,p///, \md3rd ijhnwA 'oi CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028296816 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY BY 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 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY BY MRS. ALFRED SIDGWIGK NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY i 1912 Firit Piiiltshed . . May 190S Second Edition . June igoS Third Edition .... iqi2 CONTENTS I. Introductory . , . « I II. Children . . . . • 7 III. Schools . . . . IS IV. The Education of the Poor 28 V. The Backfisch 36 VI. The Student 47 VII. RiEHL on Women . 59 VIII. The Old and the New . 68 IX. Girlhood 78 X. Marriages . . 92 XI. The Householder . . 103 XII. Housewives . » "3 XIII. Housewives (continued) . 123 XIV. Servants ^ . 138 XV. Food .... ■ IS3 XVI. Shops and Markets . 167 XVII. Expenses of Life . . '177 XVIII. Hospitality . . ig6 XIX. German Sundays . . 205 XX. Sports and Games '. . 217 XXI. Inns and Restaurants . . 225 VI HOME LIFE IN GERMANY CHAP. PAGE XXII. Life in Lodgings,. . 237 XXIII. Summer Resorts • . 250 XXIV. Peasant Life . 267 XXV. How THE Po»R Live . 286 XXVI. Berlin . 297 XXVII. Odds and Ends , • 307 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY HOME LIFE IN GERMANY CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY I WAS once greatly impressed by a story of an officer in the German army, who told his English hostess that he knew the position of every blacksmith's forge in Yorkshire. I wondered at the time how many officers in the English army had learned where to find the blacksmiths' forges in Pomerania. But those are bygone days. Most of us know more about Germany now than we do about our own country.^ We go over there singly and in batches, we see their admirable public institutions, we visit their factories, we examine their Poor Laws, we walk their hospitals, we look on at their drill and their manoeuvres, we follow each twist and turn of their politics, we watch their birth-rate, we write reams about their navy, and we can explain to any one according to our bias exactly what their system of Protection does for them. We are often suffici- ently ignorant to compare them with the Japanese, and about once a month we publish a weighty book con- cerning various aspects of their flourishing empire. ' Throughout the book, although I am of German parentage, I have spoken of England as my country and of the English as my country-people. I was born and bred in England, and I found it more convenient for purposes of expression to belong to one country than to both. I 2 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY Some of these books I have read with ardent and respectful interest ; and always as I read, my own little venture seemed to wither and vanish in the light of a profounder knowledge and a wider judgment than I shall ever attain. Foi* I have not visited workhouses and factories, I know little more about German taxes than about English ones, and I have no statistics for the instruction and entertainment of the intelligent reader. I can take him inside a German home, but I can give him no information about German building laws. I know how German women spend their days, but I know as little about the exact function of a Biirgermeister as about the functions of a Mayor. In short, my know- ledge of Germany, like my knowledge of England, is based on a series of life-long, unclassified, more or less inchoate impressions, and the only excuse I have for writing about either country I find in my own and some other people's trivial minds. When I read of a country unknown or only slightly known, I like to be told all the insignificant trifles that make the common round of life. It is assuredly desirable that the great movements should be watched and described for us; but we want pictures of the people in their homes, pictures of them at rest and at play, as well as engaged in those public works that make their public history. For no reason in the world I happen to be interested in China, but I am still waiting for just the gossip I want about private life there. We have Pierre Loti's exquisite dream pictures of his deserted palace at Pekin, and we have many useful and expert accounts of the roads, mines, railways, factories, laws, politics, and creeds of the Celestial Empire. But the book I ask for could not be written by anyone who was not of Chinese birth, and it would probably be written by a woman. It might not have INTRODUCTORY 3 much literary form or value, but it would enter into those minutiae of life that the masculine traveller either does not see or does not think worth notice. The author of such a small-beer chronicle must have been intimate from childhood with the Chinese point of view, though her home and her friends were in a foreign land. She would probably not know much about her ancestral laws and politics, but she would have known ever since she could hear and speak just what Chinese people said to each other when none but Chinese were by, what they ate, what they wore, how they governed their homes, the relationship between husband and wife, parents and children, master and servant ; in what way they fought the battle of life, how they feasted and how they mourned. If circumstances took her over and over again to different parts of China for long stretches of time, she would add to her traditions and her early atmosphere some experience of her race on their own soil and under their own sun. What she could tell us would be of such small importance that she would often hesitate to set it down ; and again, she would hesitate lest what she had to say should be well known already to those amongst her readers who had sojourned in her father's country. She would do well, I think, to make some picture for herself of the audience she could hope to entertain, and to fix her mind on these people while she wrote her book. She would know that in the country of her adoption there were some who never crossed their own seas, and others who travelled here and there in the world but did not visit China or know much about its people. She would write for the ignorant ones, and not for any others ; and she would of necessity leave aside all great issues and all vexed questions. Her picture would be chiefly, too, a picture of the nation's women ; for though they have on the whole no share 4 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY in political history, they reckon with the men in any history of domestic life and habit. Germans often maintain that their country is more diverse than any other, and on that account more difificult to describe: a country of many races and various rules held loosely together by language and more tightly of 4ate years by the bond of empire. But the truth probably is, that in our country we see and understand varieties, while in a foreign one we chiefly perceive what is unlike ourselves and common to the people we are observing. For from the flux and welter of qualities that form a modern nation certain traits survive peculiar to that nation : specialities of feature, character, and habit, some seen at first sight, others only discovered after long and intimate acquaint- ance. It is undoubtedly true that no one person can be at home in every corner of the German Empire, or of any other empire. There are many Germanys. The one we hear most of in England nowadays is armed to the teeth, set wholly on material advancement, in a dangerously war- like mood, hustling us without scruple from our place in the world's markets, a model of municipal govern- ment and enterprise, a land where vice, poverty, idleness, and dirt are all unknown. We hear so much of this praiseworthy but most unamiable Wunderkind amongst nations, that we generally forget the Germany we know, the Germany still there for our affection and delight, the dear country of quaint fancies, of music and of poetry. That Germany has vanished, the wiseacres say, the dreamy unworldly German is no more with us, it is sheer sentimental folly to believe in him and to waste your time looking for him. But how if you know him everywhere, in the music and poetry that he could not have given us if they had not burned within INTRODUCTORY S him, and in the men and women who have accompanied you as friends throughout life, — how if you still find him whenever you go to Germany? Not, to be sure, in the shape of the wholly unpractical fool who pre- ceded the modern English myth ; but, for instance, in some of the mystical plays that hold his stage, in many of his toys and pictures, and above all in the kindly, lovable, clever people it is your pleasure to meet there. You may perhaps speak with all the more conviction of this attractive Germany if you have never shut your eyes and ears to the Germany that does not love us, and if you have often been vexed and offended by the Anglophobia that undoubtedly exists. This Germany makes more noise than the friendly element, and it is called into existence by a variety of causes not all important or political. It flourished long before the Transvaal War was seized as a con- venient stick to beat us with. In some measure the Anglicised Germans who love us too well are respons- ible, for they do not always love wisely. They deny their descent and their country, and that justly offends their compatriots. I do not believe that the English- man breathes who would ever wish to call himself any- thing but English ; while it is quite rare for Germans in England, America, or France to take any pride in their blood. The second generation constantly denies it, changes its name, assures you it knows nothing of Germany. They have not the spirit of a Touchstone, and in so far they do their country a wrong. In another more material sense, too, there are many Germanys, so that when you write of one corner you may easily write of ways and food and regulations that do not obtain in some other corner, and it is obviously impossible to remind the reader in every case that the part is not the whole. Wine is dear in the north, but 6 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY it has sometimes been so plentiful in the south that barrels to contain it ran short, and anyone who pos- sessed an empty one could get the measure of wine it would hold in exchange. Every town and district has its special ways of cdoking. There is great variety in manner of life, in entertainments, and in local law. There are Protestant and Catholic areas, and there are areas where Protestants, Catholics, and Jews live side by side. The peasant proprietor of Baden is on a higher level of prosperity and habit than the peasant serf of Eastern Prussia ; and the Jews on the Russian frontier, those strange Oriental figures in a special dress and wearing earlocks and long beards, have as little in common with the Jews of Mannheim or Frank- fort as with the Jews of the London Stock Exchange. It would, in fact, be impossible for any one person to enter into every shade and variety of German life. You can only describe the side you know, and comment on the things you have seen. So you bring your mite to the store of knowledge which many have increased before you, and which many will add to again. CHAPTER II CHILDREN IN Germany the storks bring the children. "I know the pond in which all the little children lie waiting till the storks come to take them to their parents," says the mother stork in Andersen's story. " The stork has visited the house," people say to each other when a child is born ; and if you go to a christen- ing party you will find that the stork has come