PEASANT LIFE
The peasant proprietors of Southern Germany are a comfortable,
prosperous class. "A rich peasant" begins your comic story as often as
"a rich Jew." The peasants own their farms and a bit of forest, as
well as a vineyard or a hop garden. They never pretend to be anything
but peasants; but when they can afford it they like to have a son who
is a doctor, a schoolmaster, or a pastor. Unless you have special
opportunities you can only watch peasant life from outside in Germany,
for you could not stay in a Bauernhaus as you would in a farmhouse in
England. At least, you could not live with the family. In some of the
summer resorts the peasants make money by furnishing bedrooms and
letting them to _Herrschaften_, but the _Herrschaften_ have to get
their meals at the nearest inn. The inner life of the peasant family
is rougher than the inner life of the farmer's family in England,
though their level of prosperity is as high, possibly higher. You
cannot imagine the English farmer and his wife putting on costly and
picturesque mediæval costumes every Sunday and solemnly marching to
church in them; but the German Bauer still does this quite simply and
proudly. In some parts of the Black Forest every valley has its own
costume, so that you know where a man lives by the clothes he wears.
There is one valley where all the girls are pretty, and on festive
occasions or for church they wear charming transparent black caps with
wings to them. There is another valley where the men are big-boned and
blackavised, with square shaven chins and spare bodies, rather like
our English legal type; and they go to church in scarlet breeches,
long black velvet coats, and black three-cornered hats. Their
women-folk wear gay-coloured skirts and mushroom hats loaded with
heavy poms-poms. In Cassel there are most curious costumes to be seen
still on high days and holidays; from Berlin, people go to the
Spreewald to see the Wendish peasants, and in Bavaria there is still
some colour and variety of costume. But everywhere you hear that these
costumes are dying out. The new generation does not care to label
itself, for it finds _städtische Kleider_ cheaper and more convenient.
The Wendish girls seem to abide by the ways of their forefathers, for
they go to service in Berlin on purpose to save money for clothes.
They buy or are presented with two or three costumes each year, and
when they marry they have a stock that will last a lifetime and will
provide them with the variety their pride demands. For they like to
have a special rig-out for every occasion, and a great many changes
for church on Sundays. In Catholic Germany a procession on a saint's
day seems to have stepped down from a stained-glass window, the
women's gowns are so vivid and their bodies so stiff and angular. But
to see the German peasantry in full dress you must go to a
_Kirchweih_, a dance, or a wedding.
You can hardly be in Germany in summer without seeing something of
peasants' weddings, and of the elaborate rites observed at them.
Different parts of the empire have different ways, and even in one
district you will find much variety. We saw several peasant weddings
in the Black Forest one summer, and no two were quite alike. Sometimes
when we were walking through the forest we met a _Brautwagen_: the
great open cart loaded with the furniture and wedding presents the
bride was taking as part of her dowry to her new home. It would be
piled with bedding, wooden bedsteads, chests of drawers, and pots and
pans; and gay-coloured ribbons would be floating from each point of
vantage. Sometimes the bridal pair was with the cart, the young
husband in his wedding clothes walking beside the horse, the bride
seated amongst her possessions. Sometimes a couple of men in working
clothes, probably the bridegroom and a friend, were carrying the
things beforehand, so that the new home should be ready directly after
the wedding. We happened to be staying in the Black Forest when our
inn-keeper's daughter was going to marry a young doctor, the son of a
rich peasant in a neighbouring valley, and we were asked to the
wedding. Our landlord ran two inns, the one in which we stayed and
another a dozen miles away, which was managed by his wife and
daughters. The wife's hotel was in a fashionable watering-place, and
offered a smarter background for a wedding than the one in our
out-of-the-world little town. It is the proper moment now for you to
object that this could not have been a "peasant" wedding at all, and
has no place in a picture of peasant life; and I concede that the
bride and bridegroom, their parents, and certain of their friends all
wore _städtische Kleider_. The bride was in black silk, and the
bridegroom in his professional black coat. But nearly all the guests
were peasants, and wore peasant costume; and the heavy long-spun
festivities were those usual at a peasant's wedding. We started with
our bicycles at six o'clock in the morning, and soon found ourselves
in a straggling procession of carts and pedestrians come from all the
valleys round. The main road was like a road on a fair day. Everyone
knew that there was to be a _Hochzeit_ at R., a big splendid
_Hochzeit_, and everyone who could afford the time and the money was
going to eat and drink and dance at it. Everyone was in a holiday
mood, and all along the lovely forest road we exchanged greetings with
our fellow-guests and gathered scraps of information about the feast
we were on our way to join. Every inn we passed had set out extra
tables, and expected extra custom that day, and when we got to one
within a mile of R. we found the garden crowded. People were ready by
this time for their second breakfast, and were having it here before
making their appearance at the wedding. We were hungry and thirsty
ourselves, so we sat down under the shade of trees and ate _belegtes
Butterbrot_ and drank Pilsener as our neighbours did. We arrived at R.
