CHAPTER XIX[ToC]
GERMAN SUNDAYS
There was to be singing in the forest on Sunday afternoon, we were told, when we arrived at our little Black Forest town; and we were on no account to miss it. We did not want to miss anything, for whenever we looked out of our windows or strolled through the streets we were entertained and enchanted. From the hotel we could see women and girls pass to and fro all day with the great wooden buckets they carried on their backs and filled at the well close by. As dusk fell the oldest woman in the community hobbled out, let down the iron chains slung across the street, and lighted the oil lamps swinging from them. All the gossips of the place gathered at the well of evenings, and throughout the day barefooted children played there. Behind the main street there were gabled houses with ancient wooden balconies and gardens crammed with pinks. The population mostly sat out of doors after dark, and as it was hot weather no one went to bed early. Even in the dead of night the timber waggons drawn by oxen passed through the town, and the driver did his best to wake us by cracking his long whip. For though a Black Forest town is mediæval in its ways, it is not restful. It may soothe you by suggestion, the people seem so leisurely and the life so easy going; but there is not an hour in the twenty-four when you are secure from noise. The Sunday in question began with the bustle occasioned in a country inn by an unusual strain on its resources. There must be an extra good dinner for the expected influx of guests, said the landlord's niece, who kept house for him, while the wife and daughters ran a second hotel higher up the valley. We escaped to the forest, where the morning hours of a hot June day were fresh and scented, and we were sorry we had to return to the hotel for a long hot midday dinner. When it was over, we sat in the garden and wondered why people held a festival on the top of a hill on such a sleepy afternoon. However, when the time came we joined the leisurely procession making the ascent. An hour's stroll took us to the concert hall, a forest glade where people sat about in groups waiting for the music to begin. Barrels of beer had been rolled up here, and children were selling Kringel, crisp twists of bread sprinkled with salt. There were more children present than adults, and we observed, as you nearly always will in Germany, that though they belonged to the poorer classes they wore neat clothes and had quiet, modest manners. The older people often let them drink out of their glasses, for it was a thirsty afternoon, and when the singing began the children joined in some of the songs. The occasion of the festival was the friendly meeting of several choirs, and they sang fine anthems as well as Volkslieder. The effect of the music in the heart of the forest was enchanting, and we stayed till the end. These choral competitions or reunions often take place on a Sunday in Germany, and in summer are often held in an inn garden. They bring some custom to the innkeeper, but drunkenness and disorder are almost unknown. In fact, all the cases of drunkenness I have seen in Germany have been in the Munich comic papers. You never by any chance hear of it as you do in England amongst people you know, and you may spend hours at the Berlin Zoo on a Whit-Monday and see no one who is not sober. University students get drunk and have fights with innkeepers and policemen, but that is etiquette rather than vice. Next day they suffer from Katzenjammer, but feel that they are upholding ancient tradition. Real intemperance is found almost entirely amongst the dregs of the big cities and the lowest class of peasants.
In Berlin the better class of artisans and small tradespeople escape from their flats on Sundays to their allotment gardens. You see whole tracts of these gardens on the outskirts of the city, and many of them have some kind of summer house or rough shelter. Here the family spends the whole day in fresher air, and presumably finds out how to grow the simpler kinds of flowers and vegetables. Those who have no garden and can afford a few pence for fares go farther afield. They carry food for the day in tin satchels, or rolls that look as if they ought to accompany butterfly nets and contain entomological specimens. But they are usually in the hands of a stout alpaca-clad middle-class mater-familias, who looks rather anxious and flustered while she herds her flock and hunts for a garden with the announcement, "Hier können Familien Kaffee kochen." There for a trifling indemnity she can be accommodated with seats, cups and saucers, and hot water; just as people can in an English tea-garden. Provisions she has with her in her Pickenick Rolle. If fate takes you to Potsdam on a fine summer Sunday, you will think that the whole bourgeoisie of Berlin has elected to come by the same train and steamer, and that everyone but you has brought food for the day in a green tin. You need not expect to find a seat either in the train or the steamer at certain hours of the day, and as you stand wedged in the crowd on the dangerously overladen boat, and look about you as best you can at the chain of wooded lakes, you wonder how it is that such overcrowding is permitted in a police-governed land. At home we take such things for granted as part of our system or want of system. But in Germany the moment you cross the frontier a thousand trifles make you feel that you are a unit in an army, drilled and kept under by the bureaucracy and the police. It surprises you to see an unmanageable crowd in a train or on a steamer, much as it would surprise you to see soldiers swarm at will into a troopship. You expect them to march precisely, each man to his place. And in Germany this nearly always happens in civil life; while even on a Sunday or a public holiday the mob behaves itself. At the Berlin Zoo, for instance, there are such masses of people every Sunday that you see nothing but people. It is impossible, or rather would not be agreeable, to force your way through the crowd surrounding the cages. But the people are interesting, and it is to see them that you have ventured here. You soon find, however, that it is not a venture at all. No one will offend you, no one is drunken or riotous. The gardens are packed with decent folk, mostly of the lower middle classes, and the only unseemly thing you see them do is to eat small hot sausages with their fingers in the open-air restaurants.
