Home Life in Germany

by Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

CHAPTER VIII[ToC]

THE OLD AND THE NEW

Germany stands midway between France and England in its care for its womenfolk. French parents consider marriage the proper career for a woman, and with logical good sense set themselves from the day of a girl's birth to provide a dowry for her. When she is of a marriageable age they provide the husband. They will make great sacrifices to establish a daughter in prosperity, and they leave nothing to chance. We leave everything to chance, and the idea of marriage made by bargain and without love offends us. Such marriages are often enough made in England, but they are never admitted. Some gloss of sentiment or of personal respect is considered decent. But on the whole in this country a girl shifts for herself. If she marries, well and good; if she remains single, well and good too, provided she can earn her living or has means. When she has neither means nor craft and fails to marry, she is one of the most tragic figures in our confused social hierarchy, difficult to help, superfluous. She sets her hand to this and that, but she has no grip on life. To think of her is to invoke the very image of failure and incompetence. She flocks into every opening, blocking and depressing it; as a "help" she becomes a byword, for she has grown up without learning to help herself or anybody else. If she is a Protestant she has no haven. Only people who have set themselves to help poor ladies know the difficulties of the undertaking, and the miseries their protégées endure.

Even in the Middle Ages the conscientious German was doing more for this helpless element of his population than England and America are doing to-day. He saw that some of his daughters would remain unmarried, and that if they were gently bred he must provide for their future, and he did this by founding Stifte. The old Stift was established by the gentlemen of some one district, who built a house and contributed land and money for its maintenance, so that when they died their unmarried daughters should still have a suitable home. Some of these old Stifte are very wealthy now, and have buildings of great dignity and beauty; they still admit none but the descendants of the men who founded them, and when they have more money than they need to support the Stift itself, they use it to pension the widows and endow the brides belonging to their group or families. In Hesse-Cassel, for instance, there is an ancient Stift formed by the Ritterschaft of the Duchy and it is so well off that it can afford to pension every widow and fatherless child, and buy an outfit for every bride whose name either by marriage or descent entitles her to its protection. The example set by the noble families of the Middle Ages was followed in time by other classes, and Stifte were established all over Germany for the daughters of the bourgeoisie. They grew in number and variety; some had a school attached to their endowment and some an orphanage. In some the rule was elastic, in others binding. There are Stifte from which a woman may absent herself for the greater part of the year, and yet draw an income from its funds and have a room or rooms appointed to her use; there are others where residence is compulsory. Some are only open to descendants of the founders; some sell vacancies. A woman may have to wait year after year for a chance of getting in; or she may belong to one that will admit her at a certain age. In many there is a presiding lady, the Domina or Abbess; and when the present Emperor visited a well-known Stift lately he gave the Abbess a shepherd's crook with which to rule her flock. Some are just sets of rooms with certain privileges of light and firing attached. Their constitution varies greatly, according to the class provided for and the means available. But you cannot be much amongst Germans without meeting women who have been educated, endowed, helped in sickness, or supported in old age by one of these organisations. You come across girls of gentle birth but with no means who have been brought up in a Stift, or you hear of well-to-do girls whose parents have paid high for their schooling in one. You know the elderly unmarried daughter of an official living on his pension, and you find that though she has never been taught to earn her bread she looks forward to old age with serenity, because when she was a child her relations bought her into a Stift that will give her at the age of fifty free quarters, fire, light, and an income on which, with her habits of thrift, she can live comfortably. Another woman engaged in private teaching and a good deal battered by the struggle for life, comes to you some day more radiant than you have ever seen her, and you find that influential friends have put her case before a Stift, and that it has granted her two charming rooms with free fire and light. I heard of a cook the other day who, after many years of faithful service, left her employers to spend her old age in a Stift. No social stigma attaches to the women living in one, and they are as free, in some cases as well placed and well born, as the English women living at Hampton Court. Some friction and some gossip is presumably inevitable wherever women herd together in an unnatural segregation from men and children. But at any rate the German Stift saves many a woman from the tragic struggle with old age and poverty to which the penniless incapable spinster is condemned in our country. It may not be a paradise, but it is a haven. As I said at the beginning, the Frenchman dowers and marries his girl, the German buys her a refuge, the Englishman leaves her to fate.

