INNS AND RESTAURANTS
English people who have travelled in Germany know some of the big
well-kept hotels in the large towns, and know that they are much like
big hotels in other continental cities. It is not in these
establishments that you can watch national life or discover much about
the Germans, except that they are good hotel-keepers; and this you
probably discovered long ago abroad or at home. If you are a woman,
you may be impressed by the fineness, the whiteness, the profusion,
and the embroidered monograms of the linen, whether you are in a huge
caravanserai or a wayside inn. Otherwise a hotel at Cologne or
Heidelberg has little to distinguish it from a hotel at Brussels or
Bâle. The dull correct suites of furniture, the two narrow bedsteads,
even the table with two tablecloths on it, a thick and a thin, the
parqueted floor, and the small carpet are here, there, and everywhere
directly you cross the Channel.
The modern German tells you with pride that this apparent want of
national quality and colour is to be felt in every corner of life, and
that what you take to be German is not peculiarly German at all, but
common to the whole continent of Europe. This may be true in certain
cases and in a certain sense, but there is another sense in which it
is never true. For instance, the women of continental nations wear
high-necked gowns in the evening. It is only English women who wear
evening gowns as a matter of course every day of their lives. I have
been told in Germany that, so far from being a sign of civilisation,
this fashion is merely a stupid survival from the times when all the
women of Europe went barenecked all day. However this may be, there is
no doubt that whether the gown be high or low, worn by sunlight or
lamplight, you can see at a glance whether the woman who wears it is
English, French, or German. Every nation has its own features, its own
manners, and its own tone, instantly recognised by foreigners, and
apparently hidden from itself. The German assures you that the English
manner is quite unmistakable, and he will even describe and imitate
for your amusement some of his silly countryfolk who were talking to
him quite naturally, but suddenly froze and stiffened at the approach
of English friends whose national manner they wished to assume. In
England we are not conscious of having a stiff frozen manner, and we
never dream that everyone has the same manner. It takes a foreigner to
perceive this; and so in Germany it takes a foreigner to appreciate
and even to see the characteristic trifles that give a nation a
complexion of its own.
Some of the most comfortable hotels in Germany are the smaller ones
supported entirely by Germans. A stray Englishman, finding one of
these starred in Baedeker and put in the second class, may try it from
motives of economy, but in many of them he would only meet merchants
on their travels and the unmarried men of the neighbourhood who dine
there. In such establishments as these the _table d'hôte_ still more
or less prevails, while if you go to fashionable hotels you dine at
small tables nowadays and see nothing of your neighbours. The part
played during dinner by the hotel proprietor varies considerably. In a
big establishment he is represented by the _Oberkellner_, and does not
appear at all. The _Oberkellner_ is a person of weight and standing;
so much so that when you are in a crowded beer garden and can get no
one to attend to you, you call out _Ober_ to the first boy waiter who
passes, and he is so touched by the compliment that he serves you
before your turn. But in a real old-fashioned German inn you have
personal relations with the proprietor, for he takes the head of his
table and attends to the comfort of his customers as carefully as if
they were his guests. This used to be a universal custom, but you only
find it observed now in the Sleepy Hollows of Germany. I have stayed
in a most comfortable and well-managed hotel where the proprietor and
his brother waited on their guests all through dinner, but never sat
down with them. There were hired men, but they played a subordinate
part. In small country inns the host still arrives in the garden when
your meal is served, asks if you have all you want, wishes you _guten
Appetit_, and after a little further conversation waddles away to
perform the same office at some other table. Except in the depths of
the country where the inn-keepers are peasants, a German hotel-keeper
invariably speaks several languages, and has usually been in Paris and
London or New York. His business is to deal with the guests and the
waiters, and to look after the cellar and the cigars; while his wife
or his sister, though she keeps more in the background than a French
proprietress, does just as much work as a Frenchwoman, and, as far as
one can judge, more than any man in the establishment. She
superintends the chambermaids and has entire care of the vast stock of
linen; in many cases she has most of it washed on the premises, and
she helps to iron and repair it. She buys the provisions, and sees
that there is neither waste nor disorder in the kitchen; she often
does a great part of the actual cooking herself. When I was a girl I
happened to spend a winter in a South German hotel of old standing,
kept for several generations in the same family, and now managed by
two brothers and a sister. The sister, a well-educated young woman of
twenty-five, used to get up at five winter and summer to buy what was
wanted for the market, and one day she took me with her. It was a
pretty lesson in the art of housekeeping as it is understood and
practised in Germany. All the peasant women in the duchy could not
have persuaded my young woman to have given the fraction of a farthing
more for her vegetables than they were worth that day, or to take any
geese except the youngest and plumpest. She went briskly from one part
of the market to the other, seeming to see at a glance where it was
profitable to deal this morning. She did not haggle or squabble as
inferior housewives will, because she knew just what she wanted and
what it was prudent to pay for it. When she got home she sat down to a
second breakfast that seemed to me like a dinner, a stew of venison
and half a bottle of light wine; but, as she said, hotel keeping is
exhausting work, and hotel-keepers must needs live well.
At some hotels in this part of Germany wine is included in the charge
for dinner, and given to each guest in a glass carafe or uncorked
bottle. It is kept on tap even in the small wayside inns, where you
get half a litre for two or three pence when you are out for a walk
and are thirsty. If you dislike thin sour wine you had better avoid
the grape-growing lands and travel in Bavaria, where every country
inn-keeper brews his own beer. Many of these small inns entertain
summer visitors, not English and Americans who want luxuries, but
their own countryfolk, whose purses and requirements are both small.
As far as I know by personal experience and by hearsay, the rooms in
these inns are always clean. The bedding all over Germany is most
scrupulously kept and aired. In country places you see the mattresses
and feather beds hanging out of the windows near the pots of
carnations every sunny day. The floors are painted, and are washed all
over every morning. The curtains are spotless. In each room there is
the inevitable sofa with the table in front of it, a most sensible and
comfortable addition to a bedroom, enabling you to seek peace and
privacy when you will. If you wander far enough from the beaten track,
you may still find that all the water you are supposed to want is
contained in a good-sized glass bottle; but if you are English your
curious habits will be known, and more water will be brought to you in
a can or pail. My husband and I once spent a summer in a Thuringian
inn that had never taken staying guests before, and even here we found
that the proprietress had heard of English ways, and was willing, with
a smile of benevolent amusement, to fill a travelling bath every day.
This inn had a summer house where all our meals were served as a
matter of course, and where people from a fashionable watering-place
in the next valley came for coffee or beer sometimes. The household
itself consisted of the proprietress, her daughter, and her
maidservant, and during the four months we spent there I never knew
them to sit down to a regular meal. They ate anything at any time, as
they fancied it. The summer house in which we had our meals was large
and pleasant, with a wide view of the hills and a near one of an old
stone bridge and a trout stream. The trees near the inn were limes,
and their scent while they were in flower overpowered the scent of
pines coming at other times with strength and fragrance from the
surrounding forest. The only drawback to our comfort was a hornets'
nest in an old apple-tree close to the summer-house. The hornets used
to buzz round us at every meal, and at first we supposed they might
sting us. This they never did, though we waged war on them fiercely.
But no one wants to be chasing and killing hornets all through
breakfast and dinner, so we asked the maid of the inn what could be
done to get rid of them. She smiled and said _Jawohl_, which was what
she always said; and we went out for a walk. When we came back and sat
down to supper there were no hornets. _Jawohl_ had just stood on a
chair, she said, poured a can of water into the nest, and stuffed up
the opening with grass. She had not been stung, and we were not
pestered by a hornet again that summer. I have sometimes told this
story to English people, and seen that though they were too polite to
say so they did not believe it. But that is their fault. The story as
I have told it is true. We found immense numbers of hornets in one
wild uninhabited valley where we sometimes walked that summer, but we
were never stung.
The proprietress of this inn, like most German women, was a fair cook.
