Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

There were a half-dozen discharged soldiers in the glee club, but if anything this increased the eagerness with which I was welcomed. Their attitude was almost exactly what would be that of a football team which chanced to meet a rival player a year or so after disbanding—they were glad to compare notes and to amuse themselves by living over old times again. For a while I deliberately tried to stir up some sign of anger or resentment among them; if they had any personal feelings during the contest they had now completely faded out of existence. One dwarfish, insignificant, whole-hearted little fellow, a mill-hand on week-days, had been in the same sector as I during the reduction of the St.-Mihiel salient. Unless we misunderstood each other’s description of it, I had entered the dugout he had lived in for months a few hours after he so hastily abandoned it. He laughed heartily at my description of the food we had found still on the stove; he had been cook himself that morning. Every one knew, he asserted, that the St.-Mihiel attack was coming, two weeks before it started, but no one had expected it that cold, rainy morning. On the strength of the coincidence we had discovered, he proposed me as an honorary member of the Verein for the day, and the nomination was quickly and unanimously accepted.

We loafed on through the perfect early-summer morning, a soloist striking up on voice and instrument now and then, the whole club joining frequently in some old German song proposed by the blind leader, halting here and there to sit in the shade of a grassy slope, pouring pellmell every mile or two into a Gasthaus, where even the shy little girls emptied their half-liter mugs of beer without an effort. One of the ex-soldiers enlivened the stroll by giving me his unexpurgated opinion of the Prussians. They “hogged” everything they could lay their hands on, he grumbled. Prussian wounded sent to Bavaria had been fed like princes; Bavarians who were so unfortunate as to be assigned to hospitals in Prussia—he had suffered that misfortune himself—had been treated like cattle and robbed even of the food sent them from home. He “had no use for” die verdammten Preussen, from any viewpoint; it was their “big men” who had started the war in the first place, but.... No, indeed, Bavaria could not afford to separate from Prussia. She had no coal of her own and she had no seaport. Business interests were too closely linked together through all the Empire to make separation possible. It would be cutting their own throats.

Toward noon we reached the village of Neudrossenfeld, where the Verein had engaged for the day a rambling old country inn, with a spacious dance-hall above an outdoor Kegelbahn for those who bowled, and a shady arbor overlooking a vast stretch of rolling summer landscape for those who did not, in the garden at the rear. Other glee clubs, from Kulmbach and another neighboring city, had occupied the other two Gasthäuser and every even semi-public establishment. The town resounded from one end to the other with singing and playing, with laughter and dancing, with the clatter of ninepins and the rattle of table utensils. A lone stranger without glee-club standing would have been forced to plod on, hungry and thirsty. I spent half the afternoon in the shady arbor. Several of the girls were well worth looking at; the music, not being over-ambitious, added just the needed touch to the languid, sun-flooded day. One could not but be struck by the innocence of these typically Bavarian pleasures. Not a suggestion of rowdyism, none of the questionable antics of similar gatherings in some other lands, marred the amusements of these childlike holiday-makers. They were as gentle-mannered as the tones of the guitars, zithers, and mandolins they thrummed so diligently, with never a rude word or act even toward hangers-on like myself. Yet there was a bit less gaiety than one would have expected. Even the youthful drifted now and then into moods of sadness—or was it mere apathy due to their long lack of abundant wholesome food?

The philosophical old landlord brought us a word of wisdom with each double-handful of overflowing beer-mugs. “If ever the world gets reasonable again,” he mused, “the good old times will come back—and we shall be able to serve real beer at the proper price. But what ideas people get into their Schädels nowadays! They can never let well enough alone. The moment man gets contented, the moment he has everything as it should be, he must go and start something and tumble it all into a heap again.”

A rumor broke out that cookies were being sold across the street. I joined the foraging-party that quickly fled from the arbor. When we reached the house of the enterprising old lady who had mothered this brilliant idea it was packed with clamoring humanity like the scene of the latest crime of violence. At intervals a glee-clubber catapulted out of the mob, grinning gleefully and tenaciously clutching in one hand a paper sack containing three of the precious Kuchen, but even with so low a ration the producer could not begin to make headway against the feverish demands. I decided that I could not justly add my extraneous competition in a contest that meant so much more to others and, taking my leave of the Sängerverein, struck off again to the north.

A middle-aged baker from Kulmbach, who had been “hamstering” all day, with slight success, fell in with me. He had that pathetic, uncomplaining manner of so many of his class, seeming to lay his misfortunes at the door of some power too high to be reached by mere human protest. The war had left him one eye and a weakened physique. Two Ersatz teeth gleamed at me dully whenever his wan smile disclosed them. He worked nights, and earned forty-eight marks a week. That was eighteen more than he had been paid before the war, to be sure, and the hours were a bit shorter. But how was a man to feed a wife and three children on forty-eight marks, with present prices; would I tell him that? He walked his legs off during the hours he wished to be sleeping, and often came home without so much as a potato. There were a dozen or so in his rucksack now, and he had tramped more than thirty kilometers. I suggested that the apples would be large enough on the trees that bordered our route to be worth picking in a couple of months. He gave me a startled glance, as if I had proposed that we rob a bank together. The apples along public highways, he explained patiently, were property of the state. No one but those the government sent to pick them could touch them. True, hunger was driving people to strange doings these days. Guards patrolled the roads now when the apples began to get ripe. Peasants had to protect their potato-fields in the same manner. He, however, would remain an honest man, no matter what happened to him or to his wife and his three children. The apparently complete absence of country police was one of the things I had often wondered at during my tramp. The baker assured me that none were needed, except in harvest time. He had never seen a kodak in action. He would not at first believe that it could catch a picture in an instant. Surely it would need a half-hour or so to get down all the details! Queer people Americans must be, to send men out through the world just to get pictures of simple country people. Still he wouldn’t mind having a trade like that himself—if it were not for his wife and his three children.

