just in time to remove the dust of the road, and then walk, as we found our hosts expected us to do, in the wedding procession. First came the bride and bridegroom, and then a long crocodile of bridesmaids, all wearing the curious high bead wreaths possessed by every village girl of standing in this part of Germany. We witnessed the civil ceremony, but though I have been present at several German civil weddings I remember as little about them as about a visit to the English District Council Office where I have sometimes been to pay taxes. In both cases there is a bare room, an indifferent official, some production of official papers, and the thing is done. When the bride and bridegroom had been made legally man and wife they headed the waiting procession again, and proceeded to the church for the real, the religious ceremony. It was packed with people, and the service, which was Catholic, lasted a long time. When it was over everyone streamed back to the hotel, and as soon as possible the _Hochzeitsmahl_ began; but though we were politely bidden to it we politely excused ourselves, for we knew that the feast would last for hours and would be more than we could bear. Till evening, they said, it would last, and there would be many speeches, and it was a broiling summer day. The guests we perceived to be a mixed company of peasants in costume, of inn-keepers and their families in ordinary clothes, and of university students in black coats who were removed from the peasantry by their education, but not by birth and affection. The invited guests sat down to dinner in the _Speisesaal_, but the hotel garden was crowded with country people who paid for what they consumed. The dinner served to us and to others out here was an unusually good one, so we discovered that people who attend a wedding unasked get a spectacle, a dance, and extra fine food for their money.
Towards the end of the afternoon before we left R. we looked in at the ballroom, where dancing had begun already.
At another peasant"s wedding in the Black Forest we saw some quaint customs observed that were omitted at R. In this case the bride and bridegroom were themselves peasants, and wore the costume of their valley. The bride was said to be well endowed, but she was extremely plain. Amongst German peasants, however, beauty hardly counts. What a woman is worth to a man, he reckons partly in hard cash and partly in the work she can do. There were two charmingly pretty girls in the Bavarian village where we once spent a summer, but we were told that they had not the faintest chance of marriage, because, though they belonged to a respectable family, they were orphans and dowerless.
Auerbach"s enchanting story of _Barfussele_, in which the village Cinderella marries the rich peasant, is a fairy story and not a picture of real life. The feast at this second wedding we saw must have cost a good deal, for it was prepared at our hotel for a large crowd of guests and lasted for hours. It was an agitating wedding in some of its aspects. The day before we had been startled at irregular but frequent intervals by loud gunshots, and we were told that these were fired in welcome of the wedding guests as they arrived. When the bride appeared with her _Brautwagen_ and an escort of young men there was a volley in her honour. We did not go to church to see that wedding, as we were not attracted by the bridal pair; but we watched the crowd from our windows, and as it was a wet day, endured the sounds of revelry that lasted for hours after the feast began. There was no dancing at this marriage, and as each batch of guests departed a bra.s.s band just outside our rooms played them a send-off. It was a jerky irritating performance, because the instant the object of their attentions disappeared round the turn of the hill they stopped short, and only began a new tune when there was a new departure. We were rather glad when the day came to an end. In the Black Forest you always know where there is a wedding, because two small fir trees are brought from the forest decked with flying coloured streamers of paper or ribbon, and set on either side of the bride"s front door.
The German peasant loves his pipe and his beer, and on a Sunday afternoon his game of _Kegel_; but on high days and holidays he likes to be dancing. He and she will trudge for miles to dance at some distant village inn. You meet them dressed in their best clothes, walking barefoot and carrying clean boots and stockings. How they can dance in tight boots after a long hot walk on a dusty road, you must be a German peasant yourself to understand. The dance I remember best took place in a barn belonging to a village inn in Bavaria. I went with several English friends to look on at it, and the men of our party danced with some of the village girls. The room was only lighted by a few candles, and it was so crowded that while everyone was dancing everyone was hustled. But we were told that anyone who chose could "buy the floor" for a time by giving sixpence or a shilling to the band. Two of the Englishmen did this, and the crowd looked on in solemn approval while they waltzed once or twice round with the pretty granddaughters of our hosts. It was a scene I have often wished I could paint, the crowd was so dense, and the faces, from our point of view, so foreign. The candles only lifted the semi-darkness here and there, but where their light fell it flashed on the bright-coloured handkerchiefs which the women of this village twisted round their heads like turbans, and pinned across their bosoms. I think it is absurd, though, to say that German peasants dance well. They enjoy the exercise immensely, but are heavy and loutish in their movements, and they flounder about in a grotesque way with their hands on each other"s shoulders. At a _Kirchweih_ they dance in the open air.