just in time to remove the dust of the road, and then walk, as we
found our hosts expected us to do, in the wedding procession. First
came the bride and bridegroom, and then a long crocodile of
bridesmaids, all wearing the curious high bead wreaths possessed by
every village girl of standing in this part of Germany. We witnessed
the civil ceremony, but though I have been present at several German
civil weddings I remember as little about them as about a visit to the
English District Council Office where I have sometimes been to pay
taxes. In both cases there is a bare room, an indifferent official,
some production of official papers, and the thing is done. When the
bride and bridegroom had been made legally man and wife they headed
the waiting procession again, and proceeded to the church for the
real, the religious ceremony. It was packed with people, and the
service, which was Catholic, lasted a long time. When it was over
everyone streamed back to the hotel, and as soon as possible the
_Hochzeitsmahl_ began; but though we were politely bidden to it we
politely excused ourselves, for we knew that the feast would last for
hours and would be more than we could bear. Till evening, they said,
it would last, and there would be many speeches, and it was a broiling
summer day. The guests we perceived to be a mixed company of peasants
in costume, of inn-keepers and their families in ordinary clothes, and
of university students in black coats who were removed from the
peasantry by their education, but not by birth and affection. The
invited guests sat down to dinner in the _Speisesaal_, but the hotel
garden was crowded with country people who paid for what they
consumed. The dinner served to us and to others out here was an
unusually good one, so we discovered that people who attend a wedding
unasked get a spectacle, a dance, and extra fine food for their money.
Towards the end of the afternoon before we left R. we looked in at the
ballroom, where dancing had begun already.
At another peasant's wedding in the Black Forest we saw some quaint
customs observed that were omitted at R. In this case the bride and
bridegroom were themselves peasants, and wore the costume of their
valley. The bride was said to be well endowed, but she was extremely
plain. Amongst German peasants, however, beauty hardly counts. What a
woman is worth to a man, he reckons partly in hard cash and partly in
the work she can do. There were two charmingly pretty girls in the
Bavarian village where we once spent a summer, but we were told that
they had not the faintest chance of marriage, because, though they
belonged to a respectable family, they were orphans and dowerless.
Auerbach's enchanting story of _Barfüssele_, in which the village
Cinderella marries the rich peasant, is a fairy story and not a
picture of real life. The feast at this second wedding we saw must
have cost a good deal, for it was prepared at our hotel for a large
crowd of guests and lasted for hours. It was an agitating wedding in
some of its aspects. The day before we had been startled at irregular
but frequent intervals by loud gunshots, and we were told that these
were fired in welcome of the wedding guests as they arrived. When the
bride appeared with her _Brautwagen_ and an escort of young men there
was a volley in her honour. We did not go to church to see that
wedding, as we were not attracted by the bridal pair; but we watched
the crowd from our windows, and as it was a wet day, endured the
sounds of revelry that lasted for hours after the feast began. There
was no dancing at this marriage, and as each batch of guests departed
a brass band just outside our rooms played them a send-off. It was a
jerky irritating performance, because the instant the object of their
attentions disappeared round the turn of the hill they stopped short,
and only began a new tune when there was a new departure. We were
rather glad when the day came to an end. In the Black Forest you
always know where there is a wedding, because two small fir trees are
brought from the forest decked with flying coloured streamers of paper
or ribbon, and set on either side of the bride's front door.
