GERMAN SUNDAYS
There was to be singing in the forest on Sunday afternoon, we were
told, when we arrived at our little Black Forest town; and we were on
no account to miss it. We did not want to miss anything, for whenever
we looked out of our windows or strolled through the streets we were
entertained and enchanted. From the hotel we could see women and girls
pass to and fro all day with the great wooden buckets they carried on
their backs and filled at the well close by. As dusk fell the oldest
woman in the community hobbled out, let down the iron chains slung
across the street, and lighted the oil lamps swinging from them. All
the gossips of the place gathered at the well of evenings, and
throughout the day barefooted children played there. Behind the main
street there were gabled houses with ancient wooden balconies and
gardens crammed with pinks. The population mostly sat out of doors
after dark, and as it was hot weather no one went to bed early. Even
in the dead of night the timber waggons drawn by oxen passed through
the town, and the driver did his best to wake us by cracking his long
whip. For though a Black Forest town is mediæval in its ways, it is
not restful. It may soothe you by suggestion, the people seem so
leisurely and the life so easy going; but there is not an hour in the
twenty-four when you are secure from noise. The Sunday in question
began with the bustle occasioned in a country inn by an unusual strain
on its resources. There must be an extra good dinner for the expected
influx of guests, said the landlord's niece, who kept house for him,
while the wife and daughters ran a second hotel higher up the valley.
We escaped to the forest, where the morning hours of a hot June day
were fresh and scented, and we were sorry we had to return to the
hotel for a long hot midday dinner. When it was over, we sat in the
garden and wondered why people held a festival on the top of a hill on
such a sleepy afternoon. However, when the time came we joined the
leisurely procession making the ascent. An hour's stroll took us to
the concert hall, a forest glade where people sat about in groups
waiting for the music to begin. Barrels of beer had been rolled up
here, and children were selling _Kringel_, crisp twists of bread
sprinkled with salt. There were more children present than adults, and
we observed, as you nearly always will in Germany, that though they
belonged to the poorer classes they wore neat clothes and had quiet,
modest manners. The older people often let them drink out of their
glasses, for it was a thirsty afternoon, and when the singing began
the children joined in some of the songs. The occasion of the festival
was the friendly meeting of several choirs, and they sang fine anthems
as well as _Volkslieder_. The effect of the music in the heart of the
forest was enchanting, and we stayed till the end. These choral
competitions or reunions often take place on a Sunday in Germany, and
in summer are often held in an inn garden. They bring some custom to
the innkeeper, but drunkenness and disorder are almost unknown. In
fact, all the cases of drunkenness I have seen in Germany have been
in the Munich comic papers. You never by any chance hear of it as you
do in England amongst people you know, and you may spend hours at the
Berlin Zoo on a Whit-Monday and see no one who is not sober.
University students get drunk and have fights with innkeepers and
policemen, but that is etiquette rather than vice. Next day they
suffer from _Katzenjammer_, but feel that they are upholding ancient
tradition. Real intemperance is found almost entirely amongst the
dregs of the big cities and the lowest class of peasants.
In Berlin the better class of artisans and small tradespeople escape
from their flats on Sundays to their allotment gardens. You see whole
tracts of these gardens on the outskirts of the city, and many of them
have some kind of summer house or rough shelter. Here the family
spends the whole day in fresher air, and presumably finds out how to
grow the simpler kinds of flowers and vegetables. Those who have no
garden and can afford a few pence for fares go farther afield. They
carry food for the day in tin satchels, or rolls that look as if they
ought to accompany butterfly nets and contain entomological specimens.
