MRS. ALFRED UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY LIBRARY OP THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Class // A HOME LIFE IN GERMANY BV THE SAME AUTHOR THE KINSMAN THE PROFESSOR'S LEGACY THE BERYL STONES THE THOUSAND EUGENIAS CYNTHIA'S WAY THE INNER SHRINE COUSIN Ivo A WOMAN WITH A FUTURE THE GRASSHOPPERS MRS. FINCH-BRASSEY LESSER'S DAUGHTER A SPLENDID COUSIN ISAAC ELLER'S MONEY YOUNG GERMANY l-'KOM I HE I'AINTINCi I>V C. HKK'TKL HOME LIFE IN GERMANY BY MRS. ALFRED SIDGWICK WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS SECOND EDITION NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1909 First Published . . May / classes where women could work at subjects not taught in girls' schools, Latin for instance, and advanced mathematics ; for the State in Germany has always decided how much as well as how little women may learn. It would not allow people as ignorant as Squeers to keep a school because it offered an easy livelihood. It organised women's education carefully and thoroughly in the admirable German way ; but it laid down the law from A to Z, which is also the German way. When, therefore, Helene Lange opened her classes for women, the officials came to her and said that she was doing an illegal thing. She replied that her students were not schoolgirls under the German school laws, but grown-up women free to learn what they needed and desired. The officials said that an old law of 1837 would empower them to close the classes by force if Helene Lange did not do so of her own accord. After some reflection and in some anxiety she decided to go on with them. By this time public opinion was on her side and came to her assistance ; for public opinion does count in Germany even with the officials. The classes went on, and were 24 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY changed in 1893 t Gymnasialkurse. In 1896 the first German women passed the Abiturienten examina- tion, the difficult examination young men of eighteen pass at the end of a nine years' course in one of the classical schools. Even to-day you may hear German men argue that women should not be admitted to universities because they have had no classical training. Helene Lange was the first to prove that even without early training women can prepare themselves for an academic career. Her experiment led to the establish- ment of Gymnasialkurse in many German cities ; and even to the admission of girls in some few cases to boys' Gymnasium schools. To-day Helene Lange and her associates are con- tending with the schoolmasters, who desire to keep the management of girls' schools in their own hands. She calls the Hohere Tochterschule the failure of German school organisation, and she says that the difference of view taken by men and women teachers as to the proper work of girls' schools makes it most difficult to come to an understanding. Consciously or not, men form an ideal of what they want and expect of women, and try to educate them up to it ; while women think of the claims life may make on a girl, and desire the full development of her powers. " The Higher Daughter," she says, " must vanish, and her place must be taken by the girl who has been thoroughly prepared for life, who can stand on her own feet if circumstances require it, or who brings with her as housewife the founda- tions of further self-development, instead of the pretentiousness of the half educated. In one ot her many articles on the subject of school reform she points to three directions where reform is needed. What she says about the teaching of history is so characteristic of her views and of the modern move- SCHOOLS 25 ment in Germany, that I think the whole passage is worth translation : " All those subjects that help to make a woman a better citizen must be taken more seriously," she says. " It can no longer be the proper aim of history teaching to foster and strengthen in women a sentimental at- tachment to her country and its national character : its aim must be to give her the insight that will enable her to understand the forces at work, and ultimately play an active part in them. Many branches of our social life await the work of women, civic philanthropy to begin with ; and as our public life becomes more and more con- stitutional, it demands from the individual both a ripe insight into the good of the community and a living sense of duty in regard to its destiny ; and, on the other hand, the foundations of this insight and sense of duty must be in our times more and more laid by the mother, since the father is often entirely prevented by his work from sharing in the education of his children. Therefore, both on her own account and in consideration of the task before her, a woman just as much as a man should understand and take a practical interest in public life, and it is the business of the school to see that she does so. Over and over again those who are trying to reform girls' schools insist that history teaching should lead the student to understand the present time ; that it should recognise those economic conditions on which the history of the world, especially in our day, depends in so great a measure ; that it should pay attention not only to dates and events, but also to the living process of civilisation, since it is only from the latter inquiry that we can arrive at the principles of individual effort in forwarding social life." Nowadays in Germany Helene Lange is considered 26 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY one of the " Moderates," but it will be seen from the above quotation that she has travelled far from the old ideals which invested women with many beautiful qualities, but not with the sense and knowledge re- quired of useful public citizens. She proceeds in the same article to say that scientific and mathematical teaching should reach a higher standard in girls' schools ; and thirdly, that certain branches of psychology, phy- siology, and hygiene should receive greater attention, because a woman is a better wife and mother when she fulfils her duties with understanding instead of by mere instinct. Nor will education on this higher plane deprive women of any valuable feminine virtues if it is carried out in the right way. But to this end women must direct it, and in great measure take it into their own hands. She would not shut men out of girls' schools, but she would place women in supreme authority there, and give them the lion's share of the work. It seems to the English onlooker that this contest can only end in one way, and that if the women of Germany mean to have the control of girls' schools they are bound to get it. Some of the evils of the present system lie on the surface. " It is a fact," said a schoolmaster, speaking lately at a conference, " it is a fact that a more intimate, spiritual, and personal relation- ship is developed between a schoolgirl and her master than between a schoolgirl and her mistress." This remark, evidently made in good faith, was received with hilarity by a large mixed audience of teachers; and when one reflects on the unbridled sentiment of some " higher daughters " one sees where it must inevitably find food under the present anomalous state of things. But the schoolmaster's argument is the argument brought forward by many men against the reforms desired by Helene Lange and her party. They insist SCHOOLS 27 that girls would deteriorate if they were withdrawn throughout their youth from masculine scholarship and masculine authority in school. They talk of the emasculation of the staff as a future danger. They do not seem to talk of their natural reluctance to cede important posts to women, but this must, of course, strengthen their pugnacity and in some cases colour their views. Meanwhile many parents prefer to send their daughters to one of the private schools that have a woman at the head, and where most of the teaching is done by women ; or to a S tift t a residential school of the conventual type, which may be either Protestant or Catholic. A girl who had spent some years at a well-known Protestant Stiff described her school life to me as minutely as possible, and it sounded so like the life in a good English boarding-school thirty years ago that it is difficult to pick out points of differences. That only means, of course, that the differences were subtle and not apparent in rules and time-tables. The girls wore a school uniform, were well fed and taught, strictly looked after, taken out for walks and excursions, allowed a private correspondence, shown how to mend their clothes, made to keep their rooms tidy, encouraged in piety and decorum. In these strenuous times it sounds a little old-fashioned, and as a matter of fact a school of this kind fits a girl for a sheltered home but not for the open road. For everyone concerned about the education of women the interesting spectacle in Germany to-day is the campaign being carried on by Helene Lange and her party, the support they receive from the official as well as from the unofficial world, and the progress they make year by year to gain their ends. CHAPTER IV THE EDUCATION OF THE POOR THERE are no people in the world who need driving to school less than the Germans. There are no people in the world who set so high a value on knowledge. In the old days, when they lived with Jove in the clouds, they valued knowledge solely for its own sake, and did not trouble much about its practical use in the world. It is absurd to say, as people often do now, that this spirit is dead in the nation. You cannot be long in the society of Germans without recognising that it survives wherever the stress of modern life leaves room for it. You see that when a German makes money his sons constantly enter the learned and the artistic professions with his full approval, though they are most unlikely to make a big income in this way. You are told by people who work amongst the poor, that parents will make any sacrifices year after year in order to send a boy to one of the higher schools. You know that the Scotsmen who live on oatmeal while they acquire learning have their counterparts in the German univer- sities, where many a student would not dine at all if private or organised charity did not give him a dinner so many days a week. Sometimes you have heard it said of such and such a great German, that he was so poor when he was young that he had to accept these free dinners given in every German university town to THE EDUCATION OF THE POOR 29 penniless students. The fact would be remembered, but it would never count against a man in Germany. The dollar is not almighty there. To say, therefore, that education is compulsory throughout the empire is not to say that it is unpopular. A teacher in an elementary school was once telling me how particular the authorities were that every child, even the poorest, should come to school properly clothed and shod. " For instance," she said, " if a child comes to school in house-shoes he is sent straight home again." " But do the parents mind that ? " I asked from my English point of view, for the teacher was speaking of people who in England would live in slums and care little whether their children were educated or not. But in Germany even the poorest of the poor do care, and to refuse a child admission to school is an effective punishment. At any rate, you may say this of the majority. No doubt if school was not compulsory the dregs of the nation would slip out of the net, especially in those parts of the empire where the prevalent char- acter is shiftless and easy going. " When you English think that we hold the reins too tight, it is because you do not understand what a mixed team we have to drive," a north German said to me. " We should not get on, we should not hold together long, if our rule was slack and our attention careless." At the last census only one in 10,000 could not read or write, and these dunces were all Slavs. But how even a Slav born under the eye of the Eagle can remain illiterate is a mystery. In 1905 there were 59,348 elementary schools in the empire, and their organisation is as elaborate and well planned as the organisation of the army. In Berlin alone there are 280. All the teachers at these schools have been trained to teach at special seminaries, and have passed State examina- 30 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY tions that qualify them for their work. In Germany many men and women, entitled both by class and training to teach in the higher grade schools, have taken up work in the elementary ones from choice. I know one lady whose certificates qualify her to teach in a Hbhere Tocliterschule, and who elects to teach a large class of backward children in a Volkschule. Her ambition is to teach those children described in Germany as nicht vb'llig normal', children we should describe as " wanting." She says that her backward children repay her for any extra trouble they give by their affection and gratitude. She knows the circum- stances of every child in her class, and where there is real need she can get help from official sources or from philanthropic organisations, because a teacher's recom- mendation carries great weight in Germany. This lady gets up every day in summer at a quarter past five, in order to be in school by seven. Her school hours are from seven to eleven in summer, and from eight till twelve in winter ; but she has a great deal of work to prepare and correct after school. Her salary is raised with every year of service, and when she is past work she will be entitled to a State pension of thirty pounds. Children have to attend school from the age of six and to stay till they are fourteen ; and in their school years they are not allowed to work at a trade without permission. They do not learn foreign languages, but they are thoroughly grounded in German, and they receive religious instruction. Of course, they learn history, geography, and arithmetic. In the new schools every child is obliged to have a warm bath every week, but it is not part of a teacher's duties to superintend it. Probably the women who clean the school buildings do so. In the old schools, where there are no bathrooms, THE EDUCATION OF THE POOR 31 the children are given tickets for the public bathing establishments. The State does not supply free food, but there are philanthropic societies that supply those children who need it with a breakfast of bread and milk in winter. Everyone connected with German schools says that no child would apply for this if his parents were not destitute, and one teacher told me a story of the headmaster's boy being found, to his father's horror and indignation, seated with the starving children and sharing their free lunch. He had brought his own lunch with him, but it was his first week at school, and he thought that a dispensation of bread and milk in the middle of the morning was part of the curriculum. School books are supplied to children too poor to buy them, and it seems that no trouble is given by applications for this kind of relief by people not entitled to it. Gymnastics are compulsory for both boys and girls in the lower classes, and choral singing is taught in every school. Teachers must all be qualified to accompany singing on the violin. Most of the ele- mentary schools in Prussia are free. Some few charge sixpence a month. A child can even have free teaching in its own home if it is able to receive instruction, but not to attend school. Medical inspection is rigorously carried out in German elementary schools. The doctor not only watches the general health of the school, but he registers the height, weight, carriage, state of nourishment, and vaccination marks of each child on admission ; the condition of the eyes and ears and any marked constitutional tendency he can discover. Every child is examined once a month, when necessary once a fortnight. In this way weak or wanting children are weeded out, and removed to other surroundings, the short-sighted and the deaf are given 32 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY places in the schoolroom to suit them. The system protects the child and helps the teacher, and has had the best results since it was introduced into Prussia in 1888. Attendance at continuation schools is now com- pulsory on boys and girls for three years after leaving the elementary school, where they have had eight years steady education. They must attend from four to six hours weekly ; instruction is free, and is given in the evening, when the working day is over. Certain classes of the community are free, but about 30,000 students attend these schools in Berlin. The subjects taught are too many to enumerate. They comprise modern languages, history, law, painting, music, mathe- matics, and various domestic arts, such as ironing and cooking. More boys than girls attend these schools, as girls are more easily exempt. It is presumably not considered so necessary for them as for their brothers to continue their education after the age of fourteen. One of the most interesting experiments being made in Germany at present is the " open air " school, established for sickly children during the summer months. The first one was set up by the city of Charlottenberg at the suggestion of their Schulrat and their school doctor, and it is now being imitated in other parts of Germany. From Charlottenberg the electric cars take you right into the pine forest, far beyond the last houses of the growing city. The soil here is loose and sandy, and the air in summer so soft that it wants strength and freshness. But as far out as this it is pure, and the medical men must deem it healing, for they have set up three separate ventures close together amongst the pine trees. One belongs to the Society of the Red Cross, and here sick and con- sumptive women come with their children for the day, THE EDUCATION OF THE POOR 33 and are waited on by the Red Cross sisters. We saw some of them lying about on reclining chairs, and some, less sickly, were playing croquet. The second establishment is for children who are not able to do any lessons, children who have been weeded out by the school doctor because they are backward and sickly. There are a hundred and forty children in this school, and there is a creche with twenty beds attached to it for babies and very young children. One airy room with two rows of neat beds was for rickety children. The third and largest of the settlements was the Waldschule, open every day, Sundays included, from the end of April to the middle of October, and educating two hundred and forty delicate children chosen from the elementary schools of Charlottenberg. We arrived there just as the children were going to sit down to their afternoon meal of bread and milk, and each child was fetching its own mug hanging on a numbered hook. The meals in fine weather are taken at long tables in the open air. When it rains they are served in big shelters closed on three sides. Dotted about the forest there were mushroom-shaped shelters with seats and tables beneath them, sufficient cover in slight showers ; and there were well lighted, well aired class- rooms, where the children are taught for twenty-five minutes at a time. All the buildings are on the Doecker system, and were manufactured by Messrs. Christoph & Unmark of Niesky. This firm makes a speciality of schools and hospitals, built in what we should call the bungalow style. Of course, this style exactly suits the needs of the school in the forest. There is not a staircase in the place, there is no danger of fire, no want of ventilation, and very little work for housemaids or charwomen. The school furniture is simple and care- 3 34 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY fully planned. Some of it was designed by Richard Riemerschmid of Munich, the well-known artist. Each child has two and a half hours' work each day ; all who are strong enough do gymnastics, and all have baths at school. Each child has its own locker and its own numbered blanket for use out of doors on damp or chilly days. The doctor visits the school twice a week, and the weight of each child is carefully watched. The busy sister who superintends the housekeeping and the hygienic arrangements seemed to know how much each child had increased already ; and she told us what quantities of food were consumed every day. The kitchen and larder were as bright and clean as such places always are in Germany. When the children arrive in the morning at half-past seven they have a first breakfast of Griesbrei. At ten o'clock they have rolls and butter. Their dinner consists of one solid dish. The day we were there it had been pork and cabbage, a combination Germans give more willingly to delicate children than we should ; the next day it was to be Nudelsuppe and beef. At four o'clock they have bread and milk, and just before they go home a supper like their early breakfast of milk-soup, and bread. 260 litres of milk are used every day, 50 to 60 Ibs. of meat, 2 cwts. potatoes, 30 big rye loaves, 280 rolls, and when spinach, for instance, is given, 80 Ibs. of spinach. We asked whether the children paid, and were told that those who could afford it paid from 25 to 45 pf. a day. The school is kept open through- out the summer holidays, but no work is done then, and two-thirds of the teachers are away. Although the children are at play for the greater part of the day in term time, and all day in the holidays, the head- master told us that they gave no trouble. There was not a dirty or untidy child to be seen, nor one with rough THE EDUCATION OF THE POOR 35 manners. They are allowed to play in the light, sandy soil of the forest, much as English children play at the seaside, and we saw the beginning of an elaborate chain of fortresses defended by toy guns and decorated with flowers. We heard a lesson in mental arithmetic given in one of the class-rooms, the boys sitting on one side of the room and the girls on the other ; and we found that these young sickly children were admirably taught and well advanced for their age. To be a teacher in one of these open-air schools is hard work, because the strain is never wholly relaxed. All day long, and a German day is very long, the children must be watched and guarded, sheltered from changes in the weather and prevented from over-tiring themselves. Many of them come from poor cramped homes, and to spend the whole summer in the forest more at play than at work makes them most happy. I met Germans who did not approve of the Waldschule^ who considered it a fantastic extravagant experiment, too heavy for the rate-payers to bear. This is a side of the question that the rate-payers must settle for themselves ; but there is no doubt about the results of the venture on the children sent to school in the forest. They get a training that must shape their whole future, moral and physical, a training that changes so many unsound citizens into sound ones every year for the German Empire. If the rate-payers can survive the strain it seems worth while. CHAPTER V THE BACKFISCH THE word is untranslatable, though my dictionary translates it. Backfisch, m. fried fish ; young girl ; says the dictionary. In Germany a woman does not arrive at her own gender till she marries and becomes somebody's Frau. Woman in general, girl, and miss are neuter; and the fried-fish girl is masculine. But if one little versed in German wished to tell you that he liked a fried sole, and said Ich Hebe einen Backfisch, it might lead to misunderstandings. The origin of the word in this application is dubious. Some say it means fish that are baked in the oven because they are too small to fry in pans ; but this does not seem a sensible explanation to anyone who has seen white- bait cooked. Others say it means fish the anglers throw back into the water because they are small. At any rate, the word used is to convey an impression of immaturity. A Backfisch is what English and American fashion papers call a " miss." You may see, too, in German shop windows a printed intimation that special attention is given to Backfisch Moden. It is a girl who has left school but has not cast off her school-girl manners ; and who, according to her nation and her history, will require more or less last touches. Miss Betham-Edwards tells us that a French girl is taught from babyhood to play her part in society, THE BACKFISCH 37 and that the exquisite grace and taste of Frenchwomen are carefully developed in them from the cradle. An English girl begins her social education in the nursery, and is trained from infancy in habits of personal clean- liness and in what old-fashioned English people call "table manners." An Englishwoman, who for many years lived happily as governess in a German country house, told me how on the night of her arrival she tried out of politeness to eat and drink as her hosts did ; and how the mistress of the house confided to her later that she had disappointed everyone grievously. There were daughters in the family, and they were to learn to behave at table in the English way. That was why the father, arriving from Berlin, had on his own initiative brought them an English governess ; for the English are admitted by their continental friends to excel in this special branch of manners, while their continental enemies charge them with being " ostentatiously " well groomed and dainty. The truth is, that if you have lived much with both English and Germans, and desire to be fair and friendly to both races, you find that your generalisations will not often weigh on one side. The English child learns to eat with a fork rather than with a spoon, and never by any chance to put a knife in its mouth, or to touch a bone with its fingers. The German child learns that it must never wear a soiled or an unmended garment or have untidy hair. I have known a German scandalised by the slovenly wardrobe of her well-to-do English pupil, and I have heard English people say that to hear Germans eat soup destroyed their appetite for dinner. English girls are not all slovens, and nowadays decently bred Germans behave like other people at table. But untidiness is commoner in England than in Germany, and you may still stumble across a German any day 38 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY who, abiding by old customs, puts his knife in his mouth and takes his bones in his hands. He will not only do these things, but defend them vociferously. In that case you are strongly advised not to eat a dish of asparagus in his company. Your modern German Backfisch may be a person of finish and wide culture. You may find that she insists on her cold tub every morning, and is scandalised by your offer of hot water in it. She has seen Salome as a play and heard Salome as an opera. She has seen plays by G.B.S. both in Berlin and L.ondon. She does not care to see Shakespeare in London, because, as she tells you, the English know nothing about him. Besides, he could not sound as well in English as in German. She has read Carlyle, and is now reading Ruskin. She adores Byron, but does not know Keats, Shelley, or Rossetti. Tennyson she waves contemptuously away from her, not because she has read him, but because she has been taught that his poetry is " bourgeois." Her favourite novels are Dorian Gray and Misunderstood. She dresses with effect and in the height of fashion, she speaks French and English fluently, she has travelled in Italy and Switzerland, she plays tennis well, she can ride and swim and skate, and she would cycle if it was not out of fashion. In fact, she can do anything, and she knows everything, and she has been everywhere Your French and English girls are ignorant misses in comparison with her, and you say to yourself as you watch her and humbly listen to her opinions, de- livered without hesitation and expressed without mistakes : " Where is the German Backfisch of yester year ? " " Did you ever read Backfischcheris Leiden und Freuden ? " you say to her ; for the book is in its 55th edition, and you have seen German girls de- THE BACKFISCH 39 vouring it only last week ; German girls of a different type, that is, from your present glittering companion. "That old-fashioned inferior thing," she says con- temptuously. " I believe my mother had it. That is not literature." You leave her to suppose you could not have made that discovery for yourself, and you spend an amusing hour over the story again, for there are occasions when a book that is not " literature " will serve your purpose better than a masterpiece. The little book has enter- tained generations of German girls, and is presumably accepted by them, just as Little Women is accepted in -America or The Daisy Chain in England. The picture was always a little exaggerated, and some of its touches are now out of date ; yet as a picture of manners it still has a value. It narrates the joys and sorrows of a young girl of good family who leaves her country home in order to live with an aunt in Berlin, a facetious but highly civilised aunt who uses a large quantity of water at her morning toilet. All the stages of this toilet are minutely described, and all the mistakes the poor countrified Backfisch makes the first morning. She actually gets out of bed before she puts on her clothes, and has to be driven behind the bed curtains by her aunt's irony. This is an incident that is either out of date or due to the genius and imagination of the author, for I have never seen bed curtains in Germany. However, Gretchen is taught to perform the early stages of her toilet behind them, and then to wash for the first time in her life in a basin full of water. She is sixteen. Her aunt presents her with a sponge, and observes that the civilisation of a nation is judged by the amount of soap it uses. " In much embarrassment I applied myself to this unaccustomed task," continues the