A _Kirchweih_ is a feast to celebrate the foundations of the village church, and it takes the form of a fair. The preparations begin the day before, when the roundabouts and shooting booths are put up in the appointed field. On the day before the _Kirchweih_ in our Bavarian village I found the inn-keeper"s wife cooking what we call Berlin pancakes in a cauldron of boiling fat, the like of which I have never seen before or since for size. It must have held gallons. All day long she stood there throwing in the cinnamon flavoured batter, and taking out the little crisp brown b.a.l.l.s. They are, it seems, a favourite dainty at a Bavarian _Kirchweih_, and must be provided in large quant.i.ties. On the fair field itself the food offered by the stall-keepers seemed to be chiefly enormous slabs of shiny gingerbread made in fanciful shapes, such as hearts, lyres, and garlands, cheap sweetmeats, and the small boiled sausages the artless German eats in public without a knife and fork.
The _Kirchweih_ is the chief event of the summer in a German village, and is talked of for weeks beforehand. The peasants stream in from all the villages near, and join in the dancing and the shooting matches.
When the day is fine and the fair field has a background of wooded hills, you see where the librettists of pre-Wagnerian days went for their stage effects. All the characters of many a German opera are there correctly dressed, joining in the songs and dances, shooting for wagers, making love, sometimes coming to blows. But you may look on at a _Kirchweih_ from morning till night without seeing either horseplay or drunkenness. Not that the German peasant is an opera hero in his inner life. He is a hard-working man, G.o.d-fearing on the whole, stupid and stolid often, narrowly shrewd often, having his eye on the main chance. When he is stupid but not G.o.d-fearing he dresses himself and his wife in their best clothes, puts his insurance papers in his pockets, sets his thatched house on fire, and goes for a walk. Then he is surprised that he is caught and punished. Fires are frequent in German villages, and in a high wind and where the roofs are of straw destruction is complete sometimes. You often come across the blackened remains of houses, and you always feel anxious about the new buildings that will replace them. It is a good deal to say, but I believe our own jerry-builders are outdone in florid vulgarity by German villadom, and the German atrocities will last longer than ours, because the building laws are more stringent. But the old _Bauernhaus_ still to be seen in most parts of the Black Forest is dignified and beautiful. The Swiss chalet is a poor gim-crack thing in comparison.
Sometimes the German house has a shingled roof, and sometimes a thatched roof dark with age, and it has drooping eaves and an outside staircase and balcony of wood. It shelters the farm cattle in the stables on the ground floor, and the family on the upper floor, and in the roof there are granaries. But the beautiful old thatched roofs are gradually giving place to the slate ones, because they burn so easily, and fire, when it comes, is the village tragedy. I can remember when a fire in a big German commercial town was proclaimed by a beating drum, the noisy parade of fire-men, the clanging of bells, and all the hullaballoo that panic and curiosity could make. But last year, in Berlin, looking at houses like the tower of Babel, I said something of fire, and was told that no one felt nervous nowadays, the arrangements for dealing with it were so complete.
"People just look out of the window, see that there is a fire next door, or above or beneath them, and go about their business," said my hosts. "They know that the fire brigade will do their business and put it out."
I did not see a fire in Berlin, so I had no opportunity of witnessing the remarkable coolness of the Berliner in circ.u.mstances the ordinary man finds trying; but I saw a fire in my Bavarian village, and there were not many cool people there. The summons came in the middle of the night with the hoa.r.s.e insistent clanging of the church bell, the sudden start into life of the sleeping village, the sounds in the house and in the street of people astir and terrified. Then there came the brilliant reflection of the flames in the opposite windows, and the roar and crackle of fire no one at first knew where. It was only a barn after all, a barn luckily detached from other buildings. Yet when we got into the street we found most of the population removing its treasures, as if danger was imminent. All the beds and chairs and pots and pans of the place seemed to be on the cobble-stones, and the women wailed and the children wept. "But the village is not on fire," we said. "It may be at any moment," they a.s.sured us, and were scandalised by our cold-bloodedness. For we had not carted our trunks into the street, but hastened towards the burning barn to see if we could help the men and boys carrying water. The weather was still and the barn isolated, so we knew there was no danger of the fire spreading. But the villagers were too excitable and too panic-stricken to be convinced of this. All their lives they had dreaded fire, and when the flames broke out so near them they thought that their houses were doomed.
Next to fire the German peasant hates beggars and gipsies. We were six months in the Black Forest and only met one beggar the whole time, and he was a decent-looking old man who seemed to ask alms unwillingly.