Besides the inn she owned a small brewery, and employed a brewer who
lived quite near, and showed us the whole process by which he
transferred the water of the trout stream into foaming beer. His
mistress had no rival in the village, and the village was a small one,
so sometimes the beer was a little flat. When _Jawohl_ brought a jug
from a cask just broached, she put it on the table with a proud air,
and informed us that it was _frisch angesteckt_. We once spent a
summer in a Bavarian village where a dozen inns brewed their own beer,
and it was always known which one had just tapped a cask. Then
everyone crowded there as a matter of course. In all these country
inns there is one room with rough wooden tables and benches, and here
the peasants sit smoking their long pipes and emptying their big mugs
or glasses, and as a rule hardly speaking. They do not get drunk, but
no doubt they spend more than they can afford out of their scanty
earnings.
In the Bavarian village the inns were filled all through the summer
with people from Nuremberg, Erlangen, Augsburg, Erfurth, and other
Bavarian towns. The inn-keeper used to charge five shillings a week
for a scrupulously clean, comfortably furnished room, breakfast was
sixpence, dinner one and two-pence, and supper as you ordered it. For
dinner they gave you good soup, _Rindfleisch_, either poultry or roast
meat, and one of the _Mehlspeisen_ for which Bavaria is celebrated,
some dish, that is, made with eggs and flour. There was a great
variety of them, but I only remember one clearly, because I was
impressed by its disreputable name. It was some sort of small pancake
soaked in a wine sauce, and it was called _versoffene Jungfern_. Most
of these inns kept no servants, and except in the Kurhaus there was
not a black-coated waiter in the place. Our inn-keeper tilled his own
fields, grew his own hops, and brewed his own beer; and his wife,
wearing her peasant's costume, did all the cooking and cleaning,
assisted by a daughter or a cousin. When you met her out of doors she
would be carrying one of the immense loads peasant women do carry up
hill and down dale in Germany. She was hale and hearty in her middle
age, and always cheerful and obliging. At that inn, too, we never had
a meal indoors from May till October. Everything was brought out to a
summer-house, from which we looked straight down the village, its
irregular Noah's Ark-like houses, and its background of mountains and
forest.
When you first get back to England from Germany, you have to pull
yourself together and remember that in your own country, even on a hot
still summer evening, you cannot sit in a garden where a band is
playing and have your dinner in the open air, unless you happen to be
within reach of Earl's Court. In German towns there are always numbers
of restaurants in which, according to the weather, meals can be served
indoors or out. You see what use people make of them if, for instance,
you happen to be in Hamburg on a hot summer night. All round the basin
of the Alster there are houses, hotels, and gardens, and every public
garden is so crowded that you wonder the waiters can pass to and fro.
Bands are playing, lights are flashing, the little sailing boats are
flitting about. The whole city after its day's work has turned out for
air and music and to talk with friends. And as you watch the scene you
know that in every city, even in every village of the empire, there is
some such gala going on: in gardens going down to the Rhine from the
old Rhenish towns; in the gardens of ancient castles set high above
the stifling air of valleys; in the forest that comes to the very edge
of so many little German towns; even in the streets of towns where a
table set on the pavement will be pleasanter than in a room on such a
night as this. You can sit at one of these restaurants and order
nothing but a cup of coffee or a glass of beer; or you can dine, for
the most part, well and cheaply. If you order a _halbe Portion_ of
any dish, as Germans do, you will be served with more than you can eat
of it. The variety offered by some of the restaurants in the big
cities, the excellence of the cooking, the civilisation of the
appointments, and the service, all show that the German must be the
most industrious creature in the world, and the thriftiest and one of
the cleverest. In London we have luxurious restaurants for people who
can spend a great deal of money, but in Berlin they have them for
people who cannot spend much. That is the difference between the two
cities. How Berlin does it is a mystery. In the restaurants I have
seen there is neither noise nor bustle nor garish colours nor rough
service nor any other of the miseries we find in our own cheap
eating-houses. In one of them the walls were done in some kind of
plain fumed wood with a frieze and ceiling of soft dull gold. In
another each room had a different scheme of colour.
