LIFE IN LODGINGS
As rents are high in Germany, it is usual for people of small means to
let off one or two rooms, either furnished or unfurnished. But it is
not usual to supply a lodger with any meal except his coffee and rolls
in the morning. If you wish to take lodgings in a German town, and
work through the long list of them in a local paper, you will probably
find no one willing to provide for you in the English fashion.
"Cooking!" they say with horror,--"cooking! You want to eat in your
room. No. That can we not undertake. Coffee in the morning, yes; and
rolls with it and butter and even two eggs, but nothing further. Just
round the corner in the _Königstrasse_ are two very fine restaurants,
where the _Herrschaften_ can eat what they will at any hour of the
day, and for moderate prices."
If you insist, the most they will promise, and that not willingly, is
to provide you with a knife and fork and a tablecloth for a pyramid of
courses sent hot from one of the very fine adjacent restaurants for 1
mark or 1 mark 20 pf. Supper in Germany is the easiest meal in the day
to provide, as you buy the substantial part of it at a
_Delikatessenhandlung_, and find that even a German landlady will
condescend to get you rolls and butter and beer. This sounds like the
Simple Life, to be sure; but if you are in German lodgings for any
length of time you probably desire for one reason or the other to lead
it. The plan of having your dinner sent piping hot from a restaurant in
nice clean white dishes rather like monster soufflé dishes is not a bad
one if the restaurant keeps faith with you. It is rather amusing to
begin at the top with soup and work through the various surprises and
temptations of the pyramid till you get to _Biskuit-Pudding mit Vanille
Sauce_ at the bottom. But in nine cases out of ten the restaurant fails
you, sends uneatable food, is absurdly unpunctual or says plainly it
can't be bothered. Then you have to wander about and out of doors for
your food in all weathers and all states of health. This is amusing for
a time, but not in the long run. It is astonishing how tired you can
get of the "very fine" restaurants within reach, of their waitresses,
their furniture, their menus, and their daily guests. At least, this is
so in a small town where the best restaurant is not "very fine,"
although both food and service will be better than in an English town
of the same size. If you are in Berlin and can go to the good
restaurants, there you will be in danger of becoming a gourmet and
losing your natural affection for cold mutton.
In a university or a big commercial town it is easy to get rooms for
less than we pay in England; but in a small _Residenz_ I have found it
difficult. There were rooms to let, but no one wanted us, because we
were not officers with soldier servants to wait on us; nor did we want
to engage rooms as the officers did for at least six months. In fact,
we found ourselves as unpopular as ladies are in a London suburb where
all the lodging-house keepers want "gentlemen in the city" who are
away all day and give no trouble. At last, after searching through
every likely street in the town, we found a dentist with exuberant
manners, who said he would overlook our shortcomings, and allow us to
inhabit his rooms at a high price on condition we gave no trouble. We
said we never gave trouble anywhere, and left both hotels and
lodging-houses with an excellent character, so the bargain was
concluded. I saw that his wife was not a party to it, but he overruled
her, and as he was a big red-faced noisy man, and she was a small rat
of a woman, I thought he would continue to do so. One is always making
these stupid elementary mistakes about one's fellow-creatures. But a
little later in the day I had occasion to call at the rooms to
complete some arrangement about luggage, and then the wife received me
alone. I asked her if she could put a small table into a room that
only had a big one. I forget why I wanted it.
"Table!" she said rudely. "What can you want another table for? Isn't
that one enough?"
"I should like another," I said,--"any little one would do."
"I don't keep tables up my sleeve," said she. "You see what you can
have, ... just what is there. If it doesn't suit you...."
"But it does suit me," I said hurriedly, for the search had been long
and exhausting, and the rooms were pleasant enough. I thought we need
not deal much with the woman.
"No meals except coffee in the morning; you understand that?" she said
in a truculent tone.
"Oh yes, I understand. We shall go out at midday and at night.
Afternoon tea I always make myself with a spirit lamp...."
Never in my life have I been so startled. I thought the woman was
going to behave like a rat in a corner, and fly at me. She shook her
fist and shouted so loud that she brought the dentist on the scene.
"_Spiritus_," she screamed. "_Spiritus--Spiritus leid' ich nicht._"
"Bless us!" I said in English. "What's the matter?"
"_Was ist's?_" said the dentist, and he looked downright frightened.
"_Sie will kochen_," said his wife, shaking her fist at me again. "She
has a spirit lamp. She wants to turn my beautiful _bestes Zimmer_ into
a kitchen. She will take all the polish off my furniture, just as the
last people did when they cooked for themselves."