But in some parts of Germany there are a great many most unpleasant-looking tramps. The village council puts up a notice that forbids begging, and has a general fund from which it sends tramps on their way. But it does not seem able to deal with the caravans of gipsies that come from Hungary and Bohemia. In a Thuringian village we came down one morning to find our inn locked and barricaded as if a riot was expected, and an attack. Even the shutters were drawn and bolted. "_Was ist denn los?_" we asked in amazement, and were told that the gipsies were coming.
"But will they do you any harm?" we asked.
"They will steal all they can lay hands on," our landlady a.s.sured us.
She was a widow, and her brewer, the only man in her employ, was, we supposed, standing guard over his own house. We thought the panic seemed extreme, but we had never encountered Hungarian gipsies on the warpath, and we did not know how many were coming. So, after a.s.suring our excited little Frau that we would stand by her as well as we could, we went to an upper window to watch for the enemy. Presently the procession began, a straggling procession of the dirtiest, meanest-looking ruffians ever seen. There was waggon after waggon, swarming with ragam.u.f.fins of both s.e.xes and all ages. The men were mostly on foot, casting furtive glances to right and left, evident snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, truculent, ragged, wearing evil-looking knives by their sides. During their transit the village had shut itself up, as Coventry did for G.o.diva"s ride. When we all ventured forth again the talk was of missing poultry and rifled fruit trees. The geese had luckily started for their day on the high pastures before the bad folk came; for in a German village there is always a gooseherd. Sometimes it is a little boy or girl, sometimes an old woman, and early in the morning whoever has the post collects the whole flock, drives it to a chosen feeding ground, spends the day there, and brings it back at night. It must be a contemplative life, and in dry weather pleasant. I think it would suit a philosopher if he could choose his days. In our Franconian village the gooseherd was a little boy, vastly proud of his job. Every morning, long before we were up, he would stride past our windows piping the same tune, and at the sound of it every goose in the village would waddle out from her night quarters and join the cackling fussy crowd at his heels. Every evening as dusk fell he came back again, still piping the same tune, and then the geese would detach themselves in little groups from the main body and find their own homes as surely as cows do.
Every rural district of Germany has its own novelist. Fritz Reuter, Frenssen, Rosegger, Sudermann all write of country life in the places they know best. In Hauptmann"s beautiful plays you see the peasant through a veil of poetry and mysticism. Auerbach, I am told, is out of fashion. His stories end well mostly, his construction one must admit is childish, and his characters change their natures with the suddenness of a thunderbolt to suit his plot. Yet when I have _Sehnsucht_ for Germany, and cannot go there in reality, I love to go in fancy where Auerbach leads. He takes you to a house in the Black Forest, and you sit at breakfast with the family eating _Haferbrei_ out of one bowl. You know the people gathered there as well as if you had been with them all the summer, and you know them now in winter time when the roads are deep in snow and a wolf is abroad in the forest. The story I am thinking of was published in 1860, and I believe that there are no wolves now in the Black Forest. But as far as one outside peasant life can judge, I doubt whether anything else has changed much. You hear the history of the _Grossbauer_, the rich farmer of the district whose breed is as strong and daring as the breed of the Volsungs. Seven years ago the only son and heir of this forest magnate, Adam Rottman, loved a poor girl called Martina, and their child Joseph is now six years old. Adam is still faithful to Martina, but his parents will not consent to their marriage, and insists on betrothing him to an heiress as rich as he will be, Heidenmuller"s Toni. The whole village looks on at the romance and sides with Martina; for Adam"s mother, _die wilde Rottmannin_, is one of those stormy viragoes I myself have met amongst German women. She masters her husband and son with her temper. She is so rich that she has more _Schmalz_ than she can use, and so mean that she would rather let it go bad than give it to the poor. At midnight, when the roads are deep in snow, she sends for the _Pfarrer_, and when he risks his life and goes because he thinks she is dying, he finds she is merely bored and wanted his company; for she has been used to think that she could tyrannise over all men because she was richer and more determined than most. Next day she gets up, orders her husband and son to put on Sunday clothes, and well wrapped up in _Betten_ drives with them to the _Heidenmuhle_, where Adam is formally betrothed to Toni.
The girl knows all about Martina, but she consents because she would marry anyone to escape from her stepmother, who treats her cruelly, and in order to hurt her feelings has given her mother"s cup to the _Knecht_. After the betrothal the two fathers sit together and drink hot spiced wine, the two mothers gossip together, and the _Brautpaar_ talk sadly about Martina, who should be Adam"s wife, and Joseph who is his child. At last Adam could bear it no longer. He would go straight to Martina, he said, and he would be with Toni again before the Christmas tree was lighted; and then he would either break with Toni or feel free to marry her. "The bride stared at Adam with amazement as he put on his grey cloak and his fur cap and seized his pointed stick.