too : in sugar on a cake, perhaps, or to be handed round in the form of ice cream. Most of the kindly intimate little jests about babies have a stork in them, and a stranger might easily blunder by presenting an emblem of the bird where it would not be welcome. The house on which storks build is a lucky one, and people regret the disappearance of their nests from the large towns. When the baby has come it is not allowed out of doors for weeks. Air and sunlight are considered dangerous at first, and so is soap and even an im- moderate use of water. For eight weeks it lies day and night in the Steckkissen, a long bag that confines its legs and body but not its arms. The bag is lined with wadding, and a German nurse, who was showing me one with great pride, assured me that while a child's bones were soft it was not safe to lift it in any other way. These bags are comparatively naodern, 8 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY and have succeeded the swaddling clothes still used in some parts of Germany. They are bandages wrap- ping the child round like a mummy, and imprisoning its arms as well as its legs. A German doctor told me that as these Wtckelkinder had never known free- dom they did not miss it ; but he seemed to approve of the modern compromise that leaves the upper limbs some power of movement. Well - to - do German mothers rarely nurse their children. When you ask why, you hear of nerves and anaemia, and are told that at any rate in cities women find it impossible. I have seen it stated in a popular book about Germany that mothers there are little more than " aunts " to their children ; and the Steckkissen and the foster-mother were about equally blamed for this unnatural state of affairs. From our point of view there is not a word to be said in favour of the Steck- kissen, but it really is impossible to believe that a bag lined with wadding can undermine a mother's affection for her child. Your German friends will often show you a photograph of a young mother holding her baby in her arms, and the baby, if it is young enough, will probably be in its bag. But unless you look closely you will take the bag for a long robe, it hangs so softly and seems so little in the mother's way. It will be as dainty as a robe too, and when people have the means as costly ; for you can deck out your bag with ribbons and laces as easily as your robe. The objec- tion to foster-mothers has reality behind it, but the evils of the system are well understood, and have been much discussed of late. Formerly every mother who could afford it hired one for her child, and peasant women still come to town to make money in this way. But the practice is on the wane, now that doctors order sterilised milk. The real ruler of a German nursery is CHILDREN 9 the family doctor. He keeps his eye on an inex- perienced 'mother, calls when he sees fit, watches the baby's weight, orders its food, and sees that its feet are kept warm. A day nursery in the English sense of the word is hardly known in Germany. People who can afford it give up two rooms to the small fry, but where the flat system prevails, and rents are high, this is seldom possible. One room is usually known as the Kinder- stuhe, and here the children sleep and play. But it must be remembered that rooms are big, light, and high in Germany, and that such a Kinderstube will not be like a night nursery in a small English home. Besides, directly children can walk they are not as much shut up in the nursery as they are in England. The rooms of a German flat communicate with each other, and this in itself makes the segregation to which we are used difficult to carry out. During the first few days of a sojourn with German friends, you are constantly reminded of a pantomime rally in which people run in and out of doors on all sides of the stage ; and if they have several lively children you sometimes wish for an English room with one door only, and that door kept shut. Even when you pay a call you generally see the children, and possibly the nurse or the Mamsell with them. But a typical middle- class German family recognises no such foreign body as a nurse. It employs one maid of all work, who helps the housewife wherever help is needed, whether it is in the kitchen or the nursery. The mother spends her time with her children, playing with them when she has leisure, cooking and ironing and saving for them, and for her husband all through her busy day. Modern Germans like to tell you that young women no longer devote themselves to these simple duties, but lo HOME LIFE IN GERMANY if you use your eyes you will see that most women do their work as faithfully as ever. There is an idle, pleasure-loving, money-spending element in Germany as there is in other countries, and it makes more noise than the steady bulk of the nation, and is an attractive target there as here for the darts of popular preachers and playwrights. But it is no more preponderant in Germany than in England. On the whole, the German mother leaves her children less to servants than the English mother does, and in some way works harder for them. That is to say, a German woman will do cooking and ironing when an Englishwoman of the same class would delegate all such work to servants. This is partly because German servants are less efficient and partly because fewer servants are employed. The fashionable nurses in Germany are either English or peasant girls in costume. It is considered smart to send out your baby with a young woman from the Spreewald if you live in Berlin, or from one. of the Black Forest valleys if you live in the duchy of Baden. In some quarters of Berlin you see the elaborate skirts and caps of the Spreewald beside every other baby-carriage, but it is said that these girls are chiefly employed by the rich Jews, and you certainly need to be as rich as a Jew to pay their laundry bills. The young children of the poor are provided for in Berlin, as they are in other cities, by creches, where the working mother can leave them for the day. Several of these institutions are open to the public at certain times, and those I have seen were well kept and well arranged. The women of Germany have not thrown away their knitting needles yet, though they no longer take them to the concert or the play as they did in a less sophisticated -age. Children still learn to knit either at CHILDREN 1 1 school or at home, and if their mother teaches them she probably makes them a marvellous ball. She does this by winding the wool round little toys and small coins, until it hides as many surprises as a Christmas stocking, and is as much out of shape ; but the child who wants the treasures in the stocking has to knit for them, and the faster she secures them the faster she is learning her lesson. The mother, however, who troubles about knitting is not quite abreast of her times. The truly modern woman flies at higher game ; with the solemnity and devotion of a Mrs. Cimabue Brown she cherishes in her children a love of Art. Her watchword is Die Kunst im Leben des Kindes, or Art in the Nursery, and she is assisted by men who are doing for German children of this generation what Walter Crane and others did for English nurseries twenty-five years ago. You can get enchanting nursery pictures, toys, and decorations in Germany to-day, and each big city has its own school of artists who produce them : friezes where the birds and beasts be- loved of children solemnly pursue each other ; grotesque wooden manikins painted in motley; mysterious land- scapes where the fairy-tales of the world might any day come true. Dream pictures these are of snow and moonlight, marsh and forest, the real Germany lying everywhere outside the cities for those who have eyes to see. Even the toy department in an ordinary shop abounds in treasures that never seem to reach England : queer cheap toys made of wood, and not mechanical. It must be a dull child who is ' content with a mechan- ical toy, and it is consoling to observe that most children break the mechanism as quickly as possible and then play sensibly with the remains. Many of the toys known to generations of children seemed to be as popular as ever, and quite unchanged. You still 12 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY find the old toy towns, for instance, with their red roofed coloured houses and green curly, trees, toys that would tell an imaginative child a story every time they were set up. It is to be hoped they never will change, but in this sense I have no faith in Germany, The nation is so desperately intent on improvement that some dreadful day it will improve its toys. Indeed, I have seen a trade circular threatening some such van- dalism ; and in the last Noah's ark I bought Noah and his family had changed the cut of their clothes. So the whole ark had lost some of its charm. Everyone who is interested in children and their education, and who happens to be in Berlin, goes to see the Pestalozzi Frobel Haus, the great model Kinder- garten where children of the working classes are received for fees varying from sixpence to three shillings a month, according to the means of the parents. There are large halls in which the children drill and sing, and there are classrooms in which twelve to sixteen children are taught at a time. Every room has some live birds or other animals and some plants that the children are trained to tend ; the walls are decorated with pictures and processions of animals,' many painted and cut out by the children themselves, and every room has an impressive little rod tied with blue ribbons. But the little ones do not look as if they needed a rod much. They are cheerful, tidy little people, although many of them come from poor homes. In the middle of the morning they have a slice of rye bread, which they eat decorously at table on wooden platters. They can buy milk to drink with the bread for 5 pf., and they dine in school for i o pf. They play the usual Kindergarten games in the usual systematised mechanical fashion, and they study Nature in a real back garden, where there are real dejected-looking cocks and hens, a real CHILDREN 1 3 cow, and a lamb. What happens to the lamb when he becomes a sheep no one tells you. Perhaps he supplies mutton to the school of cookery in connection with the Kindergarten. Some of the children have their own little gardens, in which they learn to raise small salads and hardy flowers. There are carpentering rooms for the boys, and both boys and girls are allowed in the miniature laundry, where they learn how to wash, starch, and iron doll's clothes. The illustration shows them engaged in this business, apparently without a teacher ; but, as a matter of fact, the children are always under a teacher's eye, even when they are only digging in a sand heap or weeding their plots of ground. Each child has a bath at school once a week, and at first the mothers are uneasy about this part of the programme, lest it should give their child cold. But they soon learn to approve it, and however poor they are they do their utmost to send a child to school neatly shod and clad. As a rule German children of all classes are treated as children, and taught the elementary virtue of obedi- ence. Das Recht des Kindes is a new cry with some of the new people, but nevertheless Germany is one of the few remaining civilised countries where the elders still have rights and privileges. I heard of an English- woman the other day who said that she had never eaten the wing of a chicken, because when she was young it was always given to the older people, and