"Cooked!" I said. "Who speaks of cooking?--I spoke of a cup of tea."
"_Spiritus leid' ich nicht_," shrieked the woman.
"No," said the dentist, "we can't have cooking here."
"_Spiritus leid'_...."
But I fled. Luckily, we had not paid any rent in advance. I made up my
mind that I would never confess to my small harmless Etna in German
lodgings again, and would bolt the door while I boiled water for tea
in it. We found rooms after another weary search, but they were
extremely noisy and uncomfortable. We had to take them for six weeks,
and could only endure them for a fortnight, and though we paid them
the full six weeks' rent when we left, they charged us for every jug
of hot water we had used, and added a _Trinkgeld_ for the servant.
"We did not engage to pay extra either for hot water or for
_Trinkgeld_," we said, turning, as worms will even in a _Residenz_,
where everyone is a worm who is not _Militär_.
"But _Engländer_ never give a _Trinkgeld_. That is why we have put it
in the bill. The girl expects it, and has earned it."
"The girl will have it," we said; "but we shall give it her ourselves.
And what have you to say about the hot water?"
"Without coal it is impossible to have hot water. We let you our
rooms, but we did not let you our coal. It is quite simple. Have you
any other complaint to make?"
We had, but we did not make them. We went to one of the big cities,
where the civilian is still a worm, but where he has a large number
and variety of other worms to keep him company. In Berlin or Hamburg
or Leipzig there are always furnished rooms delighted to receive you.
There may be a difficulty, however, if you are a musician. The police
come in with their regulations; or your fellow-lodgers may be students
of medicine or philosophy, and driven wild by your harmonies. I knew a
young musician who always took rooms in the noisiest street in Berlin,
and practised with his windows open. He said the din of electric
trams, overhead trains, motor cars, and heavy lorries helped his
landlady and her family to suffer a Beethoven sonata quite gladly.
One of the insoluble mysteries of German life is the cheapness of
furnished lodgings as compared with the high rent and rates. To be
sure, the landlady does not cook for you, and the bed-sitting-room is
not considered sordid in Germany. In fact, the separate sitting-room
is almost unknown, though it is easy to arrange one by shifting some
furniture. The pattern of the room and its appointments hardly vary in
any part of Germany, though of course the size and quality vary with
the price. If you take a small room you have one straight window, and
if you take a large one you have several. Or you may have a broad
balcony window opening on to a balcony. You have the parqueted or
painted floor, the porcelain stove, the sofa, the table, the wooden
bedstead, and the wooden hanging cupboard wherever you are. It is
always sensible, comfortable furniture, and usually plain. When people
over there know no better they buy themselves tawdry horrors, just as
they do here. The German manufacturers flood the world with such
things. But people who let lodgings put their treasures in a sacred
room they call _das beste Zimmer_, and only use on festive occasions.
They fob you off with old-fashioned stuff they do not value, a roomy
solid cupboard, a family sofa, a chest of drawers black with age, and
a hanging mirror framed in old elm-wood; and if it were not for a
bright green rep tablecloth, snuff-coloured curtains, and a wall paper
with a brown background and yellow snakes on it, you would like your
quarters very well indeed. Rooms are usually let by the month, except
in watering-places, where weekly prices prevail. In Leipzig you can
get a room for 10s. a month. It will be a parterre or a fourth-floor
room, rather gloomy and rather shabby, but a possible room for a
student who happens to be hard up. For £1 a month you can get a room
on a higher floor, and better furnished, while for £1, 10s. a month in
Hamburg I myself have had two well-furnished rooms commanding a fine
view of the Alster, and one of them so large that in winter it was
nearly impossible to keep warm. Then my Hamburg friends told me I was
paying too much, and that they could have got better lodgings for less
money. They were nearer the sky than I should like in these days, but
the old German system of letting the higher flats in a good house for
a low rent benefits people who care about a "select" neighbourhood and
yet cannot pay very much. The modern system of lifts will gradually
make it impossible to get a flat or lodgings in a good street without
paying as much for the fifth floors as for the first.
You do not see much of a German landlady, as she does not cater for
you. She is often a widow, and when you know the rent of a flat you
wonder how she squeezes a living out of what her lodgers pay her. She
cannot even nourish herself with their scraps, or warm herself at a
kitchen fire for which they pay. Some of them perform prodigies of
thrift, especially when they have children to feed and educate. At the
end of a long severe winter, when the Alster had been frozen for
months, I found out by chance that my landlady, a sad aged widow with
one little boy, had never lighted herself a fire. She let every room
of her large flat, except a kitchen and a _Kammer_ opening out of it.
The little food she needed she cooked on an oil stove, at night she
had a lamp, and of course she never by any chance opened a window. She
said she could not afford coals, and that her son and she managed to
keep warm. The miracle is that they both kept alive and well. Another
German landlady was of a different type, a big buxom bustling
creature, who spent most of the day in her husband's coal sheds,
helping him with his books and taking orders. Although she was so busy
she undertook to cook for me, and kept her promise honourably; and she
cooked for herself, her husband, and their work-people. She used
sometimes to show me the huge dishes of food they were about to
consume, food that was cheap to buy and nourishing to eat, but
troublesome to prepare. She did all her own washing too, and dried it
in the narrow slip of a room her husband and she used for all
purposes. I discovered this by going in to see her when she was ill
one day, and finding rows of wet clothes hung on strings right across
her bed. I made no comment, for nothing that is an outrage of the
first laws of hygiene will surprise you if you have gone here and
there in the byways of Germany. An English girl told me that when she
was recovering from a slight attack of cholera in a Rhenish _Pension_,
they were quite hurt because she refused stewed cranberries. "_Das
schadet nichts, das ist gesund_," they said. I could hear them say it.
Only the summer before a kindly hotel-keeper had brought me a ragoût
of _Schweinefleisch_ and vanilla ice under similar circumstances. The
German constitution seems able to survive anything, even roast goose
at night at the age of three.
A _Pension_ in Germany costs from £3 a month upwards. That is to say,
you will get offers of a room and full board for this sum, but I must
admit that I never tried one at so low a rate, and should not expect
it to be comfortable. Rent and food are too dear in the big towns to
make a reasonable profit possible on such terms, unless the household
is managed on starvation lines. To have a comfortable room and
sufficient food, you must pay from £5 to £7 a month, and then if you
choose carefully you will be satisfied. The society is usually
cosmopolitan in these establishments, and the German spoken is a
warning rather than a lesson. It is not really German life that you
see in this way, though the proprietress and her assistants may be
German. In most of the university towns some private families take
"paying guests," and when they are agreeable people this is a
pleasanter way of life than any _Pension_.
Before you have been in Germany a fortnight the police expects to know
all about you. You have to give them your father's Christian and
surname, and tell them how he earned his living, and where he was
born; also your mother's Christian and maiden name, and where she was
born. You must declare your religion, and if you are married give your
husband's Christian and surname; also where he was born, and what he
does for a living. If you happen to do anything yourself, though, you
need not mention it. They do not expect a woman to be anything further
than married or single. But you must say when and where you were last
in Germany, and how often you have been, and why you have come now,
and what you are doing, and how long you propose to stay. They tell
you in London you do not need a passport in Germany, and they tell you
in Berlin that you must either produce one or be handed over for
inquiry to your Embassy. Last year when I was there I produced one
twenty-three years old. I had not troubled to get a new one, but I
came across this, quite yellow with age, and I thought it might serve
to make some official happy; for I had once seen my husband get
himself, me, and our bicycles over the German frontier and into
Switzerland, and next morning back into Germany, by showing the
gendarmes on the bridge his C.T.C. ticket. I cannot say that my
ancient passport made my official exactly happy. Twenty-three years
ago he was certainly in a _Steckkissen_, and no doubt he felt that in
those days, in a world without him to set it right, anything might
happen.
"Twenty-three years," he bellowed at the top of his voice, for he saw
that I was _fremd_, and wished to make himself clear. We are not the
only people who scream at foreigners that they may understand.
"Twenty-three years. But it is a lifetime."
It was for him no doubt. I admitted that twenty-three years was--well,
twenty-three years, and explained that I had been told at a
_Reisebureau_ that a passport was unnecessary.
"They know nothing in England," he said gloomily. "With us a passport
is necessary; but what is a passport twenty-three years old?"
I admitted that, from the official point of view, it was not much, and
he made no further difficulties. As a rule you need not go to the
police bureau at all. The people you are with will get the necessary
papers, and fill them in for you; but I wanted to see whether the
German jack-in-office was as bad as his reputation makes him. Germans
themselves often complain bitterly of the treatment they receive at
the hands of these lower class officials.
