Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

Beyond the medieval ruin of Hohenstein, which had served me for half the afternoon as a lighthouse does the mariner, the narrow road led gradually downward and brought me once more toward sunset, to the river valley. The railway followed the stream closely, piercing the many towering crags with its tunnels. But the broad highroad wound in great curves that almost doubled the distance, avoiding every slightest ridge, as if the road-builders of centuries ago had been bent on making the journey through this charming region as long as possible.

Velden, claiming the title of “city,” was as unprogressive and as nearly unclean as any town I ever saw in Bavaria. A half-dozen inns flashed signs of welcome in the stranger’s face, yet declined to furnish the hospitality they seemed to offer. I canvassed them all, only to be as many times turned away by females almost as slatternly in appearance and as resentful of would-be guests as the Indians of the Andes. One might have fancied the hookworm had invaded the town, so un-Bavarian was the ambitionless manner of its inhabitants and the disheveled aspect of its clientless public-houses. Only one of the latter consented even to lodge me, and that with a bad grace that was colder than indifference. None of them would so much as listen when I broached the question of food.

The shopkeepers treated me with equal scorn. One after another they asserted that they had not a scrap of Lebensmittel of any species to sell. Three times, however, they directed me to the Gasthaus that had been most decided in proclaiming its inability to supply my wants, assuring me that the proprietor was a farmer and stock-breeder who had “more than enough of everything, if the truth were known.” But a second visit to the alleged food-hoarder merely aroused the assertion that his fellow-townsmen were prevaricators striving to cover up their own faults by slandering a poor, hard-working neighbor.

Apparently Velden had developed a case of nerves on the food question. This was natural from its size and situation—it was large enough to feel something of the pinch that the blockade had brought to every German city, yet nearly enough peasant-like in character to make hoarding possible. I did not propose, however, to let an excusable selfishness deprive me of my evening meal. When it became certain that voluntary accommodations were not to be had, I took a leaf from my South American note-book and appealed my case to the local authorities.

The Bürgermeister was a miller on the river-bank at the edge of town. He received me as coldly as I had expected, and continued to discuss with an aged assistant the action to be taken on certain documents which my arrival had found them studying. I did not press matters, well knowing that I could gain full attention when I chose and being interested in examining the town headquarters. It was a high, time-smudged room of the old stone mill, with great beams across its ceiling and crude pigeonholes stuffed with musty, age-yellowed official papers along its walls. Now and again a local citizen knocked timidly at the door and entered, hat in hand, to make some request of the town’s chief authority, his apologetic air an amusing contrast to the commanding tone with which the Bürgermeister’s wife bade him, from the opposite entrance, come to supper.

He was on the point of obeying this summons when I drew forth my impressive papers and stated my case. The mayor and his assistant quickly lost their supercilious attitude. The former even gave my demands precedence over those of his wife. He slapped a hat on his head and, leaving two or three fellow-citizens standing uncovered where the new turn of events had found them, set out with me for the center of town. There he confirmed the assertions of the “prevaricators” by marching unhesitatingly into the same Gasthaus, to “The Black Bear” that had twice turned me away. Bidding me take seat at a table, he disappeared into the kitchen. Several moments later he returned, smiling encouragingly, and sat down opposite me with the information that “everything had been arranged.” Behind him came the landlady who had so forcibly denied the existence of food on her premises a half-hour before, smirking hospitality now and bearing in either hand a mug of beer. Before we had emptied these she set before me a heaping plateful of steaming potatoes, boiled in their jackets, enough cold ham to have satisfied even a tramp’s appetite several times over, and a loaf of good peasant’s bread of the size and shape of a grindstone.

The Bürgermeister remained with me to the end of his second mug of beer, declining to eat for reason of the supper that was awaiting him at home, but answering my questions with the over-courteous deliberation that befitted the official part I was playing. When he left, the Wirt seemed to feel it his duty to give as constant attention as possible to so important a guest. He sat down in the vacated chair opposite and, except when his beer-serving duties required him to absent himself momentarily, remained there all the evening. He was of the heavy, stolid type of most of his class, a peasant by day and the chief assistant of his inn-keeping spouse during the evening. For fully a half-hour he stared at me unbrokenly, watching my every slightest movement as an inventor might the actions of his latest contraption. A group of his fellow-townsmen, sipping their beer at another table, kept similar vigil, never once taking their eyes off me, uttering not a sound, sitting as motionless as the old stone statues they somehow resembled, except now and then to raise their mugs to their lips and set them noiselessly down again. The rather slatternly spouse and her brood of unkempt urchins surrounded still another table, eying me as fixedly as the rest. I attempted several times to break the ice, with no other success than to evoke a guttural monosyllable from the staring landlord. The entire assembly seemed to be dumm beyond recovery, to be stupidity personified. Unable to force oneself upon them, one could only sit and wonder what was taking place inside their thick skulls. Their vacant faces gave not an inkling of thought. Whenever I exploded a question in the oppressive silence the Wirt answered it like a school-boy reciting some reply learned by heart from his books. The stone-headed group listened motionless until long after his voice had died away, and drifted back into their silent, automatic beer-drinking.

It was, of course, as much bashfulness as stupidity that held them dumb. Peasants the world over are more or less chary of expressing themselves before strangers, before “city people,” particularly when their dialect differs considerably from the cultured form of their language. But what seemed queerest in such groups as these was their utter lack of curiosity, their apparently complete want of interest in anything beyond their own narrow sphere. They knew I was an American, they knew I had seen much of the other side of the struggle that had oppressed them for nearly five years and brought their once powerful Fatherland close to annihilation. Yet they had not a question to ask. It was as if they had grown accustomed through generations of training to having their information delivered to them in packages bearing the seal of their overlords, and considered it neither advantageous nor seemly to tap any other sources they came upon in their life’s journey.

Very gradually, as the evening wore on, the landlord’s replies to my queries reached the length of being informative. Velden, he asserted, was a Protestant community; there was not a Catholic in town, nor a Jew. On the other hand, Neuhaus, a few miles beyond, paid universal homage to Rome. With a population of one hundred and seventy families, averaging four to five each now, or a total of eight hundred, Velden had lost thirty-seven men in the war, besides three times that many being seriously wounded, nearly half of them more or less crippled for life. Then there were some fifty prisoners in France, whom they never expected to return. The Allies would keep them to rebuild the cities the Germans had destroyed—and those the Allied artillery had ruined, too; that was the especially unfair side of it. No, he had not been a soldier himself—he was barely forty and to all appearances as powerful as an ox—because he had been more useful at home. His family had not exactly suffered, though the schools had become almost a farce, with all the teachers at war. Women? Faugh! How can women teach boys? They grow up altogether too soft even under the strengest of masters. As to food; well, being mostly peasants, they probably had about a hundred pounds of fat or meat where two hundred or so were needed. But it was a constant struggle to keep the “hamsterers” from carrying off what the town required for its own use.

That the struggle had been won was evident from the quantities of ham, beef, potatoes, and bread which his wife served her habitual clients in the course of the evening. She seemed to have food hidden away in every nook and cranny of the house, like a miser his gold, and acknowledged its existence with the canniness of the South American Indian. As she lighted me to a comfortable bedchamber above, as clean as the lower story was disorderly, she remarked, apologetically: