Home Life in Germany

by Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

English people who have travelled in Germany know some of the big well-kept hotels in the large towns, and know that they are much like big hotels in other continental cities. It is not in these establishments that you can watch national life or discover much about the Germans, except that they are good hotel-keepers; and this you probably discovered long ago abroad or at home. If you are a woman, you may be impressed by the fineness, the whiteness, the profusion, and the embroidered monograms of the linen, whether you are in a huge caravanserai or a wayside inn. Otherwise a hotel at Cologne or Heidelberg has little to distinguish it from a hotel at Brussels or Bâle. The dull correct suites of furniture, the two narrow bedsteads, even the table with two tablecloths on it, a thick and a thin, the parqueted floor, and the small carpet are here, there, and everywhere directly you cross the Channel.

The modern German tells you with pride that this apparent want of national quality and colour is to be felt in every corner of life, and that what you take to be German is not peculiarly German at all, but common to the whole continent of Europe. This may be true in certain cases and in a certain sense, but there is another sense in which it is never true. For instance, the women of continental nations wear high-necked gowns in the evening. It is only English women who wear evening gowns as a matter of course every day of their lives. I have been told in Germany that, so far from being a sign of civilisation, this fashion is merely a stupid survival from the times when all the women of Europe went barenecked all day. However this may be, there is no doubt that whether the gown be high or low, worn by sunlight or lamplight, you can see at a glance whether the woman who wears it is English, French, or German. Every nation has its own features, its own manners, and its own tone, instantly recognised by foreigners, and apparently hidden from itself. The German assures you that the English manner is quite unmistakable, and he will even describe and imitate for your amusement some of his silly countryfolk who were talking to him quite naturally, but suddenly froze and stiffened at the approach of English friends whose national manner they wished to assume. In England we are not conscious of having a stiff frozen manner, and we never dream that everyone has the same manner. It takes a foreigner to perceive this; and so in Germany it takes a foreigner to appreciate and even to see the characteristic trifles that give a nation a complexion of its own.

Some of the most comfortable hotels in Germany are the smaller ones supported entirely by Germans. A stray Englishman, finding one of these starred in Baedeker and put in the second class, may try it from motives of economy, but in many of them he would only meet merchants on their travels and the unmarried men of the neighbourhood who dine there. In such establishments as these the table d'hôte still more or less prevails, while if you go to fashionable hotels you dine at small tables nowadays and see nothing of your neighbours. The part played during dinner by the hotel proprietor varies considerably. In a big establishment he is represented by the Oberkellner, and does not appear at all. The Oberkellner is a person of weight and standing; so much so that when you are in a crowded beer garden and can get no one to attend to you, you call out Ober to the first boy waiter who passes, and he is so touched by the compliment that he serves you before your turn. But in a real old-fashioned German inn you have personal relations with the proprietor, for he takes the head of his table and attends to the comfort of his customers as carefully as if they were his guests. This used to be a universal custom, but you only find it observed now in the Sleepy Hollows of Germany. I have stayed in a most comfortable and well-managed hotel where the proprietor and his brother waited on their guests all through dinner, but never sat down with them. There were hired men, but they played a subordinate part. In small country inns the host still arrives in the garden when your meal is served, asks if you have all you want, wishes you guten Appetit, and after a little further conversation waddles away to perform the same office at some other table. Except in the depths of the country where the inn-keepers are peasants, a German hotel-keeper invariably speaks several languages, and has usually been in Paris and London or New York. His business is to deal with the guests and the waiters, and to look after the cellar and the cigars; while his wife or his sister, though she keeps more in the background than a French proprietress, does just as much work as a Frenchwoman, and, as far as one can judge, more than any man in the establishment. She superintends the chambermaids and has entire care of the vast stock of linen; in many cases she has most of it washed on the premises, and she helps to iron and repair it. She buys the provisions, and sees that there is neither waste nor disorder in the kitchen; she often does a great part of the actual cooking herself. When I was a girl I happened to spend a winter in a South German hotel of old standing, kept for several generations in the same family, and now managed by two brothers and a sister. The sister, a well-educated young woman of twenty-five, used to get up at five winter and summer to buy what was wanted for the market, and one day she took me with her. It was a pretty lesson in the art of housekeeping as it is understood and practised in Germany. All the peasant women in the duchy could not have persuaded my young woman to have given the fraction of a farthing more for her vegetables than they were worth that day, or to take any geese except the youngest and plumpest. She went briskly from one part of the market to the other, seeming to see at a glance where it was profitable to deal this morning. She did not haggle or squabble as inferior housewives will, because she knew just what she wanted and what it was prudent to pay for it. When she got home she sat down to a second breakfast that seemed to me like a dinner, a stew of venison and half a bottle of light wine; but, as she said, hotel keeping is exhausting work, and hotel-keepers must needs live well.