Sunday is the great day of the week at German theatres. In all the large towns there are afternoon performances at popular prices, and this means that people who can pay a few pence for a seat can see all the great classical plays and most of the successful modern ones; and they can hear many of the great operas as well as a variety of charming light ones never heard in this country. On one Sunday afternoon in Berlin, Hoffmann's Erzählungen was played at one theatre, and at others Gorky's Nachtasyl, Tolstoy's Power of Darkness, Hauptmann's Versunkene Glocke, the well known military play Zapfenstreich, and Lortzing's light opera Der Waffenschmied. The star players and singers do not usually appear at these popular performances, and the Wagnerian Ring has, as far as I know, never yet been given. But on Sunday afternoons all through the winter the playhouses are crowded with people who cannot pay week-day prices, and yet are intelligent enough to enjoy a fairly good performance of Hamlet or Egmont; who are musical and choose a Mozart opera; or who are interested in the problems of life presented by Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoy, or their own great fellow-countryman Gerhardt Hauptmann. When summer comes, as long as the theatres are open the whole audience streams out between the acts to have coffee or beer in the garden, or when there is no garden, in the nearest restaurant; and then comes your chance of appraising the people who take their pleasure in this way. They look for the most part as if they belonged to the small official and shop-keeper class. If the play is a suitable one, there are sure to be a great many young people present, and at the State-supported theatres these Sunday performances are such as young people are allowed to see.
In the evening the Sunday play or opera is always one of the most important of the week; the play everyone wishes to see or the opera that is most attractive. A Wagner opera is often played on a Sunday evening in the theatre that undertakes Wagner. The smaller stages will give some old favourite, Der Freischütz, Don Juan, Oberon, or Die Zauberflöte. In fact, all through the winter the upper and middle classes make the play and the opera their favourite Sunday pastime. The lower classes depend a good deal on the public dancing saloons, which seem to do as much harm as our public-houses, and to be disliked and discouraged by all sensible Germans.
So far this account of a German Sunday suggests that Germans always go from home for their weekly holiday, and it is true that when Sunday comes the German likes to amuse himself. But he is not invariably at the play or in inn gardens. It is the day when scattered members of a family will meet most easily, and when the branch of the family that can best do so will entertain the others. Some years ago in a North German city I was often with friends who had a dining-room and narrow dinner table long enough for a hotel. The host and hostess, when they were by themselves, dined in a smaller room, sitting next to each other on the sofa; but on Sundays their children and grandchildren, some spinster cousins, some Stammgäste (old friends who came every week) all met in the drawing-room at five o'clock, and sat down soon after to a dinner of four or five courses in a long dining-room. It was a company of all ages and some variety of station, and the patriarchal arrangement placed the venerable and beloved host and hostess side by side at the top of the room, with their friends in order of importance to right and left of them, until you came, below the salt as it were, to the Mamsells and the little children at the foot of the table. But the Mamsells did not leave the room when the sweets arrived. Everyone ate everything, including the preserved fruits that came round with the roast meat, and the pudding that arrived after the cheese. In those days it was not considered proper in Germany for ladies to eat cheese, and no young lady would dream of taking one of the little glasses of Madeira offered on a tray. They were exclusively for die Herren, and always gave a fillip to the conversation, which was also more or less a masculine monopoly. Just before the end of the dinner it was the business of the Mamsell belonging to the house to light a little army of Vienna coffee machines standing ready on the sideboard, so that coffee could be served when everyone went back to the drawing-room. The men smoked their cigars there too, and someone would play the piano, and when no music was going on there was harmless, rather dull, family conversation. The spinster cousins got out their embroidery, the Mamsells disappeared with the children, die Herren either talked to each other or had a quiet game of Skat. The women and some of the men had been to church in the morning, but this did not prevent them from spending the rest of the day as it pleased them.