"So according to your _Stimmung_ you will choose your room," said the
friends who took me. "To-night we are rather cheerful. We will go to
the big room on the first floor. That is all pale green and ivory."
"You have nothing like this in England," said the artist as we went up
the lift. "It is terrible in England. When I asked for my lunch at
three or four o'clock I was told that lunch was over. _Das hat keinen
Zweck_,--I want my lunch when I am hungry."
"But you are terribly behindhand in some ways in Berlin," I said, for
I knew the artist liked an argument. "In London you can shop all
through the night by telephone. It is most convenient."
"Have you ever done it?"
"I'm not on the telephone, and I am generally asleep at night. But
other people...."
"_Verrückt_," said the artist. "Who in his senses wants to do shopping
at night? Now look at this room, and admit that you have nothing at
all like it."
The first swift impression of the place was that Liberty had brought
his stuffs, his furniture, and his glass from London and set up as a
restaurateur in Berlin. The whole thing was certainly well done. It
was not as florid and fussy as our expensive restaurants. The colours
were quiet, and the necessary draperies plain. The glass was thin and
elegant; so were the coffee cups; and the table linen was white and
fine. Nothing about it, however, would be worth describing if it had
been expensive. But the menu, which covered four closely printed
pages, showed that the most expensive dish offered there cost one and
threepence, while the greater number cost ninepence, sixpence, or
threepence each. The hungry man would begin with crayfish, which were
offered to him prepared in ten various ways; for the Germans, like the
French, are extremely fond of crayfish. He would have them in soup,
for instance, or with asparagus, with salad or dressed with dill. Then
he would find the week's bill of fare on his card, three or four
dishes for each day, some cooked in small casseroles and served so to
any guest who orders one. If it was a Friday he could have a ragoût of
chicken in the Bremen style, or a slice from a Hamburg leg of mutton
with cream sauce and celery salad, or ox-tongue cooked with young
turnips. If he was a Catholic he would find two kinds of fish ready
for him,--trout, cooked blue, and a ragoût of crayfish with asparagus
and baked perch. But these are just the special dishes of the day, and
he is not bound to try them. There are seven kinds of soup, including
real turtle, and it is not for me to say how real turtle can be
supplied in Berlin for 30 pfennig. There are seven kinds of fish and
too many varieties of meat, poultry, salads, vegetables and sweets,
both hot and cold, to count. A man can have any kind of cooking he
fancies, too; his steak may be German, Austrian, or French; he can
have English roast beef, Russian caviare, a Maltese rice pudding,
apples from the Tyrol, wild strawberries from a German forest, all the
cheeses of France and England, a Welsh rarebit, and English celery.
The English celery is as mysterious as the real turtle, for it was
offered in June. Pheasants and partridges, I can honestly say,
however, were not offered. Under the head of game there were only
venison, geese, chickens, and pigeons.
I am sorry now that when I dined at this restaurant I did not order
real turtle soup, _Roast beef Engl. mit Schmorkartoffeln_, celery, and
a Welsh rarebit, because then I should have discovered whether these
old British friends were recognisable in their Berlin environment. But
it was more amusing at the time to ask for ham cooked in champagne and
served with radish sauce, and other curious inviting combinations.
"But at home," I said to the artist,--"at home we just eat to live. We
have a great contempt for people who pay much attention to food."
"I stayed in an English house last year, and never did I hear so much
about food," said he. "One would eat nothing but grape-nuts and
cheese, and another swore by toast and hot water and little
_Pastetchen_ of beef, and the third would have large rice puddings,
and the fourth asked for fruit at every meal, and the fifth said all
the others were wrong and that he wanted a good dinner. The poor
hostess would have been distracted if she had not been one of those
who love a new fad and try each one in turn. Also there were two
eminent physicians in the house, and one of these drank champagne
every night, while the other would touch nothing but Perrier and said
champagne was poison. Directly we sat down we discussed these things,
... and everyone assured me that if I tried his regime I should
improve in health most marvellously."
"Which did you try?" I asked.
"The good dinner and the champagne, of course. But I did not find they
affected my health one way or the other."