ingenuous Backfisch^ " and I managed it so cleverly 40 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY that everything around me was soon swimming. To make matters worse, I upset the water-jug, and now the flood spread to the washstand, the floor, the bed curtains, even to my clothes lying on the chair. " If only this business of dressing was over," she sighs as she is about to brush her teeth, with brushes supplied by her aunt. But it is by no means over. She is just going to slip into a dressing-gown, cover her un- brushed hair with a cap, and so proceed to breakfast, when this exacting aunt stops her : actually desires her to plait and comb her hair at this hour of the morning, and to put on a tidy gown. Gretchen's gown is extremely untidy, and on that account I will not admit that the portrait is wholly lifelike. In fact, the author has summed up the sins of all the Backfisch tribe, and made a single Backfisch guilty of them. But caricature, if you know how to allow for it, is instructive. Mr. Stiggins is a caricature, yet he stands for failings that exist among us, though they are never displayed quite so crudely. " Go and brush your nails," says the aunt to the niece when the girl attempts to kiss her hand ; and the Backfisch uses a nail-brush for the first time in her life. Then the two ladies sit down to breakfast. Gretchen fills the cups too full, soaks her roll in her coffee, and drinks out of her saucer. Her aunt informs her that " coffee pudding " is not polite, and can only be allowed when they are by themselves ; also that she must not drink out of the saucer. " But we children always did it at home," says Gretchen. " I can well believe it," says the aunt. " Everything is permitted to children? The italics are mine. An aunt who has such ideas about the education of the young is naturally not surprised when at dinner- time she has to admonish her niece not to wipe her f CONFIRMATION IN A CATHOLIC CHURCH AFTER THE 1'AINTING BY HERMANN BEHRENS THE BACKFISCH 41 mouth with her hand, not to speak with her mouth full, to eat her soup quietly, to keep her elbows off the table, not to put her fingers in her plate or her knife in her mouth, and not to take her chicken into her hands on ceremonial occasions. " My treasure," says the aunt, " as you know, we are going to dinner with the Bunkers to-morrow. Be good enough not to take your chicken into your hands. Here at home I don't object to it, but the really correct way is to separate the meat from the bone with the knife and fork." The docile Backfisch says Jawohl, liebe Tante, and feels that this business of becoming civilised is full of pitfalls and surprises. Never in her life has she eaten poultry without the assistance of her fingers. When she gets to the dinner-party she is fortunate enough to sit next to her bosom frienc, who starts in horror and whispers " With a knife, Gretchen," when Gretchen is just about to dip her fingers in the salt. The Backfisch is truly anxious to learn, but she feels that the injunc- tions of society are hard, and says it is poor sport to eat your chicken with a knife and fork, because the best part sticks to the bones. Then her friend stops her from drinking fruit syrup out of her plate, and her neighbour on the other side, a stout guzzler who has not been taught by his aunt to eat properly, encourages Gretchen to drink too much champagne. After these early adventures the education of the Backfisch proceeds quickly. She has to learn at her aunt's tea-parties not to fill cups to overflowing in sheer exuberance of hospitality ; and she is also in- structed not to press food on people. " In good society," says the aunt, " people decline to eat because they have had enough, and not because they require pressing." She is obliged also to discourage Gretchen 42 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY from waiting too attentively on the young men who visit at the house ; and Gretchen, who does not care about young men, but only yearns to be serviceable, devotes herself in future to the old ladies, their foot- stools, their knitting, and their smelling bottles. This touch is one of many that makes the book, in spite of its obvious shortcomings, valuable as a picture of German character and manner. It is impossible to imagine Gretchen in a French or English story of the same class. The French girl would be more adroit and witty; the English girl would expect young men to wait on her; and neither of them would gush as Gretchen did about her old ladies. " My readiness to serve them knew no bounds. To arrange their seats to their liking, to give them stools for their feet and cushions for their backs, to rush for their shawls and cloaks, to count the rows in their knitting, to help them pick up their stitches, to thread their needles, to wind silk or wool, to peel fruit, to run for smelling bottles and cold water, all these things I did with delight the instant my watchful eye discovered the smallest wish, and I was always cordially thanked." Tastes differ. Some old ladies would be made quite uncomfortable by such fussy attentions. The Backfisch goes on to say that she was equally assiduous i waiting on the old gentlemen, She picked up anything they dropped, polished their spectacles for them, and listened to their dull stories when no one else would. I consider the portrait of Gretchen in this story a literary triumph. I can see the girl ; I can hear her voice and laugh. I know exactly how she behaved and what the old ladies and gentlemen said to her, how she dressed and how she did her hair ; not because the author tells me just these things, but because her type is as true to life to-day as it was thirty years ago. As THE BACKFISCH 43 a contrast to her, a fine young lady from the city presently joins the household, and the aunt does not have to provide her with a tooth-brush. The new arrival wears blue satin slippers, drinks her chocolate in bed, and cannot dress without the help of a maid. In this way the author shows you that girls brought up in cities are superfine rather than savage, and that you are not to suppose the ordinary German Backfisch is like her little heroine from the provinces. The truth of the matter is, that no one nowadays has such manners as the Backfisch had when she first came from the wilds ; at least, no one of her class, even irthey have grown up in Hinter-Pommern. But if you travel in Germany next week and stay in small towns and country places, you will still meet plenty of people who take their poultry bones in their fingers and put their knives in their mouths. If they are men you will see them use their fork as a dagger to hold the meat while they cut it up ; you will see them stick their napkins into their shirt collars and placidly comb their hair with a pocket comb in public ; if they are women and at a restaurant, they will pocket the lumps of sugar they have not used in their coffee. But if you are in private houses amongst people of Gretchen's type you will see none of these things. A German host still pulls the joint close to him sometimes or stands up to carve, and a German hostess still presses you to eat, still in the kindness of her heart piles up your plate. But this embarrassing form of hospitality is dying out. As Gretchen's aunt said, people in good society recognise that a guest refuses food because he does not want it. Some years ago, when you had satisfied your hunger and declined more, your German friends used to look offended or distressed, and say Sie geniren sich geiviss. This is a difficult phrase to translate, because the idea is 44 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY one that has never taken root in the English mind, Sick geniren y however, is a reflective verb, a corruption of the French verb se g^ner^ and what they meant was that you really wanted a third potato dumpling but did not like to say so. Whether your reluctance was supposed to proceed from your distrust of your host's hospitality or shame at your own appetite, is not clear ; in either case it was taken, is even to-day still often taken, for artificial. To accept a portion of an untouched dish was considered a sign that you came from " a good house " where no one grudged or wished to save the food put on the table ; and formerly you could not refuse sugar in your tea without being commended for your economy. You are still invited to eat tarts and puddings in Germany with what we consider the insufficient assistance of a tea-spoon, but I have never been in a private house where salt-spoons were not provided. You never used to find them in inns of a plain kind, and unless you were known to be English and peculiar you were not provided with more than one knife and fork for all the courses of a table (fhote You would see your German neighbours putting theirs aside as a matter of course when their plates were removed. On the whole, then, the celebrated picture of the Backfisch^ though it is overloaded, bears some relation to the facts of life in Germany : not only in the episodes that make the early chapters entertaining, but all through the story in atmosphere, in the little touches that give a story nationality. When the excellent Gretchen has been civilised she spends a great deal of time in the kitchen, and soon knows all the duties of the complete housekeeper ; while, when the frivolous Eugenie becomes Braut she cannot cook at all. But frivolous as she is, she recognises that marriage is unthinkable without THE BACKFISCH 45 cooking, and straightway sets to work to learn. Then, too, the Backfisch is the ideal German maiden, cheerful, docile, and facetious ; and constantly on the jump (spring-en is the word she uses) to serve her elders. Middle-aged Germans used to have a most tiresome way of expecting girls to be like lambs in spring, always in the mood to frisk and caper : so that a quiet or a delicate girl had a bad time with some of them. Bin junges Mddchen muss immer heiter sein, they would say reproachfully. But it does not follow that you are always heiter just because you are not twenty yet; especially in Germany, where girls are often anaemic and have headaches. However, perhaps the modern German maiden does not allow her elders to be so silly. There are some other ways, too, in which my Backfisch of thirty years ago is typical of German womanhood both then and now. She is as good as gold, she is devoted to duty not to pleasure, and she is as guileless as a child. You know that when she marries she will be faithful unto death ; you know that her husband and her children will call her blessed. These things come out quite naturally, almost unconsciously, in the little story that is " not literature," and which for all that is so truly and deeply German in its quality and tone. This Gretchen of the schoolroom, this caricature of the country cousin, is akin in her simplicity, sweetness, and depth of nature to that other Gretchen whose figure lives for ever in the greatest of German poems. Just as the women of Shakespeare and the women of Miss Austen are subtly kin to each other, inasmuch as they are English women, so Goethe's girl and the girl of the poor little schoolroom story are German in every pulse and fibre. And this national essence, the honesty, goodness, and sweetness of the girl, are the real things, 46 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY the things to remember about her. Those little matters of the toilet and the table will soon be out of date, are out of date already in the greater part of Germany. As a picture of forgotten manners they will always be amusing, just as it is amusing to read an eighteenth- century English story of school life, in which the young ladies fought and bit and scratched each other and were whipped and sent to bed. CHAPTER VI THE STUDENT WHEN an English lad goes to the university he usually goes there from a public school, where out of school hours he has been learning for years past to be a man. In these strenuous days he may have learned a little in school hours too, but that is a new departure. Cricket and character are what an English boy expects to develop at school, and if there is stuff in him he succeeds. He does not set a high value on learning. Even if he works and brings home prizes he will not be as proud of them as of his football cap, while a boy who is head of the school, but a duffer at games, will live for all time in the memory of his fellows as a failure. But the German boy goes to school to acquire knowledge, and he too gets what he wants. The habit of work must be strong in him when at the age of eighteen he goes to one of his many universities. But when he gets there he is free for the first time in his life, and the first use he for the most part makes of his freedom is to be thoroughly, happily idle. This idleness, if he has a backbone and a call to work, only lasts a term or two ; and no one who knows how a German boy is held to the grind- stone for twelve years of school life can grudge him a holiday. But the odd fact is, that the Briton who leaves school a man is more under control at Oxford 47 48 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY or Cambridge than the German at Heidelberg who leaves school a boy. A German university is a teaching institution which prepares for the State examinations, and is never residential. There are no old colleges. The professors live in flats like other people, and the students live in lodgings or board with private families. There is one building or block of buildings called the Universitdt where there are laboratories and lecture-rooms. The State can decline a professor chosen by the university ; but this power is rarely exercised. The teachers at a German university consist of ordinary professors, extraordinary professors, and Privatdocenten men who are not professors yet, but hope to be some day. An Englishman in his ignorance might think that an extraordinary professor ought to rank higher than an ordinary one ; but this is not so. The ordinary pro- fessors are those who have chairs ; the extraordinary ones have none. But all professors have a fixed salary which is paid to the day of their death, though they may cease work when they choose. The salaries vary from 240 to 350, and are paid by the State, but this income is increased by lecturing fees. Whether it is largely increased depends on the popularity of the lecturer and on his subject. An astronomer cannot expect large classes, while a celebrated professor of Law or Medicine addresses crowds. I have found it difficult to make my English friends believe that there are professors now in Berlin earning as much as 2500 a year. The English idea of the Ger- man professor is rudely disturbed by such a fact, for his poverty and simplicity of life have played as large a part in our tradition of him as his learning. The Germans seem to recognise that a scholar cannot want as much money as a man of affairs ; therefore, THE STUDENT 49 when one of their professors is so highly esteemed by the youth of the nation that his fees exceed 225, half of the overflow goes to the university and not to him at all. In this way Berlin receives a considerable sum every year, and uses it to assist poorer pro- fessors and to attract new men. As a rule a German professor has not passed the State examinations. These are official, not academic, and they qualify men for government posts rather than for professorial chairs. A professor acquires the academic title of doctor by writing an original essay that convinces the university of his learning. The title confers no privileges. It is an academic distinction, and its value depends on the prestige of the university conferring it. Germans say that our English universities exist to turn out gentlemen rather than scholars, and that the aim of their own universities is to train servants for the State and to encourage learning. I think an English- man would say that a gentleman is bred at home, but he would understand how the German arrived at his point of view. When a German talks of an English university he is thinking of Oxford and Cambridge, and he knows that, roughly speaking, it is the sons of well-to-do men who go there. Perhaps he does not know much about the Scotch and Irish and Welsh universities, or London, or the north of England ; though it is never safe to build on what a German does not know. I once took for granted that a man talking to me of some point in history would no more remember all the names and dates of the Kings of Scotland than I remember them myself. But he knew every one, and was scandalised by my ignorance. So perhaps the average German knows better than I do what it costs a man to graduate at Edinburgh or at Dublin. Anyhow, he knows that three or four years 4 50 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY at Oxford or Cambridge cost a good deal ; and he knows that in Berlin, for instance, a student can live on sixty pounds a year, out of which he can afford about five pounds a term for academic fees. If he is too poor to pay his fees the authorities allow him to get into their debt, and pay later in life when he has a post. There are cases where a man pays for his university training six years after he has ended it. But a German university comes to a man's help still more effectively when there is need for it, and will grant him partial or even entire support. Then there are various organisations for providing hungry men with dinners so many days a week ; sometimes at a public table, sometimes with families who arrange to receive one or more guests on certain days every week. The Jewish community in a university always looks after its poor students well, and this practice of entertaining them in private houses is one that gives rises to many jests and stories. The students soon find out which of their hosts are liberal and which are not, and give them a reputation accordingly. A German comparing his universities with the English ones will always lay stress on the fact that his are not examining bodies, and that his professors are not crammers but teachers. A student who intends to pass the State examinations chooses his own course of reading for them, and the lectures that he thinks will help him. He does not necessarily spend his whole time at the same university, but may move from one to the other in pursuit of the professors he wants for his special purpose. He is quite free to do this ; and he is free to work night and day, or to drink beer night and day. He is under no supervision either in his studies or his way of life. English people who have been to Germany at all BURSCHENHERRLICHKEIT FROM THE PAINTING BY CH. HEYUEN THE STUDENT 51 have invariably been to Heidelberg, and if they have been there in term time they have been amused by the gangs of young men who swagger about the narrow streets, each gang wearing a different coloured cap. They will have been told that these are the " corps " students, and the sight of them so jolly and so idle will confirm their mental picture of the German student, the picture of a young man who does nothing but drink beer, fight duels, sing Volkslieder and Trinklieder, and make love to pretty low-born maidens. When you see a company of these young men clatter into the Schloss garden on a summer afternoon, and drink vast quantities of beer, when you observe their elaborate ceremonial of bows and greetings, when you hear their laughter and listen to the latest stories of their monkey tricks, you understand that the student's life is a merry one, but except for the sake of tradition you wonder why he need lead it at a seat of learning. Anything further removed from learning than a German corps student cannot be imagined, and the noise he makes must incommode the quiet working students who do not join a corps. Not that the quiet working students would wish to banish the others. They are the glory of the German universities. In novels and on the stage none others appear. The innocent foreigner thinks that the moment a young German goes to the Alma Mater of his choice he puts on an absurd little cap, gets his face slashed, buys a boarhound, and devotes all his energies to drinking beer and ragging officials. But though the " corps " students are so conspicuous in the small university towns, it is only the men of means who join them. For poorer students there is a cheaper form of union, called a Burschenschaft. When a young German goes to the university he has probably 52 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY never been from home before, and by joining a Corps or a Burschenschaft he finds something to take the place of home, companions with whom he has a special bond of intimacy, and a discipline that carries on his social education ; for the etiquette of these associations is most elaborate and strict. The members of a corps all say " thou " to each other, and on the Alte Herren Abende, when members of an older generation are entertained by the young ones of to-day, this practice still obtains, although one man may be a great minister of State and the other a lad fresh from school. The laws of a "corps" remind you of the laws made by English schoolboys for themselves, they are as solemnly binding, as educational, and as absurd. If a Vandal meets a Hessian in the street he may not recognise him, though the Hessian be his brother ; but outside the town's boundary this prohibi- tion is relaxed, for it is not rooted in ill feeling but in ceremony. One corps will challenge another to meet it on the duelling ground, just as an English football team will meet another in friendly rivalry. All the students' associations except the theological require their members to fight these duels, which are really exercises in fencing, and take place on regular days of the week, just as cricket matches do in England. The men are protected by goggles and by shields and baskets on various parts of their bodies, but their faces are exposed, and they get ugly cuts, of which they are extremely proud. As it is quite impossible that I should have seen these duels myself, I will quote from a description sent me by an English friend who was taken to them in Heidelberg by a corps student. " They take place," he says, " in a large bare room with a plain boarded floor. There were tables, each to hold ten or twelve persons, on three THE STUDENT 53 sides of the room, and a refreshment counter on the fourth side, where an elderly woman and one or two girls were serving wine. The wine was brought to the tables, and the various corps sat at their special tables, all drinking and smoking. The dressing and undressing and the sewing up of wounds was done in an adjoining room. When the combatants were ready they were led in by their seconds, who held up their arms one on each side. The face and the top of the head were exposed, but the body, arms and neck were heavily bandaged. The duellists are placed opposite each other, and the seconds, who also have swords in their hands, stand one on each side, ready to interfere and knock up the combatant's sword. They say l Auf die Mensurl and then the slashing begins. As soon as blood is drawn the seconds interfere, and the doctor examines the cut. If it is not bad they go on fighting directly. If it needs sewing up they go into the next room, and you wait an endless time for the next party. I got awfully tired of the long intervals, sitting at the tables, drinking and smoking. While the fights were going on we all stood round in a ring. There were only about three duels the whole morning. There was a good deal of blood on the floor. The women at the refreshment counter were quite uncon- cerned. They didn't trouble to look on, but talked to each other about blouses like girls in a post office. The students drove out to the inn and back in open carriages. It is a mile from Heidelberg. The duels are generally as impersonal as games, but sometimes they are in settlement of quarrels. I think any student may come and fight on these occasions, but I suppose he has to be the guest of a corps." A German professor lecturing on university life constantly used a word I did not understand at first. 54 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY The word as he said it was Commang, with a strong accent on the second syllable. The word as it is written is Comment, and means the etiquette set up and obeyed by the students. The Germans have taken many French words into their language and corrupted them, much as we have ourselves : sometimes by Germanising the pronunciation, sometimes by con- jugating a French verb in the German way as they do in raisonniren and geniren. The Commang, said the professor, was a highly valuable factor in a young man's education, because it helped more than anything else to turn a schoolboy into a man of the world. So when I saw a little book called Der Bier Comment for sale I bought it instantly, for I wanted to know how beer turned a schoolboy into a man of the world. It began with a little preface, a word of warning to anyone attempting to write about the morals, customs, and characteristics of the German nation. No one undertaking this was to forget that the Germans had an amazing Bierdurst, and that they liked to assuage this thirst in company, to be cheerful and easy, and to sing while they were drinking. Then it goes on to give the elaborate ceremonial observed at the Kneiptafel. One of my dictionaries, although the German-English part has 24 1 2 pages, translates Kneipe as " any instru- ment for pinching." I never yet found anything I wanted in those 2412 pages. Another dictionary, one that cost ninepence, and is supposed to give you all words in common use, does not include Kneipe at all. As an instrument for pinching, Kneipe is certainly not common, except possibly amongst people who use tools. As a word for a sort of beer club it is as common as beer. It is not only students who go to the Kneipe. In some parts of Germany men spend most of the evening drinking beer and smoking with their friends, THE STUDENT 55 while the womenfolk are by themselves or with the children at home. But the beer Commang that the professor thought had such educational value is the name for certain intricate rites practised by university students at the Kneiptafel. Those who sit at the table are called Beer Persons, and they are of various ranks according to the time of membership and their position in the Kneipe. Every Beer Person must drink beer and join in the songs, unless he has special permission from the chairman. The Beer Persons do not just sit round the table and drink as they please. If they did there would be no Comment, and I suppose no educa- tional value. They have to invite their fellows to drink with them, and the quantity drunk, the persons who may have challenged, and the exact number of minutes that may elapse before a challenge is accepted and returned, is all exactly laid down. Then there are various festive and ingenious ways of drinking together, so as to turn the orgy into something like a game. For instance, the glass " goes into the world," that is, it circulates, and any Beer Person who seizes it with a different hand or different fingers from his neighbour is fined. Or the glasses are piled one on the top of another while the Beer Persons sing, and some one man has to drink to each glass in the pile at the word of command. Or the president orders a " Beer Galop " with the words " Silentium fur einen Biergalopp : ich bitte den notigen Stoff anzuschaffen" At the word of command everyone, beginning with the president, passes his glass to his left-hand neighbour and empties the one he receives. Then the glasses are refilled, passed to the right, and emptied again as soon as possible. The president, it seems, has to exercise a good deal of discretion and ingenuity, for if the Kneipe seems flat it lies with him to order the moves in the 56 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY game that will make it lively and stimulate beer, song, and conversation. There are various fines and punishments inflicted according to strict rule on those who transgress the code of the Kneipe, but as far as I can make out they all resolve themselves into drinking extra beer, singing extra songs, or in really serious cases ceasing to be a Beer Person for whatever length of time meets the offence. An Englishman who was present at some of these gatherings in Heidelberg, told me that the etiquette was most difficult for a foreigner to understand, and always a source of anxiety to him all the evening. He was constantly invited to drink with various members, and the German responsible for him explained that he must not only respond to the invitation at the moment, but return it at the right time: not too soon, because that would look like shaking off an obligation, and not too late, because that would look like forgetting it. A Kommers is a students' festival in which the professors and other senior members of a university take part, and at which outsiders are allowed to look on. The presiding students appear in vollem Wichs, as we should say in their war paint, with sashes and rapiers. Young and old together drink beer, sing songs, make speeches, and in honour of one or the other they " rub a Salamander," a word which is said to be a corruption of Sauft alle mit einander. This is a curious ceremony and of great antiquity. When the glasses are filled, at the word of command they are rubbed on the table ; at the word of command they are raised and emptied ; and again at the word of command every man rubs his glass on the table, the second time raises it and brings it down with a crash. Anyone who brought his glass down a moment earlier or later than the others would spoil THE STUDENT 57 the Salamander and be in disgrace. In Ekkehardt Scheffel describes a similar ceremonial in the tenth century. "The men seized their mugs," he says, " and rubbed them three times in unison on the smooth rocks, producing a humming noise, then they lifted them towards the sun and drank ; each man set down his mug at the same moment, so that it sounded like a single stroke." A Kommers is not always a gay festival. It may be a memorial ceremony in honour of some great man lately dead. Then speeches are made in his praise, solemn and sacred music is sung, and the Salamander, an impressive libation to the dead man's Manes, is drunk with mournful effect. In small university towns and it must be re- membered that there are twenty-two universities in Germany the students play a great part in the social life of the place. German ladies have often told me that the balls they looked forward to with most delight as girls were those given by students, when one " corps " would take rooms and pay for music, wine, and lights. For supper, tickets are issued on such occasions, which the guests pay themselves. The small German universities seem full of the students in term time, especially in those places where people congregate for pleasure and not for work. Even in a town as big as Leipsic they are seen a good deal, filling the pavement, occupying the restaurants, going in gangs to the play. But in Berlin the German student of tradition, the beer person, the duellist, the rollicking lad with his big dog, is lost. He is there, you are told, but if you keep to the highway you never see him ; and, to tell the truth, in Germany you miss him. He stands for youth and high spirits and that world of ancient custom most 58 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY of us would be loth to lose. In Berlin, if you go to the Universitat when the working day begins, you see a crowd of serious, well-mannered young men, most of them carrying books and papers. They are swarming like bees to the various lecture-rooms ; they are as quiet as the elderly professors who appear amongst them. They have no corps caps, no dogs, no scars on their scholarly faces. By their figures you judge that they are not Beer Persons. They have worked hard for twelve years in the gymnasiums of Germany, they have no idle habits, no interests so keen as their interest in this business of preparing for the future. They are the men of next year's Germany, and will carry on their country's reputation in the world for efficiency and scholarship. CHAPTER VII RIEHL ON WOMEN NOT long ago I heard a German professor say that anyone who wanted to speak with authority about the German family must read Die Familie by W. H. Riehl. He said that, amongst other things, this important work explained why men went to the Kneipe, because they were fond of home life ; and also what was the sphere of women. I thought it would be useful to have both these points settled ; besides, I asked several wise Germans about the book, and they all nodded their heads and said it was a good one. So I got it, and was surprised to find it came out in 1854. I thought ideas about women had advanced since then, even in Germany, though a German friend had warned me just before my last visit not to expect much in this way. She made a movement with her lips as if she was blowing a bit of thistledown from her. " Remember," she said, " that is what you will be directly you get there . . . nothing at all." But I had been to Germany so often that I was prepared to be " nothing at all " for a time, and not to mind it much. What I wanted to discover was how far German women had arrived at being " something " in the eyes of their men. In my eyes they had always been a good deal : admirable wives and mothers, for instance, patient, capable, thrifty, and 59 60 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY self-sacrificing. At first I thought that my friend was wrong, and that women of late years had made great strides in Germany. I met single women who had careers and homes of their own and were quite cheerful. When you are old enough to look back twenty or thirty years, and remember the blight there used to be on the " old maid," and the narrow gossiping life she was driven to lead, you must admit that these contented bachelor women have done a good deal to emancipate themselves. In England they have been with us for a long time, but formerly I had not come across them in Germany. On the contrary, I well remember my amazement as a girl at hearing a sane able-bodied single woman of sixty say she had naturally not ventured on a summer journey to Switzerland till some man who looked after her money affairs, but was in no way related^ had given her his consent. I did once hear a German boast of having struck his wife in order to bring her to submission. He was not a navvy either, but a merchant of good standing. He was not a common type, however. German men, on the whole, treat their womenfolk kindly, but never as their equals. Over and over again German women have told me they envied the wives of Englishmen, and I should say that it is impossible for an English woman to be in Germany without feeling, if she understands what is going on around her, that she has suddenly lost caste. She is " nothing at all " because she is a woman : to be treated with gallantry if she is young and pretty, and as a negligible quantity if she is not. That perhaps is a bitter description of what really takes place, but after reading Herr Riehl, and hearing that his ideas are still widely accepted in Germany, I am not much afraid of being unjust. His own arguments convict RIEHL ON WOMEN 61 the men of the nation in a measure nothing I could say would. They are in extreme opposition to the ideas fermenting amongst modern women there, and the strange fact that they are not regarded as quite out of date makes them interesting. Herr Riehl's theory, to put it in a nutshell, is that the family is all-important, and the individual, if she is a woman, is of no importance at all. He does not object to her being yoked to a plough, because then she is working for the family, but he would forbid her, if he could, to enter any profession that would make her independent of the family. She is not to practise ariy art, and if she " commences author " it is a sure sign that she is ugly, soured, and bitter. In any country where they are allowed to rule, and even in any country where they distinguish themselves in art and literature, civilisation as well as statecraft must be at a standstill. Queen Elizabeth and Maria Theresa were evidently awkward people for a man laying down this theory to encounter, so he goes out of his way to say that they were not women at all, but men in women's clothes. Moreover, he has no doubt that the Salic law must ultimately prevail everywhere. A woman has no independent existence : he says she is taught from childhood to be subordinate to others ; she cannot go out by herself with propriety ; she is not a complete creature till she finds a mate. The unlucky women who never find one (more than 400,000 in Germany) are not to make any kind of career for themselves, either humble or glorious. Each one is to search carefully for relatives who will give her a corner in their house, and allow her to work for them. If no one wants her she may live with other women and bring up poor children. He would allow women some education. Far be it te .' 62 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY from him to think that women are to remain in com- pulsory ignorance. But their education is to be " womanly," and carried on in the family. Women teachers in public schools he considered a danger to the State, and he would send all girls till they reach their twelfth or fourteenth year to the elementary schools, where they would be taught by men and associate with bare-footed children. Woman, in short, is to learn how to be woman at home, and how not to be superwoman in school. She may even have some instruction in art and science, but only a limited instruction that will not encroach on her duty to the family. The fate of lonely single women is much on Herr Riehl's mind. What are we to do with them ? he asks despairingly. " What is to become of the army of innocent creatures, without means, without a craft, doomed to an aimless, disappointed life. Shall we shut them up in convents ? Shall we buy them into Stifts ? Shall we send them to Australia ? Shall we put an end to them ? " Quite in the manner of Dogberry, he answers his own questions. Let them go their ways as before, he says. He knows there is no short cut to social regeneration, and he will not recommend one, not even extirpation. He points out that the working women of Germany have never asked to be on an equality with men. The lower you descend in the social scale the less sharply women are differentiated from men, and the worse time women have in con- sequence. The wife of a peasant is only his equal in one respect : she works as hard as he does. Other- wise she is his serf. The sole public position allowed to a woman in a village is that of gooseherd ; while those original minds who in other circumstances would take to authorship or painting have to wait, if they are RIEHL ON WOMEN 63 peasants, till they are old, when they can take to fortune- telling and witchcraft. Herr Riehl admits that the lot of women when they are peasants is not a happy one. He does not make the admission because he thinks it of much consequence, but because it illustrates his argument that the less " feminine " women are the less power they exercise. He has no great fault to find with the peasant's household, where the wife is a beast of burden in the field and a slave indoors, bears children in quick succession, is old before her time, and sacrifices herself body and soul to the family. But he points out that on a higher social plane, where women are more unlike men, more distinctively feminine, the position they take is more honourable. Yet it is these same " superfeminine " women who are foolishly claiming equality with men. Herr Riehl's views expressed in English seem a little behind the times, here and there more than a little brutal. He speaks with sympathy of suttee, and he quotes the Volga-Kalmucks with approval. This tribe, it seems, " treat their wives with the most exquisite patriarchal courtesy; but directly the wife neglects a household duty courtesy ceases (for the genius of the house is more important than the personal dignity of the wife), and the sinner is castigated (wird tUchtig durchgepeitscht). The whip used, the household sword and sceptre, is handed down from generation to generation as a sacred heirloom." I have translated this passage instead of alluding to it, because I thought it was an occasion on which Herr Riehl should literally speak for himself. It is, however, fair to explain that modern men as well as modern women come under his censure. All the tendencies and all the habits of modern life afflict him, and he lashes out at them without discrimination, 64 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY and with such an entire lack of prophetic insight that I have found him consoling. For this book was published sixteen years before the Franco-Prussian War, when Germany, the world must admit, proved that it was not decadent. Yet every page of it is a Jeremiad, an exhortation to his countryfolk to stop short on the road to ruin. He does not see that the whole nation is slowly and patiently girding its loins for that mighty effort ; he believes it is blind, weak, and flighty. If he had lived in England, and a little later, he would certainly have talked about the Smart Set, Foreign Financiers, and the Yellow Press. As he lived in Germany fifty years ago, he scolds his countryfolk for living in flats. He wants to know why a family cannot herd in one room instead of scattering itself in several. As for a father who cannot endure the cry of children, that man should never have been a father, says Herr Riehl. He cannot approve of the dinner hour being put off till two o'clock. Why not begin work at five and dine at eleven in the good old German way ? He praises the ruinous elaborate festivals that used to celebrate family events, and considers that the police help to destroy family life by fining people who in their opinion spend more than they can afford on a wedding or a christening. He objects to artificial Christmas trees, and points out that other nations set a tree in the drawing-room, but that Germans have it in the nursery, the innermost sanctum of family life. He arrives at some curious conclusions when he dis- cusses the German's habit of turning the beer-house into a sort of club that he calls his Kneipe. Other races can drink, he says ; aber bloss die germanischen konnen kneipen only the Germanic peoples can make themselves at home in an inn. What does the Stamm- gast> the regular guest, ask but the ways of homef RIEHL ON WOMEN 65 the same chair every night, the same corner, the same glass, the same wine ; and where there is a Stammtisch the same companions. He sees that family life is more or less destroyed when the men of the household spend their leisure hours, and especially their evenings, at an inn, but he says that the homelike surroundings of the Kneipe prove the German's love of home. In fact, he suggests that even the habitual drunkard is often a weak, amiable creature cut out for family life ; only, he has sought it at the public-house instead of on his own hearth. Herr Riehl is, in fact, deeply concerned to see amongst his countryfolk a gradual slackening of family ties, a widespread selfish individualism amongst women, an abdication of duty and authority amongst men. His views about women sound outrageous to-day, chiefly because he wants to apply them to all women without distinction ; and also because they display a total want of consideration for the welfare and the wishes of women themselves. But his position is interesting, because with some modifications it is the position still taken by the majority of German men ; naturally, not by the most advanced and intelligent, but by the average German from the Spree to the Danube. He thinks that woman was made for man, and that if she has board, lodging, and raiment, according to the means of her menfolk, she has all she can possibly ask of life. When her menfolk are peasants, she must work in the fields; when they belong to the middle or upper classes, her place is in the kitchen and the nursery. Unless he is exceptionally intelligent he does not understand that this simple rule is complicated by modern economic conditions, and by the enormous number of women thrown on their own resources. He would send them as Herr Riehl did, to the kitchens and nurseries of other people ; or he would 5 66 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY give up the problem in despair, as Herr Riehl did, admitting with a sigh that modern humanitarianism forbids the establishment of a lethal chamber for the superfluous members of a weaker sex. The most modern German women are in direct op- position to Herr Riehl, and it must be said that some of their leaders are enthusiastic rather than sensible. They are drunk with the freedom they claim in a country where women are not even allowed to attend a political meeting except with the express consent of the police. In their ravings against the tyranny of men they lose all historical sense, just as an American does when he describes a mediaeval crime as if it had been committed by a European with a twentieth-century conscience. They charge men with keeping half humanity in a de- grading state of slavery, and attribute all the sins of civilisation to the enforced ignorance and helplessness of women. Their contempt for their masters is almost beyond the German language to express, eloquently as they use it. They demand equality of education and opportunity, but they do not want to be men. Far be such a desire from their minds. They mean to be some- thing much better. To what a pass have men brought the world, they ask ? How much better would manners and morals and politics be in the hands of women ! They repel with indignation the taunt that women have no right to govern the State because their bodies are too weak to defend it. They point out with a gleam of sense and justice that the mother of children does serve the State in a supremely important way ; and for that matter they are willing to take many State duties on their shoulders, and to train for them as arduously and regularly as men train for the wretched business of killing each other. They will not mate with those poor things modern men under the existing marriage RIEHL ON WOMEN 67 laws. They refuse to be household beasts of burden a day longer. Life, life to the dregs with all its joys and all its responsibilities, is what they want, and love if it comes their way. But not marriage. Young Siegfrieds they ask for, young lions. Here one be- wildered reader rubbed her eyes ; for she had just heard Siegfried and the Gotterdammerung again, and some- times she reads in the Nibelungenlied\ and if ever a man won a woman with his club, by muscle seemingly, by magic really, but anyhow by sheer bodily strength, was not that man Siegfried ? and was not the woman Briinnhilde ? And what does the Siegfried of the Lied say when his wife has failed to keep a guard on her tongue "Man soil so Frauen ziehen," sprach Siegfried, " der Degen, Das sie tippig Reden lassen unterwegen. Verbiet es deinem Weibe ; der meinen thu' ich's auch. Ich scha'me mich, wahrlich um solchen iibermuthigen Brauch." And then, just as if he was one of those Volga- Kalmucks admired by Herr Riehl, he beats poor Kriemhilde black and blue. "Das hat mich bald gereuet," so sprach das edle Weib; " Auch hat er so zerblaiiet deswegen meinen Leib ! Dass ich es je geredet, beschwerte ihm den Muth : Das hat gar wohl gerochen der Degen tapfer und gut." Yet here is the last development in women, the woman who refuses as an outrage both the theory of masculine superiority and the fact so evident in Germany of masculine domination, here is the self-constituted superwoman calling as if she was Eve to the primaeval male. It may be perverse of me, but my imagination refuses to behold them mated. CHAPTER VIII THE OLD AND THE NEW ERMANY stands midway between France and England in its care for its womenfolk. French parents consider marriage the proper career for a woman, and with logical good sense set themselves from the day of a girl's birth to provide a dowry for her. When she is of a marriageable age they provide the husband. They will make great sacrifices to establish a daughter in prosperity, and they leave nothing to chance. We leave everything to chance, and the idea of marriage made by bargain and without love offends us. Such marriages are often enough made in England, but they are never admitted. Some gloss of sentiment or of personal respect is considered decent. But on the whole in this country a girl shifts for herself. If she marries, well and good ; if she remains single, well and good too, provided she can earn her living or has means. When she has neither means nor craft and fails to marry, she is one of the most tragic figures in our confused social hierarchy, difficult to help, superfluous. She sets her hand to this and that, but she has no grip on life. To think of her is to invoke the very image of failure and incom- petence. She flocks into every opening, blocking and depressing it ; as a " help " she becomes a byword, for she has grown up without learning to help herself or 68 THE OLD AND THE NEW 69 anybody else. If she is a Protestant she has no haven. Only people who have set themselves to help poor ladies know the difficulties of the undertaking, and the miseries their prot^g^es endure. Even in the Middle Ages the conscientious German was doing more for this helpless element of his popula- tion than England and America are doing to-day. He saw that some of his daughters would remain unmarried, and that if they were gently bred he must provide for their future, and he did this by founding Stifle. The old Stiff was established by the gentlemen of some one district, who built a house and contributed land and money for its maintenance, so that when they died their unmarried daughters should still have a suitable home. Some of these old Stifle are very wealthy now, and have buildings of great dignity and beauty ; they still admit none but the descendants of the men who founded them, and when they have more money than they need to support the Stift itself, they use it to pension the widows and endow the brides belonging to their group or families. In Hesse-Cassel, for instance, there is an ancient Stift formed by the Ritterschaft of the Duchy and it is so well off that it can afford to pension every widow and fatherless child, and buy an outfit for every bride whose name either by marriage or descent entitles her to its protection. The example set by the noble families of the Middle Ages was followed in time by other classes, and Stifle were established all over Germany for the daughters of the bourgeoisie. They grew in number and variety ; some had a school attached to their endowment and some an orphanage. In some the rule was elastic, in others binding. There are Stifle from which a woman may absent herself for the greater part of the year, and yet draw an income from its funds and have a room or rooms appointed 70 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY to her use ; there are others where residence, is com- pulsory. Some are only open to descendants of the founders ; some sell vacancies. A woman may have to wait year after year for a chance of getting in ; or she may belong to one that will admit her at a certain age. In many there is a presiding lady, the Domina or Abbess ; and when the present Emperor visited a well-known Stiff lately he gave the Abbess a shepherd's crook with which to rule her flock. Some are just sets of rooms with certain privileges of light and firing attached. Their constitution varies greatly, according to the class provided for and the means available. But you cannot be much amongst Germans without meeting women who have been educated, endowed, helped in sickness, or supported in old age by one of these organisations. You come across girls of gentle birth but with no means who have been brought up in a Stiff, or you hear of well-to-do girls whose parents have paid high for their schooling in one. You know the elderly unmarried daughter of an official living on his pension, and you find that though she has never been taught to earn her bread she looks forward to old age with serenity, because when she was a child her relations bought her into a Stiff that will give her at the age of fifty free quarters, fire, light, and an income on which, with her habits of thrift, she can live com- fortably. Another woman engaged in private teaching and a good deal battered by the struggle for life, comes to you some day more radiant than you have ever seen her, and you find that influential friends have put her case before a Stiff, and that it has granted her two charming rooms with free fire and light. I heard of a cook the other day who, after many years of faithful service, left her employers to spend her old age in a Stift. No social stigma attaches to the women living THE OLD AND THE NEW 71 in one, and they are as free, in some cases as well placed and well born, as the English women living at Hampton Court. Some friction and some gossip is presumably inevitable wherever women herd together in an unnatural segregation from men and children. But at any rate the German Stiff saves many a woman from the tragic struggle with old age and poverty to which the penniless incapable spinster is condemned in our country. It may not be a paradise, but it is a haven. As I said at the beginning, the Frenchman dowers and marries his girl, the German buys her a refuge, the Englishman leaves her to fate. On the whole, the German believes that the woman's province is within the limits of the household. He wants her to be a home-maker, and in Germany what " he " wants her to be still fixes the standard. But as the census reveals the existence of large numbers of single women, and as " he " often has a thoughtful and benevolent mind, more and more is done there every year to prepare those women who must earn their living to earn it capably. It has been understood for some time past that Herr Riehl's plan of finding a family roof for every woman without one presents difficulties where there are 400,000 odd women to provide for in this way. One of the people who first saw this clearly, and supported every sensible undertaking that came to the assistance of women, was the Empress Frederick ; and one of the institutions that she encouraged and esteemed from the beginning was the Lette-Verein in Berlin. The Lette-Verein, named after its originator, Dr. A. Lette, was founded, says its prospectus, to further the education of women and to increase the efficiency of women dependent on themselves for support. What it actually does is to train for housekeeping and office 72 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY work, and for some trades. Its interest lies in the ordered and thoughtful provision it makes both for the woman who means to devote herself body and soul to the family ; and for the woman who prefers, or who is driven, to stand in the market-place and compete with men. The Lette-Verein does not train servants or admit servants to its classes. It occupies a large block of buildings in the west of Berlin, for its various schools and hostels require a great deal of room. Students who live in the city can attend daily classes ; but those who come from a distance can have board and residence for 1 a week or less. Once a week strangers are allowed to see the Lette-Haus at work, and when I went there we were taken first to the kitchens, where the future housewives of Germany were learning to cook. The stoves were the sensible low closed-in ones used on the continent, and the vessels were either earthenware or metal, kept brightly polished both inside and out. The students were preparing and cooking various dishes, but the one that interested me was the Leipziger Allerlei^ because I compared it with the " herbage " an English plain cook throws into water and sends up half drained, half cold, and often enough half clean. I could not stop to count the vegetables required for Leipziger Allerlei, but there seemed to be at least six varieties, all cooked separately, and after- wards combined with a properly made sauce. The Englishman may say that he prefers his half-cooked cabbage, and the English woman, if she is a plain cook, will certainly say that the cabbage gives her as much trouble as she means to take ; but the German woman knows that when she marries her husband will want Leipziger Allerlei, so she goes to the Lette-Haus and learns how to make it. Even the young doctors of Berlin learn cooking at the Lette-Haus. Special THE OLD AND THE NEW 73 classes for invalid cookery are held on their behalf, and are said to be popular and extremely useful. Certainly doctors whose work is amongst the poor or in country places must often wish they understood something about the preparation of food. The girls who go to the Lette-Haus are taught the whole art of housekeeping, from the proper way to scour a pan or scrub a floor to fine laundry work and darning, and even how to set and serve a table. An intelligent girl who had been right through the courses at the Lette-Haus could train an inexperienced servant, because 'she would understand exactly how things ought to be done, how much time they should take, and what amount of fatigue they involve. If her servants failed her she would be independent of them. Some students at the Lette-Haus do, as a matter of fact, form a household that is carried on without a single servant, and is on this account the most interesting branch of the organisation. The girls are from fourteen to sixteen years of age, and they pay 2$ a year for instruction, board, and lodging. Some of them are the daughters of landed proprietors, and some will eventually earn a living as " supports of the housewife," an honourable career shortly referred to by Germans as eine Stiitze. They were a happy, healthy looking lot of girls. They wear neat serviceable gowns while they are at work, aprons, linen sleeves to protect their stuff ones, and pretty blue handkerchiefs tied like tur- bans over their hair. Some of them were busy at the wash-tub, and this seemed heavy work for girls of that age. The various kinds of work are done in turn, and the student when her washing week comes round is employed in this way three hours every morning. On alternate days she mangles clothes, and in the after- noons she sews. Our guide would not admit that three 74 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY hours at the wash-tub could be too great a strain on a half-developed girl, and it is a question for medical wisdom to decide. The cooking and ironing looked hot work, but these young German girls were cheerfully and thoroughly learning how to do them, and whether they marry or stay single their knowledge of these arts will be of inestimable use in later years. I heard of an able-bodied Englishwoman the other day who took to her bed in tears because her maids left her suddenly. She could not have roasted a leg of mutton or made the plainest pudding. This is the school of the future, said our enthusiastic guide when we went to see the "children" at work at the Lette-Haus\ and I, remembering my helpless Englishwoman, agreed with her. The children's afternoons are mostly given to needlework, and they are instructed in the prospectus not to bring new clothes with them, because it is desired that they should learn how to mend old ones neatly and correctly. They are taught to darn and patch so finely that the repair cannot easily be discovered ; they make sets of body linen for themselves, three finely sewn men's linen shirts, a gown for work- days, and some elaborate blouses. In another part of the Lette-Haus, where students were being trained as expert embroiderers and dressmakers, we were shown pieces of flowered brocade into which patches had been so skilfully inserted that you could only find them by holding them up to the light. In the bookbinding department there were amateur and professional students. The professionals apprentice themselves for three years, and from the first receive a small weekly wage. The length of their apprenticeship is determined by the length of time prescribed for men, and not by what is necessary for their training. I asked if they easily found regular work later, and was told that at THE OLD AND THE NEW 75 present the demand for expert women bookbinders exceeded the supply. The Lette-Haus trains women to be photographers, printers, and clerks. In fact, with German thoroughness and foresight it does all one big institution can to save the women of the nation from the curse of incompetence. It turns them out efficient housewives or efficient craftswomen, according to their needs. The German woman of to-day has travelled far from the ideal set up by Herr Riehl, and still upheld by his disciples. Women have found that the realities of life 'clash with that particular ideal, and rudely upset it. Just like any man, a woman wants bread when she is hungry, and when there is no man to give it to her she must raven for it herself. She has been driven from a family hearth that has no fire on it, and from a family roof that cannot afford her shelter. On the whole, if I may judge from personal observation, it has done her good. The traditional old maid is dying out in Germany as assuredly as she is dying out in England, and who shall regret her? Her outlook was narrow, her temper often soured. She had neither self-reliance nor charm. She was that sad, silly spectacle, a clinging plant without support. Now that she is learning to grow on her own account, she finds that there is a good deal in life a sensible plant can enjoy without clinging. The German " old maid " of the twentieth century has, like her English sister, transformed herself into a " bachelor," a person who for this reason or that has not married, and who nevertheless has a cheerful time. She has her own work, she often has her own flat, and if she lives in one of the big cities she has her own club. There are at present three Ladies' Clubs in Berlin all flourishing. The subscription to the Berliner Frauenklub is only six marks a year, yet it provides 76 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY the members with comfortably furnished rooms and well cooked meals at low prices. A member of this club can dine for ninepence, and have a hot dish from fourpence to sevenpence. She has access to a library of 1 300 volumes, to the leading papers and reviews, and to magazines in four languages. She can entertain women at the club, but not men ; though she can meet men there at certain hours of the day. Social gather- ings of various kinds are arranged to meet the various needs and ages of the members ; and one night a week four or five card-tables are set out, so that the older members can have a quiet game of skat or whist. We wonder what Herr Riehl would say if he could see them. Another German Ladies' Club in Berlin is the Deutscher Frauenklub, and it is nicknamed the Millionaire's Club because the subscription is twenty- five shillings. It is a rather smarter club than the other, and has a charming set of rooms. There are about 450 members. The Third Club is a branch of the London Lyceum, and it has aroused great interest and attention in Berlin, not only because it is on a more magnificent scale than the other clubs, but because of the brave effort it makes to unite the women of all nations and help them. Most of the women distin- guished in art and literature have joined it. I began this chapter by saying something of the Stift, the refuge for unmarried women that Germany established in the Middle Ages and still preserves. I end it with the Lyceum Club, that latest manifestation of a modern woman's desire to help her own sex. The character of these institutions and their history are both significant. In other days men helped women ; in these days women try to help themselves. The Stiff gives a woman bread and shelter in idleness ; the THE OLD AND THE NEW 77 aim of the Lyceum Club is not to give, but to bring women together and to encourage good work. The Stifte are still crowded and the Lyceum flourishes, for in our time the old woman jostles the new. But the new woman has arrived, and is making herself felt ; with amazing force and swiftness, you must admit when you reflect on the position of women in Germany thirty or forty years ago. CHAPTER IX GIRLHOOD IN the Memoiren einer Idealistin, those genuine and interesting Memoirs that have been so widely read in Germany of late, Malvida von Meysenbug, the daughter of a highly placed official at a small German Court, describes her confirmation day and the long period of preparation and the spiritual struggle that preceded it. " During a whole year my sister and I went twice a week to the pastor's house to be instructed in the dogma of the Protestant Church," she says. ..." The ceremony was to be on Sunday. The Friday before we had our last lesson. Our teacher was deeply moved ; with tears in his eyes he spoke to us of the holiness and importance of the act we were about to perform. . . . According to the German custom amongst girls of the better classes, we put on black silk dresses for the first time for our confirmation, and this ceremonial attire calmed me and did me good. Our maid took special pains with our toilet, as if we were going to a worldly entertainment, and chattered more than usual. It jarred on me, but it helped to distract my thoughts. When it was time to start I said Good-bye to my mother with deep emotion, and asked her to forgive me my faults. My sister and I were to go to the pastor's house on our way to church. 78 GIRLHOOD 79 There we found everything strewn with flowers. Our teacher received us in his priestly robes, and spoke to all of us so lovingly and earnestly that the most indifferent were moved. When the church bells began to peal our procession set out, the pastor at its head, and we following two by two. The way from the rectory to the church was strewn with flowers, and the church was decked with them. The Choral Society of the town, to which some of our best friends belonged, received us with a beautiful hymn. I felt on wings, I prayed to God that this hour might be blessed to me throughout my life. The sermon preached by the voice that had so often affected me made me calm. When the preacher required us to make our confession of faith, I uttered my ' Yes ' with firm assurance. Then I knelt before him with the rest to receive his blessing. He put his hands on our heads, accepted us as members of the Protestant Church, and blessed each one separately, and with a special verse from the Bible. To me he said, ' Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.' My heart echoed the solemn vow : Faithful unto death. The choir greeted the young Christians with a song of victory. We did not return to the seats reserved for candidates, but sat with our parents and relatives waiting with them until everyone had left the church, except those who wished to partake of the Holy Communion." Malvida von Meysenbug is too much absorbed in her intense spiritual experiences to describe the lighter side of confirmation in Germany, which celebrates it with presents and a gathering of friends. A girl gets her first black silk gown for the occasion, and both boys and girls get as many presents as they do at Christmas or on a birthday. These are all set out for the inspection of the friends who assemble at the house 8o HOME LIFE IN GERMANY after the religious ceremony, to congratulate the parents and the youngest member of their church. There is an entertainment of coffee, chocolate, and cakes ; and a few days later both boys and girls return these visits of congratulation in the company of their parents. Some years ago, when a girl had been confirmed, she was considered officially grown up and marriageable, and entered straight away into the gaieties that are sup- posed to lead to marriage. But the modern tendency in Germany is to prolong girlhood, and the wife of sixteen is as rare there amongst the educated classes as it is here. Amongst the Jews in Germany marriages are still arranged for the young people by their elders ; often, as in France, through the intervention of friends, but also by the business-like office of the marriage broker. It need hardly be said, perhaps, that the refined and enlightened Jews refuse to marry in this way. They insist on choosing their own mate, and even on over- looking some disparity of fortune. Unorthodox Jews marry Christian women, and the Jewish heiress constantly allies herself and her money with a title or a uniform. In the latter case, however, the nuptials are just as business-like as if the Schadchan had arranged them and received his commission. The Graf or the Major gets the gold he lacks, and the rich Jewess gets social prestige or the nearest approach to it possible in a Jew-baiting land. An ardent anti-Semite told me that these mixed marriages were not fertile, and that if only everyone of Jewish blood would marry a Christian, the country would in course of time be cleared of a race that, she solemnly assured me, is as great a curse to it, and as inferior as the negro in America. But as she was an anti-Semite with a sense of humour she admitted that the remedy was a slow one and difficult to enforce. GIRLHOOD 8 1 As a matter of fact, the Jews marry mostly amongst themselves in Germany, and men are still living in Frankfurt and other large cities who have made comfortable fortunes by the brokerage they charged on their matchmaking. Formerly a prosperous unmarried Jew used to be besieged by offers from these agents ; and so were men who could give their daughters a good dowry. The better-class Jews do not employ them nowadays, but their marriages are suggested and arranged much as marriages are in France. A young merchant of Berlin thinks it is time to settle down, or -perhaps wants a little capital to enlarge his business. He consults an uncle in Frankfurt. The uncle tells his old friend, the father of several daughters, that the most handsome, industrious, and accomplished man the world has ever seen, his own nephew, in fact, thinks of marriage, and that his conditions are this and that ; he tells his nephew that the most beautiful and amiable creature in Germany, a brilliant musician, a fluent linguist, a devoted daughter, and a person of simple housewifely tastes, lives next door to him, the uncle. Except for the housewifely tastes, it sounds, and in fact is, rather like a courtship in the Arabian Nights so far. The prince hears of the princess, and without having seen her sets out to seek her hand. The young merchant pays a flying visit to Frankfurt, is presented to the most beautiful creature in Germany, finds her passable, has a talk to her father as business-like as a talk between two solicitors, proposes, is accepted, and at once becomes the most ardent lover the world has ever seen. Amongst Christians marriages are certainly not arranged for girls in this matter-of-course way, and so " old maids " abound. Girls without money have far less chance of marriage in Germany than in England, 6 82 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY where young people mate as they please and where a man expects to support his wife entirely ; while the spectacle, quite common here, of girls with a good deal of money remaining single from various reasons, some- times actually from want of opportunity to marry, this every-day occurrence amongst the English better classes is unknown on the continent. In her powerful novel Aus guter Familie, Gabrielle Reuter describes the life of a German girl whose parents cannot give her a dowry, and who is doomed in consequence to old maidhood and to all the disappointments, restrictions, and humiliations of unsought women. While women look to marriage and nothing else for happiness, there must be such lives in every monogamous country, where they outnumber the men ; but in England a woman's marriage is much more a matter of chance and charm than of money. If she is poor and misses her chance she is worse off than the German, for she has no Stiff provided for her ; but if she is attractive she is just as likely to marry without a fortune as with one. Those German women who consider their ideas " progressive " have taken up a new cry of late, a cry about every woman's " right " to motherhood ; but they do not seem to have found a satisfactory way of securing this right to the 400,000 women who out- number the men. One learned professor wrote a pamphlet advocating polygamy, but his proposal did not have the success he no doubt felt it deserved. The women who discuss these questions, in magazines they edit and mostly write themselves, said that his arguments were all conducted from the man's point of view, and were most reprehensible. Their own chief aim at present is to protect the mothers of illegitimate children, and this seems a natural and proper thing for the women of any community to do. Otherwise they GIRLHOOD 83 are not a united body. There are moderates and immoderates amongst them, and as I am a moderate myself in such matters, I think those who go all lengths are lunatics. It makes one open one's eyes to go to Germany to-day with one's old-fashioned ideas of the German Frau, and hear what she is doing in her desire to reform society and inaugurate a new code of morals. She does not even wait till she is married to speak with authority. On the contrary, she says that marriage is degrading, and that temporary unions are more to the honour and profit of women. " Dear Aunt S.," I heard of one girl writing to a venerable relative, " I want you to congratulate me on my happiness. I am about to be united with the man I love, and we shall live together (in freier Ehe) till one of us is tired of it." A German lady of wide views and worldly knowledge told me a girl had lately sent her a little volume of original poems that she could only describe as unfit for publication ; yet she knew the girl and thought her a harmless creature. She was presumably a goose who wanted to cackle in chorus. This same lady met another girl in the gallery of an artist who belonged to what Mr. Gilbert calls the " fleshly school." " Ah ! " said the girl to my friend, " this is where I feel at home." One of these immoderates, on the authority of Plato, recommended at a public meeting that girls should do gymnastics unclothed. Some of them are men-haters, some in the interests of their sex are all for free love. None of them accept the domination of men in theory, so I think that the facts of life in their own country must often be unpleasantly forced on them. I discussed the movement, which is a marked one in Germany at present, with two women whose experience and good sense made their opinion valuable. But they did not agree. One said that the excesses 84 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY of these people were the outcome of long repression, and would wear out in time. The other thought the movement would go on and grow ; which was as much as to say that she thought the old morals were dead. Undoubtedly they are dead in some sets in Germany to-day. You hear of girls of good family who have asserted their " right to motherhood " without marriage ; and you hear of other girls who refuse to marry because they will not make vows or accept conditions they con- sider humiliating. These views do not attract large numbers ; probably never will. But they are sufficiently widespread to express themselves in many modern essays, novels, and pamphlets, and even to support several magazines. The women holding them are of various types and quality, and are by no manner of means agreed with each other; while those women who are working steadily and discreetly for the progress of their sex condemn the extreme party, and consider them a check on all real advancement. The German girl, then, is not always the simple creature tradition paints her. At any rate she reads novels and sees plays that would have been forbidden to her mother. Nevertheless she is as a rule just as happy as a girl should be when the man of her dreams asks her to marry him. In other days a proposal of marriage was a ceremonial in Germany. A man had to put on evening dress for the occasion, and carry a bouquet with him. " Oh yes," said a German friend of mine, " this is still done sometimes. A little while ago a cousin of mine in Mainz was seen coming home in evening dress by broad daylight carrying his bouquet. The poor fellow had been refused." But in these laxer times a man is spared such an ordeal. It is more usual in Germany than in England to speak to a girl's father before proposing to her, but even this is GIRLHOOD 85 not invariable nowadays. Young people make their own opportunities. " Last year my brother proposed to his present wife in the woods near Baden while they gathered Waldmeister," said a young German to a girl he ardently admired. " It will be in flower next week, and your parents have just arranged that I may meet them at the Alte Schloss in time for dinner. After dinner we will walk in the woods nicht wahr ? " But the girl, as it happened, did not wish to receive a proposal of marriage from this young man, so she took care not to walk in the woods and gather Waldmeister with him. It is often said that the sexes herd separately in Germany, and do not meet each other much. But this always seems to me one of the things said by people who have looked at Germans and not lived amongst them. A nation that has such an intimate home life, and is on the whole poor, receives its friends in an intimate informal way. Young men have different occupations and interests from girls, but when they are admitted to a family they are often admitted on terms of easy friendship. In London you may ask a young man with others to dinner at intervals, and never get to know him ; in Berlin you ask him without others to supper, and soon get to know him very well. Besides, a German cannot endure life long without an Ausflug or a Landpartie, and when the family plans one it includes one or two of its friends. When two Germans do get engaged they let their world know of it. A betrothal there is not the informal flimsy contract it often is with us. They begin by publishing the event in their newspapers, and sending round printed forms announcing it to their friends. In the newspaper the announcement is rather bare compared with the advertisement of other family events, " Engaged. Frl, Martha Raekelwitz mit Hrn, 86 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY Ingenieur Julius Prinz Dresden- Hamburg" is con- sidered sufficient. But the printed intimations sent round on gilt-edged paper or cardboard to the friends of the contracting parties are more communicative. On one side the parents have the honour to announce the engagement of their daughter Anna to Mr. So-and- So, and on the other side Mr. So-and-So announces his engagement to Miss Anna. Here is a reproduction of such a form, with nothing altered except the actual names and addresses. On the left-hand side of the double sheet of cartridge paper the parents of the Braut have their say " Die Verlobung ihrer Tochter Pauline mit Herrn Referendar Dr. jur. Heinrich Schmidt in Berlin beehren sich ergebenst anzuzeigen. Geh. Regierungsrat Dr. EuGEN BRAND Konigl. Gymnasialdirektor und FRAU HELENE, geb. ENGEL STUTTGART, imjuni 1906 Tiergarten 7 " Then on the opposite page the future bridegroom speaks for himself "Meine Verlobung mit Fraulein Pauline Brand, Tochter des Konigl. Gymnasialdirektors Herrn Geh. Regierungsrat Dr. Eugen Brand und seiner Frau Ge- mahlin Helene, geb. Engel, in Stuttgart, beehre ich mich ergebenst anzuzeigen. Dr. jur. HEINRICH SCHMIDT Referendar BERLIN, im /uni 1906 Kurfurstendamm 2000 " GIRLHOOD 87 Directly these forms have been circulated, all the friends who have received one and live near enough pay a visit of congratulation to the bride's parents, and soon after the betrothed couple return these visits with some ceremony. It is quite impossible, by the way, to talk of Germans who are officially engaged without calling them the bride and bridegroom. They plight their troth with the plain gold rings that will be their wedding rings, and this stage of their union is celebrated with as much ceremony and merrymaking as the actual wedding. The Germans are giving up so many of their quaint poetical customs that the girl of to-day probably wears a fine diamond engagement ring instead of the old-fashioned gold one. But the ring with which her mother and grandmother plighted their troth was the ring with which they were wedded, and when Chamisso wrote Du Ring an meinem Finger he was not writing of diamonds. All the tenderness and poetry of Ger- many go out to lovers, and the thought of a German bride and bridegroom flashes through the mind with thoughts of flowers and moonlight and nightingales. At least, it does if you can associate them with the poems of Heine and Chamisso, with the songs of Schumann, and with the caressing intimate talk of the German tongue unloosed by love. But your experi- ence is just as likely to play you the unkindest trick, and remind you of German lovers whose uncouth public endearments made everyone not to the manner born uncomfortable. When the bride and bridegroom live in the same town, and know a large number of people, they are overdone with festivities from the moment of betrothal to the day of marriage. The round of entertainments begins with a gala dinner given by the bride's father, and this is followed by invitations from all the relatives 88 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY and friends on either side. When you receive a German Brautpaar they should be the guests of honour, and if you can hang garlands near them so much the better. You must certainly present the Braut with a bouquet at some stage of the proceedings, and you will give pleasure if you can manufacture one or two mottoes in green stuff and put them in conspicuous places. For instance, I knew of a girl who got engaged away from home. Do you suppose that she was allowed to return to a bare and speechless front door as her English cousin would ? Nothing of the kind. The whole family had set to work to twine laurel wreaths and garlands in her honour, and she was received with Wilkommen du gliickseliges Kind done in ivy leaves by her grand- mother. It was considered very riihrend and innig. At some time during the engagement the betrothed couple are sure to get photographed together, and anyone who possesses a German family album will bear me out that the lady is nearly always standing, while her bearded lover is sitting down. When they are both standing they are arm in arm or hand in hand. I remember a collection possessing two photographs of a married daughter with her husband. One had been taken just before the wedding in the orthodox pose ; he in an easy chair and she standing meekly by his side : the other represented them a year after marriage, when Heaven had sent them twins. They were both standing then, and they each had a baby in a Steckkissen in their arms. If the bridegroom is not living in the same town with his bride her life is supposed to run rather quietly in his absence. She is not expected to dance with other men, for instance ; but rather to spend her time in embroidering his monogram on every conceivable object he might use : on tobacco pouches, or slippers, T BRIDAL GARMENTS I-KOM A PAINTING AFTER H. BINDE In some districts bunches of flowers are brought by friends and relations of ihe bride on the day the "Aussteu is hung on the line. This pretty custom expresses the wish that the beautiful and graceful shall go hana hand with the useful and practical in the married state GIRLHOOD 89 on letter cases, on braces, on photograph frames, on luggage straps, on fine pocket handkerchiefs. If she is expert and possesses the true sentiment she will em- broider things for him with her hair. In these degenerate days she does not make her own outfit. Formerly, when a German girl left school she began to make stores of body and house linen for future years. But in modern cities the Braut gets everything at one of the big " white " shops, from her own laces and muslins to the saucepan holders for the kitchen, and the bread bags ,her cook will hang outside the flat for the baker's boy. In Germany it is the bride, or rather her parents, who furnish the house and provide the household linen ; and the linen is all embroidered with her initials. This custom extends to all classes, so that you constantly hear of a servant who is saving up for her Aussteuer, that is, the furniture and linen of a house as well as her own clothes. If you ask whether she is engaged you are told that the outfit is the thing. When the money for that is there it is easy to provide the bridegroom. In higher spheres much more is spent on a bride's trousseau than in England, taking class for class. Some years ago I had occasion to help in the choice of a trousseau bought in Hamburg, and to be often in and out of a great " white ware " business there. I cannot remember how many outfits were on view during those weeks, but they were all much alike. What some people call " undies " had been ordered in immense quantities, sometimes heavily trimmed with Madeira work, sometimes with a plain scollop of double linen warranted to wash and wear for ever. The material was also invariably of a kind to wear, a fine linen or a closely woven English longcloth. How any one woman could want some six dozen " nighties " (the silly slang sounds especially silly when I think of those po HOME LIFE IN GERMANY solid highly respectable German garments) was a question no one seemed to ask. The bride's father could afford six dozen ; it was the custom to have six dozen if you could pay for them, and there they were. The thin cambric garments French women were begin- ning to wear then were shown to you and tossed contemptuously aside as only fit for actresses. But this has all been changed. If you ask for " undies " in Berlin to-day, a supercilious shoplady brings you the last folly in gossamer, decollete'e, and with elbow sleeves ; and you wonder as you stare at it what a sane portly German housewife makes of such a gar- ment. In this, as in other things, instead of abiding by his own sensible fashions, the German is imitating the French and the Americans ; for it is the French and the Americans who have taught the women of other nations to buy clothes so fragile and so costly that they are only fit for the purse of a Chicago packer. When the outfit is ready and the wedding day near, the bride returns all the entertainments given in her honour by inviting her girl friends to a Bride-chocolate or a Bean-coffee. This festivity is like a Kaffee-Klatsch, or what we should call an afternoon tea. In Germany, until quite lately, chocolate and coffee were preferred to tea, and the guests sat round a dining-table well spread with cakes. At a Bean-coffee the cake of honour had a bean in it, and the girl who got the bean in her slice would be Braut before the year was out. Another entertainment that takes place immediately before the marriage is given by the bride's best friend, who invites several other girls to help her weave the bridal wreath of myrtle. The bride does not help with it. She appears with the bridegroom later in the afternoon when the wreath is ready. It is presented to her with GIRLHOOD 91 great ceremony on a cushion, and as they bring it the girls sing the well-known song from the Freischiltz "Wir winden dir den Jungfernkranz Mit veilchenblauer Seide ; Wir fuhren dich zu Spiel und Tanz Zu Gliick und Liebesfreude ! Lavendel, Myrt' und Thymian Das wachst in meinen Garten ; Wie lang bleibt doch der Freiersmann? Ich kann es kaum erwarten. Sie hat gesponnen sieben Jahr Den goldnen Flachs am Rocken ; Die Schleier sind wie Spinnweb klar, Und griin der Kranz der Locken. Und als der schmucke Freier kam, War'n sieben Jahr verronnen : Und weil sie der Herzliebste nahm Hat sie den Kranz gewonnen." The bridegroom receives a buttonhole, but no one sings him a song. In the opera he is not on the stage during the bridesmaids' chorus. I have not been able to find out whether the quaint pretty verses are by Friedrich Kind, who founded the libretto of the opera on a story by August Apel, or whether he borrowed them from an older source. German brides wore myrtle and their friends wove a wedding wreath for them long before 1820, when Der Freischiitz appeared. CHAPTER X MARRIAGES E was a pompous, stiff-jointed man," said my friends, "an official in a small town, who would go to the stake rather than break the letter of the law. But when he came to Berlin to attend a niece's marriage he thought he would have some fun. He arrived late on Polterabend, and he brought with him an enormous earthenware crock. Instead of ring- ing he hurled the crock against the outside door of the flat, so that it smashed to atoms with a noise like thunder. The inhabitants of that flat came forth like a swarm of bees, but they were not laughing at the fun, because it was not their Polterabend." He had broken crockery on the wrong floor. In cities this ancient German custom of breaking crockery at the bride's door on Polterabend (the night before the wedding) has died out, but it has not long been dead. I have talked with people who remembered it in full force when they were young. I believe that the idea was to appease the Poltergeist, who would otherwise vex and disturb the young couple. My dictionary, the one that has 2412 pages, says that a Poltergeist is a " racketing spectre," probably what we who are not dictionary makers would call a hobgoblin. In Brands' Antiquities I find reference to this old custom at the marriage of a Duke of York in Germany, when great quantities of glass and china were smashed at the palace doors the night before the wedding. 