He looked both handsome and terrible." For he is one of the heroes Germans love, a giant who once held a bull by its horns while Martina escaped from it, who is called the _Gaul_, because for a wager he once carried the cart and the load a cart horse should have carried, and who on this wild winter night meets the wolf in the forest and kills it with his stick. So you see him striding through the snow-bound forest to the village where Martina lives, dragging the wolf after him, as strong as Siegfried, as credulous as a child, ready to believe that the voices of his father and his child both looking for him in the snow are witches" voices. But when he gets to the village he finds that his child, so long disowned and disregarded, is really lost, and is looking for him in the snow. The hatter who tramps from village to village hung with hats met him, and tried to turn him back. But the child said he had come out to find his father, and must go on. Then every man in the village a.s.sembles at the _Pfarrhaus_, and, led by the _Pfarrer"s_ brother-in-law (an eventual husband for Heidenmuller"s Toni), sets out to find Joseph in the snow. Before they start Adam vows before the whole community that whether the child is alive or dead nothing shall ever part him again from Martina, and when he has made this vow you see the whole company depart in various directions carrying torches, ladders, axes, and long ropes. Meanwhile the child, after some alarms and excursions, meets three angels (children masquerading), who take him with them to the mill where Toni has just lighted the Christmas tree. She rescues Joseph from _die wilde Rottmannin_, and that same night, her father dying of his carouse, she becomes a rich heiress and free of her wicked stepmother. Joseph"s hostile grandfathers, after a fight in the snow, make friends, the obliging _Pfarrer_ marries Adam and Martina at midnight, and soon after the _wilde Rottmannin_ who will not be reconciled leaves this world. So everyone who deserves happiness gets it. But though you only half believe in the story you have been in the very heart of the Black Forest, the companion of its people, the observer of their most intimate talk and ways. You have heard the women gossip at the well, you have made friends with Leegart the seamstress, who believes that quite against her will she is gifted with supernatural powers. There is Haspele, too, who made Joseph his new boots, and would marry Martina if he could; and there is David, the father of Martina, who was hardly kept from murdering his daughter when she came home in disgrace, and whose grandson becomes the apple of his eye. The whole picture of these people is vivid and enchanting, touched with quaint detail, veined with the tragedy of their lives, glowing with the warm human qualities that knit them to each other. The South German loves to tell you that his country is _ein gesegnetes Land_, a blessed country, flowing with milk and honey; and whether you are reading Auerbach"s peasant stories or actually staying amongst his peasant folk, you get this impression of their natural surroundings. Nature is kind here, grows forest for her people on the hill-tops, and wine, fruit and corn in her sheltered valleys, ripens their fruit in summer, gives them heavy crops of hay, and sends soft warm rain as well as sun to enrich their pastures.
In the eastern provinces of Germany the conditions of life amongst the poor are most unhappy. Here the land belongs to large proprietors, and until modern times the people born on the land belonged to the landlords too. No man could leave the village where he was born without permission, and he had to work for his masters without pay.
Even in the memory of living men the whip was quite commonly used. In her most interesting account of a Silesian village,[3] Gertrud Dyhrenfurth says that the present condition of the peasantry in this region compares favourably with former times, but she admits that they are still miserably overworked and underpaid. They are no longer legally obliged to submit to corporal punishment, nor can they be forced to live where they were born, and as they emigrate in large numbers, scarcity of labour has brought about slightly improved conditions for those remaining. But a man"s wage is still a mark a day in summer and 90 pf. in winter. A woman earns 60 pf. in summer and 50 pf. in winter. Besides receiving these wages, a family regularly employed lives rent free and gets a fixed amount of coal, and at harvest time some corn and brandy. You cannot say the family has a house or cottage to itself, because the system is to build long bare-looking barracks in which numbers of working families herd like rabbits in a warren. In modern times each family has a kitchen to itself, so there is one warm room where the small children can be kept alive. In former times there was a general kitchen, and in the rooms appointed to each family no heating apparatus; therefore, if the children were not to die of cold, they had to be carried every morning to the kitchen, where there was a fire. The present plan has grave disadvantages, as in one room the whole family has to sleep, eat, wash, and cook for themselves and for the animals in their care. The furniture consists of two or three bedsteads with straw mattresses and feather plumeaux, shelves for pots and pans, a china cupboard with gla.s.s doors, a table in the window, and wooden benches with backs.
This installation is quite luxurious compared with that of a milkmaid"s or a stablemaid"s surroundings sixty or seventy years ago.
