Home Life in Germany

by Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

The Pension price at a German summer hotel varies from four to fifteen marks, according to the general style of the establishment and the position of the rooms engaged. In one frequented by Germans the sitting-rooms are bare and formal, and as English visitors are not expected no English papers are taken. The season begins in June and lasts till the end of September, and you must be a successful hotel-keeper yourself to understand how so much can be provided for so little, miles away from any market. Many of these summer hotels have been built high up in the forest, and with no others near them. Some are run as a speculation by doctors. There is hardly a woman or girl in Germany who has not needed a Kur at some time of her life, or who does not need one every year if she has money and pretty gowns. The Badereise and everything connected with it serves the German professional humorist much as the mother-in-law and the drop too much serve the English one, perennially and faithfully. For the wife is determined to have her Badereise, and the husband is not inclined to pay for it, and the family doctor is called in to prescribe it. The artifices and complications arising suggest themselves, and to judge by the postcards and farces of Germany never weary the public they are designed to amuse.

In Berlin, when the hot weather comes, you see the family luggage and bedding going off to the sea-coast, for people who take a house take part of their bedding with them. There is so little seaside and so much Berlin that prices rule high wherever there is civilised accommodation. In Ruegen £1 a week per room is usual, and the room you get for that may be a very poor one. In most German watering-places, both on the coast and in the forest, you can have furnished rooms if you prefer them to hotel life, but as a rule you must either cook your own dinner or go out to a hotel for it. The cooking landlady is as rare in the country as in the town. Then in some places, at Oberhof, for instance, high upon the hills above Gotha, there are charming little furnished bungalows. Friends of mine go there or to one of the neighbouring villages every year, and never enter a hotel. They either take a servant with them, or find someone on the spot to do what is necessary. When there are no mineral waters or sea baths to give a place importance, Germans say they have come there to do a Luftkur. A delightful Frenchwoman who has written about England lately is amused by our everlasting babble about a "change." This one needs a change, she says, and that one is away for a change, and the other means to have a change next week. So the Germans amuse us by their eternal "cures." One tries air, and the other water, and the next iron, and the fourth sulphur, while the number and variety of nerve cures, Blutarmut cures, diet cures, and obesity cures are bewildering. It is difficult to believe that life in a hotel can cure anyone anywhere. However, in Germany, if you are under a capable Badearzt, there may be some salvation for you, since he orders your baths, measures your walks, and limits your diet so strictly. At one of the well-known places where people who eat too much all the year round go to reduce their figures, there is in the chief hotels a table known as the Corpulententisch, and a man who sits there is not allowed an ounce of bread beyond what his physician has prescribed.

But the German Luxusbad, the fashionable watering-place where the guests are cosmopolitan and the prices high—Marienbad, Homburg, Karlsbad, Schwalbach, Wiesbaden—all these places are as well known to English people as their own Bath and Buxton. Homburg they have swallowed, and I have somewhere come across a paragraph from an English newspaper objecting to the presence of Germans there. It is the quiet German watering-place where no English come that is interesting and not impossible to find. During the summer I spent in a Bavarian forest village I only saw one English person the whole time, except my own two or three friends. I heard the other day that the village and the life there have hardly altered at all, but that some English people have discovered the trout streams and come every year for fishing. In my time no one seemed to care about fishing. You went for walks in the forest. There was nothing else to do, unless you played Kegel and drank beer; for it was only a Luftkur. There was no Badearzt and no mineral water. To be sure, there were caves, huge limestone caves that you visited with a guide the day after you arrived, and never thought about again. There were various ruined castles, too, in the neighbourhood that made a goal for a drive in cases where there was a restaurant attached, and not far off there was a curious network of underground beer-cellars that I did not see, but which seemed to attract the men of our party sometimes. There were several inns in the straggling village, for the place lay high up amongst the dolomite hills of Upper Franconia, and people came there from the neighbouring towns for Waldluft. The summer I was there Richard Wagner passed through with his family, and we saw him more than once. He stayed at the Kurhaus, a hotel of more pretentions than the village inns, for it had a good sized garden and did not entertain peasants. My inn, recommended by an old Nuremberg friend, was owned and managed by a peasant proprietor, his wife, their elderly daughter, and two charming orphan grandchildren in their early teens. The peasant customers had as usual a large rough room to themselves, the town guests had their plain bare Speisesaal, and we Britishers possessed the summer house; so we were all happy. The whole glory of the place was in the forest; for it was not flat sandy forest that has no undergrowth, and wearies you very soon with its sameness and its still, oppressive air. It was up hill and down dale forest, full of lovely glades, broken by massive dolomite rocks; the trees not set in serried rows, but growing for the most part as the birds and the wind planted them; a varied natural forest tended but not dragooned by man. The flowers there were a delight to us, for we arrived early enough in the year to find lilies of the valley growing in great quantities amongst the rocks, while a little later the stream and pathways were bordered by oak and beech fern and by many wild orchises that are rare now with us. It was not here, however, but in another German forest, where, one day when I had no time to linger, I met people with great bunches of the Cypripedium calceolus that they had gathered as we gather primroses. At the Bavarian watering-place we had the whole forest as much to ourselves as the summer house, for no one seemed to wander farther than the seats placed amongst the trees by the Verschönerungsverein.

"Warum willst du weiter schweifen
Sieh das Gute liegt so nah,"

says Goethe, and most Germans out for their summer holiday seem to take his advice in the most literal way, and find their happiness as near home as they possibly can.

When you begin to think about the actual process of travelling in Germany, the tiresome business of getting from the city to the forest village, for instance, you at once remember both the many complaints you have heard Germans make of our system, or rather want of system, and the bitter scorn poured on German fussiness by travelling Britons. The ways of one nation are certainly not the ways of another in this respect. Directly I cross the German frontier I know that I am safe from muddle and mistakes, that I need not look after myself or my luggage, that I cannot get into a wrong train or alight at a wrong station, or suffer any injury through carelessness or mismanagement. Everything is managed for me, and on long journeys in the corridor trains things are well managed. But your carriage is far more likely to be unpleasantly crowded in Germany than in England; and as hand-luggage is not charged for, the public takes all it can, and fills the racks, the seats, and the floor with heavy bags and portmanteaux. In bygone years the saying was that none travelled first class save fools and Englishmen, but nowadays Germans travel in their own first-class carriages a good deal. The third-class accommodation is wretched, more fit for animals than men. In some districts there are fourth-class uncovered seats on the roof of the carriages, but I have only seen these used in summer. When I was last in Germany a year ago there was much excitement and indignation over certain changes that were to make travelling dearer for everyone. All luggage in the van was to be paid for in future, first-class fares were to be raised, and no return tickets issued.

But you must not think that when you have bought a ticket from one place to another you can get to it by any train you please. "I want the 10.15 to Entepfuhl," you say to the nearest and biggest official you can see; and he looks at your ticket.

"Personenzug," he says in a withering way,—"the 10.15 is an express."

You say humbly that you like an express.

"Then you must get an extra ticket," he says, "This one only admits you to slow trains."