93 MARRIAGES 93 Polterabend is still celebrated by Germans, although they no longer consider it polite to smash crockery. There is always a large entertainment, sometimes at the bride's house, sometimes at the house of a near relative ; there are theatricals with personal allusions, or recitations of home-made topical poetry, some good music, and the inevitable evergreens woven into senti- ments of encouragement and congratulation. The bride's presents are set out much as they are in England, and perhaps class for class more valuable presents are given in Germany than in England. Electro-plate, for instance, Was considered impossible a few years ago. A wedding present, if it was silver at all, must he real silver. But it is not so much the custom as with us to give presents of money. The civil marriage takes place either the day before or early on the same day as the religious ceremony. The bride used to wear black silk, and still wears a dark plain costume for this official function. Her parents go with her and the necessary witnesses. The religious ceremony often used to take place in the house, but that is no longer customary. The anonymous author of German Home Life, a book published and a good deal read in 1879, says that marriage is a troublesome and expensive ceremony in Germany, and that this accounts for the large number of illegitimate children. Mr. O. Eltzbacher, the author of Modern Germany published in 1905, confirms what was said in 1877 as to the number of illegitimate children born in Germany and Austria, for he says that in Germany itself they are 9 per cent., while in those districts of Austria where the Germans form about nine-tenths of the population, from 20 per cent, to 40 per cent, of the children are born out of wedlock. In France statistics give 9 per cent, in Scotland 7.4 per cent., and in 94 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY England and Wales 4.2 per cent. Nevertheless in modern Germany children are not illegitimate because their parents are too poor to pay their marriage fees. The civil marriage is obligatory everywhere, and costs nothing. The religious ceremony need cost nothing at all. In the porch of every church in Prussia there is a notice stating on which days Freie Trauungen are conducted. Several couples are married at the same time, but they have the full liturgy and the marriage sermon. A small charge is made for the organist and for the decoration of the church. A friend whose husband has a large poor parish in Berlin tells me that the Social Democrats object to the religious ceremony, and will stand guard outside the house on the day of the civil marriage, to make sure that the newly made husband and wife do not leave together to go to church. Sometimes an artisan will wait a fortnight after the civil ceremony before he ventures to have the religious one. Every artisan in Berlin has to belong to the Sozialdemokratischer Verbund, because if he did not his fellow-workmen would destroy his tools and ruin his chances of work. Apparently they interfere with his private affairs as well. The marriage service is not to be found in the prayer-book Germans take to church, but I have both read it and listened to it. The vows made are much the same as here ; but in Germany great importance is attached to the homily or marriage sermon. This is often long and heavy. I have heard the pastor preach to the young couple for nearly half an hour about their duties, and especially about the wife's duty of submission and obedience. His victims were kept standing before him the whole time, and the poor little bride was shak- ing from head to foot with nervousness and excitement In some cities the carriage used by a well-to-do bride MARRIAGES 95 and bridegroom is as big as a royal coach, and up- holstered with white satin, and on the wedding day decorated inside and out with garlands of flowers. The bridegroom fetches his bride in this coach, and enters the church with her. When a pretty popular girl gets married all her admirers send flowers to the church to decorate it. The bride and bridgroom exchange rings, for in Germany men as well as women wear a plain gold wedding ring, and it is always worn on the right hand. The bridegroom and all the male guests wear evening dress and silk hats. The women wear evening clothes too, and no hats. The bride wears the conventional white silk or satin and a white veil, but her wreath must be partly of myrtle, for in Germany myrtle is the bride's emblem. After the wedding dinner the bride slips away unnoticed and changes her gown, and is presently joined by the bridegroom, but not by any of the guests. No rice and no old slippers are thrown in Germany, and no crowd of friends assembles to see the young pair start. The bride bids her parents farewell, and slips away with her husband unseen and unattended. After the wedding dinner there is often dancing and music. A hundred years ago wedding festivities lasted for many days after the wedding, and the bride and bride- groom did not go till they were over. When the celebrated and much married Caroline Schlegel married her first husband, George Bohmer, in 1 784, the ceremony took place at her own home in Gottingen, where her father was a well-known professor. " It would be un- natural if a young wife did not begin with an account of her wedding day," she says in one of her letters. " Mine was delightful enough. Bohmer breakfasted with me, and the morning hours passed gaily, and yet with quietness. There was no trepidation only an 96 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY intercourse of souls. My brother came. We were together till four, and when he left us he gave us his blessing with tears. . . . Lotte and Friederike wove the bridal wreath. . . . Then I had a talk with my father and dressed myself. . . . Meanwhile those dear Meiners sent me a note, with which were some garters they had embroidered themselves. Several of my friends wrote to me, and last of all I got a silhouette, painted on glass, of Lotte and Friederike weaving my bridal wreath. When I was dressed I was a pretty bride. The room was charmingly decorated by my mother. Soon after four o'clock Bbhmer arrived, and the guests, thirty-eight in number. Thank Heaven, there were no old uncles and aunts, so the company was of a more bearable type than is usual on such occasions. I stood there surrounded by my girl friends, and my most vivid thought was of what my condition would be if I did not love the man before me. My father, who was still far from well, led me to the clergy- man, and I saw myself for life at Bohmer's side and yet did not tremble. During the ceremony I did not cry. But after it was over and Bohmer took me in his arms with every expression of the deepest love, while parents, brothers, sisters, and friends greeted me with kind wishes as never a bride was greeted before, my brother being quite overwhelmed then my heart melted and overflowed out of sheer happiness." A week later Caroline and her husband are still at Gottingen, and still celebrating their marriage. At one house, under pretence of the heat, the bride was led into the garden, and beheld there an illuminated motto: " Happy the man who has a virtuous wife : his life will be doubly long." Another friend arrayed her son as Hymen, and taught him to strew flowers in Caroline's path, leading her thus to an arbour where there was a MARRIAGES 97 throne of moss and flowers, with high steps ascending to it, a canopy and a triumphal arch. Concealed behind a bush were musicians, who sang an appropriate song, while the bride and bridegroom mounted the throne and sank in each other's arms before a crowd of sympathising and tearful spectators. This took place more than a hundred and twenty years ago, but I have in my possession what I can only describe as the " literature " of a marriage celebrated three years ago between a North and a South German, both belonging to commercial families of old standing ; and it supplies me, if I needed it, with documentary evidence that Germans enjoy now what they enjoyed then. The marriage took place in winter and from a flat, so that the bride's friends could not build grottoes or hide musicians behind a bush ; but for weeks before both sides of the family must have been busy composing the poems sung at the wedding feast, the music that accompanied them, and the elaborate humorous verses containing allusions to the past history of the bride and bridegroom. To begin with, there is a dainty book of picture postcards, the first one giving portraits of a very handsome and dignified bridegroom with his dainty bride. Then there is a view of Dresden where the bridegroom was born, another of the Rhenish town in which he found his bride, and one of Berlin where she used to stay with a married sister and deal " baskets " right and left to would-be admirers. In Germany, when a girl refuses a man she is said to give him a " basket," and a favourite old figure in the cotillon used to put one in a girl's hands and then present two men to her. She danced with the one she liked best, and the rejected man had to dance round after them with the basket. Besides the book of postcards, each guest at this wedding was presented with printed copies of the 7 98 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY Tafel-Lieder composed by members of the family. One of these has eight verses and each verse has eight lines. It relates little events in the life of the bridegroom from babyhood onwards. You learn that he was a clever child, that he lived at home with his mother instead of going abroad to learn his work, that when he was young he ardently desired to go on the stage, that he is a fine gymnast and musician, but that he needs a wife because he is a dreamy person capable of putting on odd boots. Another Taf el-Lied describes the courtship step by step, and even the assistance given by the poet's wife to bring the romance to its present happy conclusion. "At last Frau Sophie stirred in the affair, Her eyes had pierced to his heart's desire, With fine diplomacy she coaxed Miss Clare To own her maiden heart was set on fire. On all the words and sighs there follow deeds: He comes, he woos her, and at last succeeds." The songs are not all sentiment. They are jocular, and contain puns and play upon names. Three out of the five end with an invitation to everyone to raise their glasses with a Hoch to the married pair. This is done over and over again at German weddings, and as all the guests want to clink glasses with the bride and bridegroom, there is a good deal of movement as well as noise. Besides the Tafel-Lieder^ each of which made a separate booklet with its own dedication and illus- tration, every guest received an elaborate book of samples : samples of the various straws used that summer for ladies' hats. The bridegroom's family had manufactured hats for many generations ; they were wealthy, highly considered people, and extremely proud of their position in their own industry. I am sure that when an Englishman in the same trade and of the same standing gets married, the last thing that would be MARRIAGES 99 mentioned at his wedding would be hats. It would be considered in the highest degree indecorous. But the German is still guileless enough to be satisfied with his station in life when it is sufficiently honourable and prosperous, and for this wedding two little nieces had prepared this card of samples and composed a rhyme for each different colour "Wie 1st doch der Onkel hoch begluckt Das Tantchen heute der 'Brautkranz' schmiickt" went with " myrtle green." "Liebe Gaste, mit Genuss, Wollet alle Euch erheben Hoch das Brautpaar Es soil leben!" went with the " champagne " straw at the end ; and one accompanying the " silver " straw contained an allusion to the " silver " wedding twenty-five years hence, when the bride's golden hair would be silver-grey. Here is the menu, mostly in French, to which all the Tafel-Lieder were sung, and all the toasts drunk and congratulatory speeches made. You will observe that it is none of your light cup, cake, and ice entertainments that you have substituted for the solid old wedding breakfast in this country. HOCHZEITS-TAFEL. Caviar- Schnitten Potage Douglas Saumon-S ce Bernaise Pommes Naturelles Selle de Chevreuil k la Chipolata Ris de Veau en demi Deuil Poularde Salade & Compote Asperges en Branches S ce Mousseline Glace Napolitaine Patisserie Fruits & Dessert Fromage Scharzberger Mousseux ipooer Caseler i896er St. Emilion Schloss Johannisberg Moet et Chandon White Star 100 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY And that no guest should depart hungry Kaltes Abendbrot | Bier Germans celebrate both silver and golden weddings with as much ceremony and rejoicing as the first wedding. The husband and wife receive presents from all their friends, and entertain them according to the best of their circumstances. Children will travel across the world and bring grandchildren with them to one of these anniversaries, and they are of course a great occasion for the topical poetry, theatricals, and tableaux that Germans enjoy. If the grandmother by good luck has saved a gown she wore as a girl, and the grandchild can put it on and act some little episode from the old lady's youth, everyone will ap- plaud and enjoy and be stirred to smiles and tears. There is as much feasting as at a youthful wedding, and perhaps more elaborate performances. Silver- grey is considered the proper thing for the silver bride to wear. It seems like a want of sentiment to speak of divorce in the same breath with weddings ; but as a matter of fact, divorce is commoner in Germany than in England, and more easily obtained. Imprisonment for felony is sufficient reason, and unfaithfulness without cruelty, insanity that has lasted three years, desertion, ill treat- ment or any attempt on the other's life. You hear divorce spoken of lightly by people whose counterparts in England would be shocked by it; people, I mean, of blameless sequestered lives and rigid moral views. Some saintly ladies, who I am sure have never harboured a light thought or spent a frivolous hour, told me of a cousin who played whist every evening with her present husband and his predecessor. My friends seemed to think the situation amusing, but not in any way to be MARRIAGES 101 condemned. At the same time, I have heard Germans quote the saying " Geschiedene Leute scheiden fort und fort? and object strongly to associate with anyone, however innocent, who had been connected with a matrimonial scandal. A woman remains in possession of her own money after marriage even without marriage settlements; but the husband has certain rights of use and investment. Her clothes, jewels, and tools are her own, and the wages she earns by her own work. A man's creditors cannot seize either these or her fortune to pay his debts. Both in Germany and England the wife must live in the house and place chosen by the husband, but in Germany she need not follow him to unwirtlichen countries against her will. He can insist on her doing the housework and helping him in his business when he has no means to pay substitutes ; but she can insist on being maintained in a style proper to their station in life. He is responsible for her business debts if he has consented to her undertakings ; but he can forbid her to carry on a business if he prefers that she should be supported by him and give her time and strength to the administration of their home. When they are legally separated he must make her an allowance, but it need only be enough for the bare necessaries of life if the separation is due to her misconduct. The father and mother have joint control of the children, but during the father's lifetime his rule is paramount. When he is dead or incapacitated parental authority remains in the mother's hands. It is her right and duty to care for the child's person, to decide where it shall live, and to superintend its education. She can claim it legally from people who desire to keep it from her. A child born in wedlock is legitimate unless the husband can prove otherwise, and he must establish proof within a 102 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY 1 , " i ' . ." year of the birth coming to his knowledge. But a woman is not allowed to prove that a child born in wedlock is illegitimate. If a man dies intestate and leaves children or grand- children, his widow inherits a fourth of his property; if he only has more distant relatives, half; if he has none, the whole. A man cannot cut his wife off with a shilling. He must leave her at least half of what would come to her if he died intestate. All the laws relating to husband and wife are to be found in the Biirgerliches Gesetzbuch^ which can be bought for a mark. As far as the non-legal intelligence can grasp them, they seem according to our times to be just to women, except when they give the use of her income to the husband. This is a big exception, however. I remember hearing a German say that his sister's quarterly allowance, which happened to be a large one, was always sent to her husband, as it was right and proper that important sums of money should be in the man's hands and under his control. This undoubtedly is the general German view. After the moonshine, the nightingales, the feasting, the toasts, and the family poetry come the realities of life: and the realities in German make the man the predominant partner. CHAPTER XI THE HOUSEHOLDER RENTS are high in Germany. At least, the Germans say so, and so do the people whose books about Germany are crammed with soul-satisfying statistics and elaborate calculations. Over-crowding, too, is said to be worse in Germany than in English cities. But I have always seen the rent and the crowding judged by the number of rooms and not by their size. This is really misleading, because you could put the whole of a small London flat into many a German middle-class dining-room or Wohnzimmer. You could bring up a family in a single room I once had for a whole summer in Thiiringen for 5s. a week. It was as big as a church, and most light and airy. One camped in bits of it. I think rent for rent rooms in Germany are quite twice as large as in London. In Berlin, where rent is considered wickedly high, you can get a flat in a good quarter for 80, and for that sum you will have four large rooms, three smaller ones, a good kitchen, an attic that serves as a lumber-room, and a share in a laundry at the top of the house. There will even be a bathroom with a trickle of cold water, but it is only in the very newest and most expensive German flats that you find hot and cold water laid on. Your drawing and dining-rooms will be spacious, and one of them is almost sure to have a balcony looking on the 103 104 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY street and the pleasant avenue of trees with which it is planted. For this rent you must either make your- self happy on the third or fourth floor in a house without a lift, or you must find one of the delightful " garden " dwellings behind the Hof\ but you will have a better home for your money than you could get in a decent part of London. In fact, it comes to this, in spite of all the statistics in favour of London. If you can only spend 80 on your rent you can live in a good quarter of Berlin, near enough to the Tiergarten, close to the Zoological Gardens, and within a tram-ride of the delightful woods at Halensee. In London you can get a small house for 80, but it will either be in an unattractive quarter or in a suburb. A flat, wherever it is, must always seem a dwelling place rather than a home, but the Germans have elected to live in flats and accept their disadvantages. In and around all the great cities there are villas, but their number hardly counts in comparison with the masses of tall white houses, six storeys high for the most part, and holding within their walls all degrees of wealth and poverty. The German villa is florid, and likes blue glass balls and artificial fountains in its garden. It is often a villa in appearance and several flats in reality. Its most pleasant feature is the garden-room or big verandah, where in summer all meals are served. Outside Ham- burg, on the banks of the Elbe, the merchant princes of the city have built themselves palaces surrounded by splendid park-like gardens. But Hamburg, though it does not love the English, is always accused by the rest of Germany of being English. It certainly has beauti- ful gardens. So have other German cities in some instances, but well kept gardens are not the matter of course in Germany that they are here. You see more bare and artificial ones and more neglected overgrown THE HOUSEHOLDER 105 ones in an afternoon's walk than you do all the year round in England. But I wish we could follow the German fashion of planting all our streets with double avenues of healthy trees. Berlin in spring seems to be set in a wood ; it is so fresh and green. The flowering shrubs, on the other hand, are not to be compared with ours. Everyone rushes to see a few lilac bushes, and Gueldres roses trimmed to a stiff snowball of flowers, and everyone says Wie Herrlich ! but you miss the profu- sion of lilac, hawthorn, and laburnum that runs riot all about London in every residential road and every garden. Above all, you miss the English lawns. In Berlin wherever grass is grown it looks either thin or coarse. The majority of Germans do not dream of wanting a garden. They are content with a few palms in their sitting-room or window boxes on their balcony. They are proud of their window-gardening in Berlin, but I think London windows in June are gayer and more flowery. The palms kept in German rooms attain to a great size and number, and a palm is a favourite present. Nursery gardeners undertake the troublesome business of repotting them every spring, so the owners have nothing to do but water them and keep them from draughts. There are usually so many windows in a German sitting-room that those near the plants need never be opened in winter ; and even when the tempera- ture sinks several degrees below zero outside, the air of the flat is kept artificially warm, so warm that English folk gasp and flag in it. At the first sign of winter the outside windows, removed for the summer, are brought back again. Our windows are unknown on the continent, and disliked by continentals who see them here. They call them guillotine windows, and consider them dangerous. Theirs all open like doors, so that you have four doors to each window, and until you get io6 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY used to them you find they make a pretty clatter whenever you set them wide. But in winter they are only opened for a few minutes every morning when the room is " aired." It is considered extravagant to open them at other times, because the heat would escape and more fuel would be required. I suppose everyone in England understands that our open fireplaces are almost unknown in Germany. They have enclosed stoves of iron or porcelain that make little work or dirt and give no pleasure. There is no gathering round the hearth. You sit about the room as you would in summer, for it is evenly heated. All the beauty and poetry of fire are wanting ; you have nothing but an atmosphere that will be comfortable or asphyxiating, according to the taste of your hosts. Years ago in South Germany you burnt nothing but logs of wood in the old-fashioned iron stoves, and there was some faint pleasure in listening to their crackle. You could just see the flames too, if you stooped low enough and opened the little stove door. But the wood burnt so quickly that it was most difficult to keep a big room warm. Nowadays you always find the porcelain stove that Mark Twain says looks like the family monument. In some of these coal is burnt, or a mixture of coal and peat. Some burn anthracite, and are considered economical. A Filllofen of this kind is kept burning night and day during the worst of the winter. It requires attention two or three times in twenty-four hours; it is easily regulated, and if the communicating doors are left open it warms two or three rooms. A friend who has a large flat in Berlin told me that there was one of these stoves in her husband's study, and that her drawing-room which opens out of it, and which they constantly use, had only had a fire in it five times last winter. I find on look- THE HOUSEHOLDER 107 ing at this friend's budget that she spends 16 a year on turf and other fuel, and this seems high for a flat where so few fires were lighted. But fuel is dear in German towns. Briquettes are largely used in cities, small slabs of condensed coal that cost one pfennig each. It takes about twenty-four slabs to keep a stove in during the day. The great advantage of the Fullofen over the ordinary stove is that it keeps in all night. There are dangerous variations of temperature in a German flat that is kept as hot as an oven all day, and allowed to sink below zero during the night. But you hear complaints on all sides in Germany, both of incon- siderate English people who waste fuel by opening windows in cold weather ; and of the sufferings endured by Germans who have been in England in winter. They do not like our open fireplaces at all, because they say they wish to be warm all over and not in bits. " In England," they tell you solemnly, " you can be warm either in front or at the back ; but you cannot be warm on both sides as we are here. Besides, your fireplaces make dirt and work and are extravagant. They would not suit us." In fact, they imply that for the French and the English they are well enough, but not for the salt of the earth. The German kitchen stoves are certainly more practical and economical than ours, and I never can understand why we do not fetch a few over and try them. They are entirely enclosed, and much lower than ours. The Berlin kitchener has one fire that is lighted for a short time to roast a joint, and another using less fuel that heats water and does light cooking. The sweep, who is bound by the etiquette of his trade to wear a tall hat in Germany, does not come into your flat at all. You hear him shout through the courtyard that he will visit the house next day, and he works from the garrets and cellars. The police regulate io8 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY his visits as they regulate everything else in Germany. Chimneys must be swept every six weeks in summer, and every four weeks in winter in Berlin. Dustbins are emptied every day, and in some towns the police make most troublesome regulations with regard to them. The householder has to set his outside to be emptied, and the police insist on this being done at a certain hour, neither earlier nor later, so that if your servant happens to be careless or unpunctual you will be repeatedly fined. Staircases vary greatly according to the date and rent of the house. The most modern houses in Berlin have broad front staircases with thick carpets, and in some cases seats of " Nouveau Art " design on the landings. In such houses you are always met on the threshold by printed requests to wipe your feet and shut the door gently. They don't tell you to do as you're bid. That is taken for granted, or the police will know the reason why. There is always an uncarpeted back staircase for servants and trades- people, and for the tenants who inhabit the poorer parts of the building. In houses where all the tenants belong to the poorer classes, you find notices that forbid children to play in the Hof, and command people not to loiter or to make any noise on the stairs. Carpet- beating and shaking, which is constantly and vigorously carried on, is only allowed on certain days of the week and at certain hours. When there is a house porter he is not as important and conspicuous as the French concierge. In my experience he has usually gone out and thoughtfully left the front door ajar. He is not a universal institution even in Berlin. Taxes vary in different parts of Germany. In Saxony a man spending $oo a year pays altogether 60 for Income tax, Municipal rates, Water, School, THE HOUSEHOLDER 109 and Church rates. In Berlin the Income tax is not an Imperial (Reichs) tax, but a Landes tax, and amounts to 15 on an income of 500. Smaller incomes pay less and larger ones more, in proportion varying from about 2 to 4 per cent. Besides this Staats tax there is a municipal tax of exactly the same amount in Berlin and Charlottenberg. But there are towns in Prussia where it is less ; others, mostly in the Western Provinces, where it is more, considerably more in some cases. The water rate is paid by the house owners, and the tenant pays it in his rent. There are no school taxes. The church tax is compul- sory on members of the Landeskirche. When a man has no capital his income tax is levied on his yearly expenses ; but the man whose income is derived from capital pays a higher tax than the man who has none. The German, too, pays a great deal to the State indirectly ; for nearly everything he requires is taxed. But the three things he loves best, tobacco, beer, and music, he gets cheap cheaper than he can in this Free Trade country ; so he pays