CHAPTER XI[ToC]
THE HOUSEHOLDER
Rents are high in Germany. At least, the Germans say so, and so do the people whose books about Germany are crammed with soul-satisfying statistics and elaborate calculations. Over-crowding, too, is said to be worse in Germany than in English cities. But I have always seen the rent and the crowding judged by the number of rooms and not by their size. This is really misleading, because you could put the whole of a small London flat into many a German middle-class dining-room or Wohnzimmer. You could bring up a family in a single room I once had for a whole summer in Thüringen for 5s. a week. It was as big as a church, and most light and airy. One camped in bits of it. I think rent for rent rooms in Germany are quite twice as large as in London. In Berlin, where rent is considered wickedly high, you can get a flat in a good quarter for £80, and for that sum you will have four large rooms, three smaller ones, a good kitchen, an attic that serves as a lumber-room, and a share in a laundry at the top of the house. There will even be a bathroom with a trickle of cold water, but it is only in the very newest and most expensive German flats that you find hot and cold water laid on. Your drawing and dining-rooms will be spacious, and one of them is almost sure to have a balcony looking on the street and the pleasant avenue of trees with which it is planted. For this rent you must either make yourself happy on the third or fourth floor in a house without a lift, or you must find one of the delightful "garden" dwellings behind the Hof; but you will have a better home for your money than you could get in a decent part of London. In fact, it comes to this, in spite of all the statistics in favour of London. If you can only spend £80 on your rent you can live in a good quarter of Berlin, near enough to the Tiergarten, close to the Zoological Gardens, and within a tram-ride of the delightful woods at Halensee. In London you can get a small house for £80, but it will either be in an unattractive quarter or in a suburb. A flat, wherever it is, must always seem a dwelling place rather than a home, but the Germans have elected to live in flats and accept their disadvantages. In and around all the great cities there are villas, but their number hardly counts in comparison with the masses of tall white houses, six storeys high for the most part, and holding within their walls all degrees of wealth and poverty. The German villa is florid, and likes blue glass balls and artificial fountains in its garden. It is often a villa in appearance and several flats in reality. Its most pleasant feature is the garden-room or big verandah, where in summer all meals are served. Outside Hamburg, on the banks of the Elbe, the merchant princes of the city have built themselves palaces surrounded by splendid park-like gardens. But Hamburg, though it does not love the English, is always accused by the rest of Germany of being English. It certainly has beautiful gardens. So have other German cities in some instances, but well kept gardens are not the matter of course in Germany that they are here. You see more bare and artificial ones and more neglected overgrown ones in an afternoon's walk than you do all the year round in England. But I wish we could follow the German fashion of planting all our streets with double avenues of healthy trees. Berlin in spring seems to be set in a wood; it is so fresh and green. The flowering shrubs, on the other hand, are not to be compared with ours. Everyone rushes to see a few lilac bushes, and Gueldres roses trimmed to a stiff snowball of flowers, and everyone says Wie Herrlich! but you miss the profusion of lilac, hawthorn, and laburnum that runs riot all about London in every residential road and every garden. Above all, you miss the English lawns. In Berlin wherever grass is grown it looks either thin or coarse. The majority of Germans do not dream of wanting a garden. They are content with a few palms in their sitting-room or window boxes on their balcony. They are proud of their window-gardening in Berlin, but I think London windows in June are gayer and more flowery. The palms kept in German rooms attain to a great size and number, and a palm is a favourite present. Nursery gardeners undertake the troublesome business of repotting them every spring, so the owners have nothing to do but water them and keep them from draughts. There are usually so many windows in a German sitting-room that those near the plants need never be opened in winter; and even when the temperature sinks several degrees below zero outside, the air of the flat is kept artificially warm, so warm that English folk gasp and flag in it. At the first sign of winter the outside windows, removed for the summer, are brought back again. Our windows are unknown on the continent, and disliked by continentals who see them here. They call them guillotine windows, and consider them dangerous. Theirs all open like doors, so that you have four doors to each window, and until you get used to them you find they make a pretty clatter whenever you set them wide. But in winter they are only opened for a few minutes every morning when the room is "aired." It is considered extravagant to open them at other times, because the heat would escape and more fuel would be required. I suppose everyone in England understands that our open fireplaces are almost unknown in Germany. They have enclosed stoves of iron or porcelain that make little work or dirt and give no pleasure. There is no gathering round the hearth. You sit about the room as you would in summer, for it is evenly heated. All the beauty and poetry of fire are wanting; you have nothing but an atmosphere that will be comfortable or asphyxiating, according to the taste of your hosts. Years ago in South Germany you burnt nothing but logs of wood in the old-fashioned iron stoves, and there was some faint pleasure in listening to their crackle. You could just see the flames too, if you stooped low enough and opened the little stove door. But the wood burnt so quickly that it was most difficult to keep a big room warm. Nowadays you always find the porcelain stove that Mark Twain says looks like the family monument. In some of these coal is burnt, or a mixture of coal and peat. Some burn anthracite, and are considered economical. A Füllofen of this kind is kept burning night and day during the worst of the winter. It requires attention two or three times in twenty-four hours; it is easily regulated, and if the communicating doors are left open it warms two or three rooms. A friend who has a large flat in Berlin told me that there was one of these stoves in her husband's study, and that her drawing-room which opens out of it, and which they constantly use, had only had a fire in it five times last winter. I find on looking at this friend's budget that she spends £16 a year on turf and other fuel, and this seems high for a flat where so few fires were lighted. But fuel is dear in German towns. Briquettes are largely used in cities, small slabs of condensed coal that cost one pfennig each. It takes about twenty-four slabs to keep a stove in during the day. The great advantage of the Füllofen over the ordinary stove is that it keeps in all night. There are dangerous variations of temperature in a German flat that is kept as hot as an oven all day, and allowed to sink below zero during the night. But you hear complaints on all sides in Germany, both of inconsiderate English people who waste fuel by opening windows in cold weather; and of the sufferings endured by Germans who have been in England in winter. They do not like our open fireplaces at all, because they say they wish to be warm all over and not in bits. "In England," they tell you solemnly, "you can be warm either in front or at the back; but you cannot be warm on both sides as we are here. Besides, your fireplaces make dirt and work and are extravagant. They would not suit us." In fact, they imply that for the French and the English they are well enough, but not for the salt of the earth. The German kitchen stoves are certainly more practical and economical than ours, and I never can understand why we do not fetch a few over and try them. They are entirely enclosed, and much lower than ours. The Berlin kitchener has one fire that is lighted for a short time to roast a joint, and another using less fuel that heats water and does light cooking. The sweep, who is bound by the etiquette of his trade to wear a tall hat in Germany, does not come into your flat at all. You hear him shout through the courtyard that he will visit the house next day, and he works from the garrets and cellars. The police regulate his visits as they regulate everything else in Germany. Chimneys must be swept every six weeks in summer, and every four weeks in winter in Berlin. Dustbins are emptied every day, and in some towns the police make most troublesome regulations with regard to them. The householder has to set his outside to be emptied, and the police insist on this being done at a certain hour, neither earlier nor later, so that if your servant happens to be careless or unpunctual you will be repeatedly fined.