now that she was old it was saved for the children. If she lived in Germany she would still have a chance, provided she kept away from a small loud set, who in all matters of education and morality would like to turn the world upside down. In most German homes the noisy, spoilt American child would not be endured for a moment, and the little tyrant of a French family 14 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY would be taught its place, to the comfort and advantage of all concerned. I have dined with a large family where eight young ones of various ages sat at an over- flow table, and did not disturb their elders by a sound. It was not because the elders were harsh or the young folk repressed, but because Germany teaches its youth to behave. The little girls still drop you a pretty old- fashioned curtsey when they greet you ; just such a curtsey as Miss Austen's heroines must have made to their friends. The little boys, if you are staying in the house with theim, come and shake hands at unexpected times, — when they arrive from school, for instance, and before they go out for a walk. At first they take you by surprise, but you soon learn to be ready for them. They play many of the same games as English children, and I need hardly say that they are brought up on the same fairy stories, because many of our favourites come from Germany. The little boys wear sensible carpenters' aprons indoors, made of leather or American cloth ; and the little girls still wear bib aprons of black alpaca. Their elders do not play games with them as much as English people do with their children. They are expected to entertain and employ themselves ; and the immense educational value of games, the train- ing they are in temper, skill, and manners, is not understood or admitted in Germany as it is here. The Kindergarten exercises are not competitive, and do not teach a child to play a losing game with effort and good grace. CHAPTER III SCHOOLS GERMAN children go to day schools. This is not to say that there are no boarding schools in Germany; but the prevailing system throughout the empire is a system of day schools. The German mother does not get rid of her boys and girls for months together, and look forward to the holidays as a time of uproar and enjoyment. She does not wonder anxiously what changes she will see in them when they come back to her. They are with her all the year round, — the boys till they go to a university, the girls till they marry. Any day in the streets of a German city you may see troops of children going to school, not with a maid at their heels as in Paris, but unattended as in England. They have long tin satchels in which they carry their books and lunch, the boys wear peaked caps, and many children of both sexes wear spectacles. Except at the Kindergarten, boys and girls are educated separately and differently in Germany. In some rare cases lately some few girls have been admitted to a boys' Gymnasium, but this is experi- mental and at present unusual. It may be found that the presence of a small number in a large boys' school does not work well. In addition to the elementary schools, there are four kincls of Public Day School for 1 6 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY boys in Germany, and they are all under State super- vision. There is the Gymnasium, the Real-Gymnasium, the Ober-Real Schule, and the Real-Schule. Until 1870 the Gymnasiums were the only schools that could send their scholars to the universities ; a system that had serious disadvantages. It meant that in choosing a child's school, parents had to decide whether at the end of his school life he was to have a university education. Children with no aptitude for scholarship were sent to these schools to receive a scholar's train- ing; while boys who would have done well in one of the learned professions could not be admitted to a university, except for science or modern languages, because they had not attended a Gymnasium. A boy who has passed through one of these higher schools has had twelve years' education. He began Latin at the age of ten, and Greek at thirteen. He has learned some French and mathematics, but no English unless he paid for it as an extra. His school years have been chiefly a preparation for the university. If he never reaches the higher classes he leaves the Gymnasium with a stigma upon him, a record of failure that will hamper him in his career. The higher official posts and the professions will be closed to him ; and he will be unfitted by his education for business. This at least is what many thoughtful Germans say of their classical schools ; and they lament over the un^ suitable boys who are sent to them because their parents want a professor or a high official in the family. It is considered more sensible to send an average boy to a Real-Gymnasium or to an Ober-Real Schule, because nowadays these schools prepare for the university, and any boy with a turn for scholarship can get the training he needs. The Ober-Real Schule professedly pays most attention to modern languages ; SCHOOLS 17 and it is, in fact, only since 1 900 that their boys are received at a university on the classical side. They still prepare largely for technical schools and for a commercial career. At a Real-Schule, the fourth grade of higher school, the course only lasts six years. They do not prepare for the Abiturienten examination, and their scholars can- not go from them to a university. They prepare for practical life, and they admit promising boys from the elementary schools. A boy who has been through any one of these higher schools successfully need only serve in the army for one year ; and that in itself is a great incentive to parents to send their children. A Real- Schule in Prussia only costs a hundred marks a year, and a Gymnasium a hundred and thirty-five marks. In some parts of Germany the fees are rather higher, in some still lower. The headmasters of these schools are all university men, and are themselves under State supervision. In an entertaining play called Flachs- mann als Erzieher the headmaster had not been doing his duty, and has allowed the school to get into a bad way. The subordinates are either slack or righteously rebellious, and the children are unruly. The State official pays a surprise visit, discovers the state of things, and reads the Riot Act all round. The wicked headmaster is dismissed, the eager young reformer is put in his place, the slackers are warned and given another chance. . . . Blessed be St. Bureaukrazius . . . says the genial old god out of a machine, when by virtue of his office he has righted every man's wrongs. The school in the play must be an elementary one, for children and teachers are of both sexes, but a master at a Gymnasium told me that the picture of the official visit was not exaggerated in its importance and effect. There was considerable excitement in Germany i8 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY over the picture of the evil headmaster, his incompetent staff, and the neglected children ; and I was warned before I saw the play that I must not think such a state of affairs prevailed in German schools. The warning was quite unnecessary. An immoral, idle, and ignorant class of men could not carry on the education of a people as it is carried on throughout the German Empire to-day. I have before me the Annual Report of a Gymnasium in Berlin, and it may interest English people to see how many lessons the teachers in each subject gave every week. There were thirty teachers in the school. Lessons Subject per Week Religion ...... 31 German . 42 Latin . . . 112 Greek 72 French 36 History and Geography 44 Mathematics and Arithmetic 56 Natural History 10 Physics . . . 20 Hebrew . . 4 Law I Writing 6 Drawing 18 Singing . . . 12 Gymnasium . , . 27 Swimming . 8i Handfertigkeit . . 3 5024 lessons The headmaster took Latin for seven hours every week, and Greek for three hours. A professor who came solely for religious teaching came for ten hours every week. But most of the masters taught from sixteen to twenty-four hours, while one who is down SCHOOLS 19 for reading, writing, arithmetic, gymnastics, German, singing, and Natur could not get through all he had to do in less than thirty hours. On looking into the hours devoted to each subject by the various classes, you find that the lowest class had three hours religious instruction every week, and the other classes two hours. There were 407 boys in the school described as Evangelisch, 47 Jews, and 23 Catholics; but in Germany parents can withdraw their children from religious instruction in school, provided they satisfy the authorities that it is given elsewhere. The two highest classes had lessons on eight chapters of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, on the Epistle to the Philippians, and on the confessions of St. Augustine. Some classes were instructed in the Gospel according to St. John, and the little boys learned Bible History. So Germans are not without orthodox theological teaching in their early years, whatever opinions they arrive at in their adolescence. Every boy in the school spent two or three hours each week on German composition, and, like boys in other countries, handled themes they could assuredly not understand, probably, like other boys, without a scruple or a hesitation. " Why does the ghost of Banquo appear to Macbeth, and not the ghost of Duncan ? " " How are the unities of time, place, and action treated in Schiller's ballads ? " " Discuss the antitheses in Lessing's Laokoon." " What can you say about the representation of concrete objects in Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea f " These examples are taken at random from a list too long to quote completely; but no one need be impressed by them. Boys perform wonderful feats of this kind in England too. However, I once heard a 20 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY German professor say that the English boy outdid the German in gesunder Menschenverstand (sound common sense), but that the German wins in the race when it comes to the abstract knowledge ( Wisseri) that he and his countryfolk ^rize above all the treasures of the earth. No one who knows both countries can doubt for a single moment that the professor was right, and that he stated the case as fairly as it can be stated. In an emergency or in trying circumstances the English boy would be readier and more self- reliant : but when you meet him where entertainment is wanted rather than resource, his ignorance will make you open your eyes. This, at any rate, is the kind of story told and believed of Englishmen in Germany. A student who was working at science in a German university had been there the whole winter, and though the city possessed many fine theatres he had only visited a variety show. At last his friends told him that it was his duty to go to the Schauspielhaus and see a play by Goethe or Schiller. " Goethe ! Schiller 1 " said my Englishman, " Was ist das ? " The education of girls in Germany is in a transi- tion state at present. Important changes have been made of late years, and still greater ones, so the reformers say, are pending. Formerly, if a girl was to be educated at all she went to a Hohere Tochterschule, or to a private school conducted on the same lines, and, like the official establishment, under State supervision. When she had finished with school she had finished with education, and began to work at the useful arts of life, more especially at the art of cooking. What she had learned at school