HOSPITALITY
If a German cannot afford to ask you to dinner he asks you to supper,
and makes his supper inviting. At least, he does if he is sensible,
and if he lives where an inexpensive form of entertainment is in
vogue. But even in Germany people are not sensible everywhere. The
headmaster of a school in a small East Prussian town told me that his
colleagues, the higher officials and other persons of local
importance, felt bound to entertain their friends at least once a
year, and that their way was to invite everyone together to a dinner
given at the chief hotel in the town; and that to do this a family
would stint itself for months beforehand. He spoke with knowledge, so
I record what he said; but I have never been amongst Germans who were
hospitable in this painful way. Hotels are used for large
entertainments, just as they are in England, but most people receive
their friends in their homes, and only hire servants for some special
function, like a wedding or a public dinner.
The form of hospitality most popular in England now, the visit of two
or three days' duration, is hardly known in Germany, and I believe
that they have not begun yet to supply their guests with small cakes
of soap labelled "Visitors," and meant to last for a week-end but not
longer. In towns no one dreams of having a constant succession of
staying guests, and either in town or country when a German family
expects a guest at all it is more often than not for the whole summer
or winter. You do not find a German girl arranging, as her English
cousin will, for a round of visits, fitting in dates, writing here and
there to know if people can take her in, and by the same post
answering those who are planning a pilgrimage for themselves and wish
to be taken. A visit in Germany is not the flighty affair it is with
us.
"This winter," says your friend, "my niece from Posen will be with
us," and presently the niece arrives and stays about three months.
There is rarely more than one spare room on a flat, and that is often
a room not easily spared. In country houses there are rows of rooms,
but they are not filled by an everlasting procession of guests in the
English way. When you stay in a country house at home you wonder how
your hosts ever get anything done, and whether they don't sometimes
wish they had a few days to themselves. To be sure, English hosts go
about their business and leave you to yours, more than Germans think
polite. I once spent six weeks, quite an ordinary visit as to length,
with some friends who had several grown-up children. It was a most
cheerful friendly household, but one day I got into a corner near the
stove, rather glad for a change to be myself for a while with a novel
for company. When I had been there a little time the second daughter
looked in and at once apologised.
"Mamma sent me to see," she explained,--"she feared you were by
yourself."
It is not easy to tell your German hosts that you like and wish to be
by yourself sometimes; and if you say that you are used to it in
England you won't impress them. The English are so inhospitable and
unfriendly, they will say, for that is one of the many popular myths
that are believed about us. I have been told of a German lady who has
lived here most of her life, and complains to her German friends that
she has never spent a night under an English roof; but then, she
chooses to associate exclusively with Germans, whose roofs she refuses
to regard as English ones, even when they are in Kensington; and she
cherishes such an invincible prejudice against the born English that
she lives amongst them year after year without making a friend. It
would be quite simple to perform the same feat in Paris, or even in
Berlin, although there you would not have such a large foreign colony
to stand between you and the detestable natives.