"Her home consisted of a plank slung from the stable roof and furnished with a sack of straw and a plumeau. Her small belongings were in a little trunk in a wooden niche, her clothes in a chest that stood in the garret." Here is the life history of an unmarried working woman of eighty-six born in a Silesian village. When she left school she was apprenticed to a thrasher, with a yearly wage of four thalers, besides two chemises and two ap.r.o.ns as a Christmas present. Even in those days this money did not suffice for clothing, although even in winter the women wore no warm under-garments. Quite unprotected, they waded up to the middle in snow.... In summer the girl was in the barn and at work by dawn; in winter they threshed by artificial light. A bit of bread taken in the pocket served as breakfast. The first warm meal was taken at midday. When the farm work was finished there was spinning to do till 10 o"clock.
This woman "bettered herself" as she grew older till she was earning 35 thalers (5, 5s. 0d.) a year; she accustomed herself to live on this sum, and when wages increased, to put by the surplus. So in her old age she is a capitalist, has saved enough for a decent funeral, for certain small legacies, and for such an amazing luxury as a tin foot-warmer. The family she faithfully served for so many years allows her coal, milk and potatoes, and when necessary pays for doctor and medicine. Her weekly budget is as follows--
Pf.
Rent 50 Bread 25 Rolls 5 __ Carried forward 80
Pf.
Brought forward 80 lb. b.u.t.ter 25 lb. coffee and chicory 25 Sugar 15 1 lb. flour 14 Salt 1 Light 10 Washing 5 ------ 1m. 75 ======
Meat is of course out of the question, and in discussing another budget Fraulein Dyhrenfurth shows that a family of eight people could only afford three quarters of a pound a week. Their yearly expenses amounted to 455 m. 26 pf., so each one of the eight had to be fed and clothed for about 1s. 1d. a week. Women are still terribly overworked in the fields. They used to begin at four o"clock in the morning, and go on till nine at night,--a working day, that is, of seventeen hours for a wife and the mother of a family. When the family at the mansion had the great half-yearly wash, the village women called in to help began at midnight, and stood at the washtub till eight o"clock next evening, twenty hours, that is, on end. In 1880 the working day was shortened, and only lasts now from five in the morning till seven at night, with a two hours" pause for dinner and shorter pauses for breakfast and vesper. But, on the other hand, women do work now that only men did in former times. The threshing of corn has fallen entirely into their hands, and they follow a plough yoked with oxen.
Both kinds of work are heavy and unpleasant. But women are glad to get the threshing in winter time when other work fails, and it is often on this account that the proprietors do not introduce threshing machines.
At certain times of the year Poles swarm over the frontier into the eastern provinces of Germany, but Fraulein Dyhrenfurth says that they do not work for lower wages. The women have no house-keeping to do, and can therefore give more hours to field labour. One woman prepares a meal for a whole gang of her country people, and they live almost entirely on bread, potatoes, and brandy. They do not mix with the Germans, but spend their evenings and Sundays in playing the harmonium, dancing, and drinking. They return every year, are always foreigners in Germany, and are very industrious, religious, contented, and cheerful, but inclined to drink and fight.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] _Ein schlesisches Dorf und Rittergut_, von Gertrud Dyhrenfurth.
Leipzig, Duncker und Humblot.
CHAPTER XXV
HOW THE POOR LIVE
Poverty in German cities puts on a more respectable face than it does in London or Manchester. It herds in the cellars and courtyards of houses that have an imposing frontage; and when it walks out of doors it does not walk in rags. But you only have to look at the pinched faces of the children in the poorer quarters of any city to know that it is there. They are tidier and cleaner than English slum children, but they make you wish just as ardently that you were the Pied Piper and could pipe them all with you to a land of plenty. It would require more experience and wider facts than I possess to compare the condition of the poor in England and Germany, especially as the professed economists and philanthropists who make it their business to understand such things disagree with each other about every detail. If you talk to Englishmen, one will tell you that the German starves on rye bread and horse sausage because he is oppressed by an iniquitous tariff; and the next will a.s.sure you that the German flourishes and fattens on the high wages and prosperous trade he owes entirely to his admirable protective laws. If you talk to the Anglophobe, he will tell you that the dirt, drunkenness, disease, and extravagance of the English lower cla.s.ses are the sin and scandal of the civilised world; that it is useless for you to ask where the poor live in Berlin, because there are no poor. Everyone in Germany is clean, virtuous, well housed, and well-to-do. If you talk to an honest, reasonable German, he will recognise that each country has its own difficulties and its own shortcomings, and that both countries make valiant efforts to fight their own dragons. He will tell you of the suffering that exists amongst the German poor crowded into these houses with the imposing fronts, and of all that statecraft and philanthropy are patiently trying to accomplish. Doctor Shadwell, in his most valuable and interesting book _Industrial Efficiency_, says that the American has to pay twice as much rent as the English working man, and that rents in Germany are nearer the American than the English level. As wages are lower in Germany than in England, and as meat and groceries are decidedly dearer, it is plain that the working man cannot live in clover. Doctor Shadwell gives an example of a smith earning 1050 marks, and having to pay 280 for rent. He had a wife and two children, and Doctor Shadwell reckoned that the family to make two ends meet must live on 37 pf. per head per day; the prison scale per head being 80 pf. I know a respectable German charwoman who earns 41 marks a month, and pays 25 marks a month for her parterre flat in the _Hof_.