she had learned thoroughly, and it was considered in those days quite as much as was good for her. The officials who watched and regulated the education of boys had nothing to do with SCHOOLS 21 girls' schools. These were left to the staff that managed elementary schools, and kept on much the same level. Girls learned history, geography, ele- mentary arithmetic, two modern languages, and a great deal of mythology. The scandalous ignorance of mythology displayed by Englishwomen still shocks the right-minded German. If a woman asked for more than this because she was going to earn her bread, she spent three years in reading for an examina- tion that qualified her for one of the lower posts in the school. The higher posts were all in the hands of men. Of late years women have been able to prepare for a teacher's career at one of the Teachers' Seminaries, most of which were opened in 1897. More than forty years ago the English princess in Berlin was not satisfied with what was done in Germany for the education of women ; and one of the many monuments to her memory is the Victoria Lyceum. This institution was founded at her suggestion by Miss Archer, an English lady who had been teaching in Berlin for some years, and who was greatly liked and respected there. At first it only aimed at giving some further education to girls who had left school, and it was not easy to get men of standing to teach them. But as it was the outcome of a movement with life in it the early difficulties were surmounted, and its scope and usefulness have grown since its foundation thirty-eight years ago. It is not a residential college, and it has no laboratories. During the winter it still holds courses of lectures for women who are not training for a definite career ; but under its present head, Fraulein von Cotta, the chief work of the Victoria Lyceum has become the preparation of women for the Ober Lehrerin examination. This is a State examination that can only be passed five years after a girl has qualified as Lehrerin, and two 2 2 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY of these five years must have been spent in teaching at a German school. To qualify as Lehrerin, a girl must have spent three years at a Seminary for teachers after she leaves school, and she usually gets through this stage of her training between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. Therefore a woman must have three years special preparation for a subordinate post and eight years for a higher post in a German girls' school. The whole question of women's education is in a ferment in Germany at present, and though everyone interested is ready to talk of it, everyone tells you that it is impossible to foresee exactly what reforms are coming. There are to be new schools established, Lyceen and Ober-Lyceen, and Ober-Lyceen will prepare for matriculation. When girls have matriculated from one of these schools they will be ready for the university, and will work for the same examinations as men. Baden was the first German State that allowed women to matriculate at its universities. It did so in 1900, and in 1903 Bavaria followed suit. In 1905 there were eighty-five women at the universities who had matriculated in Germany; but there are hundreds working at the universities without matriculating first. At present the professors are free to admit women or to exclude them from their classes; but the right of exclusion is rarely exercised. Before long it will pre- sumably be a thing of the past. An Englishwoman residing at Berlin, and engaged in education, told me that in her opinion no German woman living had done as much for her countrywomen as Helene Lange, the president of the Allgemeine deutsche Frauenverein. Nineteen years ago she began the struggle that is by no means over, the struggle to secure a better education for women and a greater share in its control. In English ears her aim will SCHOOLS 23 sound a modest one, but English girls' schools are not entirely in the hands of men, with men for principals and men to teach the higher classes. She began in 1887 by publishing a pamphlet that made a great sensation, because it demanded, what after a mighty tussle was conceded, women teachers for the higher classes in girls' schools, and for these women an academic education. In 1890 she founded, together with Auguste Schmidt and Marie Loeper-Housselle, the Allegemeine deutsche Lehrerinnen- Verein, which now has 80 branches and 17,000 members. But the pluckiest thing she did was to fight Prussian officialdom and win. In 1889 she opened Real-Kurse fur Mddchen und Frauen, 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 to 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 H'dhere 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 of 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 Stift, 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 Stift 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 takpn up work in the elementary ones from choice. I know one lady whose certificates qualify her to teach iiji a H'dhere Tochterschule, 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 vollig 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 systenj 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- 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 lbs. of meat, 2 cwts. potatoes, 30 big rye loaves, 280 rolls, and when spinach, for instance, is given, 80 lbs. 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 i ' I ""HE word is untranslatable, though my dictionary A 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, 36 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 London. 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 Backfischchen' s Leiden und Freuden f " you say to her ; for the book is in its 5 5 th 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 unatcustomed 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 THE BACKFISCH 41 uth with her hand, not to speak with her mouth full, eat her soup quietly, to keep her elbows off the table, ; to put her fingers in her plate or her knife in her uth, and not to take her chicken into her hands on emonial occasions. ' My treasure," says the aunt, " as you know, we are ng to dinner with the Dunkers to-morrow. Be good )Ugh not to take your chicken into your hands. Here home I don't object to it, but the really correct way :o separate the meat from the bone with the knife 1 fork." The docile Backfisch says Jawohl, Hebe Tante, and is that this business of becoming civilised is full of Falls and surprises. Never in her life has she eaten jltry without the assistance of her fingers. When ; gets to the dinner-party she is fortunate enough sit next to her bosom friend, who starts in horror 1 whispers " With a knife, Gretchen," when Gretchen is t about to dip her fingers in the salt. The Backfisch :ruly anxious to learn, but she feels that the injunc- ns of society are hard, and says it is poor sport to your chicken with a knife and fork, because the best •t sticks to the bones. Then her friend stops her m drinking fruit syrup out of her plate, and her ghbour on the other side, a stout guzzler who has : been taught by his aunt to eat properly, encourages 2tchen to drink too much champagne. After these early adventures the education of the ckfisch proceeds quickly. She has to learn at her it's tea-parties not to fill cups to overflowing in :er exuberance of hospitality; and she is also in- jcted not to press food on people. " In good iety," says the aunt, " people decline to eat because y have had enough, and not because they require ssing." 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, «ind 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 in 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 :ontrast to her, a fine young lady from the city sently joins the household, and the aunt does not 'e to provide her with a tooth-brush. The new [val wears blue satin slippers, drinks her chocolate bed, and cannot dress without the help of a maid, this way the author shows you that girls brought up :ities are superfine rather than savage, and that you not to suppose the ordinary German Backfisch is ; her little heroine from the provinces. The truth of the matter is, that no one nowadays I such manners as the Backfisch had when she first ne from the wilds ; at least, no one of her class, even hey have grown up in Hinter-Pommern. But if you vel in Germany next week and stay in small towns \ country places, you will still meet plenty of people take their poultry bones in their fingers and put ;ir knives in their mouths. If they are men you 1 see them use their fork as a dagger to hold the at while they cut it up ; you will see them stick their pkins into their shirt collars and placidly comb their r with a pocket comb in public ; if they are women i at a restaurant, they will pocket the lumps of jar they have not used in their coffee. But if you ; in private houses amongst people of Gretchen's type u will see none of these things. A German host .1 pulls the joint close to him sometimes or stands up carve, and a German hostess still presses you to eat, II in the kindness of her heart piles up your plate, t this embarrassing form of hospitality is dying out. Gretchen's aunt said, people in good society recognise it a guest refuses food because he does not want it me years ago, when you had satisfied your hunger J declined more, your German friends used to look ended or distressed, and say Sie geniren sich gewiss. lis 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, Sich geniren, however, is a reflective verb, a corruption of the French verb se giner, 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 d!hdte 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 ispringen 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. Ein 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 ansemic 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 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 Universitat 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 ;^3S0, 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 ;^2 500 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 ;£^22 5, 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, riot 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 so 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 THE STUDENT Si /e invariably been to Heidelberg, and if they have ;n there in term time they have been amused by the ags of young men who swagger about the narrow eets, each gang wearing a different coloured cap. ley will have been told that these are the " corps " idents, and the sight of them so jolly and so idle II confirm their mental picture of the German ident, the picture of a young man who does nothing but !nk beer, fight duels, sing Volkslieder and Trinklieder, d make love to pretty low-born maidens. When u see a company of these young men clatter into 5 Schloss garden on a summer afternoon, and drink 3t quantities of beer, when you observe their iborate ceremonial of bows and greetings, when you ar their laughter and listen to the latest stories of €vc monkey tricks, you understand that the student's 2 is a merry one, but except for the sake of tradition u wonder why he need lead it at a seat of learning, lything further removed from learning than a :rman corps student cannot be imagined, and the lise he makes must incommode the quiet working idents who do not join a corps. Not that the liet working students would wish to banish the others, tiey are the glory of the German universities. In ivels and on the stage none others appear. The nocent foreigner thinks that the moment a young srman goes to the Alma Mater of his choice he its on an absurd little cap, gets his face slashed, lys a boarhound, and devotes all his energies to inking beer and ragging officials. But though the ;orps" students are so conspicuous in the small liversity towns, it is only the men of means who in them. For poorer students there is a cheaper rm of union, called a Burschenschaft. When a )ung German goes to the university he has probably 53 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY lever been from home before, and by joining a Corps yc a Burschenschaft he finds something to take the Dlace of home, companions wjth whom he has a ipecial bond of intimacy, and a discipline that carries 3n his social educatiopj for the etiquette of these issociations is most elaborate and strict. The members of a corps all say " thou " to each other, and jn the Alte Herren Abende, when members of an older generation are entertained by the young ones of to-day, :his practice still obtains, although one man may be a jreat 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 ibsurd. 