faced cupboard in which hang the long, hand-decorated porcelain pipes of the local smoking-club, each with the name of its owner stenciled upon it. Far to the rear sits a middle-aged phonograph with the contrite yet defiant air of a recent comer who realizes himself rather out of place and not over-popular in the conservative old society upon which he has forced himself. Deep window embrasures, gay with flowers in dull-red pots, hung with snowy little lace curtains, are backed by even more immaculate glass, in small squares. This bulges outwardly in a way to admit a maximum of light, yet is quite impenetrable from the outside, from where it merely throws back into the face of the would-be observer his own reflection. In the afternoon a powerfully built young woman, barefoot or shod only in low slippers, is almost certain to be found ironing at one of the tables. At the others sit a guest or two, their heavy glass or stone mugs before them. No fowls, dogs, or other domestic nuisances are permitted to enter, though the placid, Bavarian family cat is almost sure to look each new-comer over with a more or less disapproving air from her place of vantage toward the rear. It would take sharp eyes indeed to detect a fleck of dust, a beer stain, or the tiniest cobweb anywhere in the room.
Over the door is a sign, as time-mellowed as an ancient painting, announcing the price of a liter of beer—risen to thirty-two or thirty-four pfennigs in these sad war-times—though seldom mentioning the beverage by name. That information is not needed in a community where other drinks are as strangers in a strange land. About the spigots at the rear hovers a woman who might resent being called old and fat, yet who would find it difficult to convince a critical observer that she could lay any claim to being either young or slender. As often as a guest enters to take his seat at a table, with a mumbled “Scoot” she waddles forward with a dripping half-liter mug of beer, bringing another the instant her apparently dull but really eagle eye catches sight of one emptied. At her waist hangs from a strap over the opposite shoulder a huge satchel-purse of ancient design from which she scoops up a pudgy handful of copper and pewter coins whenever a guest indicates that he is ready to pay his reckoning, and dismisses him with another “Scoot” as he opens the door. From a score to a hundred times an hour, depending on the time of day, the size of the village, and the popularity of that particular establishment, a bell tinkles and she waddles to a little trap-door near the spigots to fill the receptacle that is handed in by some neighbor, usually an urchin or a disheveled little girl barely tall enough to peer in at the waist-high opening, and thrusts it out again as she drops another handful of copper coins into her capacious wallet.
They are always named in huge letters on the street façade, these Bavarian Gasthäuser: “Zum Rothen Hahn” (“To the Red Rooster”), “Zum Grauen Ross” (“To the Gray Steed”), “To the Golden Star,” “To the Black Bear,” “To the Golden Angel,” “To the Blue Grapes,” “To the White Swan,” “To the Post,” and so on through all the colors of the animal, vegetable, and heavenly kingdom. Whether in reference to the good old days when Bavaria’s beer was more elevating in its strength, or merely an evidence of the mixture of the poetic and the religious in the native character, one of the favorite names is “To the Ladder of Heaven.”
In the evening the interior scene changes somewhat. The laundress has become a serving-maid, the man of the house has returned from his fields and joins his waddling spouse in carrying foaming mugs from spigots to trap-door or to tables, crowded now with muscular, sun-browned peasants languid from the labors of the day. Then is the time that a rare traveling guest may ask to be shown to one of the clean and simple little chambers above. The wise man will always seek one of these inns of the olden days in which to spend the night, even in cities large enough to boast more presumptuous quarters. The establishment announcing itself as a “Hotel” is certain to be several times more expensive, often less clean and comfortable, superior only in outward show, and always far less homelike than the modest Gasthaus.
It may have been imagination, but I fancied I saw a considerable variation in types in different villages. In some almost every inhabitant seemed broad-shouldered and brawny; in others the under-sized prevailed. This particular hamlet in which the police-soldier and I took our farewell glass appeared to be the gathering-place of dwarfs. At any rate, a majority of those I caught sight of could have walked under my outstretched arm. It may be that the war had carried off the full-grown, or they may have been away tilling the fields. The head of the inn family, aged sixty or more, was as exact a copy of the gnomes whom Rip van Winkle found playing ninepins as the most experienced stage manager could have chosen and costumed. Hunched back, hooked nose, short legs, long, tasseled, woolen knit cap, whimsical smile and all, he was the exact picture of those play-people of our childhood fairy-books. Indeed, he went them one better, for the long vest that covered his unnatural expanse of chest gleamed with a score of buttons fashioned from silver coins of centuries ago, of the size of half-dollars. He sold me an extra one, at the instigation of my companion, for the appalling price of two marks! It proved to date back to the days when Spain held chief sway over the continent of Europe. His wife was his companion even in appearance and suggested some medieval gargoyle as she paddled in upon us, clutching a froth-topped stone mug in either dwarfish hand. She had the fairy-tale kindness of heart, too, for when my companion suggested that his thirst was no greater than his hunger she duck-footed noiselessly away and returned with a generous wedge of her own bread. It was distinctly brown and would not have struck the casual American observer as a delicacy, but the Nürnberger fell upon it with a smacking of the lips and a joyful: “Na! Das ist Bauernbrod—genuine peasant’s bread. You don’t get that in the cities, na!”