But they are usually in the hands of a stout alpaca-clad middle-class
mater-familias, who looks rather anxious and flustered while she herds
her flock and hunts for a garden with the announcement, "Hier können
Familien Kaffee kochen." There for a trifling indemnity she can be
accommodated with seats, cups and saucers, and hot water; just as
people can in an English tea-garden. Provisions she has with her in
her _Pickenick Rolle_. If fate takes you to Potsdam on a fine summer
Sunday, you will think that the whole bourgeoisie of Berlin has
elected to come by the same train and steamer, and that everyone but
you has brought food for the day in a green tin. You need not expect
to find a seat either in the train or the steamer at certain hours of
the day, and as you stand wedged in the crowd on the dangerously
overladen boat, and look about you as best you can at the chain of
wooded lakes, you wonder how it is that such overcrowding is permitted
in a police-governed land. At home we take such things for granted as
part of our system or want of system. But in Germany the moment you
cross the frontier a thousand trifles make you feel that you are a
unit in an army, drilled and kept under by the bureaucracy and the
police. It surprises you to see an unmanageable crowd in a train or on
a steamer, much as it would surprise you to see soldiers swarm at will
into a troopship. You expect them to march precisely, each man to his
place. And in Germany this nearly always happens in civil life; while
even on a Sunday or a public holiday the mob behaves itself. At the
Berlin Zoo, for instance, there are such masses of people every Sunday
that you see nothing but people. It is impossible, or rather would not
be agreeable, to force your way through the crowd surrounding the
cages. But the people are interesting, and it is to see them that you
have ventured here. You soon find, however, that it is not a venture
at all. No one will offend you, no one is drunken or riotous. The
gardens are packed with decent folk, mostly of the lower middle
classes, and the only unseemly thing you see them do is to eat small
hot sausages with their fingers in the open-air restaurants.
Sunday is the great day of the week at German theatres. In all the
large towns there are afternoon performances at popular prices, and
this means that people who can pay a few pence for a seat can see all
the great classical plays and most of the successful modern ones; and
they can hear many of the great operas as well as a variety of
charming light ones never heard in this country. On one Sunday
afternoon in Berlin, Hoffmann's _Erzählungen_ was played at one
theatre, and at others Gorky's _Nachtasyl_, Tolstoy's _Power of
Darkness_, Hauptmann's _Versunkene Glocke_, the well known military
play _Zapfenstreich_, and Lortzing's light opera _Der Waffenschmied_.
The star players and singers do not usually appear at these popular
performances, and the Wagnerian _Ring_ has, as far as I know, never
yet been given. But on Sunday afternoons all through the winter the
playhouses are crowded with people who cannot pay week-day prices, and
yet are intelligent enough to enjoy a fairly good performance of
_Hamlet_ or _Egmont_; who are musical and choose a Mozart opera; or
who are interested in the problems of life presented by Ibsen, Gorky,
Tolstoy, or their own great fellow-countryman Gerhardt Hauptmann. When
summer comes, as long as the theatres are open the whole audience
streams out between the acts to have coffee or beer in the garden, or
when there is no garden, in the nearest restaurant; and then comes
your chance of appraising the people who take their pleasure in this
way. They look for the most part as if they belonged to the small
official and shop-keeper class. If the play is a suitable one, there
are sure to be a great many young people present, and at the
State-supported theatres these Sunday performances are such as young
people are allowed to see.
In the evening the Sunday play or opera is always one of the most
important of the week; the play everyone wishes to see or the opera
that is most attractive. A Wagner opera is often played on a Sunday
evening in the theatre that undertakes Wagner. The smaller stages will
give some old favourite, _Der Freischütz_, _Don Juan_, _Oberon_, or
_Die Zauberflöte_. In fact, all through the winter the upper and
middle classes make the play and the opera their favourite Sunday
pastime. The lower classes depend a good deal on the public dancing
saloons, which seem to do as much harm as our public-houses, and to be
disliked and discouraged by all sensible Germans.