The real difficulty in writing about German hospitality is to find and
express the ways in which it differs from our own; and certainly these
lie little in qualities of kindness and generosity. Amongst both
nations, if you have a friendly disposition you will find friends
easily, and receive kindness on all sides. Perhaps, as one concrete
instance is worth many assertions, I may describe a visit I paid many
years ago to a family who invited me because a marriage had recently
connected us. I had seen some of the family at the wedding, and had
been surprised to receive a warm invitation, not for a week-end and a
cake of visitors' soap, but for the rest of the winter; six weeks or
two months at least. The family living at home consisted of the
parents, a grown-up son and two grown-up daughters. Some of them met
me at the station, for the German does not breathe who would let a
guest arrive or depart alone. Your friends often give you flowers when
you arrive, and invariably when you go away. I cannot remember about
the flowers on this occasion, but I remember vividly that the day
after my arrival the two married daughters living in the same town
both called on me and brought me flowers. Week after week, too, they
made it their pleasure to entertain me just as kindly as my immediate
hosts, taking me to concerts or the opera, asking me to dinner or
supper, including me on every occasion in the family festivities,
which were numerous and lively. In some ways my hosts found me a
disappointing guest, and said so. The trouble was that I liked plain
rolls and butter for breakfast, while the daughters for days before I
came had baked every size and variety of rich cake for me to eat first
thing in the morning with my coffee. I never could eat enough to
please anyone either. You never can in Germany, try as you may. Yet it
was hungry weather, for the Rhine was frozen hard all the time I was
there, and we used to skate every day in the harbour when the
daughters of the house had finished their morning's work. Two maids
were kept on the flat, but, like most German servants, they were
supposed to require constant supervision, and when a room was turned
out the young ladies in their morning wrappers helped to do it. They
helped with the ironing too and the cooking, and did all the mending
of linen and clothes. "A child's time belongs to her parents," said
the father one day when the elder daughter wanted to skate, but was
told that she could not be spared. "I've had a heavenly time," said a
girl friend who had been laid up for some weeks with a sprained ankle;
"I've had nothing to do but read and amuse myself." The household
work, however, was usually done before the one o'clock dinner, and the
afternoon was given up to skating, walks, and visits. There were not
so many formal calls paid as in England, but there was a constant
interchange of hospitality amongst the members of the family, the kind
of intimate unceremonious entertaining described in Miss Austen's
novels. Every time one of the many small children had a birthday there
was a feast of chocolate and cakes, a gathering of the whole clan. The
birthday cake had a sugared _Spruch_ on it, and a little lighted
candle for each year of the child's age, and the birthday table had a
present on it from everyone who came to the party, and many who did
not. Once a week the married daughters and their husbands came to
supper with my hosts, and every day when they were not coming to
supper they called on their mother, and if she could coax them to stay
drank their afternoon coffee with her. Sometimes one or two strangers
were asked to coffee, for this household was an old-fashioned one, and
gave you good coffee rather than wishy-washy tea. It made a point of
honour of a _Meringuetorte_ when strangers came, and of the little
chocolate cream cakes Germans call Othellos. But it must not be
supposed that one or two strangers constitute a _Kaffee-Klatsch_, that
celebrated form of entertainment where at every sip a reputation dies.
A genuine _Klatsch_ was, however, given during my stay by a young
married woman who wished to entertain her friends and display her
furniture. About twenty ladies were invited, and when they had
assembled they were solemnly conducted through every room of the flat
from the drawing-room to the spick-and-span kitchen, where every pan
was of shining copper and every cloth embroidered with the bride's
monogram. The procession as it filed through the rooms chattered like
magpies, for except myself every member of it had been to school with
the bride, and had helped to adorn her home with embroidered chair
backs, cushions, cloths, newspaper stands, foot-stools, duster bags,
and suchlike, all of which they now had the pleasure of seeing in the
places suitable to them. By the time we sat down in the dining-room
to a table loaded with cakes, the slight frost of arrival had melted
away. The strange Englishwoman no longer acted as a wet blanket, and
when she tried to converse with her neighbours she found, as she still
finds at German entertainments, that she could only do so by screaming
at the top of her voice as you do in England in a high wind or in the
sound of loud machinery. Everyone was in the highest spirits, and the
collective noise they made was amazing. In Germany, when actors play
English parts or when people in private life put on English manners,
the first thing they do is to lower their voices as if they had met to
bury a friend. This is the way our natural manner strikes them, while
their natural manner strikes us as easy and jolly, but tiring to the
voice and after a time to the spirit. There are quiet Germans, but
when they sit at a good man's table they must certainly either shout
or be left out of all that goes on. At a _Kaffee-Klatsch_ you either
shout or whisper, you eat every sort of rich cake presented to you if
you can, you drink chocolate or coffee with whipped cream. Nowadays
you would often find tea provided instead. When the hostess finds she
cannot persuade anyone to eat another cake, she leads her guests back
to the drawing-room, and the _Klatsch_ goes on. There is often music
as well as gossip, and before you are allowed to depart there are more
refreshments, ices, sweetmeats, fruit, little glasses of lemonade or
_Bowle_. When you get home you do not want any supper, and you are
quite hoarse, though you have only been to a simple _Kaffee-Klatsch_
without _Schleppe_. Your friends tell you that when they were young a
_Kaffee-Klatsch mit Schleppe_ was the favourite form of entertaining,
and lasted the whole afternoon and evening. Men were asked to come in
when the _Klatsch_ was over and a supper was provided. Those must have
been proud and bustling days for a _Hausfrau_ with one "girl."
