Home Life in Germany

by Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

HOSPITALITY

If a German cannot afford to ask you to dinner he asks you to supper, and makes his supper inviting. At least, he does if he is sensible, and if he lives where an inexpensive form of entertainment is in vogue. But even in Germany people are not sensible everywhere. The headmaster of a school in a small East Prussian town told me that his colleagues, the higher officials and other persons of local importance, felt bound to entertain their friends at least once a year, and that their way was to invite everyone together to a dinner given at the chief hotel in the town; and that to do this a family would stint itself for months beforehand. He spoke with knowledge, so I record what he said; but I have never been amongst Germans who were hospitable in this painful way. Hotels are used for large entertainments, just as they are in England, but most people receive their friends in their homes, and only hire servants for some special function, like a wedding or a public dinner.

The form of hospitality most popular in England now, the visit of two or three days' duration, is hardly known in Germany, and I believe that they have not begun yet to supply their guests with small cakes of soap labelled "Visitors," and meant to last for a week-end but not longer. In towns no one dreams of having a constant succession of staying guests, and either in town or country when a German family expects a guest at all it is more often than not for the whole summer or winter. You do not find a German girl arranging, as her English cousin will, for a round of visits, fitting in dates, writing here and there to know if people can take her in, and by the same post answering those who are planning a pilgrimage for themselves and wish to be taken. A visit in Germany is not the flighty affair it is with us.

"This winter," says your friend, "my niece from Posen will be with us," and presently the niece arrives and stays about three months. There is rarely more than one spare room on a flat, and that is often a room not easily spared. In country houses there are rows of rooms, but they are not filled by an everlasting procession of guests in the English way. When you stay in a country house at home you wonder how your hosts ever get anything done, and whether they don't sometimes wish they had a few days to themselves. To be sure, English hosts go about their business and leave you to yours, more than Germans think polite. I once spent six weeks, quite an ordinary visit as to length, with some friends who had several grown-up children. It was a most cheerful friendly household, but one day I got into a corner near the stove, rather glad for a change to be myself for a while with a novel for company. When I had been there a little time the second daughter looked in and at once apologised.

"Mamma sent me to see," she explained,—"she feared you were by yourself."

It is not easy to tell your German hosts that you like and wish to be by yourself sometimes; and if you say that you are used to it in England you won't impress them. The English are so inhospitable and unfriendly, they will say, for that is one of the many popular myths that are believed about us. I have been told of a German lady who has lived here most of her life, and complains to her German friends that she has never spent a night under an English roof; but then, she chooses to associate exclusively with Germans, whose roofs she refuses to regard as English ones, even when they are in Kensington; and she cherishes such an invincible prejudice against the born English that she lives amongst them year after year without making a friend. It would be quite simple to perform the same feat in Paris, or even in Berlin, although there you would not have such a large foreign colony to stand between you and the detestable natives.

The real difficulty in writing about German hospitality is to find and express the ways in which it differs from our own; and certainly these lie little in qualities of kindness and generosity. Amongst both nations, if you have a friendly disposition you will find friends easily, and receive kindness on all sides. Perhaps, as one concrete instance is worth many assertions, I may describe a visit I paid many years ago to a family who invited me because a marriage had recently connected us. I had seen some of the family at the wedding, and had been surprised to receive a warm invitation, not for a week-end and a cake of visitors' soap, but for the rest of the winter; six weeks or two months at least. The family living at home consisted of the parents, a grown-up son and two grown-up daughters. Some of them met me at the station, for the German does not breathe who would let a guest arrive or depart alone. Your friends often give you flowers when you arrive, and invariably when you go away. I cannot remember about the flowers on this occasion, but I remember vividly that the day after my arrival the two married daughters living in the same town both called on me and brought me flowers. Week after week, too, they made it their pleasure to entertain me just as kindly as my immediate hosts, taking me to concerts or the opera, asking me to dinner or supper, including me on every occasion in the family festivities, which were numerous and lively. In some ways my hosts found me a disappointing guest, and said so. The trouble was that I liked plain rolls and butter for breakfast, while the daughters for days before I came had baked every size and variety of rich cake for me to eat first thing in the morning with my coffee. I never could eat enough to please anyone either. You never can in Germany, try as you may. Yet it was hungry weather, for the Rhine was frozen hard all the time I was there, and we used to skate every day in the harbour when the daughters of the house had finished their morning's work. Two maids were kept on the flat, but, like most German servants, they were supposed to require constant supervision, and when a room was turned out the young ladies in their morning wrappers helped to do it. They helped with the ironing too and the cooking, and did all the mending of linen and clothes. "A child's time belongs to her parents," said the father one day when the elder daughter wanted to skate, but was told that she could not be spared. "I've had a heavenly time," said a girl friend who had been laid up for some weeks with a sprained ankle; "I've had nothing to do but read and amuse myself." The household work, however, was usually done before the one o'clock dinner, and the afternoon was given up to skating, walks, and visits. There were not so many formal calls paid as in England, but there was a constant interchange of hospitality amongst the members of the family, the kind of intimate unceremonious entertaining described in Miss Austen's novels. Every time one of the many small children had a birthday there was a feast of chocolate and cakes, a gathering of the whole clan. The birthday cake had a sugared Spruch on it, and a little lighted candle for each year of the child's age, and the birthday table had a present on it from everyone who came to the party, and many who did not. Once a week the married daughters and their husbands came to supper with my hosts, and every day when they were not coming to supper they called on their mother, and if she could coax them to stay drank their afternoon coffee with her. Sometimes one or two strangers were asked to coffee, for this household was an old-fashioned one, and gave you good coffee rather than wishy-washy tea. It made a point of honour of a Meringuetorte when strangers came, and of the little chocolate cream cakes Germans call Othellos. But it must not be supposed that one or two strangers constitute a Kaffee-Klatsch, that celebrated form of entertainment where at every sip a reputation dies. A genuine Klatsch was, however, given during my stay by a young married woman who wished to entertain her friends and display her furniture. About twenty ladies were invited, and when they had assembled they were solemnly conducted through every room of the flat from the drawing-room to the spick-and-span kitchen, where every pan was of shining copper and every cloth embroidered with the bride's monogram. The procession as it filed through the rooms chattered like magpies, for except myself every member of it had been to school with the bride, and had helped to adorn her home with embroidered chair backs, cushions, cloths, newspaper stands, foot-stools, duster bags, and suchlike, all of which they now had the pleasure of seeing in the places suitable to them. By the time we sat down in the dining-room to a table loaded with cakes, the slight frost of arrival had melted away. The strange Englishwoman no longer acted as a wet blanket, and when she tried to converse with her neighbours she found, as she still finds at German entertainments, that she could only do so by screaming at the top of her voice as you do in England in a high wind or in the sound of loud machinery. Everyone was in the highest spirits, and the collective noise they made was amazing. In Germany, when actors play English parts or when people in private life put on English manners, the first thing they do is to lower their voices as if they had met to bury a friend. This is the way our natural manner strikes them, while their natural manner strikes us as easy and jolly, but tiring to the voice and after a time to the spirit. There are quiet Germans, but when they sit at a good man's table they must certainly either shout or be left out of all that goes on. At a Kaffee-Klatsch you either shout or whisper, you eat every sort of rich cake presented to you if you can, you drink chocolate or coffee with whipped cream. Nowadays you would often find tea provided instead. When the hostess finds she cannot persuade anyone to eat another cake, she leads her guests back to the drawing-room, and the Klatsch goes on. There is often music as well as gossip, and before you are allowed to depart there are more refreshments, ices, sweetmeats, fruit, little glasses of lemonade or Bowle. When you get home you do not want any supper, and you are quite hoarse, though you have only been to a simple Kaffee-Klatsch without Schleppe. Your friends tell you that when they were young a Kaffee-Klatsch mit Schleppe was the favourite form of entertaining, and lasted the whole afternoon and evening. Men were asked to come in when the Klatsch was over and a supper was provided. Those must have been proud and bustling days for a Hausfrau with one "girl."