for everything else as best he can, and tries to look pleasant. " But the burden is almost more than we can bear," said one thoughtful German to me when I told him how greatly English people admired their municipal enterprise, and the admirable provision made in Berlin for the very poor. Last time I went to Germany I actually made the acquaintance of one German who did not smoke, and on various occasions I was in the society of others who did not smoke for some hours. In the Berlin tramcars smoking is strictly forbidden, but I did not observe that this rule was strictly enforced. In fact, my attention was drawn to it one day by rinding my neighbour's cigar unpleasantly strong. One cigar no HOME LIFE IN GERMANY in a tramcar, however, is nothing at all, and should not be mentioned. It is when a railway carriage beauti- fully upholstered with crimson velvet holds you, six Germans, and one Englishman, for eight hours on a blazing summer day, that you begin to wonder whether, after all, you do mind smoke. To be sure, you might have travelled in a Nichtraucher or a Damen-Coupe\ but changes are a nuisance on a journey. Besides, you know that a Damen-Coupt is always crowded, and that the moment you open a window someone will hold a handkerchief tearfully to her neck and say, " Aber ich bitte meine Dame: eszieht!" and all the other women in the carriage will say in chorus, "/#/ ja I es zieht ! " and if you don't shut the window instantly the conductor will be summoned, and he will give the case against you. So you travel all day long with seven cigars, most of them cheap strong ones, that their owners smoke very slowly and replace directly they are finished. And after a time the conversation turns on smoking, and your neighbour admits that he always lights his first cigar when he gets up in the morning and smokes it while he is dressing. His wife dresses in the same room and does not like it, but ... It is unnecessary to say more. Five cigars out of six are in sympathy with him, while you amuse yourself by wondering what revenge a wife could take in such circumstances. A bottle of the most offensive scent in the market suggests itself, but you look at your neighbour's profile, and see that he is the kind of man to pitch scent he did not like out of the window. You have heard of one German husband who did this when his wife brought home perfumes that did not please him. And then your memory travels back and back along the years, arriving at last at the picture of an English nursery, in the household THE HOUSEHOLDER in where a German guest had arrived the night before. The nurses and the children are sitting peacefully at breakfast, when there enters to them a housemaid, scornful, scandalised, out of breath with her hurry to impart what she had seen. " He's a-smoking in bed," she says, " that there Mr. Hoggenheimer ! He's a-smoking in bed ! " " Some of them do," says nurse, who is a travelled person, and refuses to be taken by surprise. " Well, of all the nasty . . ." " Sh ! " says nurse, pointing to the children, all eyes ,and ears. So that is all you can remember about the house- maid and Mr. Hoggenheimer. But you remember him a little dark man who sent you books you could not read at Christmas, and brought you enchanting gingerbreads covered with hundreds and thousands. You thought him rather funny, but you liked him, and if he wanted to smoke in bed why not? You liked toys in bed yourself, and you would have taken the dog there if only it had been allowed. Then you come back again to the present hour, nearly all the years of your life later, and you are in a railway carriage with six German householders who, like Mr. Hoggenheimer, want cigars in and out of season. " To-morrow," you say to your Englishman ; " to- morrow I shall travel in a Nichtraucher? " But then I can't smoke," he says quite truly. " We shall not travel together." " But that is so unsociable." " I would rather be unsociable than suffocated," you explain. " I have suffered tortures to-day." " Have you ? But you always say you don't mind smoke." " In reason. Seven cigars and one woman are not H2 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY reasonable. Never again will I travel with seven cigars." " I thought we had a pleasant journey," says the Englishman regretfully. " That little man next to you " " Mr. Hoggenheimer ? " "Was that his name? I couldn't understand all he said, but he had an amusing face." "A face can be misleading," you say; "that man bullies his wife." " How do you know ? " " He told us so. He smokes before breakfast . . . while he is dressing, . . . and he has no dressing room. . . ." The Englishman looks calm. " They do take one into their confidence," he remarks. " My neighbour told me that he never could eat mayonnaise of salmon directly after roast pork, because it gave him peculiar pains. I was afraid you'd hear him describe his symptoms ; but I believe you were asleep." " No, I wasn't," you confess ; " I heard it all, and I shut my eyes, because I knew if I opened them he'd address himself to me. I shut them when he began talking to you about your Magen and what you ought to do to give it tone. You seemed interested." " It's quite an interesting subject," says the English- man, who makes friends with every German he meets. " He is not in the least like an Englishman," they say to you cordially, " he is so friendly and amiable." CHAPTER XII HOUSEWIVES RENCH WOMEN are the best housewives in Europe," said a German lady who knew most European countries well ; " the next best are the English; Germans come third." The lady speaking was one whose opinions were always uttered with much charm, but ex-cathedra ; so that you found it impossible to disagree with her . . . until you got home. But to hear the supreme excellence of the Hausfrau contested takes the breath away ; to see her deposed from the first place by one of her own countrywomen dazzles the eyes. It was a new idea to me that any women in the world except the Germans kept house at all. If you live amongst Germans when you are young you adopt this view quite insensibly and without argument. " My son is in England," you hear a German mother say. " I am uneasy about him. I fear he may marry an Englishwoman." " They sometimes do," says her gossip, shaking her head. "It would break my heart. The women of that nation know nothing of housekeeping. They sit in their drawing-rooms all day, while their husband's hard- earned money is wasted in the kitchen. Besides . . , mein armer Karl he loves Nudelsuppe and Kuken mit SpargeL What does an Englishwoman know of such 8 H4 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY things? She would give him cold mutton to eat, and he would die of an indigestion. I was once in England in my youth, and when I got back we had a Frikassee von Hdhnchen mit Krebsen for dinner, and I wept with pleasure." " Perhaps," says the gossip consolingly, " your Karl will remember these things and fetch himself a German wife." " Poor girl ! " says Karl's not-to-be-consoled mother, " she would have to live in England and keep house there. It happened to my niece Greta Lohring. She had a new cook every fortnight, and each one was worse than the one before. In England when a cook spoils a pudding she puts it in the fire and makes another. Imagine the eggs that are used under such circumstances." I remember this little dialogue, because I was young and ignorant enough at the time to ask what a German did when she spoilt a pudding, and was promptly informed that in Germany such things could not happen. A cook was not allowed to make puddings unless her mistress stood by and saw that she made them properly; "unless she is ^perfekte Kochin" added Karl's mother, " and then she does not spoil things." A German friend, not the travelled one, but a real home-baked domestic German, took me one hot after- noon this summer to pay a call, and at once fell to talking to the mistress of the house about the washing of lace curtains. There were eight windows in front of the flat, and each window had a pair of stiff spotless lace curtains, and each curtain had been washed by the lady's own hands. My friend had just washed hers, and they both approached the subject as keenly as two gardeners will approach a question of bulbs or Alpines. There are different ways of washing a white HOUSEWIVES 1 1 5 curtain, you know, and different methods of rinsing and drying it, and various soaps. Starch is used too at some stage of the process ; at least, I think so. But the afternoon was hot and the argument involved. The starch I will not swear to, but I will swear to ten waters ten successive cleansings in fresh water before the soul of the housewife was at rest. " And how do you wash yours ? " said one of them, turning to me. " Oh I ! " I stammered, taken aback, for I had been nearly asleep ; " I send a post-card to Whiteley's, and 'they fetch them one week and bring them back the next. They cost is. a pair." The two German ladies looked at each other and smiled. Then they politely changed the subject. This trivial story is not told for its intrinsic merits, but because it illustrates the difference of method between English and German women. The German with much wear and tear of body and spirit washes her own lace curtains. She saves a little money, and spends a great deal of time over them. The English- woman, when she possibly can, likes to spend her time in a different way. In both countries there are admirable housekeepers, and middlmg housekeepers, and extremely bad ones. The German who goes the wrong way about it sends her husband to the Kneipe by her eternal fussing and fidgeting. She is not his companion mentally, but the cook's, for her mind has sunk to the cook's level, while her temper through constant fault-finding is on a lower one. The English- woman sends her husband to the club or the public house, according to his social station, because she is incapable of giving him eatable food. But the English belief that German housewives are invariably dull and stodgy is not a whit more ignorant and untrue than n6 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY the German belief that all Englishwomen are neglectful, extravagant housekeepers. The Englishwoman keeps house in her own way, and it is different from the German way, but it is often admirable. The comfort, the organisation, and the unbroken peace of a well- managed English household are not surpassed, in some details not equalled, anywhere in the world. The German ideal (for women) is one of service and self-sacrifice. Let her learn betimes to serve, says Goethe, for by service only shall she attain to command and to the authority in the house that is her due. " Dienen lerne bei Zeiten das Weib nach ihrer Bestimmung, Denn durch Dienen allein gelangt sie endlich zum Herrschen Zu der verdienten Gewalt, die doch ihr im Ilause gehoret, Dienet die Schwester dem Bruder doch friih, sie dienet den Eltern ; Und ihr Leben ist immer ein ewiges Gehen und Kommen, Oder ein Heben und Tragen, Bereiten und Schaffen fiir Andre; Wohl ihr, wenn sie daran sich gewohnt, dass kein Weg ihr zu sauer Wird, und die Stunden der Nacht ihr sind wie die Stunden des Tages : Dass ihr niemals die Arbeit zu klein und die Nadel zu fein diinkt, Dass sie sich ganz vergisst, und leben mag nur in Andern ! " She is to serve her brothers and parents. Her whole life is to be a going and coming, a lifting and carrying, a preparing and acting for others. Well for her if she treads her way unweariedly, if night is as day to her, it no task seems too small and no needle too fine. She is to forget herself altogether and live in others. It is a beautiful passage, and an unabashed magnificent masculine egotism speaks in every line of it. Whenever I read it I think of the little girl in Punch whose little brother called to her, " Come here, Effie. I wants you." And Effie answered, " Thank you, Archie, but I wants myself! " Herr Riehl quotes the passage at the end of his own exhortations to his HOUSEWIVES 117 countrywomen, which are all in the same spirit, and were not needed by them. German women have always been devoted to their homes and their families, and they are as subservient to their menfolk as the Japanese. They do not actually fall on their knees before their lords, but the tone of voice in which a woman of the old school speaks of die Herren is enough to make a French, American, or Englishwoman think there is something to be said for the modern revolt against men. For any woman with a spice of feminine perversity in her nature will be driven to the other camp when she meets extremes ; so that in Germany she feels ready to rise against overbearing males ; whilst in America she misses some of the regard for masculine judgment and authority that German women show in excess. At least, it seems an excess of duty to us when we hear of a German bride who will not go down to dinner with the man appointed by her hostess till she has asked her husband's permission ; and when we hear of another writing from Germany that, although in England she had ardently believed in total absten- tion, she had now changed her opinion because her husband drank beer and desired her to approve of it. But it was an Englishwoman who, when asked about some question of politics, said quite simply and honestly, " I think what Jack thinks." The truth is, that the women of the two great Germanic races are kin. There are differences, chiefly those of history, manners, and environment. The likeness is profound. " Par une rencontre singuliere," says M. Taine, " les femmes sont plus femmes et les hommes plus hommes ici qu'ailleurs. Les deux natures vont chacune a son extreme ; chez les uns vers 1'audace, 1'esprit d'entreprise et de resistance, le caractere guerrier, imp devoir. . . ." I cannot imagine what M. Taine means by saying that Englishwomen lead a more sedentary and se- questered life than Frenchwomen, but the rest of his description presents a well-known type in England and Germany. " Voir la peinture de ce caractere dans toute la litte'rature anglaise et allemande," he says in a footnote. " Le plus grand des observateurs, Stendhal tout impre'gne' des moeurs et des ide*es Italiennes et franchises, est stupefait a cette vue. II ne comprend rien a cette espece de deVouement, ' a cette servitude, que les maris Anglais, sous le nom de devoir, ont eu 1'esprit d'im- poser a leurs femmes,' Ce sont ' rios moeurs de s^rail.' " HOUSEWIVES 119 Here the " greatest of all observers " seems to talk nonsense, for marriage in the seraglio does not hinge on the submission of one wife to one husband, but on a plurality of wives that English and German women have only endured in certain historic cases. In both western countries marriage has its roots in the fidelity of one man and one woman to each other. A well- known English novelist once said quite truly that an Englishman very rarely distrusts his wife, and never by any chance distrusts the girl who is to become his wife ; and just the same may be said of the German of the better classes. In both countries you will find sections of society above and below where morals are lax and manners corrupt. German professors write sketches of London in which our busy grimy city is held up to a virtuous Germania as the modern Sodom and Gomorrah ; and the Continental Anglophobe likes nothing better than to entertain you with pictures of our decadent society, pictures that really do credit to the vividness and detail of his imagination. Meanwhile our press assures the respectable Briton that Berlin is the most profligate city in Europe, and that scurrilous German novels about the German army will show him what the rotten state of things really is in that much over- rated organisation. But these national amenities are misleading. The bulk of the nation in both countries is sound, and family life still flourishes both here and there. The men of the race, in spite of Herr Riehl's prognostications, still have the whip hand, as much as is good for them in England, a little more than is good for them in Germany. If you go to Germany you must not expect a man to open a door for you, or to wait on you at afternoon tea, or to carry a parcel for you in the street. He will kiss your hand when he greets you, he will address you as gracious lady or 120 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY gracious miss, he will put his heels together and make you beautiful bows, he will pay you compliments that are manifestly, almost admittedly, artificial. That at least is one type of man. He may leave out the kisses and the bows and the compliments and be quite un- disguisedly bearish ; or he may be something betwixt and between, kindly, concerned for your pleasure and welfare. But whatever he is he will never forget for a moment that you are " only a woman." If you marry him he will expect to rule everywhere except in the kitchen, and as you value a quiet life you had better take care that the kitchen produces what pleases him. On occasion he will assert his authority with some violence and naivete*. No one can be long amongst Germans, or even read many German novels, without coming across instances of what I mean. For example, there was once a quarrel between lovers that all turned upon a second glass of champagne. The girl did not want it, and the man insisted that she should drink it whether she wanted it or not. What happened in the end is forgotten and does not matter. It is the com- ment of the historian that remains in the memory. " Her family had spoilt her," said he. " When they are married and my friend gets her to himself she will not behave so." " But why should she drink a second glass of cham- pagne if she did not want it ? " I asked. " Because he commanded her to," said this Petruchio, beginning to bristle at once ; and he straightway told me another story about a man who threw his lady-love's dog into a pond, not because the dog needed a bath, but in assertion of his authority. The lady had wished to keep her dog out of the water. " Did she ever forgive the man ? " said I. " Forgive ! What was there to forgive ? The man HOUSEWIVES 121 wished to put the dog in the pond. A man must know how to enforce his will ... or he is no man." I nearly said "Lor!" like Mr. Tweddle in The Tinted Venus, but in Germany it's a serious matter, a sort of lese majesty to laugh at the rightful rule of man. You must expect to see them waited on hand and foot, and to take this service as a matter of course. I have known Englishmen embarrassed by this state of affairs, " They will get me chairs," complained one, " and at table the daughters jump up and wait on me. It's horrid." " Not at all," said I. " It's your due. You must behave as if you were used to it." " I can't. The other day I got the daughters of the house to sit still while I handed about cups of tea, and if some of the old boys didn't jump down their throats and tell them they'd no business to let me forget my dignity. Bless my dignity ... if it's such a tender plant as that. ..." " Sh ! " I said. " They must have been old-fashioned people. In some houses young men hand cups." " They look jolly self-conscious while they're doing it, ... as if they didn't half like it. You bet, they take it out of their womenfolk when they get home. Look at that chap Miiller ! " "Where is he?" " In Dresden, where I lived last winter. He stormed the house down because his wife took up his glass of beer and drank before he did. Nearly had a fit. Said his dignity as a husband was damaged. Then he turned to me and asked whether even in England a wife would be so bold and bad ? " " What did you say ? " " I didn't say anything. I looked sick." 122 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY " That's no use. You should say a great deal, and wave your arms about and hammer on the table. You don't know how to show emotion." " I should hope not," says the Englishman. " But German women are always telling me they envy the women in our country." " That's their politeness," I assure him. " They don't mean it. They're as happy as the day is long. Besides, Germans don't get drunk and beat their wives with pokers. You know perfectly well that most Englishmen " But, of course, whatever you say about German women of the present day can be contradicted by anybody who chooses to describe one at either end of the scale, for the contrasts there are violent. You will find in the same street a woman who exercises a profession, lives more or less at her club, and is as independent as her brother; and women who are household drudges, with neither leisure nor spirit for any occupation that would enrich their minds. CHAPTER XIII HOUSEWIVES (Continued) IN Germany the home is furnished by the bride's parents, and the household linen forms part of her trousseau and is marked by her monogram. In describing the furniture of a German flat, you must first decide whether you are going to choose one furnished to-day by a fashionable young woman in Berlin or Hamburg ; or one furnished by her parents twenty to twenty-five years ago. Modern German furniture is quite easily suggested to the English imagination, because some of it looks as if the artist had visited our Arts and Crafts Exhibitions and then made his own designs in a nightmare ; while some has accepted English inspiration and adapted itself wisely and cleverly to German needs. To-day a German bride will have in her bedroom a wardrobe with a big mirror, a toilet table or chest, a marble-topped wash- stand and two narrow bedsteads, all of fumed wood. If she has money and understanding the things have probably come from England, not from an emporium, but from one of our artists in furniture whom the Germans know better and value more highly than we do ourselves. But if she has money only she can buy florid pretentious stuff that outdoes in ugliness the worst productions of our " suite " sellers. Her mother, however, probably did without any kind of toilet table 123 124 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY or glass in her wardrobe. Twenty years ago you occasionally saw such things in the houses of rich people, but they were quite unusual. A small hanging glass behind the washstand was considered enough for any ordentliche Frau. Nowadays in rare cases the ordentliche Frau actually has silver brushes and powder pots and trinket boxes. But as a rule she still does without such things ; she brushes her beautiful hair with an ivory or a wooden brush, and leaves paint and powder to ladies who are presumably not ordentlich. At one time narrow brass or iron bedsteads were introduced from England, and were used a great deal in Germany. I remember seeing one all forlorn in a vast magnificent palace bedroom where a fourposter hung with brocade or tapestry would have looked more at home. But the real old-fashioned bedstead, still much liked and formerly seen everywhere was always of wood, single and with deep sides to hold the heavy box mattress. In Mariana Starcke's Travels in Europe, published in 1833, she says of an inn in Villach, " tall people cannot sleep comfortably here or in any part of Germany ; the beds, which are very narrow, being placed in wooden frames or boxes, so short that any person who happened to be above five feet high must absolutely sit up all night supported by pillows ; and this, in fact, is the way in which the Germans sleep." I think this is a statement that will be as surprising to any German who reads it as the statements made by Germans about England have often been to me. It is true, however, that tall people do find the old- fashioned German bedsteads short ; and it is true that the big square downy pillows are supported by a wedge-shaped bolster called a Keilkissen. But the Plumeau is what the German loves, and the Briton HOUSEWIVES 125 hates above all things : the mountain of down or feathers that tumbles off on cold nights and stays on on hot ones. You hate it all the year round, because in winter it is too short and in summer it is an oppression. Sometimes the sheet is buttoned to it, and then though you are a traveller you are less than ever content. At the best you never succumb to its attractions. Every spring the good German housewife takes her maid and her Plumeaux to a cleaner and sits there while the feathers are purified by machinery and returned to their bags. In this way she makes sure of getting back her own feathers both in quality and quantity. Except for the Plumeaux and the want of a dressing-table and proper mirror, an ordinary German bedroom is very comfortable and always very clean. However plain it is you can use it partly as a sitting- room, because a sofa and a good sized table in front of it are considered an indispensable part of its furniture. When Germans come to England and have to live in lodgings or poorly furnished inns, the bedrooms seem to them most comfortless and ill provided. The poor Idealist who lived as an exile in London in the early Victorian age describes her forlorn room with nothing in it but a " colossal " bed, a washstand, and a chest of drawers, and though she does not describe them, you who know London from that side can see the half- dirty honey-combed counterpane, the untempting cotton sheets, the worn uncleanly carpet, the grained or painted furniture with doors and drawers that will not shut ; and if you know Germany too you must in honesty compare with it the pleasant rooms you have inhabited there for less rent than she paid her Mrs. Quickly, rooms with cool clean painted floors, solid old dark elm cupboards, and bedsteads that when you had pitched the Plumeau on the floor or the sofa were 126 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY inviting because they were made with spotless home- spun linen. What we call the drawing-room used to be extremely chill and formal in Germany, but it has never been as hideously overloaded as English drawing-rooms belonging to people who do not know better. The " suite " of furniture covered with rep or brocade was everywhere, and the rep was frequently grass-green or magenta. There was invariably a sofa and a table in front of the sofa, and a rug or a small carpet under the table. Even in these days this arrangement prevails and must continue to do so while the sofa is considered the place of honour to which the hostess invites her leading guest. If you go to Germany in ignorance of the social importance attached to the sofa, you may blunder quite absurdly and sit down uninvited or when your age or your sex does not entitle you to a seat there. I was once present when an English girl innocently chose a corner of the sofa instead of a chair, though there were older women in the room. The hostess promptly and audibly told her to get up, for she knew it was not an affair to pass off as a joke. In England the question of precedence comes up chiefly at the dinner-table. The host and hostess must send the right people together and place them correctly too. In Germany you have to know as hostess who is to sit on the sofa ; and your decision may be complicated by the absurd titles of your guests. For instance, one Frau Direktor may be the wife of a post office official who had a university education, and in Germany a university education counts ; while another Frau Direktor, though she can afford better clothes, is merely the wife of the man who manages the factory in the next village. I have heard a story of a Frau Kreisrichter and a Frau Actuar that ended in a life- HOUSEWIVES 127 long feud, and it all turned on a Kaffee Klatsch and the wrong woman on the sofa. It it not easy to know what to do about these ridiculous titles in Germany, because some people insist on them and some laugh at them as much as we do. I once asked a lady who had the best right to know, about using military titles instead of names : Herr Lieutenant, Herr Major, and so on. She was quite explicit. " Mir ist es ein Greuel" she said, and went on to tell me that it was only done as one might expect by people who did not know better, and of course by servants. All the same, it is well to be careful and study the individual case. I know of an American who addressed his professor as Professor Lachs, " Where are your manners, mein Herr ? " said the professor in a fury, " I am Herr Professor Dr. Lachs to every student in this laboratory." But when it comes to Mrs. Tax-Collector and Mrs. Organist and Mrs. Head Master, and it does come to this quite seriously, it is difficult for the foreigner to appraise values. The length of the titles, too, is a stumbling-block. You may marry a harmless Herr Braun, and in course of time become Frau Wirklicher- geheimeroberregierungsrath. In this case I don't think your friends would use the whole of your title every time they addressed you ; but you would undoubtedly have a seat on the sofa before all the small fry. On the table in front of the sofa there used always to be a heavy coloured cloth, and then put diamond- wise a light embroidered or lace one. A vase of artificial or real flowers, according to taste, stood exactly in the middle, and a few books in ornamental bindings on either side. There would be very few ornaments, but these few would be good of their kind, 128 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY though probably hideous. Luckily the family did not assemble here on State occasions. For every-day use there was a Wohnzimmer soberly furnished with solid well made chairs and cupboards. Here the mistress of the house kept her palms, her work-table, and her pet birds. Here her husband smoked his after-dinner cigar and drank his coffee before going to his work again. Here the elder children did their lessons for next day's school, and here at night the family sat round one lamp, the father smoking, the mother probably mending, the children playing games. For German fathers do not