SHOPS AND MARKETS
Berlin people compare their Wertheim with the Bon Marché at Paris, or
with Whiteley's in London; only always adding that Wertheim is
superior to any emporium in France or England. So it really is in one
way. A great artist designed it, and the outside of the building is
plain and stately, a most refreshing contrast to most Berlin
architecture. On the ground floor there is a high spacious hall that
is splendid when it is lighted up at night, and a staircase leads up
and down from here to the various departments, all decorated soberly
and pleasantly, mostly with wood. You can buy almost anything you want
at Wertheim's, from the furniture of your house to a threepenny pair
of cotton mittens with a thumb and no fingers. You can see tons of the
most hideous rubbish there, and you can find a corner reserved for
original work, done by two or three artists whose names are well known
in Germany. For instance, Wertheim exhibits the very clever curious
"applications" done by Frau Katy Münchhausen, groups of monkeys,
storks, cocks and hens, and other animals, drawn with immense spirit
and life on cloth, cut out and then _machined_ on a background of
another colour. The machining has a bad sound, I admit, but for all
that the "applications" are enchanting. Wertheim, too, shows some
good furniture; he sells theatre tickets, books, fruit, groceries,
Liberty cushions, embroideries, soaps, perfumes, toys, ironmongery,
china, glass, as well as everything that can be called drapery. He has
a tea-room as well as a large general refreshment-room, where you can
get ices, iced coffee, beer, all kinds of sandwiches, and the various
_Torten_ Germans make so very much better than other people. In this
room no money is wasted on waiters or waitresses, and no one expects
to be tipped. You fetch what you want from a long bar running along
two sides of the room, and divided into short stretches, each selling
its own stuff; you pay at the counter, and you carry your ice or your
cake to any little marble-topped table you choose. The advantage of
the plan is that you do not have to wait till you catch the eye of a
waitress determined not to look your way: the disadvantage is that you
have to perform the difficult feat of carrying a full cup or a full
glass through a crowd. Whatever you buy at the counter is sure to be
good, but if all you could get was a Mugby Junction bun you would have
to eat it after the exhausting process of buying a yard of ribbon or a
few picture postcards at Wertheim's.
To begin with, there are no chairs. You cannot sit down. On a hot
summer morning, when you have perhaps been to the market already, you
go to the Leipziger Strasse for theatre tickets, a pair of gloves, and
two or three small odds and ends. On the ground floor you see gloves,
innumerable boxes of them besieged by a pushing, determined crowd of
women. The shop ladies in any coloured blouses look hot and weary, but
try to serve six customers at once. When you have chosen what you
want, and know exactly how sharp the elbows to left and right of you
are, you see your lady walk off with your most pushful neighbour and
the pair of three-penny gloves she has after much argument agreed to
buy; for at Wertheim's you cannot depart with so much as a halfpenny
postcard till it has passed through three pairs of hands besides your
own. First the shop lady must deposit it with a bill at the cashier's
desk. Then, when the cashier can attend to you, you pay for it. Then
you may wait any time until the third person concerned will do it up
in paper and string. This last proceeding is often so interminably
delayed that if you were not in Germany you would snatch at what you
have paid for and make off. But the _Polizei_ alone knows what would
happen if you ran your head against the established pedantry of things
in the city of the Spree. You would probably find yourself in prison
for _Beamtenbeleidigung_ or _lèse majesté_. "The Emperor is a fool,"
said some disloyal subject in a public place. "To prison with him,"
screamed every horror-struck official. "Off with his head!" "But I
meant the Emperor of China," protested the sinner. "That's
impossible," said the officials in chorus. "Anyone who says the
Emperor is a fool means our Emperor." And an official spirit seems to
encroach on the business one, and drill its very customers while it
anxiously serves them. For instance, the arrangements for sending what
you buy are most tiresome and difficult to understand at Wertheim's.
His carts patrol the streets, and your German friends assure you that
he sends anything. You find that if you shop with a country card the
things entered on it will arrive; but if you buy a bulky toy or some
heavy books and pay for them in their departments, you meet with fuss
and refusal when you ask as a matter of course to have them sent. It
can be done if your goods have cost enough, but not if you have only
spent two or three shillings. It is the fashion in England just now
for every man who writes about Germans to say that they are immensely
ahead of us in business matters. I cannot judge of them in their
factories and warehouses, but I am sure they are behind us in their
shops. A woman cannot live three hundred miles from Berlin and get
everything she wants from Wertheim delivered by return and carriage
free. Nor will he supply her with an immense illustrated catalogue and
a book of order forms addressed to his firm, so that the trouble of
shopping from a distance is reduced to a minimum. In England you can
do your London shopping as easily, promptly, and cheaply from a Scotch
or a Cornish village as you can from a Surrey suburb.