To be asked to dinner or supper in Germany may mean anything. Either form of invitation varies both in hour and kind more than it does in England; but unless you are asked to a dinner that precedes a dance you hardly ever need evening dress. Some years ago you would have written that people never dressed for dinner in Germany except when the dinner celebrated a betrothal, a wedding, or some equally important and unusual event. But it has become the fashion in Berlin lately to dress for large dinners and evening entertainments. No rule can be laid down for the guidance of English visitors to Germany, because what you wear must depend partly on the dinner hour and partly on the ways of your hosts and their friends. Last year when I was in Berlin I accepted a formal invitation sent a fortnight beforehand to a dinner given on a Sunday at five o'clock. As the host was a distinguished scientific man who had just returned from a journey round the world, it promised to be an interesting entertainment; and there were, in fact, some of the most celebrated members of the University present. They were all in morning dress, and their womenfolk wore what we should call Sunday frocks. The dinner was beautifully cooked and served, and was not oppressively long. Soup began it of course, roast veal with various vegetables followed, fish came next, lovely little grey-blue fish better to look at than to eat, then chicken, ice pudding, and dessert. There were flowers on the table, but not as many as we should have with the same opportunities, for the house was set in an immense garden; and all down the long narrow table there were bottles of wine and mineral water. When the champagne came, and that is served at a later stage in Germany than it is with us, speeches of congratulation were made to the host on his safe return, and every guest in reach clinked their glasses with his. After dinner men and women rose together in the German way, and drank coffee in the drawing-room. The men lighted cigars. A little later in the evening slender glasses of beer and lemonade were brought round, and just before everyone left at nine o'clock there was tea and a variety of little cakes and sandwiches, not our double sandwiches, but tiny single slices of buttered roll, each with its scrap of caviare or smoked salmon.

A ball supper or a Christmas supper in Germany consists of three or four courses served separately, and all hot except the sweet, which is usually Gefrorenes. Salmon, roast beef or veal, venison or chicken, and then ice would be an ordinary menu, and every course would be divided into portions and handed round on long narrow dishes. In most German towns you are often asked to supper, and very seldom to dinner. You never know beforehand what sort of meal to expect unless you have been to the house before. In some houses it will be hot, in others cold. In Berlin, supper usually offers you a dish made with eggs and mushrooms, eggs and asparagus, or some combination of the kind, and after this the usual variety of ham and sausages fetched from the provision shop. Tea and beer are drunk at this meal in most houses. Sometimes Rhine wine is on the table too. The sweets are often small fruit tartlets served with whipped cream. One menu I remember distinctly, because it was so quaint and full of surprises. We began with huge quantities of asparagus and poached eggs eaten together. Then we had Pumpernickel, Gruyère cheese and radishes, and for a third course vanilla ice. That was the end of the supper, but later in the evening, just before we left, in came an enormous dish covered with gooseberry tartlets, and we had to eat them, for somehow in Germany it seems ungrateful and unfriendly not to eat and drink what is provided.

After dinner or supper everyone wishes everyone else Mahlzeit which is to say, "I wish you a good digestion." Sometimes people only bow as they say it, but more often they shake hands. I know an Englishman who was much puzzled by this ceremony at his first German dinner-party. He saw everyone shaking hands as if they were about to disperse the instant the feast was over, and when his host came to him with a smiling face, took his hand and murmured Mahlzeit, he summoned what German he had at his command and answered Gute Nacht.