Germany in War Time: What an American Girl Saw and Heard

by Mary Ethel McAuley

For every article of wearing apparel or cloth that is not in this list and is cheaper than the set price, one must procure a Schein in order to buy the article. This means that all the cheaper waists, dresses, aprons, pants, stockings, underwear and skirts require a ticket, also all the cheaper cloth by the meter. One cannot buy a yard of flannel, a wash rag or a dusting rag without a ticket. Nearly everything for children requires a ticket.

It is very troublesome to get a ticket, but if you know what you want before you go to the store, you can procure your ticket first, and this saves time. The Bezugsscheinstellen are scattered all over the city. Each district has a place, and you must get your ticket from the district in which you live. They have on file all the Scheine you have procured, so you can't get more than your allowance, and if you have moved from one place to another you must wait until they investigate what you have had in the other district before they will give you a Schein. You must show your passport or your police registration.

The clothes ticket is a large piece of paper with a place for your name, address and occupation. The clerks write on the paper the article you wish and how many of each article. For every kind of an article a separate Schein is needed. On the back of the ticket it tells that it is not transferable and that the misuse of it makes you liable to six months imprisonment or a fine of 15,000 marks. It also says that it is good only in the German Empire. This is not supposed to be a joke.

If anything happens to a person's clothes, like loss by fire, new clothes can be procured if the person can prove that the fire was an accident. An American I knew had all his clothes stolen except the suit he was wearing. He went to the police and explained his case, and after a few weeks he got a permit to get some more clothes.

When a man gets a new suit he has to turn in his old suit. These old suits are repaired and are put away for the soldiers when they come home from the war. Germany forgets no details.

The limit of things that a person can buy is rather indefinite, for some people require more clothes than others. Some men get twelve shirts a year, and others get only six. Two woolen suits are allowed and six pairs of stockings.

Since April, 1917, a ticket has been required for shoes, and each person is allowed two pairs of shoes a year. This is really the hardest restriction of the whole war, for the leather is so poor that hardly the best would last six months. Shoes for men are not as bad as the shoes for women, and the soldiers have very good shoes, but when I left Berlin the only kind of shoes that a woman could buy was fancy patent leather with cloth tops, the soles of which were like paper. What the German women are going to do for shoes this winter I do not know. I could not get any shoes at all. In the summer of 1916 I had a pair made for sixty marks, but the next summer they wouldn't make any to order, and I wear so small a size that I could not get any shoes to fit me in Berlin.

When I left for Denmark I was very shabby looking. I had a nice silk suit and a pretty hat, but that was the extent of my wardrobe. The girls in the boarding-house where I lived bought nearly everything I had. They were just wild to buy my things, and I sold what they could wear because I knew I could get more and they could not. It was a pity that I am so small, because they could hardly get into what they bought. The daughter of the boarding-house keeper with whom I lived was going to have her winter suit made out of a portière that she had dyed a nice brown color. She had used up all her tickets and couldn't buy any woolen material. As I was going away I let the girls get tickets in my name. This was very nice of me, for I had to go and get the tickets myself, and I had to wait in line to get them.

The ticket is very hard on girls about to be married, as a German girl must furnish the house and have at least two dozen sets of sheets and pillow cases and about one hundred towels. As one person can get only two sheets a year on the ticket, it would at that rate take a girl twelve years before she could be properly married. So the scheming of getting things without a ticket was as great as the scheming of getting food without a card, and the government cannot prevent it.

A week before I left Berlin, a printed card was hung up in my room at the boarding-house. It said, "After August 1 people coming to this boarding-house for an extended stay must bring their own bedding with them. The washing will be done every four weeks." It was signed "The Boarding-House Union." I was glad that the washing was to be done every four weeks, because I was seven weeks at that boarding-house, and I never once had clean sheets. After three weeks the sheets got a kind of gray color, and then they never seemed to get any dirtier. Special provisions are made at hotels where each guest must be furnished with a clean sheet.