On the whole, the German believes that the woman's province is within the limits of the household. He wants her to be a home-maker, and in Germany what "he" wants her to be still fixes the standard. But as the census reveals the existence of large numbers of single women, and as "he" often has a thoughtful and benevolent mind, more and more is done there every year to prepare those women who must earn their living to earn it capably. It has been understood for some time past that Herr Riehl's plan of finding a family roof for every woman without one presents difficulties where there are 400,000-odd women to provide for in this way. One of the people who first saw this clearly, and supported every sensible undertaking that came to the assistance of women, was the Empress Frederick; and one of the institutions that she encouraged and esteemed from the beginning was the Lette-Verein in Berlin.

The Lette-Verein, named after its originator, Dr. A. Lette, was founded, says its prospectus, to further the education of women and to increase the efficiency of women dependent on themselves for support. What it actually does is to train for housekeeping and office work, and for some trades. Its interest lies in the ordered and thoughtful provision it makes both for the woman who means to devote herself body and soul to the family; and for the woman who prefers, or who is driven, to stand in the market-place and compete with men. The Lette-Verein does not train servants or admit servants to its classes. It occupies a large block of buildings in the west of Berlin, for its various schools and hostels require a great deal of room. Students who live in the city can attend daily classes; but those who come from a distance can have board and residence for £1 a week or less. Once a week strangers are allowed to see the Lette-Haus at work, and when I went there we were taken first to the kitchens, where the future housewives of Germany were learning to cook. The stoves were the sensible low closed-in ones used on the continent, and the vessels were either earthenware or metal, kept brightly polished both inside and out. The students were preparing and cooking various dishes, but the one that interested me was the Leipziger Allerlei, because I compared it with the "herbage" an English plain cook throws into water and sends up half drained, half cold, and often enough half clean. I could not stop to count the vegetables required for Leipziger Allerlei, but there seemed to be at least six varieties, all cooked separately, and afterwards combined with a properly made sauce. The Englishman may say that he prefers his half-cooked cabbage, and the English woman, if she is a plain cook, will certainly say that the cabbage gives her as much trouble as she means to take; but the German woman knows that when she marries her husband will want Leipziger Allerlei, so she goes to the Lette-Haus and learns how to make it. Even the young doctors of Berlin learn cooking at the Lette-Haus. Special classes for invalid cookery are held on their behalf, and are said to be popular and extremely useful. Certainly doctors whose work is amongst the poor or in country places must often wish they understood something about the preparation of food. The girls who go to the Lette-Haus are taught the whole art of housekeeping, from the proper way to scour a pan or scrub a floor to fine laundry work and darning, and even how to set and serve a table. An intelligent girl who had been right through the courses at the Lette-Haus could train an inexperienced servant, because she would understand exactly how things ought to be done, how much time they should take, and what amount of fatigue they involve. If her servants failed her she would be independent of them. Some students at the Lette-Haus do, as a matter of fact, form a household that is carried on without a single servant, and is on this account the most interesting branch of the organisation. The girls are from fourteen to sixteen years of age, and they pay £25 a year for instruction, board, and lodging. Some of them are the daughters of landed proprietors, and some will eventually earn a living as "supports of the housewife," an honourable career shortly referred to by Germans as eine Stütze. They were a happy, healthy looking lot of girls. They wear neat serviceable gowns while they are at work, aprons, linen sleeves to protect their stuff ones, and pretty blue handkerchiefs tied like turbans over their hair. Some of them were busy at the wash-tub, and this seemed heavy work for girls of that age. The various kinds of work are done in turn, and the student when her washing week comes round is employed in this way three hours every morning. On alternate days she mangles clothes, and in the afternoons she sews. Our guide would not admit that three hours at the wash-tub could be too great a strain on a half-developed girl, and it is a question for medical wisdom to decide. The cooking and ironing looked hot work, but these young German girls were cheerfully and thoroughly learning how to do them, and whether they marry or stay single their knowledge of these arts will be of inestimable use in later years. I heard of an able-bodied Englishwoman the other day who took to her bed in tears because her maids left her suddenly. She could not have roasted a leg of mutton or made the plainest pudding. This is the school of the future, said our enthusiastic guide when we went to see the "children" at work at the Lette-Haus; and I, remembering my helpless Englishwoman, agreed with her. The children's afternoons are mostly given to needlework, and they are instructed in the prospectus not to bring new clothes with them, because it is desired that they should learn how to mend old ones neatly and correctly. They are taught to darn and patch so finely that the repair cannot easily be discovered; they make sets of body linen for themselves, three finely sewn men's linen shirts, a gown for work-days, and some elaborate blouses. In another part of the Lette-Haus, where students were being trained as expert embroiderers and dressmakers, we were shown pieces of flowered brocade into which patches had been so skilfully inserted that you could only find them by holding them up to the light. In the bookbinding department there were amateur and professional students. The professionals apprentice themselves for three years, and from the first receive a small weekly wage. The length of their apprenticeship is determined by the length of time prescribed for men, and not by what is necessary for their training. I asked if they easily found regular work later, and was told that at present the demand for expert women bookbinders exceeded the supply. The Lette-Haus trains women to be photographers, printers, and clerks. In fact, with German thoroughness and foresight it does all one big institution can to save the women of the nation from the curse of incompetence. It turns them out efficient housewives or efficient craftswomen, according to their needs.