At some hotels in this part of Germany wine is included in the charge for dinner, and given to each guest in a glass carafe or uncorked bottle. It is kept on tap even in the small wayside inns, where you get half a litre for two or three pence when you are out for a walk and are thirsty. If you dislike thin sour wine you had better avoid the grape-growing lands and travel in Bavaria, where every country inn-keeper brews his own beer. Many of these small inns entertain summer visitors, not English and Americans who want luxuries, but their own countryfolk, whose purses and requirements are both small. As far as I know by personal experience and by hearsay, the rooms in these inns are always clean. The bedding all over Germany is most scrupulously kept and aired. In country places you see the mattresses and feather beds hanging out of the windows near the pots of carnations every sunny day. The floors are painted, and are washed all over every morning. The curtains are spotless. In each room there is the inevitable sofa with the table in front of it, a most sensible and comfortable addition to a bedroom, enabling you to seek peace and privacy when you will. If you wander far enough from the beaten track, you may still find that all the water you are supposed to want is contained in a good-sized glass bottle; but if you are English your curious habits will be known, and more water will be brought to you in a can or pail. My husband and I once spent a summer in a Thuringian inn that had never taken staying guests before, and even here we found that the proprietress had heard of English ways, and was willing, with a smile of benevolent amusement, to fill a travelling bath every day. This inn had a summer house where all our meals were served as a matter of course, and where people from a fashionable watering-place in the next valley came for coffee or beer sometimes. The household itself consisted of the proprietress, her daughter, and her maidservant, and during the four months we spent there I never knew them to sit down to a regular meal. They ate anything at any time, as they fancied it. The summer house in which we had our meals was large and pleasant, with a wide view of the hills and a near one of an old stone bridge and a trout stream. The trees near the inn were limes, and their scent while they were in flower overpowered the scent of pines coming at other times with strength and fragrance from the surrounding forest. The only drawback to our comfort was a hornets' nest in an old apple-tree close to the summer-house. The hornets used to buzz round us at every meal, and at first we supposed they might sting us. This they never did, though we waged war on them fiercely. But no one wants to be chasing and killing hornets all through breakfast and dinner, so we asked the maid of the inn what could be done to get rid of them. She smiled and said Jawohl, which was what she always said; and we went out for a walk. When we came back and sat down to supper there were no hornets. Jawohl had just stood on a chair, she said, poured a can of water into the nest, and stuffed up the opening with grass. She had not been stung, and we were not pestered by a hornet again that summer. I have sometimes told this story to English people, and seen that though they were too polite to say so they did not believe it. But that is their fault. The story as I have told it is true. We found immense numbers of hornets in one wild uninhabited valley where we sometimes walked that summer, but we were never stung.

The proprietress of this inn, like most German women, was a fair cook. Besides the inn she owned a small brewery, and employed a brewer who lived quite near, and showed us the whole process by which he transferred the water of the trout stream into foaming beer. His mistress had no rival in the village, and the village was a small one, so sometimes the beer was a little flat. When Jawohl brought a jug from a cask just broached, she put it on the table with a proud air, and informed us that it was frisch angesteckt. We once spent a summer in a Bavarian village where a dozen inns brewed their own beer, and it was always known which one had just tapped a cask. Then everyone crowded there as a matter of course. In all these country inns there is one room with rough wooden tables and benches, and here the peasants sit smoking their long pipes and emptying their big mugs or glasses, and as a rule hardly speaking. They do not get drunk, but no doubt they spend more than they can afford out of their scanty earnings.