She lets off all her rooms except the kitchen, and she sleeps in a place that is only fit for a coal-hole. A work-girl pays her 6 marks a month for a clean tidy bedroom furnished with a solid wooden bedstead, a chest of drawers, a sofa, and a table. This girl works from 7.30 to 6 in a shop, she pays the charwoman 10 pf. for her breakfast, 10 pf.
weekly for her lamp, and another 10 pf. for the use and comfort of the kitchen fire at night. Her dinner of soup, meat, and vegetables the girl gets at a _Privatkuche_ for 40 pf. So the workgirl"s weekly expenses for food, fire, and lodging are 5 marks 20 pf., but this does not give her an evening meal or afternoon coffee. The charwoman reckoned that she herself only had 15 marks a month for food, fire, light, and clothes; but she got nearly all her food with the families for whom she worked. She was a cheerful, honest body, and though she slept in a coal-hole was apparently quite healthy. She looked forward to her old age with tranquillity, because before long she would be in receipt of a pension from the State, a weekly sum that with her habits of thrift and industry would enable her to live.
A German lady who chooses to teach in a _Volksschule_, because she thinks the _Volk_ more interesting than Higher Daughters, described a home to me from which one of her pupils came. The parents had eight children, and the family of ten lived in two rooms. That is a state of things we can match in England, unhappily. But my friend described this home, not on account of its misery, but for the extraordinary neatness and comfort the mother maintained in it. "Every time I go there," said my friend, who lived with her father and sister in a charming flat,--"every time I go there I say to the woman, if only it looked like this in my home"; and there was no need for me to see the rooms to understand what she meant; for I know the air of order and even of solidity with which the poorest Germans will surround themselves if they are respectable. They have very few pieces of furniture, but those few will stand wear and tear; they prefer a clean painted floor to a filthy carpet, and they are so poor that they have no pence to spend on plush photograph frames. I cannot remember what weekly wage this family existed on, but I know that it seemed quite inadequate, and when I asked if the children were healthy as well as clean and tidy, my friend admitted that they were not. In spite of the brave struggle made by the parents, it was impossible to bring up a large family on such means, and the maladies arising from insufficient food, fire, and clothing afflicted them. The case is, I think, a typical one. English people are always impressed when they visit German cities by the tidy clothes poor people wear, and if they are shown the right interiors, by their clean tidy homes. But you need most carefully and widely collected facts and figures to judge how far the children of a nation are suffering from poverty. It was found, for instance, in one German city, that out of 1472 children examined in the elementary schools, 63 per cent. of the girls and 60 per cent. of the boys were _nicht vollig normal_.
Moreover, there are whole cla.s.ses of poor people in Germany whose homes are not tidy and comfortable, who are crowded into cellars and courtyards, and who have neither time nor strength for the decencies of life. The "Sweater" flourishes in Berlin as well as in London, and his victims are as overworked as they are here. He is usually a Jew, it is said in Berlin, but I will not guarantee the truth of that, for I have not observed that the Jew is anywhere a harder task-master than the Christian. As Berlin grew, these spiders of society increased in numbers, finding it easy and profitable to employ home workers and spare themselves the expenses of factories and of insurance. Women who could not go out to work were tempted by the chance offered them of earning a trifle at home, and woman-like never paused to reckon whether it was worth earning. As the city gets larger every evil connected with the system increases. The worst paid are naturally the incompetent rough peasant women who swarm into Berlin from the country districts, because they think that it will be easier to sit at a machine than to labour in the fields. These people have to buy their machines and their cotton at high prices from their employers, and then they get 10 pf. for making a blouse. A lady who spends her life in working amongst poor people told me that many of them worked for nothing in reality, because the trifle they earned only just paid the difference between the food they had to buy ready cooked and the food they might with more leisure prepare at home. They pay high rents for wretched homes, 15, for instance, for a kitchen and one room in a dark courtyard. Under 13 it is impossible to get anything in the poorest quarter of Berlin.
