Every rural district of Germany has its own novelist. Fritz Reuter, Frenssen, Rosegger, Sudermann all write of country life in the places they know best. In Hauptmann's beautiful plays you see the peasant through a veil of poetry and mysticism. Auerbach, I am told, is out of fashion. His stories end well mostly, his construction one must admit is childish, and his characters change their natures with the suddenness of a thunderbolt to suit his plot. Yet when I have Sehnsucht for Germany, and cannot go there in reality, I love to go in fancy where Auerbach leads. He takes you to a house in the Black Forest, and you sit at breakfast with the family eating Haferbrei out of one bowl. You know the people gathered there as well as if you had been with them all the summer, and you know them now in winter time when the roads are deep in snow and a wolf is abroad in the forest. The story I am thinking of was published in 1860, and I believe that there are no wolves now in the Black Forest. But as far as one outside peasant life can judge, I doubt whether anything else has changed much. You hear the history of the Grossbauer, the rich farmer of the district whose breed is as strong and daring as the breed of the Volsungs. Seven years ago the only son and heir of this forest magnate, Adam Röttman, loved a poor girl called Martina, and their child Joseph is now six years old. Adam is still faithful to Martina, but his parents will not consent to their marriage, and insists on betrothing him to an heiress as rich as he will be, Heidenmüller's Toni. The whole village looks on at the romance and sides with Martina; for Adam's mother, die wilde Röttmännin, is one of those stormy viragoes I myself have met amongst German women. She masters her husband and son with her temper. She is so rich that she has more Schmalz than she can use, and so mean that she would rather let it go bad than give it to the poor. At midnight, when the roads are deep in snow, she sends for the Pfarrer, and when he risks his life and goes because he thinks she is dying, he finds she is merely bored and wanted his company; for she has been used to think that she could tyrannise over all men because she was richer and more determined than most. Next day she gets up, orders her husband and son to put on Sunday clothes, and well wrapped up in Betten drives with them to the Heidenmühle, where Adam is formally betrothed to Toni. The girl knows all about Martina, but she consents because she would marry anyone to escape from her stepmother, who treats her cruelly, and in order to hurt her feelings has given her mother's cup to the Knecht. After the betrothal the two fathers sit together and drink hot spiced wine, the two mothers gossip together, and the Brautpaar talk sadly about Martina, who should be Adam's wife, and Joseph who is his child. At last Adam could bear it no longer. He would go straight to Martina, he said, and he would be with Toni again before the Christmas tree was lighted; and then he would either break with Toni or feel free to marry her. "The bride stared at Adam with amazement as he put on his grey cloak and his fur cap and seized his pointed stick. He looked both handsome and terrible." For he is one of the heroes Germans love, a giant who once held a bull by its horns while Martina escaped from it, who is called the Gaul, because for a wager he once carried the cart and the load a cart horse should have carried, and who on this wild winter night meets the wolf in the forest and kills it with his stick. So you see him striding through the snow-bound forest to the village where Martina lives, dragging the wolf after him, as strong as Siegfried, as credulous as a child, ready to believe that the voices of his father and his child both looking for him in the snow are witches' voices. But when he gets to the village he finds that his child, so long disowned and disregarded, is really lost, and is looking for him in the snow. The hatter who tramps from village to village hung with hats met him, and tried to turn him back. But the child said he had come out to find his father, and must go on. Then every man in the village assembles at the Pfarrhaus, and, led by the Pfarrer's brother-in-law (an eventual husband for Heidenmüller's Toni), sets out to find Joseph in the snow. Before they start Adam vows before the whole community that whether the child is alive or dead nothing shall ever part him again from Martina, and when he has made this vow you see the whole company depart in various directions carrying torches, ladders, axes, and long ropes. Meanwhile the child, after some alarms and excursions, meets three angels (children masquerading), who take him with them to the mill where Toni has just lighted the Christmas tree. She rescues Joseph from die wilde Röttmännin, and that same night, her father dying of his carouse, she becomes a rich heiress and free of her wicked stepmother. Joseph's hostile grandfathers, after a fight in the snow, make friends, the obliging Pfarrer marries Adam and Martina at midnight, and soon after the wilde Röttmännin who will not be reconciled leaves this world. So everyone who deserves happiness gets it. But though you only half believe in the story you have been in the very heart of the Black Forest, the companion of its people, the observer of their most intimate talk and ways. You have heard the women gossip at the well, you have made friends with Leegart the seamstress, who believes that quite against her will she is gifted with supernatural powers. There is Häspele, too, who made Joseph his new boots, and would marry Martina if he could; and there is David, the father of Martina, who was hardly kept from murdering his daughter when she came home in disgrace, and whose grandson becomes the apple of his eye. The whole picture of these people is vivid and enchanting, touched with quaint detail, veined with the tragedy of their lives, glowing with the warm human qualities that knit them to each other. The South German loves to tell you that his country is ein gesegnetes Land, a blessed country, flowing with milk and honey; and whether you are reading Auerbach's peasant stories or actually staying amongst his peasant folk, you get this impression of their natural surroundings. Nature is kind here, grows forest for her people on the hill-tops, and wine, fruit and corn in her sheltered valleys, ripens their fruit in summer, gives them heavy crops of hay, and sends soft warm rain as well as sun to enrich their pastures.