"I went to the police station," said a German lady who lived in
England, and was in her own country on a visit. "I went to _anmelden_
myself, but not one of the men in the office troubled to look up. When
I had stood there till I was tired I said that I wished someone to
attend to me. Every pen stopped, every head was raised, astounded by
my impertinence. But no one took any notice of my request. I waited a
little longer, and then fetched myself a chair that someone had left
unoccupied. I did not do it to make a sensation. I was tired. But
every pen again stopped, and one in authority asked in a voice like
thunder what I made here. I said that I had come to _anmelden_ myself,
and he began to ask the usual questions with an air of suspicion that
was highly offensive. You can see for yourself that I do not look like
an anarchist or anything but what I am, a respectable married woman of
middle age. I told the man everything he wanted to know, and at every
item he grunted as if he knew it was a lie. In the end he asked me
very rudely how long a stay I meant to make in Germany.
"Not a day longer than I can help," I said; "for your manners do not
please me."
All the pens stopped again till I left the office, and when I got
back to my mother she wept bitterly; for she said that I should be
prosecuted for _Beamtenbeleidigung_ and put in prison.
"But the really interesting fact about the system is that it doesn't
work," said a German to me; "when I wanted my papers a little while
ago I could not get them. Nothing about me could be discovered.
Officially I did not exist."
Yet he had inherited a name famous all over the world, was a
distinguished scientific man himself, and had been born in the city
where his existence was not known to the police.
"Take care you don't go in at an _Ausgang_ or out at an _Eingang_,"
said an Englishman who had just come back from Berlin. "Take care you
don't try to buy stamps at the Post Office out of your turn. Remember
that you can't choose your cab when you arrive. A policeman gives you
a number, and you have to hunt amongst a crowd of cabs for that
number, even if it is pouring with rain. Remember that the police
decides that you must buy your opera tickets on a Sunday morning, and
stand _queue_ for hours till you get them. If you have a cold in your
head, stay at home. Last winter a man was arrested for sneezing
loudly. It was considered _Beamtenbeleidigung_. The Englishwoman who
walked on the grass in the Tiergarten was not arrested, because the
official who saw her died of shock at the sight, and could not perform
his duty."
Wherever you go in Germany you hear stories of police interference and
petty tyranny, and it is mere luck if you do not innocently transgress
some of their fussy pedantic regulations. In South Germany I once put
a cream jug on my window-sill to keep a little milk cool for the
afternoon. The jug was so small and the window so high that it can
hardly have been visible from the street, but my landlady came to me
excitedly and said the police would be on her before the day was out
if the jug was left there. The police allowed nothing on a window-sill
in that town, lest it should fall on a citizen's head. Each town or
district has its own restrictions, its own crimes. In one you will
hear that a butcher boy is not allowed on the side-path carrying his
tray of meat. If a policeman catches him at it, he, or his employer,
is fined. In another town the awning from a shop window must not
exceed a certain length, and you are told of a poor widow, who, having
just had a new one put up at great expense, was compelled by the
police to take the whole thing down, because the flounce was a quarter
of an inch longer than the regulations prescribed. You hear of a poor
man laboriously building a toy brick wall round the garden in his
_Hof_, and having to pull it to pieces because "building" is not
allowed except with police permission. In some towns the length of a
woman's gown is decided in the _Polizeibureau_, and the officers fine
any woman whose skirt touches the ground. In one town you may take a
dog out without a muzzle; in another it is a crime. A merchant on his
way to his office, in a city where there was a muzzling order, found
to his annoyance, one morning, that his mother's dog had followed him
unmuzzled. He had no string with him, he could not persuade the dog to
return, and he could not go back with it, because he had an important
appointment. So he risked it and went on. Before long, however, he met
a policeman. The usual questions were asked, his name and address were
taken, and he was told that he would be fined. Hardly had he got to
the end of the street when he met a second policeman. He explained
that the matter was settled, but this was not the opinion of the
policeman. Was the dog not at large, unmuzzled, on his the
policeman's beat? With other policemen he had nothing to do. The dog
was his discovery, the name and address of the owner were required,
and there was no doubt, in the policeman's mind, that the owner would
have to pay a second fine. The merchant went his ways, still followed
by an unmuzzled unled dog. Before long he met a third policeman, gave
his name and address a third time, and was assured that he would have
to pay a third time.
"_Dann war es mir zu bunt_," said the merchant, and he picked up the
dog and carried it the rest of the way to his office. When he got
there he sent it home in a cab.