The German peasant loves his pipe and his beer, and on a Sunday
afternoon his game of _Kegel_; but on high days and holidays he likes
to be dancing. He and she will trudge for miles to dance at some
distant village inn. You meet them dressed in their best clothes,
walking barefoot and carrying clean boots and stockings. How they can
dance in tight boots after a long hot walk on a dusty road, you must
be a German peasant yourself to understand. The dance I remember best
took place in a barn belonging to a village inn in Bavaria. I went
with several English friends to look on at it, and the men of our
party danced with some of the village girls. The room was only lighted
by a few candles, and it was so crowded that while everyone was
dancing everyone was hustled. But we were told that anyone who chose
could "buy the floor" for a time by giving sixpence or a shilling to
the band. Two of the Englishmen did this, and the crowd looked on in
solemn approval while they waltzed once or twice round with the pretty
granddaughters of our hosts. It was a scene I have often wished I
could paint, the crowd was so dense, and the faces, from our point of
view, so foreign. The candles only lifted the semi-darkness here and
there, but where their light fell it flashed on the bright-coloured
handkerchiefs which the women of this village twisted round their
heads like turbans, and pinned across their bosoms. I think it is
absurd, though, to say that German peasants dance well. They enjoy the
exercise immensely, but are heavy and loutish in their movements, and
they flounder about in a grotesque way with their hands on each
other's shoulders. At a _Kirchweih_ they dance in the open air.
A _Kirchweih_ is a feast to celebrate the foundations of the village
church, and it takes the form of a fair. The preparations begin the
day before, when the roundabouts and shooting booths are put up in the
appointed field. On the day before the _Kirchweih_ in our Bavarian
village I found the inn-keeper's wife cooking what we call Berlin
pancakes in a cauldron of boiling fat, the like of which I have never
seen before or since for size. It must have held gallons. All day long
she stood there throwing in the cinnamon flavoured batter, and taking
out the little crisp brown balls. They are, it seems, a favourite
dainty at a Bavarian _Kirchweih_, and must be provided in large
quantities. On the fair field itself the food offered by the
stall-keepers seemed to be chiefly enormous slabs of shiny gingerbread
made in fanciful shapes, such as hearts, lyres, and garlands, cheap
sweetmeats, and the small boiled sausages the artless German eats in
public without a knife and fork.
The _Kirchweih_ is the chief event of the summer in a German village,
and is talked of for weeks beforehand. The peasants stream in from all
the villages near, and join in the dancing and the shooting matches.
When the day is fine and the fair field has a background of wooded
hills, you see where the librettists of pre-Wagnerian days went for
their stage effects. All the characters of many a German opera are
there correctly dressed, joining in the songs and dances, shooting for
wagers, making love, sometimes coming to blows. But you may look on at
a _Kirchweih_ from morning till night without seeing either horseplay
or drunkenness. Not that the German peasant is an opera hero in his
inner life. He is a hard-working man, God-fearing on the whole, stupid
and stolid often, narrowly shrewd often, having his eye on the main
chance. When he is stupid but not God-fearing he dresses himself and
his wife in their best clothes, puts his insurance papers in his
pockets, sets his thatched house on fire, and goes for a walk. Then he
is surprised that he is caught and punished. Fires are frequent in
German villages, and in a high wind and where the roofs are of straw
destruction is complete sometimes. You often come across the blackened
remains of houses, and you always feel anxious about the new
buildings that will replace them. It is a good deal to say, but I
believe our own jerry-builders are outdone in florid vulgarity by
German villadom, and the German atrocities will last longer than ours,
because the building laws are more stringent. But the old _Bauernhaus_
still to be seen in most parts of the Black Forest is dignified and
beautiful. The Swiss chalet is a poor gim-crack thing in comparison.