He took his final leave at the top of the rise beyond the village, deploring the fact that he could not continue with me to Berlin and imploring me to come again some other year when we could tramp the Bavarian hills together. When I turned and looked back, nearly a half-mile beyond, he stood in the selfsame spot, and he snatched off his red-banded fatigue cap and waved it half gaily, half sadly after me.
Miles ahead, over a mountainous ridge shaded by a cool and murmuring evergreen forest, I descended through the fields toward Beilngries, a reddish patch on the landscape ahead. A glass-clear brook that was almost a river hurried away across the meadow. I shed my clothes and plunged into it. A thin man was wandering along its grassy bank like a poet hunting inspiration or a victim of misfortune seeking solace for his tortured spirit. I overtook him soon after I had dressed. His garb was not that of a Bavarian villager; his manner and his speech suggested a Prussian, or at least a man from the north. I expected him to show more curiosity at sight of a wandering stranger than had the simple countrymen of the region. When I accosted him he asked if the water was cold and lapsed into silence. I made a casual reference to my walk from Munich. In any other country the mere recital of that distance on foot would have aroused astonishment. He said he had himself been fond of walking in his younger days. I implied in a conversational footnote that I was bound for Berlin. He assured me the trip would take me through some pleasant scenery. I emphasized my accent until a man of his class must have recognized that I was a foreigner. He remarked that these days were sad days for Germany. I worked carefully up to the announcement, in the most dramatic manner I could command, that I was an American recently discharged from the army. He hoped I would carry home a pleasant impression of German landscapes, even if I did not find the country what it had once been in other respects. As we parted at the edge of the town he deplored the scarcity and high price of food, shook hands limply, and wished me a successful journey. In other words, there was no means of arousing his interest, to say nothing of surprise or resentment, that the citizen of a country with which his own was still at war should be wandering freely with kodak and note-book through his Fatherland. His attitude was that of the vast majority of Germans I met on my journey, and to this day I have not ceased to wonder why their attitude should have been so indifferent. Had the whole country been starved out of the aggressive, suspicious manner of the Kaiser days, or was there truth in the assertion that they had always considered strangers honored guests and treated them as such? More likely the form of government under which they had so long lived had left the individual German the impression that personally it was no affair of his, that it was up to the officials who had appointed themselves over him to attend to such matters, while the government itself had grown so weak and disjointed that it took no cognizance of wandering strangers.
Whatever else may be said of them, the Germans certainly are a hard-working, diligent people, even in the midst of calamities. Boys of barely fourteen followed the plow from dawn to dark of these long northern summer days. Laborers toiled steadily at road-mending, at keeping in repair the material things the Kaiser régime had left them, as ambitiously as if the thought had never occurred to them that all this labor might in the end prove of advantage only to their enemies. Except that the letters “P. G.” or “P. W.” were not painted on their garments, there was nothing to distinguish these gangs of workmen in fields and along the roads from the prisoners of war one had grown so accustomed to see at similar tasks in France. They wore the same patched and discolored field gray, the same weather-faded fatigue caps. How those red-banded caps had permeated into the utmost corners of the land!
Between Beilngries and Bershing, two attractive towns with more than their share of food and comfort in the Germany of armistice days, I left the highway for the towpath of the once famous Ludwig Canal that parallels it. To all appearances this had long since been abandoned as a means of transportation. Nowhere in the many miles I followed it did I come upon a canal-boat, though its many locks were still in working order and the lock-tenders’ dwellings still inhabited. The disappearance of canal-boats may have been merely temporary, as was that of automobiles, of which I remember seeing only three during all my tramp in Germany, except those in the military service.