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 christening 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 immoderate 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 modern, and have succeeded the swaddling
clothes still used in some parts of Germany. They are bandages
wrapping the child round like a mummy, and imprisoning its arms as
well as its legs. A German doctor told me that as these _Wickelkinder_
had never known freedom 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 anæmia, 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 _Steckkissen_,
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 objection 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 the family
doctor. He keeps his eye on an inexperienced 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 _Kinderstube_, 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 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
crêches, 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
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 beloved of children solemnly pursue each other;
grotesque wooden manikins painted in motley; mysterious landscapes
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
mechanical 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 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 vandalism; 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 Fröbel Haus_, the
great model Kindergarten 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 10
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 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. You may frequently see 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 obedience. _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 Englishwoman 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 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 overflow 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 them, 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
training 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.