Sometimes the German house has a shingled roof, and sometimes a
thatched roof dark with age, and it has drooping eaves and an outside
staircase and balcony of wood. It shelters the farm cattle in the
stables on the ground floor, and the family on the upper floor, and in
the roof there are granaries. But the beautiful old thatched roofs are
gradually giving place to the slate ones, because they burn so easily,
and fire, when it comes, is the village tragedy. I can remember when a
fire in a big German commercial town was proclaimed by a beating drum,
the noisy parade of fire-men, the clanging of bells, and all the
hullaballoo that panic and curiosity could make. But last year, in
Berlin, looking at houses like the tower of Babel, I said something of
fire, and was told that no one felt nervous nowadays, the arrangements
for dealing with it were so complete.
"People just look out of the window, see that there is a fire next
door, or above or beneath them, and go about their business," said my
hosts. "They know that the fire brigade will do their business and put
it out."
I did not see a fire in Berlin, so I had no opportunity of witnessing
the remarkable coolness of the Berliner in circumstances the ordinary
man finds trying; but I saw a fire in my Bavarian village, and there
were not many cool people there. The summons came in the middle of the
night with the hoarse insistent clanging of the church bell, the
sudden start into life of the sleeping village, the sounds in the
house and in the street of people astir and terrified. Then there came
the brilliant reflection of the flames in the opposite windows, and
the roar and crackle of fire no one at first knew where. It was only a
barn after all, a barn luckily detached from other buildings. Yet when
we got into the street we found most of the population removing its
treasures, as if danger was imminent. All the beds and chairs and pots
and pans of the place seemed to be on the cobble-stones, and the women
wailed and the children wept. "But the village is not on fire," we
said. "It may be at any moment," they assured us, and were scandalised
by our cold-bloodedness. For we had not carted our trunks into the
street, but hastened towards the burning barn to see if we could help
the men and boys carrying water. The weather was still and the barn
isolated, so we knew there was no danger of the fire spreading. But
the villagers were too excitable and too panic-stricken to be
convinced of this. All their lives they had dreaded fire, and when the
flames broke out so near them they thought that their houses were
doomed.
Next to fire the German peasant hates beggars and gipsies. We were six
months in the Black Forest and only met one beggar the whole time, and
he was a decent-looking old man who seemed to ask alms unwillingly.
But in some parts of Germany there are a great many most
unpleasant-looking tramps. The village council puts up a notice that
forbids begging, and has a general fund from which it sends tramps on
their way. But it does not seem able to deal with the caravans of
gipsies that come from Hungary and Bohemia. In a Thuringian village we
came down one morning to find our inn locked and barricaded as if a
riot was expected, and an attack. Even the shutters were drawn and
bolted. "_Was ist denn los?_" we asked in amazement, and were told
that the gipsies were coming.
"But will they do you any harm?" we asked.
"They will steal all they can lay hands on," our landlady assured us.