live at the Kneipe. They are occasionally to be found with their families. When the flat was not large enough to furnish a third sitting- room, the dining-room was used in this way. A modern German family still lives in any room rather than the drawing-room, but it has learned how to make a drawing-room attractive. The odious "suite" has been abolished or dispersed, and a lighter, less formal scheme of decoration is making its way. You see charming rooms in Germany nowadays, but they are never quite like English ones, even when your friends point to a wicker chair or an Eastern carpet and tell you that they love everything English and have furnished in the English fashion. In the first place, you do not see piles of magazines and papers or of library books in a German drawing-room. They would be considered scandalously untidy, and put away in a cupboard at once. If there are cut flowers they are not arranged as they are here. On ceremonial occasions and anniversaries great quantities of flowers are pre- sented, but they are mostly wired and probably arranged in a fanciful shape. The favourite shape changes with the season and the fashion of the moment. One year those who wish to honour you and have plenty of HOUSEWIVES 129 money, will send you lyres and harps made of violets, pansies, pinks, cornflowers, any flower that will lend itself meekly to popular design. The favourite design in Berlin one spring was a large flat sofa cushion of Guelder roses with tall sprays of roses or carnations dancing from it. On ordinary occasions market bunches are put into water as an English cottager puts in his flowers, level and tightly packed. But on a festive occasion in a rich man's house you hear of a long dinner table strewn with branches of pink hawthorn and peonies. In fact, a riot of flowers is now considered dorrect by wealthy people, but you do not find them here and there and everywhere, whether people are wealthy or not, as you do in England. That is partly because there are so few private gardens. The extreme tidiness of German rooms is a constant source of surprise. They are as guiltless of " litter " as the showrooms of a furniture emporium. You would think that the people who live in them were never employed if you did not know that Germans were never idle. Every bit of embroidery has its use and its own corner. The article now being embroidered is neatly folded inside the work-basket or work-table when it is not in the lady's hands. The one book she is reading will be near. Any other books she possesses will be on shelves, and probably behind glass doors. Each chair has its place, each cushion, each ornament. Even where there are children German rooms never look disarranged. I can truly say I have only once seen a German room untidy and dusty, and that was in a house with no one but a " Mamsell " in charge ; and she apologised and explained that it was to be spring cleaned next day. There is, by the way, a curious litter of things kept on a German sideboard in many houses, coffee machines, silver, useful and 9 130 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY ornamental glass, great blue beer jugs, and suchlike ; but they are kept there with intention and not by neglectful accident. Then the narrow corridor of a German flat is often uncomfortably choked with articles of household use: lamps, for instance, and a re- frigerator, and the safe in which the mistress locks her food ; spare cupboards too, and neat piles of papers and magazines. It will be inelegant, but it will be orderly and clean. It is the way in this country to laugh at the German Hausfrau, and pity her for a drudge ; and it is the way with many Germans to talk as if all Englishwomen were pleasure loving and incompetent. The less people know of a foreign nation the greater nonsense they talk in general, and the more cocksure they are about their own opinions. A year ago, when I was in Germany, I asked a friend I could trust if there really was much Anglophobia abroad except in the newspapers. She reflected a little before she answered, for she was honest and intelligent. " There is none amongst people like ourselves," she said, " people who know the world a little. But you come across it ? " She turned to her husband. "There are others like G.," she said. "He turns green if anyone speaks of England, and he says Shakespeare is dumm. You see, he has never been out of Germany, and has never met any English people." So I told her about my English cook, who snorted with scorn when I assured her Germans considered rabbits vermin and would not eat them. " H . . . ph ! " she said, " I shouldn't have thought foreigners were so particular." The average German housewife has to keep the house going on exceedingly small means and with inefficient help. It is her pride and pleasure to make HOUSEWIVES 131 a little go a long way, and she can only achieve this by working with her hands. Probably her servant cannot cook, but she can, and it would never occur to her to let her husband and children eat ill-prepared food because servants do not like ladies in the kitchen. A German lady, like a princess of ancient Greece, considers that it becomes her to do anything she chooses in her own house, and that the most convenient household workshop is the kitchen. The Idealist from whom I have quoted before was the daughter of a well- known German diplomatist, and she had been used since childhood to the atmosphere of Courts. She was an accomplished well-born woman of the world, but she had not been a week in her sordid London lodgings with the woman she calls Mrs. Quickly, before she blundered in her innocent German way into the lodging-house kitchen. Figure to yourself the stupe- faction and the indignation of Mrs. Quickly, probably engaged, though the Idealist does not say so, in dining off the foreign woman's beef. " I went down to the kitchen," says Fraulein von Meysenbug, " with a muslin gown on my arm to ask for an iron so that I could iron my gown there. The kitchen was Mrs. Quickly's true kingdom ; here she alone reigned at the hearth, for the servant was not allowed to approach the saucepans. Mrs. Quickly looked at me with uncon- cealed astonishment as I came in, but when I proffered my request her astonishment turned to wrath. * What ! ' she shrieked, ' a lady ironing in the kitchen ? That is impossible.' And with the mien of offended majesty she snatched the gown from me, and ordered the little maid servant to put an iron in the fire and to iron the gown ; then she turned to me and said with tragic emphasis, ' You are a foreigner. You don't understand our English ways : we consider it extremely unladylike 132 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY for a lady to enter the kitchen, and worse still if she wants to iron her own gown. No, ma'am, please to ring the bell when you require anything; otherwise you will ruin my servants.' Much ashamed of my ignorance on this higher plane of English custom," continues the Idealist, " I crept back to my parlour and laughed heartily as I looked round the dirty, wretchedly furnished room, and reflected on the abyss set by pre- judice between the ground-floor and the basement." " How do you like your new German governess ? " I once asked an English friend who lived in the country and had just engaged a German lady for her only daughter. " Oh ! I like her," said my friend without enthusiasm. " She is a brilliant musician and a fine linguist and all that. But she has such odd ideas about what a girl ought to know. The other day I actually caught her teaching Patricia to dust" "If you don't watch her," I said, "she'll probably teach Patricia to cook." My friend looked anxious first, and then relieved. " I don't see how she could do that," she said. " The cook would never have them in the kitchen for five minutes. But now you mention it, I believe she can cook. When things go wrong she seems to know what has been done or not done." " That might be useful," I suggested. " I don't see it. I expect my cook to know her work, and to do it and not to rely on me. I've other fish to fry." But the German housewife expects to have her fingers literally in every pie even when by rights they should be employed elsewhere. You hear, for instance, of a great Court functionary whose wife is so devoted to cooking that though she has a large staff of servants HOUSEWIVES 133 she cannot be persuaded to spend the day anywhere but in her kitchen. Mistresses of this kind breed incap- able servants, and you find, in fact, that German maids cannot compare with our English ones in qualities of self-reliance, method, and initiative. They mostly expect to be told from hour to hour what to do, and very often to lend a hand to the ladies of the house- hold rather than to do the thing themselves. Indeed, though the servants are on duty from morning till night more than English servants are, in some ways they have an easier time of it than ours, because they are used so much to run errands and go to market. Everyone who has been in German towns can remember the hordes of servants with baskets and big umbrellas strolling in twos and threes along the streets in the early morning. They are never in any hurry to get home to work again, and a good many doubtless know that what they leave undone will be done by their mistress. The German kitchen with its beautiful cleanliness and brightly polished copper pans I have described, but I have not said anything yet about the fidgety housewife who carries her Tuchtigkeit to such a pitch that she ties every wooden spoon and twirler with a coloured ribbon to hang by against the wall. In England you hear of ladies who tie every bottle of scent on the toilet table with a different ribbon, and that really has more sense in it, because it must be try- ing to a cook's nerves to use spoons tied with delicate ribbons that must not be spoiled. Every housewife has dainty little holders for the handles of saucepans when they are hot. You see them, all different shapes and sizes, on view with the piles of kitchen cloths and the various aprons that form part of every lady's trousseau, and if you have German friends they probably present you with a few from time to time. 134 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY I have never noticed any pictures in a German kitchen, but there are nearly always Spriiche both in the kitchen, and the dining-room and sometimes in the hall : rhyming maxims that are done in poker work or painted on wood and hung in conspicuous positions "Wie die Kuche so das Haus, Reinlich drinnen, reinlich draus" is a nice one ; and so is "Trautes Heim Gluck allein." There was one in the Lette-Haus or some other big institution about an hour in the morning being worth several hours later in the day, which would prick our English consciences more sharply than it can most German ones, for they are a nation of early risers. Schools and offices all open so early that a household must of necessity be up betimes to feed its menfolk and children with bread and coffee before their day's work. In most German towns the tradespeople do not call for orders, but they do in Hamburg ; and a friend born there told me in a whisper, so that her husband should not hear the awful confession, that she would never be a good " provider " in consequence. She went to market regularly, for many housewives will not delegate this most important business to a cook, but she had not the same eye for a tough goose or a poor fish, perhaps not the same backbone for a bargain, as a housewife used from childhood to these sorties. In some towns the butcher calls over night for orders. The baker's boy brings rolls before any- one is up, and hangs them outside the flat in one of two bags every household possesses. After the early A GERMAN KITCHEN HOUSEWIVES 135 breakfast either the mistress or the cook fetches what is required for the day. When the good German housewife is not in her kitchen, English tradition believes her to be at her linen cupboard. " I am going to write a humble little gossiping book about German Home Life," I said to a learned but kindly professor last spring. " German Home Life," he said, rather aghast at my daring, for we had only just made each other's acquaint- ance, and I believe he thought that this was my first Visit to Germany and that I had been there a week. " It is a wide field," he went on. " However ... if you want to understand our Home Life . . . just look at that. . . ." We were having tea together in the dining-room in his wife's absence, and he suddenly got up from table and threw back both doors of an immense cupboard occupy- ing the longest wall in the room. I gazed at the sight before me, and my thoughts were too deep for words. It was a small household, I knew. It comprised, in fact, the professor, his beautiful young wife, and one small maid-servant; and for their happiness they possessed all this linen : shelf upon shelf, pile upon pile of linen, exactly ordered, tied with lemon coloured ribbons, embroidered beyond doubt with the initials of the lady who brought it here as a bride. The lady, it may as well be said, is a celebrated musician who passes a great part of each winter fulfilling engagements away from home. " But what happens to the linen cupboard when you are away ? " I asked her, later, for it was grievous to think of any servant, even a " pearl," making hay of those ordered shelves. " I come home for a few days in between and set things to rights again," she explained ; and then, seeing that I was 136 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY interested, she admitted that she had put up and made every blind and curtain, and had even carpentered and upholstered an empire sofa in her drawing-room. She showed me each cupboard and corner of the flat, and I saw everywhere the exquisite order and spotlessness the notable German housewife knows how to main- tain. We even peeped into the professor's dressing- 'room. " He must be a very tidy man," I said, sighing and reflecting that he could not be as other men are. " Do you never have to set things to rights here ? " " Every half hour," she said. These enormous quantities of linen that are still the housewife's pride used to be necessary when house and table linen were only washed twice a year. A German friend who entertained a large party of children and grandchildren every week, pointed out to me that she used eighteen or twenty dinner napkins each time they came, and that when washing day arrived at the end of six months even her supply was nearly exhausted. The soiled linen was stored meanwhile in an attic at the top of the house. The wash itself and the drying and ironing all took place up there with the help of a hired laundress. In most German cities this custom of washing at home still prevails, but in these days it is usually done once a month. The large attics that serve as laundries are engaged for certain days by the families living in the house, and one servant assisted for one day by a laundry woman washes and irons all the house and body linen used by her employers and herself in four weeks. It sounds impossible, but in Germany nothing involving hard work is impossible. All the differences of life between England and Germany, in as far as expenses are concerned, seem to come to this in the end : that over there both men and women HOUSEWIVES 137 will work harder for less money. On the monthly washing day the ladies of the household do the cook- ing and housework, and on the following day they help to fold the clothes and iron them. " I am very tired," confessed a little maid-servant who had been sent out at night to show me where to find a tram. " We got up at four o'clock this morning, and have been ironing all day. My mistress gets up as early, and works as hard as I do. She is very tuchtig, and where there are four children and only one servant there is a good deal to do." Yet her mistress had asked me to supper, I reflected, and everything had been to time and well cooked and served. The rooms had looked as neat and orderly as usual. The Hausfrau had entertained me as pleasantly as if she had no reason to feel tired. We had talked of English novels, and of the invasion of England by Germany ; for her husband was a soldier, and another guest present was a soldier too. The men had talked seriously, for they were as angry with certain English newspapers as we are over here with certain German ones. But the Hausfrau and I had laughed. " When they come, I'm coming with them," she said, " We will receive you with open arms," said I. CHAPTER XIV SERVANTS r I ^HE first thing that English people notice about A German servants is, that they are allowed to dress anyhow, and that the results are most unpleasing. In Hamburg, the city that gives you ox-tail soup for dinner and has sirloins of beef much like English sirloins, the maids used to wear clean crackling, light print gowns with elbow sleeves. This was their full dress in which they waited at table, and fresh looking country girls from Holstein and thereabouts looked very well in it. This costume is being superseded in Hamburg to-day by the English livery of a black frock with a white cap and apron. But in other German cities, in the ordinary middle-class household, the servants wear what they choose on all occasions. In most places they are as fond of plaids as their betters, and in a house where everything else is methodical and well arranged, you will find the dishes plumped on the table by a young woman wearing a tartan blouse decidedly decollete'e, and ornamented with a large cheap lace collar. I have dined with people whose silver, glass, and food were all luxurious ; while the girl who waited on us wore a red and white checked blouse, a plaid neck-tie with floating ends, and an enormous brooch of sham diamonds. In South Germany the servants wear a great deal of indigo blue : stuff skirts of plain blue woollen, with blouses 138 SERVANTS 139 and aprons of blue cotton that has a small white pattern on it. Seme ladies keep smart white aprons to lend their servants on state occasions, but the laciest apron will not do much for a girl in a sloppy coloured blouse with a plaid neck-tie. But these same girls who look such slovens usually have stores of tidy well-made body linen and knitted stockings. In England a ser- vant of the better class will not be seen out of doors in her working-dress. " In London," says the Idealist in her Memoirs, " no woman of the people, no servant-girl will stir a step from the house without a hat on her head, and this is one of the ugliest of English prejudices. While the clean white cap worn by a French maid looks pretty and suitable, the Englishwoman's hat which makes her " respectable " is odious, for it is usually dirty, out of shape, and trimmed with faded flowers and ribbons." It gives me pleasure to quote this criticism made by an observant German on our English servants, partly because it is true, and it is good for us to hear it, and partly because it encourages me to continue my criticism of German as compared with English servants. For it ought to be possible to criticise without giving offence. The Idealist has a very poor opinion of English lodging-house bedrooms and lodging- house keepers, and she states her opinion quite plainly, but I cannot imagine that anyone in this country would be hurt by what she says. On the contrary, it is amusing to find the ills from which most of us have suffered at times recognised by the stranger within our gates. None of us admire the battered tawdry finery we see in our streets every day, and I cannot believe that German ladies admire the shock- ing garments in which their servants will come to the door and wait at table. But though these clothes are sloppy looking and unsuitable, they are never ragged ; I 4 o HOME LIFE IN GERMANY and the girl who puts on an impossible tie and blouse will also wear an impeccable long white apron with an embroidered monogram you can see across the room. In most towns servants go shopping or to market with a large basket and an umbrella. They do not consider a hat or a stuff gown necessary, for they are not in the least ashamed of being servants. Some years ago they made no attempt to dress like ladies when they went out for themselves, and even now what they do in this way is a trifle compared to the extravagant get-up of an English cook or parlour-maid on a Sunday afternoon. A German girl in service is always saving with might and main to buy her Aussteuer, and as she gets very low wages it takes her a long time. She needs about 30, so husbands are not expensive in Germany in that class. German servants get less wages than ours, and work longer hours. Speaking out of my own experience, I should say that they were indefatigable, amiable, and inefficient. They will do anything in the world for you, but they will not do their own work in a methodical way. A lady whose uncle at one time occupied an important diplomatic post in London, told me that her aunt was immensely surprised to find that every one of her English servants knew his or her work and did it without supervision, but that none of them would do anything else. The German lady, not know- ing English ways, used to make the mistake at first of asking a servant to do what she wanted done instead of what the servant had engaged to do ; but she soon found that the first housemaid would rather leave than fill a matchbox it was the second housemaid's " place " to fill ; and what surprised her most was to find that her English friends sympathised with the housemaids and not with her. " We believe in everyone minding his own business," they said. SERVANTS 141 " We believe that it is the servant's business to do what his employer wants," says the German. " You must tell him what you want when you engage him," you say. " Then he can take your place or leave it." " But that is impossible . . . Unsinn . . . Quatsch . . ." says the German indignantly. " How can I tell what I shall want my servant to do three months hence on a Monday morning. Das hat keinen Zweck? " I know exactly what each one of my servants will do three months hence on a Monday morning," you say. " It is quite easy. You plan it all out. . . ." But you will never agree. The German has his or rather her own methods, and you will always think her unmethodical but thrifty and knowledgable, and she will always think you extravagant and ignorant, but " chic," and on these terms you may be quite good friends. In most German households there is no such thing as the strict division of labour insisted on here. Your cook will be delighted to make a blouse for you, and your nurse will turn out the dining-room, and your chambermaid will take the child for an airing. They are more human in their relation to their employers. The English servant fixes a gulf between herself and the most democratic mistress. The German servant brings her intimate joys and sorrows to a good Herrschaft, and expects their sympathy. When a girl has bad luck and engages with a bad Herrschaft she is worse off than in England, partly because when German housekeeping is mean it sounds depths of meanness not unknown, but extremely rare here ; and also because a German servant is more in the power of her employers and of the police than an English one. Anyone who has read Klara Viebig's remarkable novel, Das Tagliche I 4 2 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY Brod (a story of servant life in Berlin) will remember the mistress who kept every bit of dainty food under lock and key, and fed the kitchen on soup-meat all the year round. The chambermaid gives way in a moment of hunger and temptation, manages to get the key, and is discovered by the worthless son of the house stealing cakes. He threatens her with exposure if she will not listen to his love-making. Even if there was no son and no love-making, a girl who once steals cakes in Germany may go from place to place branded as a thief. Because every servant has to have a Dienstbuch) which is under the control of the police, and has to be shown to them whenever she leaves her situation. There is no give and take of personal character in Germany. Ladies do not see the last lady with whom a girl has lived. They advertise or they go to a registry office where servants are waiting to be engaged. In Berlin every third house seems to be a registry office, and you hear as many complaints of the people who keep them as you hear here. So the government has set up a large Public Registry in Charlottenberg, where both sides can get what they want without paying fees. But servants are not as scarce in Germany yet as they are here and in America. German ladies tell you they are scarce, but it is only true in comparison with a former state of things. In comparison with London, servants are still plentiful in Germany. When a lady finds a likely looking girl at an office, she either engages her at once on the strength of the good character in her Dienstbuch, or, if she is very particular, she takes her home and dis- cusses things with her there. The engagement is not completed until the lady has filled in several forms for police inspection; while the servant has to take her Dienstbuch to the police station both when she SERVANTS 143 leaves and when she enters a situation. It is hardly necessary to say that when a girl does anything seriously bad, and her employers record it in the book, the book gets " lost." Then the police interfere and make things extremely disagreeable for the girl. A friend told me that in the confusion of a removal her own highly valued servant lost her Dienstbuch, or rather my friend lost it, for employers usually keep it while a girl is in their service; and though she took the blame on herself, and explained that the book was lost, the police were most offensive about it. In the end the book was found, so I am not in a position to say what penalties my friend and her maid would have incurred if they had never been able to produce it. But Germans have often told me that servants as a class have real good reason to complain of police insolence and brutality. Here is an entry from a German servant's Dienstbuch, with nothing altered but the names. On the first page you found the following particulars : GESINDE-DIENSTBUCH FUr Aus Alt Statur Augen Anna Schmidt. Rheinbeck. Geb. 20 Juni 1885. Schlank. Grau. Nase 'k Mundj' ' Gewohnlich. Haare .... Dunkelblond. Besondere Merkmale , Official stamp. (^Official signature of 144 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY Then came the record of her previous situations Q Y. '. '~ & W Q Q <* O :0 25 ^5 M D 2 Cd & M Z Q Q W Z H gsi "5 a 5 & S5 O * S g H W "W'-iS V C'o^ S |-| 8 |-| 3 it i* H I n=.i; .JT3 ^s^ g C rt S S Q u SERVANTS 145 It will be seen that the characters given tell nothing about a servant's qualities and knowledge ; while the vague complaint that Anna Schmidt's behaviour no longer suited her mistress might mean anything or nothing. In this case it meant that a son of the house had annoyed the girl with his attentions, and she had in consequence treated him with some brus- querie. But ten minutes' talk with a lady who knows the best and the worst of a servant is worth any Dienst- buch in Germany. And when English servants write to the Times and ask to have the same system here, I always wonder how they would like their failings sent with them from place to place in black and white ; every fresh start made difficult, and every bad trait recorded against them as long as they earn their daily bread. Wages are much lower in Germany than here. Some years ago you could get a good cook for from 7 to 12, but those days are past. Now you hear of a general servant getting from 10 to 12, and a good plain cook from 1$ upwards. These are servants who would get from 22 to 30 in England, and more in America. But the wages of German servants are supplemented at Christmas by a system of tips and presents that has in course of time become extortionate. Germans groan under it, but every nation knows how hard it is to depart from one of these traditional indefinite customs. The system is hateful, because it is neither one of free gift nor of business-like payment, but hovers somewhere between and gives rise to much friction and discontent. In a household account book that a friend allowed me to see I found the following entry. " Christmas present for the servant. 