Staircases vary greatly according to the date and rent of the house. The most modern houses in Berlin have broad front staircases with thick carpets, and in some cases seats of "Nouveau Art" design on the landings. In such houses you are always met on the threshold by printed requests to wipe your feet and shut the door gently. They don't tell you to do as you're bid. That is taken for granted, or the police will know the reason why. There is always an uncarpeted back staircase for servants and tradespeople, and for the tenants who inhabit the poorer parts of the building. In houses where all the tenants belong to the poorer classes, you find notices that forbid children to play in the Hof, and command people not to loiter or to make any noise on the stairs. Carpet-beating and shaking, which is constantly and vigorously carried on, is only allowed on certain days of the week and at certain hours. When there is a house porter he is not as important and conspicuous as the French concierge. In my experience he has usually gone out and thoughtfully left the front door ajar. He is not a universal institution even in Berlin.
Taxes vary in different parts of Germany. In Saxony a man spending £500 a year pays altogether £60 for Income tax, Municipal rates, Water, School, and Church rates. In Berlin the Income tax is not an Imperial (Reichs) tax, but a Landes tax, and amounts to £15 on an income of £500. Smaller incomes pay less and larger ones more, in proportion varying from about 2 to 4 per cent. Besides this Staats tax there is a municipal tax of exactly the same amount in Berlin and Charlottenberg. But there are towns in Prussia where it is less; others, mostly in the Western Provinces, where it is more, considerably more in some cases. The water rate is paid by the house owners, and the tenant pays it in his rent. There are no school taxes. The church tax is compulsory on members of the Landeskirche. When a man has no capital his income tax is levied on his yearly expenses; but the man whose income is derived from capital pays a higher tax than the man who has none. The German, too, pays a great deal to the State indirectly; for nearly everything he requires is taxed. But the three things he loves best, tobacco, beer, and music, he gets cheap—cheaper than he can in a Free Trade country; so he pays for everything else as best he can, and tries to look pleasant. "But the burden is almost more than we can bear," said one thoughtful German to me when I told him how greatly English people admired their municipal enterprise, and the admirable provision made in Berlin for the very poor.
Last time I went to Germany I actually made the acquaintance of one German who did not smoke, and on various occasions I was in the society of others who did not smoke for some hours. In the Berlin tramcars smoking is strictly forbidden, but I did not observe that this rule was strictly enforced. In fact, my attention was drawn to it one day by finding my neighbour's cigar unpleasantly strong. One cigar in a tramcar, however, is nothing at all, and should not be mentioned. It is when a railway carriage beautifully upholstered with crimson velvet holds you, six Germans, and one Englishman, for eight hours on a blazing summer day, that you begin to wonder whether, after all, you do mind smoke. To be sure, you might have travelled in a Nichtraucher or a Damen-Coupé, but changes are a nuisance on a journey. Besides, you know that a Damen-Coupé is always crowded, and that the moment you open a window someone will hold a handkerchief tearfully to her neck and say, "Aber ich bitte meine Dame: es zieht!" and all the other women in the carriage will say in chorus, "Ja! ja! es zieht!" and if you don't shut the window instantly the conductor will be summoned, and he will give the case against you. So you travel all day long with seven cigars, most of them cheap strong ones, that their owners smoke very slowly and replace directly they are finished. And after a time the conversation turns on smoking, and your neighbour admits that he always lights his first cigar when he gets up in the morning and smokes it while he is dressing. His wife dresses in the same room and does not like it, but.... It is unnecessary to say more. Five cigars out of six are in sympathy with him, while you amuse yourself by wondering what revenge a wife could take in such circumstances. A bottle of the most offensive scent in the market suggests itself, but you look at your neighbour's profile, and see that he is the kind of man to pitch scent he did not like out of the window. You have heard of one German husband who did this when his wife brought home perfumes that did not please him. And then your memory travels back and back along the years, arriving at last at the picture of an English nursery, in the household where a German guest had arrived the night before. The nurses and the children are sitting peacefully at breakfast, when there enters to them a housemaid, scornful, scandalised, out of breath with her hurry to impart what she had seen.
"He's a-smoking in bed," she says, "that there Mr. Hoggenheimer! He's a-smoking in bed!"
"Some of them do," says nurse, who is a travelled person, and refuses to be taken by surprise.