She was a widow, and her brewer, the only man in her employ, was, we
supposed, standing guard over his own house. We thought the panic
seemed extreme, but we had never encountered Hungarian gipsies on the
warpath, and we did not know how many were coming. So, after assuring
our excited little Frau that we would stand by her as well as we
could, we went to an upper window to watch for the enemy. Presently
the procession began, a straggling procession of the dirtiest,
meanest-looking ruffians ever seen. There was waggon after waggon,
swarming with ragamuffins of both sexes and all ages. The men were
mostly on foot, casting furtive glances to right and left, evident
snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, truculent, ragged, wearing
evil-looking knives by their sides. During their transit the village
had shut itself up, as Coventry did for Godiva's ride. When we all
ventured forth again the talk was of missing poultry and rifled fruit
trees. The geese had luckily started for their day on the high
pastures before the bad folk came; for in a German village there is
always a gooseherd. Sometimes it is a little boy or girl, sometimes an
old woman, and early in the morning whoever has the post collects the
whole flock, drives it to a chosen feeding ground, spends the day
there, and brings it back at night. It must be a contemplative life,
and in dry weather pleasant. I think it would suit a philosopher if he
could choose his days. In our Franconian village the gooseherd was a
little boy, vastly proud of his job. Every morning, long before we
were up, he would stride past our windows piping the same tune, and at
the sound of it every goose in the village would waddle out from her
night quarters and join the cackling fussy crowd at his heels. Every
evening as dusk fell he came back again, still piping the same tune,
and then the geese would detach themselves in little groups from the
main body and find their own homes as surely as cows do.
Every rural district of Germany has its own novelist. Fritz Reuter,
Frenssen, Rosegger, Sudermann all write of country life in the places
they know best. In Hauptmann's beautiful plays you see the peasant
through a veil of poetry and mysticism. Auerbach, I am told, is out of
fashion. His stories end well mostly, his construction one must admit
is childish, and his characters change their natures with the
suddenness of a thunderbolt to suit his plot. Yet when I have
_Sehnsucht_ for Germany, and cannot go there in reality, I love to go
in fancy where Auerbach leads. He takes you to a house in the Black
Forest, and you sit at breakfast with the family eating _Haferbrei_
out of one bowl. You know the people gathered there as well as if you
had been with them all the summer, and you know them now in winter
time when the roads are deep in snow and a wolf is abroad in the
forest. The story I am thinking of was published in 1860, and I
believe that there are no wolves now in the Black Forest. But as far
as one outside peasant life can judge, I doubt whether anything else
has changed much. You hear the history of the _Grossbauer_, the rich
farmer of the district whose breed is as strong and daring as the
breed of the Volsungs. Seven years ago the only son and heir of this
forest magnate, Adam Röttman, loved a poor girl called Martina, and
their child Joseph is now six years old. Adam is still faithful to
Martina, but his parents will not consent to their marriage, and
insists on betrothing him to an heiress as rich as he will be,
Heidenmüller's Toni. The whole village looks on at the romance and
sides with Martina; for Adam's mother, _die wilde Röttmännin_, is one
of those stormy viragoes I myself have met amongst German women. She
masters her husband and son with her temper. She is so rich that she
has more _Schmalz_ than she can use, and so mean that she would rather
let it go bad than give it to the poor. At midnight, when the roads
are deep in snow, she sends for the _Pfarrer_, and when he risks his
life and goes because he thinks she is dying, he finds she is merely
bored and wanted his company; for she has been used to think that she
could tyrannise over all men because she was richer and more
determined than most. Next day she gets up, orders her husband and son
to put on Sunday clothes, and well wrapped up in _Betten_ drives with
them to the _Heidenmühle_, where Adam is formally betrothed to Toni.
The girl knows all about Martina, but she consents because she would
marry anyone to escape from her stepmother, who treats her cruelly,
and in order to hurt her feelings has given her mother's cup to the
_Knecht_. After the betrothal the two fathers sit together and drink
hot spiced wine, the two mothers gossip together, and the _Brautpaar_
talk sadly about Martina, who should be Adam's wife, and Joseph who is
his child. At last Adam could bear it no longer. He would go straight
to Martina, he said, and he would be with Toni again before the
Christmas tree was lighted; and then he would either break with Toni
or feel free to marry her. "The bride stared at Adam with amazement as
he put on his grey cloak and his fur cap and seized his pointed stick.