In the eastern provinces of Germany the conditions of life amongst the poor are most unhappy. Here the land belongs to large proprietors, and until modern times the people born on the land belonged to the landlords too. No man could leave the village where he was born without permission, and he had to work for his masters without pay. Even in the memory of living men the whip was quite commonly used. In her most interesting account of a Silesian village,[3] Gertrud Dyhrenfurth says that the present condition of the peasantry in this region compares favourably with former times, but she admits that they are still miserably overworked and underpaid. They are no longer legally obliged to submit to corporal punishment, nor can they be forced to live where they were born, and as they emigrate in large numbers, scarcity of labour has brought about slightly improved conditions for those remaining. But a man's wage is still a mark a day in summer and 90 pf. in winter. A woman earns 60 pf. in summer and 50 pf. in winter. Besides receiving these wages, a family regularly employed lives rent free and gets a fixed amount of coal, and at harvest time some corn and brandy. You cannot say the family has a house or cottage to itself, because the system is to build long bare-looking barracks in which numbers of working families herd like rabbits in a warren. In modern times each family has a kitchen to itself, so there is one warm room where the small children can be kept alive. In former times there was a general kitchen, and in the rooms appointed to each family no heating apparatus; therefore, if the children were not to die of cold, they had to be carried every morning to the kitchen, where there was a fire. The present plan has grave disadvantages, as in one room the whole family has to sleep, eat, wash, and cook for themselves and for the animals in their care. The furniture consists of two or three bedsteads with straw mattresses and feather plumeaux, shelves for pots and pans, a china cupboard with glass doors, a table in the window, and wooden benches with backs. This installation is quite luxurious compared with that of a milkmaid's or a stablemaid's surroundings sixty or seventy years ago. "Her home consisted of a plank slung from the stable roof and furnished with a sack of straw and a plumeau. Her small belongings were in a little trunk in a wooden niche, her clothes in a chest that stood in the garret." Here is the life history of an unmarried working woman of eighty-six born in a Silesian village. When she left school she was apprenticed to a thrasher, with a yearly wage of four thalers, besides two chemises and two aprons as a Christmas present. Even in those days this money did not suffice for clothing, although even in winter the women wore no warm under-garments. Quite unprotected, they waded up to the middle in snow.... In summer the girl was in the barn and at work by dawn; in winter they threshed by artificial light. A bit of bread taken in the pocket served as breakfast. The first warm meal was taken at midday. When the farm work was finished there was spinning to do till 10 o'clock.
This woman "bettered herself" as she grew older till she was earning 35 thalers (£5, 5s. 0d.) a year; she accustomed herself to live on this sum, and when wages increased, to put by the surplus. So in her old age she is a capitalist, has saved enough for a decent funeral, for certain small legacies, and for such an amazing luxury as a tin foot-warmer. The family she faithfully served for so many years allows her coal, milk and potatoes, and when necessary pays for doctor and medicine. Her weekly budget is as follows—
| Pf. | |
| Rent | 50 |
| Bread | 25 |
| Rolls | 5 |
| ¼ lb. butter | 25 |
| ¼ lb. coffee and chicory | 25 |
| Sugar | 15 |
| 1 lb. flour | 14 |
| Salt | 1 |
| Light | 10 |
| Washing | 5 |
| 1m. 75 |
Meat is of course out of the question, and in discussing another budget Fräulein Dyhrenfurth shows that a family of eight people could only afford three quarters of a pound a week. Their yearly expenses amounted to 455 m. 26 pf., so each one of the eight had to be fed and clothed for about 1s. 1d. a week. Women are still terribly overworked in the fields. They used to begin at four o'clock in the morning, and go on till nine at night,—a working day, that is, of seventeen hours for a wife and the mother of a family. When the family at the mansion had the great half-yearly wash, the village women called in to help began at midnight, and stood at the washtub till eight o'clock next evening, twenty hours, that is, on end. In 1880 the working day was shortened, and only lasts now from five in the morning till seven at night, with a two hours' pause for dinner and shorter pauses for breakfast and vesper. But, on the other hand, women do work now that only men did in former times. The threshing of corn has fallen entirely into their hands, and they follow a plough yoked with oxen. Both kinds of work are heavy and unpleasant. But women are glad to get the threshing in winter time when other work fails, and it is often on this account that the proprietors do not introduce threshing machines.
At certain times of the year Poles swarm over the frontier into the eastern provinces of Germany, but Fräulein Dyhrenfurth says that they do not work for lower wages. The women have no house-keeping to do, and can therefore give more hours to field labour. One woman prepares a meal for a whole gang of her country people, and they live almost entirely on bread, potatoes, and brandy. They do not mix with the Germans, but spend their evenings and Sundays in playing the harmonium, dancing, and drinking. They return every year, are always foreigners in Germany, and are very industrious, religious, contented, and cheerful, but inclined to drink and fight.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Ein schlesisches Dorf und Rittergut, von Gertrud Dyhrenfurth. Leipzig, Duncker und Humblot.