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 js of the room, and a refreshment counter on the rth side, where an elderly woman and one or two s were serving wine. The wine was brought to the les, and the various corps sat at their special tables, drinking and smoking. The dressing and undressing 1 the sewiflg up of wounds was done in an adjoining m. When the combatants were ready they were in by their seconds, who held up their arms one each side. The face and the top of the head were losed, but the body, arms and neck were heavily idaged. The duellists are placed opposite each er, and the seconds, who also have swords in their ids, stand one on each side, ready to interfere and )ck up the combatant's sword. They say ' Auf die nsur,' and then the slashing begins. As soon as od is drawn the seconds interfere, and the doctor .mines the cut. If it is not bad they go on fighting :ctly. If it needs sewing up they go into the next m, and you wait an endless time for the next ty. I got awfully tired of the long intervals, ing at the tables, drinking and smoking. While fights were going on we all stood round in a ring. 5re were only about three duels the whole morning. ire was a good deal of blood on the floor. The nen at the refreshment counter were quite uncon- led. They didn't trouble to look on, but talked :ach other about blouses like girls in a post office. 5 students drove out to the inn and back in open riages. It is a mile from Heidelberg. The duels generally as impersonal as games, but sometimes y are in settlement of quarrels. I think any 3ent may come and fight on these occasions, but I pose he has to be the guest of a corps." \ German professor lecturing on university life stantly 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 2412 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 drinldng beer and smoking with their friends, THE STUDENT 5 5 2 the womenfolk are by themselves or with the Iren at home. But the beer Commang that the 5Ssor thought had such educational value is the e for certain intricate rites practised by university ents at the Kneiptafel. Those who sit at the table :alled Beer Persons, and they are of various ranks rding to the time of membership and their position he Kneipe. Every Beer Person must drink beer join in the songs, unless he has special permission I the chairman. The Beer Persons do not just sit d the table and drink as they please. If they did ; would be no Comment, and I suppose no educa- il value. They have to invite their fellows to drink them, and the quantity drunk, the persons who ■ have challenged, and the exact number of minutes may elapse before a challenge is accepted and rned, is all exactly laid down. Then there are 3US festive and ingenious ways of drinking together, .s to turn the orgy into something like a game, instance, the glass " goes into the world," that is, it dates, and any Beer Person who seizes it with a rent hand or different fingers from his neighbour led. Or the glasses are piled one on the top of her while the Beer Persons sing, and some one man to drink to each glass in the pile at the word of mand. Or the president orders a " Beer Galop " the words " Silentium filr einen Biergalopp : ich den notigen Stoff anzuschaffen" At the word of mand everyone, beginning with the president, es his glass to his left-hand neighbour and ties the one he receives. Then the glasses are ed, passed to the right, and emptied again as soon ossible. The president, it seems, has to exercise a I deal of discretion and ingenuity, for if the Kneipe IS 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 Salamander and be in disgrace. In Ekkehardt ffel describes a similar ceremonial in the tenth iry. "The men seized their mugs," he says, 1 rubbed them three times in unison on the )th rocks, producing a humming noise, then they i them towards the sun and drank; each man down his mug at the same moment, so that it ded like a single stroke." Kommers is not always a gay festival. It may I memorial ceremony in honour of some great lately dead. Then speeches are made in his >e, solemn and sacred music is sung, and the mander, an impressive libation to the dead man's les, is drunk with mournful effect. 1 small university towns — and it must be re- ibered that there are twenty-two universities in nany — the students play a great part in the social Df the place. German ladies have often told me the balls they looked forward to with most jht as girls were those given by students, when " corps " would take rooms and pay for music, !, and lights. For supper, tickets are issued on . occasions, which the guests pay themselves. small German universities seem full of the ents in term time, especially in those places re people congregate for pleasure and not for c. Even in a town as big as Leipsic they are a good deal, filling the pavement, occupying restaurants, going in gangs to the play. But 5erlin the German student of tradition, the beer on, the duellist, the rollicking lad with his big dog, St. He is there, you are told, but if you keep to highway you never see him ; and, to tell the truth, rermany you miss him. He stands for youth and I 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 Universitdt 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 r OT long ago I heard a German professor say that I anyone who wanted to speak with authority it the German family must read Die Familie by H. Riehl. He said that, amongst other things, important work explained why men went to the ipe, because they were fond of home life ; and also t was the sphere of women. I thought it would ;seful to have both these points settled ; besides, jked several wise Germans about the book, and ■ all nodded their heads and said it was a good So I got it, and was surprised to find it came in 1854. I thought ideas about women had meed since then, even in Germany, though a nan friend had warned me just before my last not to expect much in this way. She made lovement with her lips as if she was blowing a Df thistledown from her. " Remember," she said, it is what you will be directly you get there . . . ling at all." But I had been to Germany so often I was prepared to be " nothing at all " for a time, not to mind it much. What I wanted to discover how far German women had arrived at being uething " in the eyes of their men. In my eyes ' had always been a good deal : admirable wives mothers, for instance, patient, capable, thrifty, and 6o 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 yoft 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 6i men of the nation in a measure nothing I could would. They are in extreme opposition to the 3 fermenting amongst modern women there, and strange fact that they are not regarded as quite Df date makes them interesting, 'err Riehl's theory, to put it in a nutshell, is that family is all-important, and the individual, if she woman, is of no importance at all. He does not ct to her being yoked to a plough, because then is working for the family, but he would forbid her, : could, to enter any profession that would make independent of the family. She is not to practise art, and if she " commences author " it is a sure that she is ugly, soured, and bitter. In any itry where they are allowed to rule, and even ny country where they distinguish themselves in and literature, civilisation as well as statecraft t be at a standstill. Queen Elizabeth and Maria resa were evidently awkward people for a man ig down this theory to encounter, so he goes out is way to say that they were not women at all, but in women's clothes. Moreover, he has no doubt the Salic law must ultimately prevail everywhere. L woman has no independent existence : he says IS taught from childhood to be subordinate to :rs ; she cannot go out by herself with propriety ; is not a complete creature till she finds a mate. unlucky women who never find one (more than ,000 in Germany) are not to make any kind ;areer for themselves, either humble or glorious, h one is to search carefully for relatives who give her a corner in their house, and allow her work for them. If no one wants her she may with other women and bring up poor children, would allow women some education. Far be it 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 wguld 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 asants, till they are old, when they can take to fortune- ling and witchcraft. Herr Riehl admits that the lot women when they are peasants is not a happy one. 2 does not make the admission because he thinks it much consequence, but because it illustrates his jument that the less " feminine " women are the less wer they exercise. He has no great fault to find th the peasant's household, where the wife is a beast burden in the field and a slave indoors, bears ildren in quick succession, is old before her time, and :rifices herself body and soul to the family. But points out that on a higher social plane, where )men are more unlike men, more distinctively ninine, the position they take is more honourable. ;t it is these same " superfeminine " women who are Dlishly claiming equality with men. Herr Riehl's views expressed in English seem a little hind the times, here and there more than a little utal. He speaks with sympathy of suttee, and he otes the Volga-Kalmucks with approval. This tribe, seems, " treat their wives with the most exquisite triarchal courtesy; but directly the wife neglects a usehold duty courtesy ceases (for the genius of the use is more important than the personal dignity of 3 wife), and the sinner is castigated (wird tuchtig rchgepeitscht). The whip used, the household ord and sceptre, is handed down from generation to neration as a sacred heirloom." I have translated is passage instead of alluding to it, because I thought was an occasion on which Herr Riehl should literally eak for himself. It is, however, fair to explain that modern men as ;11 as modern women come under his censure. All 2 tendencies and all the habits of modern life afflict n, and he lashes out at them without discrimination, HOME LIFE IN GERMANY with such an entire lack of prophetic insight that ive found him consoling. For this book was ished sixteen years before the Franco-Prussian War, 1 Germany, the world must admit, proved that it not decadent. Yet every page of it is a Jeremiad, xhortation to his countryfolk to stop short on the to ruin. He does not see that the whole nation )wly and patiently girding its loins for that mighty t ; he believes it is blind, weak, and flighty. If he lived in England, and a little later, he would linly have talked about the Smart Set, Foreign .nciers, and the Yellow Press. As he lived in nany fifty years ago, he scolds his countryfolk for g in fiats. He wants to know why a family cannot in one room instead of scattering itself in several, or a father who cannot endure the cry of children, man should never have been a father, says Herr il. He cannot approve of the dinner hour being off till two o'clock. Why not begin work at five dine at eleven in the good old German way? He ses the ruinous elaborate festivals that used to brate family events, and considers that the police I to destroy family life by fining people who in r opinion spend more than they can afford on a ding or a christening. He objects to artificial istmas trees, and points out that other nations set ee in the drawing-room, but that Germans have it ;he nursery, the innermost sanctum of family life, arrives at some curious conclusions when he dis- les the German's habit of turning the beer-house a sort of club that he calls his Kneipe. Other !S can drink, he says ; aber Moss die germanischen un kneipen — only the Germanic peoples can make nselves at home in an inn. What does the Stamm- ', the regular guest, ask but the ways of home? RIEHL ON WOMEN 65 same chair every night, the same corner, the same ss, the same wine ; and where there is a Stammtisck same companions. He sees that family life is re or less destroyed when the men of the household nd their leisure hours, and especially their evenings, in inn, but he says that the homelike surroundings the Kneipe prove the German's love of home. In t, he suggests that even the habitual drunkard is ;n a weak, amiable creature cut out for family life ; y, he has sought it at the public-house instead of his own hearth. Herr Riehl is, in fact, deeply concerned to see amongst countryfolk a gradual slackening of family ties, widespread selfish individualism amongst women, an lication of duty and authority amongst men. His ws about women sound outrageous to-day, chiefly :ause he wants to apply them to all women without tinction ; and also because they display a total want :onsideration for the welfare and the wishes of women mselves. But his position is interesting, because with ne modifications it is the position still taken by the jority of German men ; naturally, not by the most /^anced and intelligent, but by the average German m the Spree to the Danube. He thinks that woman s made for man, and that if she has board, lodging, i raiment, according to the means of her menfolk, she ) all she can possibly ask of life. When her menfolk : peasants, she must work in the fields ; when they ong to the middle or upper classes, her place is in the chen and the nursery. Unless he is exceptionally elligent he does not understand that this simple rule complicated by modern economic conditions, and by : enormous number of women thrown on their own ources. He would send them as Herr Riehl did, to : kitchens and nurseries of other people ; or he would HOME LIFE IN GERMANY up the problem in despair, as Herr Riehl did, ling with a sigh that modern humanitarianism Is the establishment of a lethal chamber for the fluous members of a weaker sex. le most modern ©erman women are in direct op- on to Herr Riehl, and it must be said that some of leaders are enthusiastic rather than sensible. They Irunk with the freedom they claim in a country ; women are not even allowed to attend a political !ng except with the express consent of the police, leir ravings against the tyranny of men they lose storical sense, just as an American does when he ibes a mediaeval crime as if it had been committed European with a twentieth-century conscience. charge men with keeping half humanity in a de- ng state of slavery, and attribute all the sins of sation to the enforced ignorance and helplessness )men. Their contempt for their masters is almost id the German language to express, eloquently as use it. They demand equality of education and rtunity, but they do not want to be men. Far be a desire from their minds. They mean to be some- ; much better. To what a pass have men brought 'orld, they ask ? How much better would manners morals and politics be in the hands of women ! ' repel with indignation the taunt that women have ght to govern the State because their bodies are veak to defend it. They point out with a gleam inse and justice that the mother of children does : the State in a supremely important way ; and for matter they are willing to take many State duties leir shoulders, and to train for them as arduously ■egularly as men train for the wretched business of g each other. They will not mate with those poor ;s — modern men — under the existing marriage RIEHL ON WOMEN 67 3. They refuse to be household beasts of burden a longer. Life, life to the dregs with all its joys all its responsibilities, is what they want, and love t comes their way. But not marriage. Young jfrieds they ask for, young lions. Here one be- lered reader rubbed her eyes ; for she had just heard jfried and the Gotterdammerung again, and some- 2S she reads in the Nibelungenlied ; and if ever a 1 won a woman with his club, by muscle seemingly, magic really, but anyhow by sheer bodily strength, not that man Siegfried ? and was not the woman nnhilde ? And what does the Siegfried of the Lied when his wife has failed to keep a guard on her 2;ue — "Man soil so Frauen Ziehen," sprach Siegfried, "der Degen, Das sie iippig Reden lassen unterwegen. Verbiet es deinem Weibe ; der meinen thu' ich's auch. Ich schame mich, wahrlich um solchen ubermilthigen Erauch." \.nd then, just as if he was one of those Volga- mucks admired by Herr Riehl, he beats poor emhilde black and blue. "Das hat mich bald gereuet," so sprach das edle Weib; " Auch hat er so zerblauet deswegen meinen Leib 1 Dass ich es je geredet, beschwerte ihm den Muth : Das hat gar wohl gerochen der Degen tapfer und gut." iTet here is the last development in women, the nan who refuses as an outrage both the theory of ;culine superiority and the fact so evident in Germany masculine domination, here is the self-constituted erwoman calling as if she was Eve to the primaeval ie. It may be perverse of me, but my imagination ises 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 its consider marriage the proper career for a m, and with logical good sense set themselves the day of a girl's birth to provide a dowry for When she is of a marriageable age they provide husband. They will make great sacrifices to lish a daughter in prosperity, and they leave ng to chance. We leave everything to chance, :he idea of marriage made by bargain and without offends us. Such marriages are often enough 5 in England, but they are never admitted. Some of sentiment or of personal respect is considered it. But on the whole in this country a girl shifts lerself. If she marries, well and good ; if she ins single, well and good too, provided she can her living or has means. When she has neither IS nor craft and fails to marry, she is one of the tragic figures in our confused social hierarchy, ult to help, superfluous. She sets her hand to ind that, but she has no grip on life. To think of 3 to invoke the very image of failure and incom- ice. She flocks into every opening, blocking and issing it ; as a " help " she becomes a byword, for las grown up without learning to help herself or 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^gdes 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 Stifte. The old Stift 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 Stifte 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 Stifte 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 Stifte 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 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY er use; there are others where residence is corn- Dry. Some are only open to descendants of the ders ; some sell vacancies. A woman may have ait year after year for a chance of getting in ; or may belong to onfe that will admit her at a certain In many there is a presiding lady, the Domina Abbess ; and when the present Emperor visited a -known Stift lately he gave the Abbess a shepherd's k with which to rule her flock. Some are just sets ooms with certain privileges of light and firing :hed. Their constitution varies greatly, according le class provided for and the means available. But cannot be much amongst Germans without meeting len who have been educated, endowed, helped in ness, or supported in old age by one of these nisations. You come across girls of gentle birth with no means who have been brought up in a t, or you hear of well-to-do girls whose parents ; paid high for their schooling in one. You know elderly unmarried daughter of an official living on pension, and you find that though she has never I taught to earn her bread she looks forward to old with serenity, because when she was a child her :ions bought her into a Stift that will give her at age of fifty free quarters, fire, light, and an income irhich, with her habits of thrift, she can live com- ibly. Another woman engaged in private teaching a good deal battered by the struggle for life, comes ou some day more radiant than you have ever seen and you find that influential friends have put her before a Stift, and that it has granted her two ming rooms with free fire and light. I heard of a : the other day who, after many years of faithful ice, left her employers to spend her old age in a t. No social stigma attaches to the women living THE OLD AND THE NEW 71 le, and they are as free, in some cases as well placed well born, as the English women living at Hampton ■t. Some friction and some gossip is presumably itable wherever women herd together in an unnatural 5gation from men and children. But at any rate jcerman Stift saves many a woman from the tragic jgle with old age and poverty to which the penniless pable spinster is condemned in our country. It not be a paradise, but it is a haven. As I said at beginning, the Frenchman dowers and marries his the German buys her a refuge, the Englishman ;s her to fate. In the whole, the German believes that the woman's ince is within the limits of the household. He ts her to be a home-maker, and in Germany what " wants her to be still fixes the standard. But as census reveals the existence of large numbers of le women, and as " he " often has a thoughtful and ;volent mind, more and more is done there every to prepare those women who must earn their living ;arn it capably. It has been understood for some ; past that Herr Riehl's plan of finding a family roof jvery woman without one presents difficulties where s are 400,000 odd women to provide for in this One of the people who first saw this clearly, and )orted every sensible undertaking that came to assistance of women, was the Empress Frederick ; one of the institutions that she encouraged and jmed from the beginning was the Lette- Verein in in. 