"The house itself looked respectable enough from outside," says Frau Buchholz, when she went to see a girl who had just married a poor man; "but oh! those steep narrow stairs that I had to mount, those wretched entrances on each floor, the miserable door handles, the sickly bluish-grey walls, the shaky banisters! It was easy to see that the outside had been devised with a view to investors, and the inside for poverty." In houses of this cla.s.s there are often three courtyards, one behind each other, all noisy and badly kept. The conditions of life in such circ.u.mstances are no better than in our own notorious slums, but a slum seven storeys high, and presenting a decent front to the world, does not suggest the real misery behind its regular row of windows, nor does the quiet well-swept street give any picture of the rabbit warren in the courtyards at the back. In the enormous "confection" trade of Berlin the home-workers are nearly all widows and mothers of families, as the unmarried girls prefer to go to factories. A skilled hand can earn a fair wage at certain seasons of the year, as the demand for skilled work in this department always exceeds the supply. But the average wage of the unskilled worker is only 10 marks a week, while it sinks as low as 4 marks for petticoats, ap.r.o.ns, and woollen goods. A corset maker, who has learned her trade, can only make from 8 to 10 marks a week in a factory, while a woman who sits at home and covers umbrellas gets 1 mark 50 pf. _a dozen_ when the coverings are of stuff, and slightly more when they are of silk. The extreme poverty of these home-workers is a constant subject of inquiry and legislation, but for various reasons it is most difficult to combat. The market is always over-crowded, because, badly paid as it is, the work is popular. Women push into it from the middle cla.s.ses for the sake of pocket-money, and from the agrarian cla.s.ses because they fancy a city life. Efforts are being made to organise them, and especially to train the daughters of these women to more healthy and profitable trades. I went over a small _Volkskuche_ in Berlin, and was told that there were many like it established by various charitable agencies, and that the effect of them was to make the children ready to go into service; a life that has some drawbacks, but should at any rate be wholesome and civilising,--a better preparation for marriage, too, than to sit like a slattern over a machine all day, and buy sc.r.a.ps of expensive ready-made food, because both time and skill are wanting for anything more palatable. In the kitchen I visited there were sixteen children from the poorest families in the neighbourhood, and, a.s.sisted by a superintendent and two teachers, they were preparing a dinner that cost 30 pf. a head for 250 people. The rooms were clean and plainly furnished. A small laundry business was run in connection with the kitchen, so that the girls should be thoroughly trained to wash and iron as well as to cook. Of late years the working cla.s.ses of Berlin have adopted what they call _Englische Tischzeit_, and no one who knows the ways of the English artisan will guess that the German means _late dinner_. He now does his long day"s work, I am told, on bread alone, and has the one solid meal in the twenty-four hours when he gets home at night. _Durch Arbeiten_, he calls it, and people interested in the welfare of the poor say it is bad for all concerned, but especially bad for the children, who come in too exhausted to eat, and for the women, who have to cook and clean up when the day"s business should be nearly done. It is quite characteristic of some kinds of modern Germans that they should in a breath condemn us, imitate us, and completely misunderstand our ways.
The business women of Germany have organised themselves. _Der Kaufmannische Verband fur Weibliche Angestellte_ was founded by Herr Julius Meyer in 1889, and, beginning with 50 members, numbered 17,000 in 1904. Its aim has been to improve the conditions of life for women working in shops and businesses, to carry on their education, and to help them when ill or out of work. It began by opening commercial schools for women, where they could receive a thorough training in book-keeping, shorthand, typewriting, and other branches of office work. These have been a great success, have been imitated all over Germany, and have led to an expansion of the law enforcing on girls attendance at the State continuation schools. The society was founded to remedy some crying abuses amongst women employed in shops and offices, a working day of seventeen hours, for instance, dismissal without notice, no rest on Sundays, no summer holiday, and not only a want of seats but an actual prohibition to sit down even when unemployed. All these matters the society, which has become a powerful one, has gradually set right. A ten-hours" day for grown-up women, and eight hours for those under age, the provision of seats, an 8 o"clock closing rule, a month"s notice on either side, some hours of rest on Sunday, and a summer holiday are all secured to members of the organisation. The system of "living in" does not obtain in Germany.
Shops may only open for five hours on Sundays now, and large numbers do not open at all. They may only keep open after ten on twenty days in the year. Other reforms the society hopes to bring about in time; and meanwhile it occupies itself both in finding work for members who are out of place, and in protecting those who are sick and dest.i.tute.