30 marks in money. Bed linen, 9.50. Pincushion, 1.5. Five small presents. In all 42 marks. Was not contented? This was a general servant in a 10 146 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY family of two occupying a good social position, but living as so many Germans do on a small income. But then the servant's wages for doing the work of a large well-furnished, well-kept flat was 14, and these same friends told me that servants now expect to get a quarter of their wages in money and presents at Christmas. A German servant gets a great deal more help from her mistress, and is more directly under her superintendence, than she would be in a household of the same social standing in this country. I have heard an English lady say that when she had asked people to dinner she made it a rule to go out all day, because if she did not her servants worried her with questions about extra silver and other tire- some details. All the notable housewives in England will say that this lady was a " freak," and must not be held up to the world as an English type. But I think there is something of her spirit in many English- women. They engage their servants to do certain work, and hold them responsible. The German holds herself responsible for every event and every corner in her husband's house, and she never for a moment closes her eyes and lets go the reins. The servants are used to working hand in hand with the ladies of the household, and do not regard the kitchen as a department belonging exclusively to themselves after an early hour in the morning. " Why did you leave your last place ? " you say to an English cook applying for yours. " Because the lady was always in the kitchen," she replies quite soberly and civilly. " I don't like to see ladies in my kitchen at all hours of the day. It is impossible to get on with the work." But in Germany the kitchen is not the cook's kitchen. It belongs to the people who maintain it, and they SERVANTS 147 enter it when they please. It is always so spick and span that you sigh as you see it, because you think of your own kitchen at home with its black pans and unpleasant looking sink. There are no black pans in a German kitchen ; you never see any grease, and you never by any chance see a teacloth or a duster with a hole in it. An English kitchen in a small household is furnished with more regard to the comfort of the servants than a German one, and with less concern for the work to be done there. We supply comfortable chairs, a coloured table-cloth, oil-cloth, books, hearth- rug, pictures, cushions, inkstand, and a roaring fire. The German kitchen lacks all these things. It does not look as if the women who live in it ever expected to pursue their own business, or rest for an hour in an easy chair. But the shining brightness of it rejoices you, every vessel is of wood, earthenware, enamel, or highly polished metal, and every one of them is scrupul- ously clean. The groceries and pudding stuffs are kept in fascinating jars and barrels, like those that come to children at Christmas in toy kitchens made in Germany. The stove is a clean, low hot table at which you can stand all day without getting black and greasy. In this sensible spotless workshop a German servant expects to be busy from morning till night. Neither for herself nor for her fellow-servants will she ever set a table for a tidy kitchen meal. She eats anywhere and anywhen, as the fancy takes her and the exigencies of the day permit. Her morning meal will consist of coffee and rye bread without butter. In the middle of the morning she will have a second breakfast, rye bread again with cheese or sausage. In a liberal household she will dine as the family dines ; in a stingy one she will fare worse than they. In an old-fashioned household her portion will be carved for her in the 1 48 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY dining-room, because the joint will not return to the kitchen when the family has done with it, but be placed straightway in the Speiseschrank under lock and key. In the afternoon she will have bread and coffee again, and for supper as a rule what the family has, sausage or ham or some dish made with eggs. One friend who goes out so much with her husband that they are rarely at home to supper, told me that she made her servant a monthly allowance to buy what she liked for supper. German servants are allowed coffee and either beer or wine, but they are never given tea. Except for the scarcity of butter in middle-class house- holds, they live very well. They go out on errands and to market a great deal, but they do not go out as much for themselves as our servants do. A few hours every other Sunday still contents them in most places. Their favourite amuse- ment is the cheap public ball, and the careful German householder is actually in the habit of trusting the key of the flat to his maid-of-all-work, and allowing her to return at any hour of the night she pleases. This at any rate is the custom in Berlin and some other large German towns, and the evil results of such a system are manifold. Over and over again burglaries have been traced to it. One beguiling man engages your maid to dance and sup with him, while his confederate gets hold of her key and comfortably rifles your rooms. On the girls themselves these entertainments are said to have the worst possible influence, and most sensible Germans would put a stop to them if they could. You must not expect in Germany to have hot water brought to you at regular intervals as you do in every orderly English household. The Germans have a curious notion that English life is quite uniform, and all English people exactly alike. One man, a notably SERVANTS 149 wise man too, said to me that if he knew one English family he knew ten thousand. Another German told me that this account of German life would be impossible to write, because one part of Germany differed from the other part ; but that a German could easily write the same kind of book about England, because from Land's End to John o' Groats we were so many peas in a pod. To us who live in England and know the differences between the Cornish and the Yorkshire people, for instance, or the Welsh and the East Anglians, this seems sheer nonsense. I have tried to understand how Germans arrive at it, and I believe it is by way of our cans of hot water brought at regular intervals every day in the year in every British house- hold. I remember that their machine-like precision impressed M. Taine when he was in England, and certainly miss them sadly while we are abroad. Gret- chen brings you no hot water unless you ask for it; but she will brush your clothes as a matter of course, though she does all the work of the household. She will, however, be hurt and surprised if you do not press a small coin into her hand at the end of each week, and one or two big ones at parting. One friend told me that when she stayed with her family at a German hotel her German relatives told her she should give the chambermaid a tip that was equal to 20 pf. for each pair of boots cleaned during their stay. It seems an odd way of reckoning, because the chambermaid does not clean boots. However, the tip came to 3, which seems a good deal and helps to explain the ease with which German servants save enough for their marriage outfit on small wages. It is usual also to tip the servant where you have supped or dined. Your opportunity probably comes when she precedes you down the unlighted stairs with a lantern or a candle to 150 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY the house door. But you need not be at all delicate about your opportunity. You see the other guests make little offerings, and you can only feel that the money has been well earned when you have eaten the elaborate meal she has helped to cook, and has after- wards served to you. Domestic servants come under the law in Germany that obliges all persons below a certain income to provide for their old age. The Post Office issues cards and 20 pf. stamps, and one of these stamps must be dated and affixed to the card every Monday. Some- times the employers buy the cards and stamps, and show them at the Post Office once a month ; sometimes they expect the servant to pay half the money required. Women who go out by the day to different families get their stamps at the house they work in on Mondays. If a girl marries she may cease to insure, and may have a sum of money towards her outfit. In that case she will receive no Old Age Pension. But if she goes on with her insurance she will have from 15 to 20 marks a month from the State after the age of 70. In cases of illness, employers are legally bound to provide for their domestic servants during the term of notice agreed on. At least this is so in Prussia, and the term varies from a fortnight to three months. In some parts of Germany servants are still engaged by the quarter, but in Berlin it has become unusual of late years. The obligation to provide for illness is often a heavy tax on employers, especially in cases when the illness has not been caused by the work or the circum- stances of the situation, but by the servant's own carelessness and folly. Most householders in Berlin subscribe 7.50 a year to an insurance company, a private undertaking that provides medical help, and when necessary sends the invalided servant to a. SERVANTS 1 5 i hospital and maintains her there. It even pays for any special food or wine ordered by its own doctor. One cause of ill health amongst German servants must often be the abominable sleeping accommodation provided for them in old-fashioned houses. It is said that rooms without windows opening to the air are no longer allowed in Germany, and there may be a police regulation against them. Even this cannot have been issued everywhere, for not long ago I had a large well furnished room of this kind offered me in a crowded hotel. It had windows, but they opened on to a narrow corridor. The proprietor was quite surprised when I said I would rather have a room at the top of the house with a window facing the street. I know a young lady acting as Stutze der Hausfrau who slept in a cupboard for years, the only light and air reaching her coming from a slit of glass over the door. I remember the consumptive looking daughter of a prosperous tradesman showing us some rooms her father wished to let, and suggesting that a cupboard off a sitting-room would make a pleasant study. She said she slept in one just like it on a higher floor. Of course she called it a Kammer and not a cupboard, but that did not make it more inviting. Over and over again I have known servants stowed away in holes that seemed fit for brooms and brushes, but not for creatures with lungs and easily poisoned blood. This is one of the facts of German life that makes comparison between England and Germany so difficult and bewildering. Everyone knowing both countries is struck by the amount of State and police surveillance and interference the Germans enjoy compared with us. I do not say " endure," because Germans would not like it. Most of them approve of the rule they are used to, and they 152 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY tell us we live in a horrid go-as-you-please fashion with the worst results. I suppose we do. But I have never known an English servant put to sleep in a cupboard, though I have heard complaints of damp fireless rooms, especially in old historical palaces and houses. And I have never been offered a room in a good English inn that had no windows to the open air. These windowless rooms may be forbidden as bedrooms by the German police, but it would take a bigger earthquake than the empire is likely to sustain to do away with those still in use. CHAPTER XV FOOD A LTHOUGH the Germans as a nation are large JL\. eaters, they begin their day with the usual light continental breakfast of coffee and rolls. In house- holds where economy is practised it is still customary to do without butter, or at any rate to provide it only for the master of the house and for visitors. In addition to rolls and butter, you may, if you are a man or a guest, have two small boiled eggs ; but eggs in a German town are apt to remind you of the Viennese waiter who assured a complaining customer that their eggs were all stamped with the day, month, and year. Home-made plum jam made with very little sugar is often eaten instead of butter by the women of the family ; and the servants, where white rolls are regarded as a luxury, have rye bread. No one need pity them on this account, however, as German rye bread is as good as bread can be. Ordinary London household bread is poor stuff in comparison with it. The white rolls and butter are always excellent too, and I would even say a good word for the coffee. To be sure, Mark Twain makes fun of German coffee in the Tramp Abroad-, says something about one chicory berry being used to a barrel of water; but the poorest German coffee is better than the tepid muddy mixture you get at all English railway stations, 153 154 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY and at most English hotels and private houses. Milk is nearly always poor in Germany, but whipped cream is often added to either coffee or chocolate. The precision that is so striking in the arrangement of German rooms is generally lacking altogether in the serving of meals. The family does not assemble in the morning at a table laid as in England with the same care for breakfast as it will be at night for dinner. It dribbles in as it pleases, arrayed as it pleases, drinks a cup of coffee, eats a roll and departs about its business. Formerly the women of the family always spent the morning in a loose gown, and wore a cap over their undressed hair. This fashion, Germans inform you, is falling into desuetude; but it falls slowly. Take an elderly German lady by surprise in the morning, and you will still find her in what fashion journals call a negligt, and what plain folk call a wrapper. When it is of shepherd's plaid or snuff-coloured wool it is not an attractive garment, and it is always what the last generation but one, with their blunt tongues, called " slummocking." Most German women are busy in the house all the morning, and when they are not going to market they like to get through their work in this form of dress and make themselves trim for the day later. The advantage claimed for the plan is one of economy. The tidy costume worn later in the day is saved considerable wear and tear. The obvious disadvantage is the encouragement it offers to the sloven. In England whatever you are by nature you must in an ordinary household be down to breakfast at a fixed hour, presentably dressed ; at any rate, with your hair done for the day, and, it is to be supposed, with your bath accomplished. Directly you depart from this you open the door to anything in the dressing-gown and FOOD 1 5 5 slipper way, to lying abed like a sluggard, and to a waste of your own and the servants' time that under- mines the whole welfare of a home. At least, this is how the question presents itself to English eyes. Meanwhile the continent continues to drink its' coffee attired in dressing-gowns, and to survive quite comfort- ably. In every trousseau you still see some of these confections, and on the stage the young wife who has to cajole her husband in the coming scene usually appears in a coquettish one. But then it will not be made of shepherd's plaid or snuff-coloured wool. The dinner hour varies so much in Germany that it is impossible to fix an hour for it. In country places you will find everyone sitting down at midday, in towns one o'clock is usual, in Hamburg five is the popular hour, in Berlin you may be invited anywhen. But unless people dine at twelve they have some kind of second breakfast, and this meal may correspond with the French dejeuner, or it may be even more informal than the morning coffee. It consists in many places of a roll or slice of bread with or without a shaving of meat or sausage. Servants have it, children take it to school, charitable institutions supply the bread without the meat to their inmates. In South Germany all the men and many women drink beer or wine with this light meal, but in Prussia most people are content with a belegtes Butterbrod, a roll cut in two, buttered, and spread with meat or sausage or smoked fish. This carries people on till one or two o'clock, when the chief meal of the day is served. All over Germany dinner begins with soup, and in most parts the soup is followed by the Ochsenfleisch that made it. At least Ochsenfleisch should make it by rights. " I know what this is," said an old German friend. 156 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY prodding at a tough slice from a dish we all found uneatable. " This is not Ochsenfleisch at all. This is cow? Good gravy or horseradish sauce is served with it, whether it is ox or cow, and for a time you take a slice day after day without complaining. It is the per- sistence of the thing that wears you out in the end. You must be born to Ochsenfleisch to eat it year in and year out as if it was bread or potatoes. It does not appear as regularly in North as in South Germany ; and in Hamburg you may once in a way have dinner without soup. People who know Germany find this almost beyond belief, but Hamburg has many little ways of its own, and is a city with a strong individual character. It is extremely proud of its cooking and its food, and it has every right to be. I once travelled with two Germans who in a heated way discussed the comparative merits of various German cities. They could not agree, and they could not let the matter drop. At last one man got the best of it. " I tell you that Hamburg is the finest city in Germany," he said. " In a Hamburg hotel I once ate the best steak I ever ate in my life." The other man had nothing to say to that. Hamburg has a splendid fish supply, and Holstein brings her quantities of fruit and of farm produce. Your second breakfast there is like a French dejeuner, a meal served and prepared according to your means, but a regular meal and not a mere snack. You drink coffee after it, and so sustain life till five o'clock, when you dine. Then you drink coffee again, and as your dinner has probably been an uncommonly good one you only need a light supper at nine o'clock, when a tray will arrive with little sandwiches and slender bottles of beer. In North Germany, where wine is scarce and dear, it is hardly ever seen in many house- FOOD 157 holds, so that a young Englishman wanting to describe his German friends, divided them for convenience into wine people and beer people. The wine people were plutocrats, and had red or white Rhine wine every day for dinner. I probably need not tell my well-informed country people that Germans never speak of hock. In households where the chief meal of the day is at one or two o'clock there is afternoon tea or coffee. It used invariably to be coffee, good hot coffee and fresh rusks and dainty little Hornchen and Radankuchen, an excellent light cake baked in a twisty tin. German cakes want a whole chapter to themselves to do them justice, and they should have it if it were not for a dialogue that frequently takes place in a family well known to me. The wife is of German origin, but as she has an English husband and English servants she keeps house in the English way. Therefore mutton cold or hashed is her frequent portion. " How I hate hashed mutton," she sometimes says. " Why do you have it, then ? " says the husband, who has a genius for asking apparently innocent but really provoking questions. " What else can I have ? " says the wife. " Eel in jelly," says the husband. He once tasted it in Berlin, and it must have given him a mental shock ; for whenever his wife approaches him with a domestic difficulty, asks him, for instance, what he would like for breakfast, he suggests this inaccessible and uninviting dish. " There is never anything to eat in England except mutton and apple-tart," says the wife. " Your plain cooks can't cook anything else. They can't cook those really. Think of a German apple-tart " " Why should I ? I don't want one." " That's the hopeless part of it. You are all content 158 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY with what Daudet called your abominable cuisine. \ thank him for the phrase. It is descriptive." " Oh, well," says the husband, " we're not a greedy nation." So if this is the English point of view the less said about cakes the better. And anyhow, it is in this country that afternoon tea .is an engaging meal. Berlin offers you tea nowadays, but it is never good, and instead of freshly cut bread and butter they have horrid little chokey biscuits flavoured with vanilla. Old- fashioned Germans used to put a bit of vanilla in the tea-pot when they had guests they delighted to honour, but they all know better than that nowadays. The milk is often boiled milk, but even that scarcely ex- plains why tea is so seldom fit to drink in Germany. Supper is a light meal in most houses. The English mutton bone is never seen, for when cold meat is eaten it is cut in neat slices and put on a long narrow dish. But there is nearly always something from the nearest Delikatessen shop with it, slices of ham or tongue, or slices of one or two of the various sausages of Germany : Blutwurst, Mettwurst, Schinkenwurst> Leberwurst, all different and all good. When a hot dish is served it is usually a light one, often an omelette or some other preparation of eggs ; and in spring eggs and bits of asparagus are a great deal cooked together in various ways : not asparagus heads so often as short lengths of the stalk sold separately in the market, and quite tender when cooked. There is nearly always a salad with the cold meat or a dish of the salted cucumbers that make such a good pickle. The big loaves of light brown rye bread appear at this meal instead of the little white rolls eaten at breakfast. Beer or wine is drunk, and very often of late years tea as well. Sweets are not usually served at supper, unless guests are present. They are FOOD 159 eaten at the midday dinner, and each part of Germany has its own favourite dishes. Soups are nearly always good in Germany, and some of the best are not known in England. The dried green corn so much used for soup in South Germany can, however, be bought in London from the German provision merchants, so at the end of this greedy chapter I will give a recipe for making it. Nudel- suppe of strong chicken stock and home-made Nudeln used to be what the Berliner called his roast goose " eine jute jabe Jottes" but the degenerate Germans of to-day buy tasteless manufactured Nudeln instead of rolling out their own. Nudeln are the German form of macaroni, but when properly made they are better than any macaroni can be. If you have been brought up in an old-fashioned German manage, and, as a child likes to do, peeped into the kitchen sometimes, you will remember seeing large sheets of something as thin and yellow as chamois leather hung on a clothes horse to dry. Then you knew that there would be Nudeln for your dinner, either narrow ones in soup, or wider ones boiled in water and sprinkled with others cut as fine as vermicelli and fried brown in butter. The paste is troublesome to make. It begins with a deceptive simplicity. Take four whole eggs and four tablespoons- ful of milk if you want enough for ten people, says the cookery book, and make a light dough of it with a knife in a basin. Anyone can do that, you find. But then you must put your dough on the pastry board, and work in more flour as you knead it with your hands. " the longer you knead and the stiffer the dough is the better your Nudeln will be," continues the cookery book. But the next operation is to cut the dough into four, and roll out each portion as thin as paper, and no one who has not seen German Nudeln 160 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY before they are cooked can believe that this is actually done. It is no use to give the rest of the recipe for drying them, rolling each piece loosely and cutting it into strips and boiling them with salt in water. If you told your English cook to make you Nudeln she would despise it for a foreign mess, and bring you something as thick as a pancake. If you want them you had better get them in a box from a provision merchant, as the Hausfrau herself does nowadays. English people often say that there is no good meat to be had in Germany. I would say that there is no good mutton, and a great deal of poor coarse beef. But the Filetbraten that you can get from the best butchers is excellent. It is a long roll of undercut of beef, so long that it seems to be sold by the yard. If you cook it in the English way, says my German cookery book, you rub it well with salt and pepper and baste it with butter ; while the gravy is made with flour, mushrooms, cream, and extract of beef. I should like to see the expression of the English plain cook if she was told to baste her beef with butter and make her gravy for it with mushrooms. I once came back from Germany with a new idea for gravy, and tried it on a cook who seemed to think that gravy was made by upsetting a kettle over a joint and then adding lumps of flour. " My sister's cook always puts an onion in the tin with a joint," I said tentatively, for I was not very hopeful. I know that there is always some in- superable objection to anything not consecrated by tradition. " It gives the gravy a flavour," I went on, " not a strong flavour " I stopped. I waited for the objection. " We couldn't do that HERE," said the cook. " Why not ? We have tins and we have onions." FOOD 161 " It would spoil the dripping. What could I do with dripping as tasted of onion ? " I had never thought of that, and so I had never asked my sister what was done in her household with dripping as tasted with onion. " I should think," I said slowly, " that it could be used to baste the next joint." "Then that would taste of onion," said the cook, " and I should have no dripping when I wanted it." I have always thought dripping a dull subject, and I know that it is an explosive one, so I said nothing more. I went on instead to describe a piece of beef stewed in its own juices on a bed of chopped vegetables. We actually tried that, and when it was cold it tasted agreeably of the vegetables, and was as tender to carve as butter. " How did you like the German beef?" I said to an Englishwoman who had been with me a great many years. " I didn't like it at all, M'm." " But it was so tender." " Yes, M'm, it made me creep," she said. So this chapter is really of no use from one point of view. You may hear what queer things benighted people like the Germans eat and drink, but you will never persuade your British household to condescend to them. Except in the coast towns, sea fish is scarce and dear all over Germany. Salt fish and fresh-water fish are what you get, and except the trout it is not interesting. A great deal of carp is eaten, cooked with vinegar to turn it blue, and served with horseradish or wine sauce. At a dinner party I have seen tench given, and they were extremely pretty, like fish in old Italian pictures, but they were not worth eating. At least a pound of fresh butter was put on each dish of them, ii 1 62 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY handed round, and you took some of it as well as a sort of mustard sauce. Perch, pike, and eel are all eaten where nothing better is to be had ; but the standing fish-course of inland Germany is trout. Most hotels have a tank where they keep it alive till it is wanted, and in the Black Forest the peasants catch it and peddle it, walking miles to make good sales. We went into the garden of our hotel in the Wiesenthal one day, and found the basin of the fountain there crammed with live trout. It was so full that you could take one in your hand for a moment and look at its speckles, as lovely as the speckles on a thrush's breast. The man who was carrying them on his back in a wooden water- tight satchel was having a drink, and he had put out his fish for a drink while he rested. I have never been within reach of fresh herrings in Germany, and have never seen them there, but smoked ones are eaten everywhere, often with salad, or together with smoked ham and potatoes in their jackets. Neither the ham nor the herrings are ever cooked when they have been smoked, and the ham is very tough in consequence. The breast of a goose, too, is eaten smoked but not cooked, and is considered a great delicacy. Poultry varies in quality a good deal. Everyone knows the little chickens that come round at hotel dinners, all legs and bones. A German family will sit down contentedly to an old hen that the most economical of us would only use for soup, and they will serve it roasted though it is as tough as leather. I think it must be said that you get better fowls both in France and England than in Germany. The German national bird is the goose. In England, if you buy a goose your cook roasts it and sends it up, and that is all you ever know of it. In Germany a goose is a carnival, rather as a newly killed pig is in an English farmhouse. FOOD 163 You begin with a stew of the giblets, you perhaps continue with the bird itself roasted and stuffed with chestnuts, you may have a dozen different dishes made of its remains, while the fat that has basted it you hoard and use sparingly for weeks. For instance, you cook a cabbage with a little of it instead of with water. In South Germany, goose livers are prepared with it, and are just as much liked as pate de foie gras. Hares are eaten and most carefully prepared in Germany. They are skinned in a way that an English poulterer has been known to learn from his German customers and pronounce very troublesome, and the back is usually served separately, larded and basted with sour cream. Vegetables are cooked less simply than in England, and you will find the two countries disagree heatedly about them. The Englishman does not want his peas messed up with grease and vinegar, and though he will be too polite to say so, he will silently agree with his plain cook who says that peas served in the pod is a dish only fit for pigs and what she has never been accustomed to ; while the German will get quite dejected over the everlasting plain boiled cabbage and potatoes he is offered week after week in his English boarding-house. At home, he says, he is used to mountains of fat asparagus all the spring, and he thinks slightly of your skinny green ones or of the wooden stuff you import and pay less for because it is " foreign." He likes potatoes cooked in twenty various ways, and when mashed he is of opinion that they should not be black or lumpy. He wants a dozen different vegetables dished up round one joint of beef, and in summer salads of various kinds on various occasions, and not your savage mixed salad with a horrible sauce poured out of a bottle ; furniture polish he believes it to be from its colour. In the autumn he 1 64 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY expects chestnuts cooked with gravy and vegetables, or made into light puddings ; and apple sauce, he assures you, should be a creamy white, and as smooth as a well made pur