'he Lette-Verein, named after its originator. Dr. A. ;e, was founded, says its prospectus, to further the ;ation of women and to increase the efficiency of len dependent on themselves for support. What ctually does is to train for housekeeping and office 2 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY rork, and for some trades. Its interest lies in the rdered and thoughtful provision it makes both for the raman who means to devote herself body and soul to he family ; and for the woman who prefers, or who is Iriven, to stand in the market-place and compete with tien. The Lette-Verein does not train servants or dmit servants to its classes. It occupies a large block if buildings in the west of Berlin, for its various schools ,nd hostels require a great deal of room. Students irho live in the city can attend daily classes ; but those irho come from a distance can have board and residence or ;£'i a week or less. Once a week strangers are .Uowed to see the Lette-Haus at work, and when I rent there we were taken first to the kitchens, where he future housewives of Germany were learning to :ook. The stoves were the sensible low closed-in ones ised on the continent, and the vessels were either arthenware or metal, kept brightly polished both nside and out. The students were preparing and- looking various dishes, but the one that interested me iras the Leipziger Allerlei, because I compared it with he " herbage " an English plain cook throws into water md sends up half drained, half cold, and often enough lalf clean. I could not stop to count the vegetables equired for Leipziger Allerlei, but there seemed to be it least six varieties, all cooked separately, and after- irards combined with a properly made sauce. The englishman may say that he prefers his half-cooked ;abbage, and the English woman, if she is a plain cook, sfill certainly say that the cabbage gives her as much rouble as she means to take; but the German woman mows that when she marries her husband will want ^^eipziger Allerlei, so she goes to the Lette-Haus and earns how to make it. Even the young doctors of Jerlin 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 ;£'25 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 Stutze. 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 4 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY ours at the wash-tub could be too great a strain on a alf-developed girl, and it is a question for medical dsdom to decide. The cooking and ironing looked ot work, but these young German girls were cheerfully nd thoroughly learning how to do them, and whether hey marry or stay single their knowledge of these arts all be of inestimable use in later years. I heard of n able-bodied Englishwoman the other day who took her bed in tears because her maids left her suddenly. Ihe could not have roasted a leg of mutton or made he plainest pudding. This is the school of the future, aid our enthusiastic guide when we went to see the children " at work at the Lette - Haus ; and I, emembering my helpless Englishwoman, agreed with ler. The children's afternoons are mostly given to leedlework, and they are instructed in the prospectus lot to bring new clothes with them, because it is lesired that they should learn how to mend old ones leatly and correctly. They are taught to darn and )atch so finely that the repair cannot easily be liscovered ; they make sets of body linen for themselves, hree finely sewn men's linen shirts, a gown for work- lays, and some elaborate blouses. In another part of he Lette-Haus, where students were being trained as ixpert embroiderers and dressmakers, we were shown )ieces of flowered brocade into which patches had been o skilfully inserted that you could only find them by lolding them up to the light. In the bookbinding lepartment there were amateur and professional tudents. The professionals apprentice themselves for hree years, and from the first receive a small weekly i^age. The length of their apprenticeship is determined >y the length of time prescribed for men, and not by /hat is necessary for their training. I asked if they asily 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 iinds 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 6 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY he members with comfortably furnished rooms and :ell cooked meals at low prices. A member of this lub can dine for ninepence, and have a hot dish from Durpence to sevenpence. She has access to a library if 1300 volumes, "to the leading papers and reviews, ,nd to magazines in four languages. She can entertain ramen at the club, but not men ; though she can meet Qen there at Certain hours of the day. Social gather- ngs of various kinds are arranged to meet the various leeds and ages of the members ; and one night a week our or five card-tables are set out, so that the older nembers can have a quiet game of skat or whist. Ve wonder what Herr Riehl would say if he could ee them. Another German Ladies' Club in Berlin is the Deutscher Frauenklub, and it is nicknamed the ilillionaire's Club because the subscription is twenty- ive shillings. It is a rather smarter club than the ither, and has a charming set of rooms. There are .bout 450 members. The Third Club is a branch of he London Lyceum, and it has aroused great interest ,nd attention in Berlin, not only because it is on a more aagnificent scale than the other clubs, but because of he brave effort it makes to unite the women of all lations and help them. Most of the women distin- juished in art and literature have joined it. I began this chapter by saying something of the ^tift, the refuge for unmarried women that Germany stablished in the Middle Ages and still preserves. I nd it with the Lyceum Club, that latest manifestation if a modern woman's desire to help her own sex. The haracter of these institutions and their history are loth significant. In other days men helped,, women ; 1 these days women try to help themselves. The "\tift 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 3 Germany of late, Malvida von Meysenbug, the daughter of a highly placed official at a small German 'ourt, describes her confirmation day and the long leriod of preparation and the spiritual struggle that ireceded it. " During a whole year my sister and I went twice a /eek to the pastor's house to be instructed in the iogma of the Protestant Church," she says. ..." The eremony was to be on Sunday. The Friday before /e had our last lesson. Our teacher was deeply noved ; with tears in his eyes he spoke to us of the loliness and importance of the act we were about to )erform. . . . According to the German custom imongst girls of the better classes, we put on black ilk dresses for the first time for our confirmation, and his ceremonial attire calmed me and did me good. )ur maid took special pains with our toilet, as if we vere going to a worldly entertainment, and chattered nore than usual. It jarred on me, but it helped to listract my thoughts. When it was time to start I aid Good-bye to my mother with deep emotion, and Lsked her to forgive me my faults. My sister and I vere 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 o HOME LIFE IN GERMANY fter the religious ceremony, to congratulate the parents nd the youngest member of their church. There is an ntertainment of coffee, chocolate, and cakes ; and a few ays later both boys and girls return these visits of ongratulation in the company of their parents. Some ears ago, when a girl had been confirmed, she was onsidered officially grown up and marriageable, and ntered straight away into the gaieties that are sup- losed to lead to marriage. But the modern tendency n Germany is to prolong girlhood, and the wife of ixteen is as rare there amongst the educated classes ,s it is here. Amongst the Jews in Germany marriages are still .rranged for the young people by their elders; often, is in France, through the intervention of friends, but ilso by the business-like office of the marriage broker, t need hardly be said, perhaps, that the refined and inlightened Jews refuse to marry in this way. They nsist on choosing their own mate, and even on over- ooking some disparity of fortune. Unorthodox Jews narry Christian women, and the Jewish heiress constantly lilies herself and her money with a title or a uniform, [n the latter case, however, the nuptials are just as 3usiness-like as if the Schadchan had arranged them ind received his commission. The Graf or the Major jets the gold he lacks, and the rich Jewess gets social Drestige or the nearest approach to it possible in a lew-baiting land. An ardent anti-Semite told me :hat these mixed marriages were not fertile, and that if Dnly everyone of Jewish blood would marry a Christian, :he country would in course of time be cleared of a race that, she solemnly assured me, is as great a curse to it, ind as inferior as the negro in America. But as she ivas an anti-Semite with a sense of humour she admitted :hat 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 12 HOME LIITE IN GERMANY rhere young people mate as they please and where a lan expects to support his wife entirely ; while the pectacle, quite common here, of girls with a good deal if money remaining single from various reasons, some- imes actually from want of opportunity to marry, this very-day occurrence amongst the English better lasses is unknown on the continent. In her powerful lovel Aus guter Familie, Gabrielle Reuter describes he life of a German girl whose parents cannot give ler a dowry, and who is doomed in consequence to old naidhood and to all the disappointments, restrictions, nd humiliations of unsought women. While women Dok to marriage and nothing else for happiness, there lust be such lives in every monogamous country, inhere they outnumber the men; but in England a I'oman's marriage is much more a matter of chance .nd charm than of money. If she is poor and misses ler chance she is worse off than the German, for she las no Stift provided for her ; but if she is attractive he is just as likely to marry without a fortune as with me. Those German women who consider their ideas progressive '' have taken up a new cry of late, a cry ibout every woman's " right " to motherhood ; but they lo not seem to have found a satisfactory way of ecuring this right to the 400,000 women who out- lumber the men. One learned professor wrote a )amphlet advocating polygamy, but his proposal did lot have the success he no doubt felt it deserved. The women who discuss these questions, in magazines hey edit and mostly write themselves, said that his irguments were all conducted from the man's point )f view, and were most reprehensible. Their own chief ;im at present is to protect the mothers of illegitimate hildren, and this seems a natural and proper thing for he 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 xioes 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 !4 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY if these people were the outcome of long repression, ,nd would wear out in time. The other thought the aovement would go on and grow ; which was as much .s to say that she thought the old morals were dead. Jndoubtedly th^ are dead in some sets in Germany o-day. You hear of girls of good family who have .sserted their " right to motherhood " without marriage ; ,nd you hear of other girls who refuse to marry because hey will not make vows or accept conditions they con- ider humiliating. These views do not attract large lumbers ; probably never will. But they are sufficiently i^idespread to express themselves in many modern issays, novels, and pamphlets, and even to support everal magazines. The women holding them are of 'arious types and quality, and are by no manner of neans agreed with each other; while those women irho are working steadily and discreetly for the progress if their sex condemn the extreme party, and consider hem a check on all real advancement. The German girl, then, is not always the simple xeature tradition paints her. At any rate she reads lovels and sees plays that would have been forbidden o her mother. Nevertheless she is as a rule just as lappy as a girl should be when the man of her dreams Lsks her to marry him. In other days a proposal of narriage was a ceremonial in Germany. A man had put on evening dress for the occasion, and carry a )ouquet with him. " Oh yes," said a German friend of nine, " this is still done sometimes. A little while ago 1 cousin of mine in Mainz was seen coming home in ivening dress by broad daylight carrying his bouquet. . The poor fellow had been refused." But in these axer times a man is spared such an ordeal. It is aore 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. 