The German woman of to-day has travelled far from the ideal set up by Herr Riehl, and still upheld by his disciples. Women have found that the realities of life clash with that particular ideal, and rudely upset it. Just like any man, a woman wants bread when she is hungry, and when there is no man to give it to her she must raven for it herself. She has been driven from a family hearth that has no fire on it, and from a family roof that cannot afford her shelter. On the whole, if I may judge from personal observation, it has done her good. The traditional old maid is dying out in Germany as assuredly as she is dying out in England, and who shall regret her? Her outlook was narrow, her temper often soured. She had neither self-reliance nor charm. She was that sad, silly spectacle, a clinging plant without support. Now that she is learning to grow on her own account, she finds that there is a good deal in life a sensible plant can enjoy without clinging. The German "old maid" of the twentieth century has, like her English sister, transformed herself into a "bachelor," a person who for this reason or that has not married, and who nevertheless has a cheerful time. She has her own work, she often has her own flat, and if she lives in one of the big cities she has her own club.

There are at present three Ladies' Clubs in Berlin all flourishing. The subscription to the Berliner Frauenklub is only six marks a year, yet it provides the members with comfortably furnished rooms and well cooked meals at low prices. A member of this club can dine for ninepence, and have a hot dish from fourpence to sevenpence. She has access to a library of 1300 volumes, to the leading papers and reviews, and to magazines in four languages. She can entertain women at the club, but not men; though she can meet men there at certain hours of the day. Social gatherings of various kinds are arranged to meet the various needs and ages of the members; and one night a week four or five card-tables are set out, so that the older members can have a quiet game of skat or whist. We wonder what Herr Riehl would say if he could see them.

Another German Ladies' Club in Berlin is the Deutscher Frauenklub, and it is nicknamed the Millionaire's Club because the subscription is twenty-five shillings. It is a rather smarter club than the other, and has a charming set of rooms. There are about 450 members. The Third Club is a branch of the London Lyceum, and it has aroused great interest and attention in Berlin, not only because it is on a more magnificent scale than the other clubs, but because of the brave effort it makes to unite the women of all nations and help them. Most of the women distinguished in art and literature have joined it.