In most German towns you still find the shops classified on the old
lines. You go to one for drapery, and to another for linen, and to
another for small wares, and to yet another for ribbons. There are
sausage shops and chocolate shops, and in Berlin there are shops for
the celebrated Berlin _Baumkuchen_. There are a great many cellar
shops all over Germany, and these are mostly restaurants, laundries,
and greengrocers. The drinking scene in _Faust_ when Mephisto made
wine flow from the table takes place in Auerbach's Keller, a cellar
restaurant still in existence in Leipzig. The lower class of cellar
takes the place in Germany of our slums, and the worst of them are
regular thieves' kitchens known to the police. There is an admirable
description of life in a cellar shop in Klara Viebig's _Das Tägliche
Brot_. The woman who keeps it has a greengrocery business and a
registry office for servants, and as such people go is respectable;
but I recommend the book to my countrymen who go to Berlin as
officials or journalists for ten days, are taken over various highly
polished public institutions, and come back to tell us that the
Germans are every man jack of them clean, prosperous, well mannered,
and healthy. It is true that German municipal government is striving
rather splendidly to bring this state of things about, but they have
plenty of work before them still. These cellar shops, for instance,
are more fit for mushroom growing than for human nurseries, and yet
the picture in the novel of the family struggling with darkness and
disease there can still be verified in most of the old streets of
Germany.
When our English journalists write column after column about the
dangerous explosive energy and restlessness of modern Germany, I feel
sure that they must be right, and yet I wish they could have come
shopping with me a year or two ago in a small Black Forest town. One
of us wanted a watch key and the other a piece of tape, and we set off
light-heartedly to buy them, for we knew that there was a draper and a
watchmaker in the main street. We knew, too, that in South Germany
everyone is first dining and then asleep between twelve and two, so we
waited till after two and then went to the watchmaker's. There was no
shop window, and when, after ringing two or three times, we were let
in we found there was no shop. We sat down in a big cool sitting-room,
beautifully clean and tidy. The watchmaker's wife appeared in due
course, looked at us with friendly interest, asked us where we came
from, and how long we meant to stay, wondered if we knew her cousin
Johannes Müller, a hairdresser in Islington, discussed the relative
merits of emigration to England and America, offered us some cherries
from a basketful on the table, and at last admitted unwillingly that
her husband was not at home, and that she herself knew not whether he
had watch keys. So we set off to buy our tape, and again found a
private room, an amiable family, but no one who felt able to sell
anything. It seemed an odd way of doing business we said to our
landlord, but he saw nothing odd in it. Most people were busy with
their hay, he explained. Towards the end of a week we caught our
watchmaker, and obtained a key, but he would not let us pay for it. He
said it was one of an old collection, and of no use to him. The
etiquette of shopping in Germany seems to us rather topsy-turvy at
first. In a small shop the proprietor is as likely as not to conduct
business with a cigar in his mouth, even if you are a lady, but if you
are a man he will think you a boor if you omit to remove your hat as
you cross his threshold. Whether you are a man, woman, or child, you
will wish him good-morning or good-evening before you ask for what you
want, and he will answer you before he asks what your commands are. If
you are a woman, about as ignorant as most women, and with a humble
mind, you will probably have no fixed opinion about the question of
free or fair trade. You may even, if you are very humble, recognise
that it is not quite the simple question Dick, Tom, and Harry think it
is. But you will know for certain that when you want ribbons for a hat
you had better buy them in Kensington and not in Frankfurt, and that
though there are plenty of cheap materials in Germany, the same
quality would be cheaper still in London. Everything to do with
women's clothing is dearer there than here. So is stationery, so are
groceries, so are the better class of fancy goods. But the Germans,
say the Fair Traders, are a prosperous nation, and it is because their
manufactures are protected. This may be so. I can only look at various
quite small unimportant trifles, such as ribbons, for instance, or
pewter vases or blotting-paper or peppermint drops. I know that a
German woman either wears a common ribbon on her hat, or pays twice
as much as I do for a good one; she is content with one pewter vase
where your English suburban drawing-room packs twenty into one corner,
with twenty silver frames and vases near them. A few years ago the one
thing German blotting-paper refused to do was to absorb ink, and it
was so dear that in all small country inns and in old-fashioned
offices you were expected to use sand instead. The sand was kept
beside the ink in a vessel that had a top like a pepper pot; and it
was more amusing than blotting-paper, but not as efficacious. As for
the peppermint drops, they used to be a regular export from families
living in London to families living in Germany. They were probably
needed after having goose and chestnuts for dinner, and ours were
twice as large as the German ones and about six times as strong, so no
doubt they were like our blotting-paper, and performed what they
engaged to perform more thoroughly.