To be asked to dinner or supper in Germany may mean anything. Either
form of invitation varies both in hour and kind more than it does in
England; but unless you are asked to a dinner that precedes a dance
you hardly ever need evening dress. Some years ago you would have
written that people never dressed for dinner in Germany except when
the dinner celebrated a betrothal, a wedding, or some equally
important and unusual event. But it has become the fashion in Berlin
lately to dress for large dinners and evening entertainments. No rule
can be laid down for the guidance of English visitors to Germany,
because what you wear must depend partly on the dinner hour and partly
on the ways of your hosts and their friends. Last year when I was in
Berlin I accepted a formal invitation sent a fortnight beforehand to a
dinner given on a Sunday at five o'clock. As the host was a
distinguished scientific man who had just returned from a journey
round the world, it promised to be an interesting entertainment; and
there were, in fact, some of the most celebrated members of the
University present. They were all in morning dress, and their
womenfolk wore what we should call Sunday frocks. The dinner was
beautifully cooked and served, and was not oppressively long. Soup
began it of course, roast veal with various vegetables followed, fish
came next, lovely little grey-blue fish better to look at than to eat,
then chicken, ice pudding, and dessert. There were flowers on the
table, but not as many as we should have with the same opportunities,
for the house was set in an immense garden; and all down the long
narrow table there were bottles of wine and mineral water. When the
champagne came, and that is served at a later stage in Germany than it
is with us, speeches of congratulation were made to the host on his
safe return, and every guest in reach clinked their glasses with his.
After dinner men and women rose together in the German way, and drank
coffee in the drawing-room. The men lighted cigars. A little later in
the evening slender glasses of beer and lemonade were brought round,
and just before everyone left at nine o'clock there was tea and a
variety of little cakes and sandwiches, not our double sandwiches, but
tiny single slices of buttered roll, each with its scrap of caviare or
smoked salmon.
A ball supper or a Christmas supper in Germany consists of three or
four courses served separately, and all hot except the sweet, which is
usually _Gefrorenes_. Salmon, roast beef or veal, venison or chicken,
and then ice would be an ordinary menu, and every course would be
divided into portions and handed round on long narrow dishes. In most
German towns you are often asked to supper, and very seldom to dinner.
You never know beforehand what sort of meal to expect unless you have
been to the house before. In some houses it will be hot, in others
cold. In Berlin, supper usually offers you a dish made with eggs and
mushrooms, eggs and asparagus, or some combination of the kind, and
after this the usual variety of ham and sausages fetched from the
provision shop. Tea and beer are drunk at this meal in most houses.
Sometimes Rhine wine is on the table too. The sweets are often small
fruit tartlets served with whipped cream. One menu I remember
distinctly, because it was so quaint and full of surprises. We began
with huge quantities of asparagus and poached eggs eaten together.
Then we had _Pumpernickel_, Gruyère cheese and radishes, and for a
third course vanilla ice. That was the end of the supper, but later in
the evening, just before we left, in came an enormous dish covered
with gooseberry tartlets, and we had to eat them, for somehow in
Germany it seems ungrateful and unfriendly not to eat and drink what
is provided.
After dinner or supper everyone wishes everyone else _Mahlzeit_ which
is to say, "I wish you a good digestion." Sometimes people only bow as
they say it, but more often they shake hands. I know an Englishman who
was much puzzled by this ceremony at his first German dinner-party. He
saw everyone shaking hands as if they were about to disperse the
instant the feast was over, and when his host came to him with a
smiling face, took his hand and murmured _Mahlzeit_, he summoned what
German he had at his command and answered _Gute Nacht_.