So far this account of a German Sunday suggests that Germans always go
from home for their weekly holiday, and it is true that when Sunday
comes the German likes to amuse himself. But he is not invariably at
the play or in inn gardens. It is the day when scattered members of a
family will meet most easily, and when the branch of the family that
can best do so will entertain the others. Some years ago in a North
German city I was often with friends who had a dining-room and narrow
dinner table long enough for a hotel. The host and hostess, when they
were by themselves, dined in a smaller room, sitting next to each
other on the sofa; but on Sundays their children and grandchildren,
some spinster cousins, some _Stammgäste_ (old friends who came every
week) all met in the drawing-room at five o'clock, and sat down soon
after to a dinner of four or five courses in a long dining-room. It
was a company of all ages and some variety of station, and the
patriarchal arrangement placed the venerable and beloved host and
hostess side by side at the top of the room, with their friends in
order of importance to right and left of them, until you came, below
the salt as it were, to the Mamsells and the little children at the
foot of the table. But the Mamsells did not leave the room when the
sweets arrived. Everyone ate everything, including the preserved
fruits that came round with the roast meat, and the pudding that
arrived after the cheese. In those days it was not considered proper
in Germany for ladies to eat cheese, and no young lady would dream of
taking one of the little glasses of Madeira offered on a tray. They
were exclusively for _die Herren_, and always gave a fillip to the
conversation, which was also more or less a masculine monopoly. Just
before the end of the dinner it was the business of the Mamsell
belonging to the house to light a little army of Vienna coffee
machines standing ready on the sideboard, so that coffee could be
served when everyone went back to the drawing-room. The men smoked
their cigars there too, and someone would play the piano, and when no
music was going on there was harmless, rather dull, family
conversation. The spinster cousins got out their embroidery, the
Mamsells disappeared with the children, _die Herren_ either talked to
each other or had a quiet game of _Skat_. The women and some of the
men had been to church in the morning, but this did not prevent them
from spending the rest of the day as it pleased them.
It will be seen that from the English point of view Sunday is not
observed at all in Germany; yet this does not mean, as is often
announced from English pulpits, that the whole nation is without
religion. Un-belief is more widely professed than here, and many
people who call themselves Christians openly reject certain vital
doctrines of Evangelical faith,--are Unitarians, in fact, but will not
say so. But the whole question of religious belief in Germany is a
difficult and contentious one, for according to the people you meet
you will be told that the nation lacks faith or possesses it. If you
use your own judgment you must conclude that there is immensely more
scepticism there than here, and that there is also a good deal of
vague belief, a belief, that is, in a personal God and a life after
death. But you must admit that except in an "evangelical" set belief
sits lightly on both men and women. Certainly it has nothing to do
with the way they spend Sunday, and if they go to church in the
morning they are as likely as not to go to the theatre in the
afternoon. They sew, they dance, they fiddle, they act, they travel on
the day of rest, more on that day than on any other, and when they
come to England there is nothing in our national life they find so
tedious and unprofitable as our Sundays. They cannot understand why a
people with so strong a tendency to drink should make the public-house
the only counter attraction to the church on the working man's day of
leisure; and when they are in a country place, and see our groups of
idle, aimless young louts standing about not knowing what to do, they
ask why in the name of common sense they should not play an outdoor
game. The Idealist expresses the German point of view very well in her
Memoirs, and in so far as she misunderstands our English point of view
she is only on a line with those amongst us who denounce the
continental Sunday as an orgy of noisy and godless pleasures. She
says: "I had a thousand opportunities of noticing that the religious
life did not mean a deep life-sanctifying belief, but simply one of
those formulas that are a part of 'respectability,' as they understand
it both in the family and in society." Nothing proves this better than
their truly shocking way of keeping holy the Sabbath day, which is the
very reverse of holy, inasmuch as it paves the way to the heaviest
boredom and slackness of spirit. I have been in English houses on
Sundays where the gentlemen threw themselves from one easy chair to
the other, and proclaimed their empty state of mind by their awful
yawns; where the children wandered about hopelessly depressed, because
they might neither play nor read an amusing book, not even Grimm's
_Fairy Tales_; where all the mental enjoyment of the household
consisted of so-called 'sacred music,' which some young miss strummed
on the piano or, worse still, sang. A young girl once spoke to me in
severe terms about the Germans who visit theatres and concerts on
Sundays. I asked her whether, if she put it to her conscience, she
could honestly say that she had holier feelings and higher thoughts,
whether, in fact, she felt herself a better human being on her quiet
Sunday, than when she heard a Beethoven Symphony, saw a Shakespeare
play, or any other noble work of art. She confessed with embarrassment
that she could not say so, but nevertheless arrived at the logical
conclusion that, for all that, it was very wicked of the Germans not
to keep Sunday more holy. Another lady, a cultured liberal-minded
person, invited me once to go with her to the Temple Church, one of
the oldest and most beautiful London churches in the city, belonging
to the great labyrinth of Temple Bar where English justice has its
seat. The music of the Temple Church is famous, and I had expressed a
wish to hear it. So I went with my house-mate and the lady in
question, and sat between them. During the sermon I had great trouble
not to fall asleep, but fought against it for the sake of decorum. To
my surprise, when I glanced at my right-hand neighbour I saw that she
was fast asleep, and when I glanced at the one on my left I saw that
she was asleep too. I looked about at other people, and saw more than
one sunk in a pious Nirvana. As we left the church I asked the
Englishwoman, who had a strong sense of humour, whether she had slept
well. 'Yes,' she said, laughing, 'it did me a lot of good.' 'But why
do you go?' I said. 'Oh, my dear,' said she, 'what can one do? It has
to be on Sundays.'