He looked both handsome and terrible." For he is one of the heroes
Germans love, a giant who once held a bull by its horns while Martina
escaped from it, who is called the _Gaul_, because for a wager he once
carried the cart and the load a cart horse should have carried, and
who on this wild winter night meets the wolf in the forest and kills
it with his stick. So you see him striding through the snow-bound
forest to the village where Martina lives, dragging the wolf after
him, as strong as Siegfried, as credulous as a child, ready to believe
that the voices of his father and his child both looking for him in
the snow are witches' voices. But when he gets to the village he finds
that his child, so long disowned and disregarded, is really lost, and
is looking for him in the snow. The hatter who tramps from village to
village hung with hats met him, and tried to turn him back. But the
child said he had come out to find his father, and must go on. Then
every man in the village assembles at the _Pfarrhaus_, and, led by the
_Pfarrer's_ brother-in-law (an eventual husband for Heidenmüller's
Toni), sets out to find Joseph in the snow. Before they start Adam
vows before the whole community that whether the child is alive or
dead nothing shall ever part him again from Martina, and when he has
made this vow you see the whole company depart in various directions
carrying torches, ladders, axes, and long ropes. Meanwhile the child,
after some alarms and excursions, meets three angels (children
masquerading), who take him with them to the mill where Toni has just
lighted the Christmas tree. She rescues Joseph from _die wilde
Röttmännin_, and that same night, her father dying of his carouse, she
becomes a rich heiress and free of her wicked stepmother. Joseph's
hostile grandfathers, after a fight in the snow, make friends, the
obliging _Pfarrer_ marries Adam and Martina at midnight, and soon
after the _wilde Röttmännin_ who will not be reconciled leaves this
world. So everyone who deserves happiness gets it. But though you only
half believe in the story you have been in the very heart of the Black
Forest, the companion of its people, the observer of their most
intimate talk and ways. You have heard the women gossip at the well,
you have made friends with Leegart the seamstress, who believes that
quite against her will she is gifted with supernatural powers. There
is Häspele, too, who made Joseph his new boots, and would marry
Martina if he could; and there is David, the father of Martina, who
was hardly kept from murdering his daughter when she came home in
disgrace, and whose grandson becomes the apple of his eye. The whole
picture of these people is vivid and enchanting, touched with quaint
detail, veined with the tragedy of their lives, glowing with the warm
human qualities that knit them to each other. The South German loves
to tell you that his country is _ein gesegnetes Land_, a blessed
country, flowing with milk and honey; and whether you are reading
Auerbach's peasant stories or actually staying amongst his peasant
folk, you get this impression of their natural surroundings. Nature is
kind here, grows forest for her people on the hill-tops, and wine,
fruit and corn in her sheltered valleys, ripens their fruit in summer,
gives them heavy crops of hay, and sends soft warm rain as well as sun
to enrich their pastures.
In the eastern provinces of Germany the conditions of life amongst the
poor are most unhappy. Here the land belongs to large proprietors, and
until modern times the people born on the land belonged to the
landlords too. No man could leave the village where he was born
without permission, and he had to work for his masters without pay.
Even in the memory of living men the whip was quite commonly used. In
her most interesting account of a Silesian village,[3] Gertrud
Dyhrenfurth says that the present condition of the peasantry in this
region compares favourably with former times, but she admits that they
are still miserably overworked and underpaid. They are no longer
legally obliged to submit to corporal punishment, nor can they be
forced to live where they were born, and as they emigrate in large
numbers, scarcity of labour has brought about slightly improved
conditions for those remaining. But a man's wage is still a mark a day
in summer and 90 pf. in winter. A woman earns 60 pf. in summer and 50
pf. in winter. Besides receiving these wages, a family regularly
employed lives rent free and gets a fixed amount of coal, and at
harvest time some corn and brandy. You cannot say the family has a
house or cottage to itself, because the system is to build long
bare-looking barracks in which numbers of working families herd like
rabbits in a warren. In modern times each family has a kitchen to
itself, so there is one warm room where the small children can be kept
alive. In former times there was a general kitchen, and in the rooms
appointed to each family no heating apparatus; therefore, if the
children were not to die of cold, they had to be carried every morning
to the kitchen, where there was a fire. The present plan has grave
disadvantages, as in one room the whole family has to sleep, eat,
wash, and cook for themselves and for the animals in their care. The
furniture consists of two or three bedsteads with straw mattresses and
feather plumeaux, shelves for pots and pans, a china cupboard with
glass doors, a table in the window, and wooden benches with backs.