But shops of any kind are dull compared with an open market held in
one of the many ancient market places of Germany. Photographs of
Freiburg give a bird's-eye view of the town with the minster rising
from the midst of its red roofs; but there is just a peep at the
market which is being held at the foot of the minster. On the side
hidden by the towering cathedral there are some of the oldest houses
in Freiburg. It is a large crowded market on certain days of the week,
and full of colour and movement. The peasants who come to it from the
neighbouring valleys wear bright-coloured skirts and headgear, and in
that part of Germany fruit is plentiful, so that all through the
summer and autumn the market carts and barrows are heaped with
cherries, wild strawberries, plums, apricots, peaches, and grapes in
their season. The market place itself, and even the steps of the
minster and of the surrounding houses, are crowded with the peasants
and their produce, and with the leisurely servants and housewives
bargaining for the day's supplies. From a view of the market place at
Cottbus in Brandenburg you may get a better idea of the people at a
German market; the servants with their umbrellas, their big baskets,
their baggy blouses and no hats, the middle class housewife with a hat
or a bonnet, and a huge basket on her arm, a nursemaid in peasant
costume stooping over her perambulator, other peasants in costume at
the stalls, and two of the farm carts that are in some districts yoked
oftener with oxen than with horses. There is naturally great variety
in the size and character of markets, according to the needs they
supply. In Hamburg the old names show you that there were separate
markets for separate trades, so that you went to the Schweinemarkt
when you wanted pigs, and to some other part of the city when you
wanted flowers and fruit. In Berlin there are twelve covered markets
besides the open ones, and they are all as admirably clean, tidy, and
unpoetical as everything else is in that spick and span, swept and
garnished Philistine city. The green gooseberries there are marked
"unripe fruit" by order of the police, so that no one should think
they were ripe and eat them uncooked; and you can buy rhubarb
nowadays, a vegetable the modern Berliner eats without shuddering. But
in a Berlin market you buy what you need as quickly as you can and
come away. There is nothing to tempt you, nothing picturesque, nothing
German, if German brings to your mind a queer mixture of poetry and
music, gabled, tumbledown houses, storks' nests, toys, marvellous
cakes and sweets and the kindliest of people. If you are so modern
that German means nothing to you but drill and hustle, the roar of
factories and the pride of monster municipal ventures, then you may
see the markets of Berlin and rest content with them. They will show
you what you already know of this day's Germany. But my household
treasures gathered here and there in German markets did not have one
added to their number in Berlin.
"That!" said a German friend when I showed her a yellow pitcher dabbed
with colour, and having a spout, a handle, and a lid,--"that! I would
not have it in my kitchen."
It certainly only cost the third of a penny, but it lived with honour
in my drawing-room till it shared the fate of all clay, and came in
two in somebody's hands. The blue and grey bellied bottle, one of
those in which the Thuringian peasants carry beer to the field, cost
three halfpence, but the butter-dish with a lid of the same ware only
cost a halfpenny. There is always an immense heap of this rough grey
and blue pottery in a South German market, and it is much prettier
than the more ornate Coblenz ware we import and sell at high prices.
So is the deep red earthenware glazed inside and rough outside and
splashed with colours. You find plenty of it at the Leipziger Messe,
that historical fair that used to be as important to Western Europe as
Nijni Novgorod is to Russia and the East. To judge from modern German
trade circulars, it is still of considerable importance, and the
buildings in which merchants of all countries display their wares have
recently been renovated and enlarged. Out of doors the various
market-places are covered with little stalls selling cheap clothing,
cheap toys, jewellery, sweets, and gingerbread; all the heterogeneous
rubbish you have seen a thousand times at German fairs, and never
tire of seeing if a fair delights you.
But better than the Leipziger Messe, better even than a summer market
at Freiburg or at Heidelburg, is a Christmas market in any one of the
old German cities in the hill country, when the streets and the open
places are covered with crisp clean snow, and the mountains are white
with it, and the moon shines on the ancient houses, and the tinkle of
sledge bells reaches you when you escape from the din of the market,
and look down at the bustle of it from some silent place, a high
window perhaps, or the high empty steps leading into the cathedral.
The air is cold and still, and heavy with the scent of the Christmas
trees brought from the forest for the pleasure of the children. Day by
day you see the rows of them growing thinner, and if you go to the
market on Christmas Eve itself you will find only a few trees left out
in the cold. The market is empty, the peasants are harnessing their
horses or their oxen, the women are packing up their unsold goods. In
every home in the city one of the trees that scented the open air a
week ago is shining now with lights and little gilded nuts and apples,
and is helping to make that Christmas smell, all compact of the pine
forest, wax candles, cakes, and painted toys, you must associate so
long as you live with Christmas in Germany.