Kulmbach, noted the world over for its beer, is surrounded with immense breweries as with a medieval city wall. But the majority of them stood idle. The beverages to be had in its Gasthäuser, too, bore little resemblance to the rich Kulmbacher of pre-war days. Thanks perhaps to its industrial character, the city of breweries seemed to be even shorter of food than Bayreuth; or it may be that its customary supply had disappeared during the celebration of Assumption Day. The meat-tickets I had carried all the way from Munich were required here for the first time. Some very appetizing little rolls were displayed in several shop-windows, but when I attempted to stock up on them I found they were to be had in exchange for special Marken, issued to Kulmbachers only. There was a more sinister, a more surly air about Kulmbach, with its garrison of Prussian-mannered soldiers housed in a great fortress on a hill towering high above the town, than I had thus far found in Bavaria.

As I sat down to an alleged dinner in a self-styled hotel, my attention was drawn to a noisy group at a neighboring table. I stared in amazement, not so much because the five men opposite were Italian soldiers in the uniform with which I had grown so familiar during my service on the Padovan plains the summer before, but because of the astonishing contrast between them and the pale, thin Germans about me. The traveler grows quickly accustomed to any abnormality of type of the people among whom he is living. He soon forgets that they look different from other people—until suddenly the appearance of some really normal being in their midst brings his judgment back with a jerk to his customary standards. I had grown to think of the Germans, particularly the Bavarians, as looking quite fit, a trifle under weight perhaps, but healthy and strong. Now all at once, in comparison with these ruddy, plump, animated Italians, they seemed a nation of invalids. The energetic chatter of the visitors brought out in striking relief the listless taciturnity of the natives; they talked more in an hour than I had ever heard all Germany do in a day. Meanwhile they made way with an immense bowlful of—well, what would you expect Italians to be eating? Macaroni, of course, and with it heaping plates of meat, vegetables, and white hard-bread that made the scant fare before me look like a phantom meal. I called the landlady aside and asked if I might not be served macaroni also. She gave me a disgusted look and informed me that she would be glad to do so—if I would bring it with me, as the Italians had. When I had paid my absurd bill I broke in upon the garrulous southerners. They greeted my use of their tongue with a lingual uproar, particularly after I had mentioned my nationality, but quickly cooled again with a reference to Fiume, and satisfied my curiosity only to the extent of stating that they were billeted in Kulmbach “on official business.”

I sought to replenish my food-tickets before setting out again next morning, but found the municipal Lebensmittelversorgung packed ten rows deep with disheveled housewives. Scientists have figured it out that the human body loses twice as much fat standing in line the four or five hours necessary to obtain the few ounces of grease-products issued weekly on the German food ration as the applicant receives for his trouble. The housewife, they assert, who remains in bed instead of entering the contest gains materially by her conservation of energy. In other words, apparently, it would have been better for the Fatherland—to say nothing of the rest of the world—had the entire nation insisted on sleeping during the five years that turned humanity topsy-turvy. Millions agree with them. But for once the German populace declines to accept the assertions of higher authorities and persists in wearing itself out by its struggles to obtain food. However short-sighted this policy may be on the part of the natives, it is certain that the tail-end of a multitude besieging a food-ticket dispensary is no place for a traveler gifted with scant patience and a tendency to profanity, and I left Kulmbach behind hours before I could have hoped to reach the laborious officials who dealt out legal permission to eat.

A General Staff map in several sheets, openly sold in the shops and giving every cowpath of the region, made it possible for me to set a course due north by compass over the almost mountainous region beyond. “Roads” little more deserving the name than those of the Andes led me up and down across fertile fields, through deep-wooded valleys, and into cozy little country villages tucked away in delightful corners of the landscape. Even in these the peasant inhabitants complained of the scarcity of food, and for the most part declined to sell anything. They recalled the South American Indian again in their transparent ruses to explain the visible presence of foodstuffs. Ducks, geese, and chickens, here and there guinea-fowls, peacocks, rabbits, not to mention pigs, sheep, and cattle, enlivened the village lanes and the surrounding meadows, but every suggestion of meat brought from innkeepers and shopkeepers clumsy, non-committal replies. At one Gasthaus where I had been refused anything but beer I opened by design the wrong door at my exit, and stared with amazement at four heaping bushel baskets of eggs, a score of grindstone-shaped cheeses, and an abundant supply of other local products that all but completely filled what I had correctly surmised was the family storeroom. “They are not ours,” exclaimed the landlady, hastily; “they belong to others, who will not permit us to sell anything.” Her competitor across the street was more hospitable, but the anticipations I unwisely permitted his honeyed words to arouse were sadly wrecked when the “dinner” he promised stopped abruptly at a watery soup, with a meager serving of real bread and butter. Another village astonished me by yielding a whole half-pound of cheese; it boasted a Kuhkäserei—what we might call a “cow cheesery”—that was fortunately out of proportion to its transportation facilities. Rodach, at the bottom of a deep cleft in the hills where my route crossed the main railway line to the south, had several by no means empty shops. I canvassed them all without reward, except that one less hard-hearted soul granted me a scoopful of the mysterious purple “marmalade” which, with the possible exception of turnips, seemed to be the only plentiful foodstuff in Germany. But has the reader ever carried a pint of marmalade, wrapped in a sheet of porous paper, over ten miles of mountainous byways on a warm summer afternoon? If not, may I not be permitted to insist, out of the fullness of experience, that it is far wiser to swallow the sickly stuff on the spot, without hoping in vain to find bread to accompany it, or, indeed, to smear it on some convenient house-wall, than to undertake that hazardous feat?