16 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY ngenieur Julius Prinz Dresden-Hamburg" is con- idered sufficient. But the printed intimations sent ound on gilt-edged paper or cardboard to the friends if the contracting parties are more communicative. )n one side the parents have the honour to announce he engagement of their daughter Anna to Mr. So-and- >o, and on the other side Mr. So-and-So announces his ngagement to Miss Anna. Here is a reproduction of uch a form, with nothing altered except the actual lames and addresses. On the left-hand side of the louble sheet of cartridge paper the parents of the 3raut have their say — " Die Verlobung ihrer Tochter Pauline mit Herm leferendar Dr. jur. Heinrich Schmidt in Berlin beehren ich 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 peaks for himself — "Meine Verlobung mit Fraulein Pauline Brand, Tochter des Konigl. Gymnasialdirektors Herrn Geh. iegierungsrat Dr. Eugen Brand und seiner Frau Ge- lahlin Helene, geb. Engel, in Stuttgart, beehre ich nich ergebenst anzuzeigen. Dr. jur. Heinrich Schmidt Referendar Berlin, itn /uni 1906 Kurfiirstendamm 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 hride 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 ;8 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY nd friends on either side. When you receive a German Irautpaar they should be the guests of honour, and if ■ou can hang garlands near them so much the better, fou must certainly present the Braut with a bouquet at ome stage of the proceedings, and you will give pleasure F you can manufacture one or two mottoes in green tuff and put them in conspicuous places. For instance, knew of a girl who got engaged away from home. Do you suppose that she was allowed to return to a lare and speechless front door as her English cousin irould ? Nothing of the kind. The whole family had et to work to twine laurel wreaths and garlands in her lonour, and she was received with Wilkommen du "luckseliges Kind done in ivy leaves by her grand- nother. It was considered very riihrend and innig. \t some time during the engagement the betrothed ouple are sure to get photographed together, and inyone who possesses a German family album will )ear me out that the lady is nearly always standing, i^hile her bearded lover is sitting down. When they re both standing they are arm in arm or hand in hand. remember a collection possessing two photographs of L married daughter with her husband. One had been aken just before the wedding in the orthodox pose ; he n an easy chair and she standing meekly by his side : he other represented them a year after marriage, when ieaven had sent them twins. They were both standing hen, and they each had a baby in a Steckkissen in heir arms. If the bridegroom is not living in the same town irith his bride her life is supposed to run rather quietly n his absence. She is not expected to dance with ither men, for instance ; but rather to spend her time n embroidering his monogram on every conceivable ibject he might use : on tobacco pouches, or slippers, 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 90 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, decollet^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 FreischUtz — "Wir winden dir den Jungfemkranz 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 del 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 Freischutz appeared. CHAPTER X MARRIAGES " T T E was a pompous, stiff-jointed man," said my i. 1 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. 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 i^ligious 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 Verband, 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 dre^ed 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 Bohmer 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 ist doch der Onkel hoch begluckt Das Tantchen heute der 'Brautkranz' schmiickt" went with " myrtle green." "Liebe Gaste, mit Genuss, WoUet alle Euch erheben — Hoch das Biautpaar — 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'='' Bemaise Pommes Naturelles Selle de Chcvreuil i la Chipolata Ris de Veau en demi Deuil Poularde Salade & Compote Asperges en Branches S"^" Mousseline Glace Napolitaine Patisserie Fruits & Dessert Fromage Scharzberger Mousseux igooer Caseler iSgeer St. Emilion iSgoer Schloss Johannisberg Moet et Chandon White Star lOO 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 loi condemned. At the same time, I have heard Germans quote the saying — " Geschiedene Leute sckeiden 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 ih 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 I02 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY 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 wido\s{ 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 Thuringen for 5 s. 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 £%o, 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 I04 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 ;^8o 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 £^o, 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 Herrlick ! 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 troublesonne 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 ;£^500 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 £\^ on an income oi £i,oo. 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 a 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 finding 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-Coufe, but changes are a nuisance on a journey. Besides, you know that a Damen-Coupi 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 ! ja ! 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 profilej 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 iii 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 tortured to-day." " Have you ? But you always say you don't mind smoke." " In reason. Seven cigars and one woman are not 112 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 " "TTRENCHWOMEN are the best housewives in JL 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 Kiiken mit Spargel. What does an Englishwoman know of such 8 114 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 LShring. 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 3l 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 middling 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 ii6 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 Bestimmnng, Denn durch Dienen allein gelangt sie endlich zum Herrschen Zu der verdienten Gewalt, die doch ihr im Hause gehoret, Dienet die Schwester dam 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 Tes uns vers I'audace, I'esprit d'entreprise et de resistance, le caractere guerrier, imp^rieux et ii8 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY rude ; chez les autres vers la douceur, 1' abnegation, la patience, I'affection in^puisable; chose inconnue dans les pays lointains, surtout en France, la femme ici se donne sans se reprendre et met sa gloire et son devoir k obeir, ci pardonnftr, k adorer, sans souhaiter ni pre- tendre autre chose que se fondre et s'absorber chaque jour davantage en celui qu'elle a volontairement et pour toujours choisi, C'est cet instinct, un antique instinct Germanique, que ces grands peintres de I'instinct mettent tous ici en lumi^re ! . . . L'^me dans cette race, est cl la fois primitive et serieuse. La candeur chez les femmes y subsiste plus longtemps qu'ailleurs. EUes perdent moins vite le respect, elles pesent moins vite les valeurs et les caract^res : elles sont moins promptes cl deviner le mal et a mesurer leurs maris. . . . Elles n'ont pas la nettet^, la hardiesse d'id^es, I'assurance de conduite, la pr^cocit^ qui chez nous en six mois font d'une jeune fille une femme d'intrigue et une reine de salon. La vie enferm^e et I'ob^issance leur sont plus faciles. Plus pliantes et plus s^dentaires elles sont en m^me temps plus concentr^es, plus intdrieures, plus dispos^es k suivre des yeux le noble r^ve qu'on nomme le 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 caract^re dans toute la litt^rature anglaise et allemande," he says in a footnote. " Le plus grand des observateurs, Stendhal tout imprdgn^ des moeurs et des id^es Italiennes et frangaises, est stup^fait k cette vue. II ne comprend rien k cette esp^ce de ddvouement, ' k cette servitude, que les maris Anglais, sous le nom de devoir, ont eu I'esprit d'im- poser a leurs femmes.' Ce sont ' des 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 I20 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 nalvet^. 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 Muller ! " "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 {Cojdinued) 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 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 12 5 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 correct 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 I30 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 iiat 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 inefiticient 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 dusf.' " 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 Ticchtigkeit 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 Sprilche 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 Kiiche so das Haus, Reinlich drinnen, reinlich draus" is a nice one ; and so is "Trautes Heim Gliick 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 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 1"^HE first thing that English people notice about 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 decolletde, 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. Some 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 ; I40 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 , . . Quatsck . . ." 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 Tdgliche 142 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY Brot (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 huBger 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 . Anna Schmidt. Aus . . Rheinbeck. Alt . Geb. 20 Juni 1885. Statur . Schlank. Augen . , . Grau. Nase 1 Mund/ • • Gewohnlich. Haare , . . . Dunkelblond. Besondere Merkmale . Official stamp. (Official signature of Amisvorsteher.) 144 HOME LIFE IN GERMANY Then came the record of her previous situations ; « •S-y Z Bi H ■^ K D EeI Q B Bi g « 1 ** O :0 » ■«< c «f z ts a Gesehen Place and dat official Stan signature) eglaubigu Bemerkun Polizei-Be Gesehe Place and da offiicial sta signature) n 1 1 Grund des Dienst- AUSTRITTS UND DiENSTABSCHIEDS — Zeugniss Wird entlassen weil ihr Benehmen mir nicht mehr passt. Sonst fleissig und ehrlich -.^l s. g| «SS N g as * Tag Die aust Den Jan 1902 gS2« Tag des Dienst- antkitts -^ 2ten bruar 02 M ^ |S^ Q Pi H < S HABE ANG MEN ^1 ci Z H S Sh s z P Q R §g£ to i_S« -□