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

by Mary Ethel McAuley

Wholesale Cabbage Market in Vienna.

In most German cities one person gets about a pound of meat a week, but in Vienna there is no meat card and you can buy as much meat as you like if you can afford to buy it. Every meat shop in Vienna is hanging full of meat—sausage, ham, pork, beef, chickens and geese. I went through the great Viennese market which is squares and squares long. Everywhere meat, meat, meat. I had forgotten that there was so much meat in the world. Stall after stall just loaded down with hams, but no bacon. Mostly young pigs. But no one was buying, only looking—like Till Eulenspiegel, as though the smell was enough. The hams were from one dollar to one dollar and sixty cents a pound, and the beef was even higher. Sausage was not so expensive, and geese were cheaper than in Germany.

I had never seen such an abundance of everything. Acres and acres of cabbages piled up as high as a house—great, hard-looking heads of a fresh green color. Then barrels and barrels of apples. Not such good apples as we have in America, but at such a fancy price! For thirty-two cents we got six little dried-up apples that we could hardly eat.

From the apple market we went to the onion market. Can you imagine a square as big as Union Square in New York where nothing but onions are sold? Well, they have that in Vienna. And the most wonderful onions! Small white ones, small red ones, big yellow ones and green ones! Onion peelings flew around everywhere, and do you know that they really smelled sweet? But the old women in back of the stalls did not look sweet, but as though they had stood among onions so long that they had become dried-up onions themselves.

Waiting for Soup at a Viennese Soup-Kitchen.

They had no potatoes in the market, but the restaurants seemed to have plenty of them. Cheese was just beginning to be scarce, and one person could buy only a quarter of a pound at a time. We collected cheese to take back to Berlin with us, and we took turns going into the shops and buying a piece so that the clerks would not know that we were together. We collected a good many pounds and we got them safely over the frontier.

Eating in a restaurant in Vienna in war time is the most expensive thing of which I know. Small meat or deer orders were from eighty cents upward, and no potatoes go with this order. In Germany, you can get a piece of meat, two potatoes and a vegetable for thirty-two cents.

There seems to be plenty of milk and sugar in Vienna, but it is forbidden for any café to serve milk in coffee between the hours of two and seven o'clock, when every Viennese goes to a café to drink coffee. This restriction saves many gallons of milk. The coffee is real coffee and very good. You can have as many eggs as you like, very nicely cooked at fifteen cents an egg. Sugar is not served on the trains between Berlin and Vienna, but in a café they give you three lumps with a cup of coffee. Saccharine is served with tea.