"But this narrow Sunday observance is worse for the lower than for the
upper classes. At that time the great dispute was just beginning as to
whether the people should be admitted to the Crystal Palace, to
museums, and suchlike institutions. The question was discussed in
Parliament, and decided in the negative. It was feared that the
churches would remain empty, and that morals would suffer if the
people began to like heathen gods, works of art and natural
curiosities, better than going to church. At least, this is the only
explanation one can give of such a decision. The churches and the
public-houses remained the only public places open on Sundays. The
churches were all very well for a few hours in the morning, but what
about the afternoon and evening? Then the beer-house was the only
refuge for the artisan or proletarian bowed down by the weight of hard
work, unused and untaught to wile away the idle hours of Sunday in any
intellectual occupation, and having no friendly attractive home to
make the peace of his own hearth the best refreshment after the
exhausting week. And so it turned out: the public-houses were full to
overflowing, and the holiness of Sunday was only too often desecrated
by the unholy sight of drunken men and, more horrible still, drunken
women; but this was not all, for so strong was the temptation thrust
upon them, that the workman's hardly earned week's wages went in
drink, and the children were left without bread and not a penny was
saved to lighten future distress. The coarse animal natures of the
only half-human beings became coarser and more animal through the
degrading passion for drink that only too often has murder in its
train, and murder in its most terrible and brutal guise!"
There is not one idea or argument in this passage that I have not
heard over and over again from the lips of every German who has
anything to say about our English Sunday, and every German who has
been in England or heard much of English life invariably attacks what
he considers this weak joint in our armour.
"What is the use?" he asks, "of going to church in the morning if you
get drunk and beat your wife at night?"
"But the same man does not usually do both things in one day," you
represent to him. "One set of people goes to church and keeps Sunday
strictly, and another set goes to public-houses and is drunk and
disorderly. You should try to get out of your head your idea that we
are all exactly alike."
"But you are--exactly alike. Everyone of you goes to church with a
solemn face, sings psalms, and comes back to his roast beef and
apple-pie. All the afternoon you are asleep; and at night the streets
and parks are not fit for respectable people."
"At night," you explain, "all the respectable people are at home
eating cold beef and cold pie. The others...."
"The others you drive to drink and fight and kill by your pharisaical
methods. You shut the doors of your theatres and your art galleries,
and you set wide the doors of your drinking hells. How you can call
yourself a religious people--it is Satanic...."
"But, my dear man," you say, taking a long breath, "the people who go
to public-houses don't want theatres and art galleries. They are on
too low a level."
"It is the business of the State to raise them--not to push them down.
Besides, there is drinking--much drinking--in England on the higher
levels too, as you well know...."
"Of course I know," you say impatiently. "All I am saying is that we
do not bring it about by shutting the British Museum on Sundays."
But next time the subject comes up for discussion your German will say
again, as he has said ever since he could speak, that the English
Sunday is anathema, and a standing witness to British _Heuchelei_,
because people sing psalms in the morning and get drunk and beat their
wives at night. You can easily imagine the Hypocrite's Progress
painted by a German Hogarth, and it would begin with a gentleman in a
black coat and tall hat on his way to church, and would end with the
same gentleman in the last stage of delirium tremens surrounded by his
slaughtered family. For in Germany one of the curious deep rooted
notions about us, who as people go are surely indifferent honest, is
that we are _ein falsches Volk_. With the want of logic that makes
human nature everywhere so entertaining, a German will nearly always
cash a cheque offered by an English stranger when he would refuse to
do so for a countryman. As far as one can get at it, what Germans
really mean by our _Heuchelei_ when they speak without malice is our
regard for the unwritten social law. This is so strong in us from old
habit and tradition that most of us do not feel the shackles; but the
stranger within our gates feels it at every step.