This installation is quite luxurious compared with that of a
milkmaid's or a stablemaid's surroundings sixty or seventy years ago.
"Her home consisted of a plank slung from the stable roof and
furnished with a sack of straw and a plumeau. Her small belongings
were in a little trunk in a wooden niche, her clothes in a chest that
stood in the garret." Here is the life history of an unmarried working
woman of eighty-six born in a Silesian village. When she left school
she was apprenticed to a thrasher, with a yearly wage of four thalers,
besides two chemises and two aprons as a Christmas present. Even in
those days this money did not suffice for clothing, although even in
winter the women wore no warm under-garments. Quite unprotected, they
waded up to the middle in snow.... In summer the girl was in the barn
and at work by dawn; in winter they threshed by artificial light. A
bit of bread taken in the pocket served as breakfast. The first warm
meal was taken at midday. When the farm work was finished there was
spinning to do till 10 o'clock.
This woman "bettered herself" as she grew older till she was earning
35 thalers (£5, 5s. 0d.) a year; she accustomed herself to live on
this sum, and when wages increased, to put by the surplus. So in her
old age she is a capitalist, has saved enough for a decent funeral,
for certain small legacies, and for such an amazing luxury as a tin
foot-warmer. The family she faithfully served for so many years allows
her coal, milk and potatoes, and when necessary pays for doctor and
medicine. Her weekly budget is as follows--
Pf.
Rent 50
Bread 25
Rolls 5
__
Carried forward 80
Pf.
Brought forward 80
¼ lb. butter 25
¼ lb. coffee and chicory 25
Sugar 15
1 lb. flour 14
Salt 1
Light 10
Washing 5
------
1m. 75
======
Meat is of course out of the question, and in discussing another
budget Fräulein Dyhrenfurth shows that a family of eight people could
only afford three quarters of a pound a week. Their yearly expenses
amounted to 455 m. 26 pf., so each one of the eight had to be fed and
clothed for about 1s. 1d. a week. Women are still terribly overworked
in the fields. They used to begin at four o'clock in the morning, and
go on till nine at night,--a working day, that is, of seventeen hours
for a wife and the mother of a family. When the family at the mansion
had the great half-yearly wash, the village women called in to help
began at midnight, and stood at the washtub till eight o'clock next
evening, twenty hours, that is, on end. In 1880 the working day was
shortened, and only lasts now from five in the morning till seven at
night, with a two hours' pause for dinner and shorter pauses for
breakfast and vesper. But, on the other hand, women do work now that
only men did in former times. The threshing of corn has fallen
entirely into their hands, and they follow a plough yoked with oxen.
Both kinds of work are heavy and unpleasant. But women are glad to get
the threshing in winter time when other work fails, and it is often on
this account that the proprietors do not introduce threshing machines.
At certain times of the year Poles swarm over the frontier into the
eastern provinces of Germany, but Fräulein Dyhrenfurth says that they
do not work for lower wages. The women have no house-keeping to do,
and can therefore give more hours to field labour. One woman prepares
a meal for a whole gang of her country people, and they live almost
entirely on bread, potatoes, and brandy. They do not mix with the
Germans, but spend their evenings and Sundays in playing the
harmonium, dancing, and drinking. They return every year, are always
foreigners in Germany, and are very industrious, religious, contented,
and cheerful, but inclined to drink and fight.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] _Ein schlesisches Dorf und Rittergut_, von Gertrud Dyhrenfurth.
Leipzig, Duncker und Humblot.