The ladies of Germany have taken to philanthropic work with characteristic energy and thoroughness. There is one society in Berlin that has 700 members, some of whom devote their whole time to their poor neighbours. I am not going to give the name of the society; so I may describe one of its secretaries, who personified the best modern type of German woman. She was about 27, a dark-haired, slim, serious-looking person with delicate Jewish features and beautiful grey eyes; a girl belonging to the wealthy cla.s.ses, and able if she had chosen to lead a life of frivolity and pleasure. But she had chosen instead to give herself to the sick, the afflicted, the needy, and even to the sinning; for she was a moving spirit of the organisation that dives down into the depths of the great city, and rescues those who have gone under. Her society also does a great deal for the children of the very poor, not only for babies in creches, but for those who go to school. The members help these older ones with their school work, and when the children are free teach them to wash, cook, and sew, and to play open-air games. They teach the blind, they look after the deserted families of men in prison, and the older members act as guardians to illegitimate children; for in Germany every illegitimate child must have a guardian, and women are now allowed to act in this capacity. The secretary said they found no difficulty in getting both married and single women to take up these good works.
"What do the parents say when their daughters take it up?" I asked, for I could not picture the German girl as I had always known her going out into the highways and byways of the city, leaving her cooking, her music, her embroidery, and her sentiment, and battling with the hideous realities of life amongst the sick, the poor, and the more or less wicked of the earth.
"The parents don"t like it," my girl with the honest eyes admitted.
"When girls have worked for us some time they often refuse to marry; at least, they refuse the arranged marriages proposed to them. But we cannot stop on that account. If a girl does not wish to marry in this way it is better that she should not. No good can come of it."
Then she went on to tell me how well it was that a child born to utmost shame and poverty should have a woman of the better cla.s.ses interested from the beginning in its welfare, and responsible for its decent upbringing. It implied contact with various officials, of course, but she said that the ladies who took this work in hand met with courtesy and support everywhere.
You have only to place this type of young woman beside the _Backfisch_, who represents an older type quite fairly, to understand how far the modern German girl has travelled from the traditional lines. If you can imagine the _Backfisch_ married and mentally little altered in her middle age, you can also imagine that she would find a daughter with the new ideas upsetting. At present both types are living side by side, for there are still numbers of women of the old school in Germany, women who pa.s.sively accept the life made for them by their surroundings, whether it suits their needs or not; and who would never strike out a path for themselves, even if by doing so they could forget their own troubles in the troubles of others.
The State and Munic.i.p.al establishments for the poor and sick have been so much described lately, that everyone in England must be acquainted with all that Berlin does for its struggling citizens. There are, of course, large hospitals and sanatoriums for consumption; and the admirable system of national insurance secures help in sickness to every working man and woman, as well as a pension in old age. "The club doctor and dispensary as we have them here do not exist," say the Birmingham Bra.s.sworkers in their pamphlet. "In their stead leading doctors and specialists (with very few exceptions) are at the service of the working man or woman."
"Yes," said a leading doctor to me when I quoted this; "we get about three half-pence for a consultation, and we find them the most impossible people in the community to satisfy. As they get medical advice for nothing they run from one doctor to another, and consult a dozen about some simple ailment that a student could set right. We all suffer from them." So that is the other side of the question.
But Berlin certainly manages its Submerged Tenth both more humanely and more wisely than we manage ours. It begins, as one thinks any civilised country must, by separating those who will not work from those who cannot. The able-bodied beggar, the drunkard, and other vagrants are sent to a house of correction and made to work. The respectable poor are not driven to herd with these people in Germany.
They receive shelter and a.s.sistance at inst.i.tutions reserved for the deserving. In one of these old married people who cannot support themselves are allowed to spend the evening of their lives together.
Anyone desiring to know more about the charitable inst.i.tutions of Berlin will find a most interesting account of them in the pamphlet written by the Birmingham Bra.s.sworkers, and published by P.S. King & Son. The bias of the authors is so strongly German that when you have read to the end you begin to lean in the opposite direction, and look for the things we manage better over here. "In 1900," they say, "there was such a shortage of houses (in Berlin) that 1500 families had to be sheltered in the Munic.i.p.al Refuge for Homeless People." That is surely a worse state of affairs than in London. But when you walk through London or a London suburb in winter, and are pestered at every crossing and corner by able-bodied young beggars of both s.e.xes, you begin to agree with the bra.s.sworkers. Berlin is clear of beggars and crossing-sweepers all the year round, and you know that as far as possible they are cla.s.sified and treated according to their deserts.
It is not possible for the individual bent on his own business to know at a glance whether he will encourage vice by giving alms or behave brutally to a deserving case by withholding them. The decision should never be forced upon him as it is in England every day of his life.
CHAPTER XXVI
BERLIN