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

by Mary Ethel McAuley

It is said that in Königsberg the military commander there has made it a criminal offense for any one to use or circulate a foreign fashion plate. There are also a small number of people who think that English or French should not be spoken on the streets during the war, although English and French are still being taught in the schools, and I often saw youngsters studying their English lessons on the trains.

But I have found that the count, the military commander at Königsberg, and the people who want nothing but German spoken on the streets represent only a small portion of the German people; the whole cry of the masses is for peace to come, so that they can have things from the outside world again.

During the two years that I was in Berlin I talked English on the streets nearly all the time, and I was spoken to only twice for talking English. Once I went to Potsdam with an American boy, and we were sitting in the train waiting for it to start. We thought the train was empty, and we were talking English very fast and rather loud. Suddenly a woman in black poked her head around from the next coupé and asked us to stop talking English. "It hurts me," she said, "the English killed my husband."

Another time I was talking to an American lady at the opera, when a pinched-faced German lady turned around in front of us and said, "Don't you know that this is the Royal German Opera House and that we are at war with England?" She thought we were English. We said nothing but commenced to speak German.

A funny thing happened to an American lady I knew. She was dining with a Turkish officer dressed in civilian clothes. As the Turk knew no German they were talking French. A nervous wounded German officer came in and seated himself at a table near them. As soon as he heard the French he sent the waiter over to tell them to stop. The Turk took his military calling-card out of his pocket and sent it over to the German. The German officer did the only thing there was to do—he came over and apologized.

Once in a while in Berlin we were cut off the telephone when we spoke English. This was a spy precaution, and Central would not connect us again even when we spoke German.

In Cologne a number of dressmakers had a meeting to establish some new styles for Germany. They dug up a lot of fashion plates from the styles fifty years back, and had fashion plates printed from them and model dresses made, and they tried to convince the modern German girl that this was what she should wear. They called the new style the Reform-Kleid or "reform dress," but their scheme was not much of a success, for if anything was ever ugly it was this dress. I never saw more than half a dozen of these dresses on the street, but once at a club I saw a number of them. They were made with a narrow skirt and a loose Russian blouse for a waist. They were absolutely shapeless and so were the women that were in them. The dresses were mostly made of flowered silk and very little trimmed. The hat that went with the reform costume was perfectly plain and fitted down over the head like a pan.

The Reform-Kleid is the butt of many a joke in the German weeklies, and the German girls I know said that they would die before they would wear them. Very wide skirts are the style in Germany, and the government has tried to make women wear narrower ones because of the amount of cloth it takes, but a woman's patriotism ceases where styles are concerned, and they all manage to get the needed cloth for their skirts.

Germany has been cut off from the world so long that her styles are different from the rest of the world. Even the Scandinavian people dress more like Americans. In Germany, very short-vamped, round-toed shoes are the style; you couldn't buy a pair of pointed shoes there. Last summer an American girl came over from the United States, and she had been told beforehand to bring shoes. She brought eleven pairs of pointed ones, and every time she went out the Germans stared at her feet. The German hats sit high from the head, and short sleeves are once more in fashion.

All the German women will be glad when they can have Paris fashions again, and most German men try to dress like Englishmen. They love English tweed and they think that there is nothing like a Burberry coat. Many of the German officers wear a monocle and this is surely English.