In the Bavarian village the inns were filled all through the summer with people from Nuremberg, Erlangen, Augsburg, Erfurth, and other Bavarian towns. The inn-keeper used to charge five shillings a week for a scrupulously clean, comfortably furnished room, breakfast was sixpence, dinner one and two-pence, and supper as you ordered it. For dinner they gave you good soup, Rindfleisch, either poultry or roast meat, and one of the Mehlspeisen for which Bavaria is celebrated, some dish, that is, made with eggs and flour. There was a great variety of them, but I only remember one clearly, because I was impressed by its disreputable name. It was some sort of small pancake soaked in a wine sauce, and it was called versoffene Jungfern. Most of these inns kept no servants, and except in the Kurhaus there was not a black-coated waiter in the place. Our inn-keeper tilled his own fields, grew his own hops, and brewed his own beer; and his wife, wearing her peasant's costume, did all the cooking and cleaning, assisted by a daughter or a cousin. When you met her out of doors she would be carrying one of the immense loads peasant women do carry up hill and down dale in Germany. She was hale and hearty in her middle age, and always cheerful and obliging. At that inn, too, we never had a meal indoors from May till October. Everything was brought out to a summer-house, from which we looked straight down the village, its irregular Noah's Ark-like houses, and its background of mountains and forest.

When you first get back to England from Germany, you have to pull yourself together and remember that in your own country, even on a hot still summer evening, you cannot sit in a garden where a band is playing and have your dinner in the open air, unless you happen to be within reach of Earl's Court. In German towns there are always numbers of restaurants in which, according to the weather, meals can be served indoors or out. You see what use people make of them if, for instance, you happen to be in Hamburg on a hot summer night. All round the basin of the Alster there are houses, hotels, and gardens, and every public garden is so crowded that you wonder the waiters can pass to and fro. Bands are playing, lights are flashing, the little sailing boats are flitting about. The whole city after its day's work has turned out for air and music and to talk with friends. And as you watch the scene you know that in every city, even in every village of the empire, there is some such gala going on: in gardens going down to the Rhine from the old Rhenish towns; in the gardens of ancient castles set high above the stifling air of valleys; in the forest that comes to the very edge of so many little German towns; even in the streets of towns where a table set on the pavement will be pleasanter than in a room on such a night as this. You can sit at one of these restaurants and order nothing but a cup of coffee or a glass of beer; or you can dine, for the most part, well and cheaply. If you order a halbe Portion of any dish, as Germans do, you will be served with more than you can eat of it. The variety offered by some of the restaurants in the big cities, the excellence of the cooking, the civilisation of the appointments, and the service, all show that the German must be the most industrious creature in the world, and the thriftiest and one of the cleverest. In London we have luxurious restaurants for people who can spend a great deal of money, but in Berlin they have them for people who cannot spend much. That is the difference between the two cities. How Berlin does it is a mystery. In the restaurants I have seen there is neither noise nor bustle nor garish colours nor rough service nor any other of the miseries we find in our own cheap eating-houses. In one of them the walls were done in some kind of plain fumed wood with a frieze and ceiling of soft dull gold. In another each room had a different scheme of colour.

"So according to your Stimmung you will choose your room," said the friends who took me. "To-night we are rather cheerful. We will go to the big room on the first floor. That is all pale green and ivory."

"You have nothing like this in England," said the artist as we went up the lift. "It is terrible in England. When I asked for my lunch at three or four o'clock I was told that lunch was over. Das hat keinen Zweck,—I want my lunch when I am hungry."

"But you are terribly behindhand in some ways in Berlin," I said, for I knew the artist liked an argument. "In London you can shop all through the night by telephone. It is most convenient."