HOW THE POOR LIVE
Poverty in German cities puts on a more respectable face than it does
in London or Manchester. It herds in the cellars and courtyards of
houses that have an imposing frontage; and when it walks out of doors
it does not walk in rags. But you only have to look at the pinched
faces of the children in the poorer quarters of any city to know that
it is there. They are tidier and cleaner than English slum children,
but they make you wish just as ardently that you were the Pied Piper
and could pipe them all with you to a land of plenty. It would require
more experience and wider facts than I possess to compare the
condition of the poor in England and Germany, especially as the
professed economists and philanthropists who make it their business to
understand such things disagree with each other about every detail. If
you talk to Englishmen, one will tell you that the German starves on
rye bread and horse sausage because he is oppressed by an iniquitous
tariff; and the next will assure you that the German flourishes and
fattens on the high wages and prosperous trade he owes entirely to his
admirable protective laws. If you talk to the Anglophobe, he will tell
you that the dirt, drunkenness, disease, and extravagance of the
English lower classes are the sin and scandal of the civilised world;
that it is useless for you to ask where the poor live in Berlin,
because there are no poor. Everyone in Germany is clean, virtuous,
well housed, and well-to-do. If you talk to an honest, reasonable
German, he will recognise that each country has its own difficulties
and its own shortcomings, and that both countries make valiant efforts
to fight their own dragons. He will tell you of the suffering that
exists amongst the German poor crowded into these houses with the
imposing fronts, and of all that statecraft and philanthropy are
patiently trying to accomplish. Doctor Shadwell, in his most valuable
and interesting book _Industrial Efficiency_, says that the American
has to pay twice as much rent as the English working man, and that
rents in Germany are nearer the American than the English level. As
wages are lower in Germany than in England, and as meat and groceries
are decidedly dearer, it is plain that the working man cannot live in
clover. Doctor Shadwell gives an example of a smith earning 1050
marks, and having to pay 280 for rent. He had a wife and two children,
and Doctor Shadwell reckoned that the family to make two ends meet
must live on 37 pf. per head per day; the prison scale per head being
80 pf. I know a respectable German charwoman who earns 41 marks a
month, and pays 25 marks a month for her parterre flat in the _Hof_.
She lets off all her rooms except the kitchen, and she sleeps in a
place that is only fit for a coal-hole. A work-girl pays her 6 marks a
month for a clean tidy bedroom furnished with a solid wooden bedstead,
a chest of drawers, a sofa, and a table. This girl works from 7.30 to
6 in a shop, she pays the charwoman 10 pf. for her breakfast, 10 pf.
weekly for her lamp, and another 10 pf. for the use and comfort of the
kitchen fire at night. Her dinner of soup, meat, and vegetables the
girl gets at a _Privatküche_ for 40 pf. So the workgirl's weekly
expenses for food, fire, and lodging are 5 marks 20 pf., but this does
not give her an evening meal or afternoon coffee. The charwoman
reckoned that she herself only had 15 marks a month for food, fire,
light, and clothes; but she got nearly all her food with the families
for whom she worked. She was a cheerful, honest body, and though she
slept in a coal-hole was apparently quite healthy. She looked forward
to her old age with tranquillity, because before long she would be in
receipt of a pension from the State, a weekly sum that with her habits
of thrift and industry would enable her to live.
A German lady who chooses to teach in a _Volksschule_, because she
thinks the _Volk_ more interesting than Higher Daughters, described a
home to me from which one of her pupils came. The parents had eight
children, and the family of ten lived in two rooms. That is a state of
things we can match in England, unhappily. But my friend described
this home, not on account of its misery, but for the extraordinary
neatness and comfort the mother maintained in it. "Every time I go
there," said my friend, who lived with her father and sister in a
charming flat,--"every time I go there I say to the woman, if only it
looked like this in my home"; and there was no need for me to see the
rooms to understand what she meant; for I know the air of order and
even of solidity with which the poorest Germans will surround
themselves if they are respectable. They have very few pieces of
furniture, but those few will stand wear and tear; they prefer a clean
painted floor to a filthy carpet, and they are so poor that they have
no pence to spend on plush photograph frames. I cannot remember what
weekly wage this family existed on, but I know that it seemed quite
inadequate, and when I asked if the children were healthy as well as
clean and tidy, my friend admitted that they were not. In spite of the
brave struggle made by the parents, it was impossible to bring up a
large family on such means, and the maladies arising from insufficient
food, fire, and clothing afflicted them. The case is, I think, a
typical one. English people are always impressed when they visit
German cities by the tidy clothes poor people wear, and if they are
shown the right interiors, by their clean tidy homes. But you need
most carefully and widely collected facts and figures to judge how far
the children of a nation are suffering from poverty. It was found, for
instance, in one German city, that out of 1472 children examined in
the elementary schools, 63 per cent. of the girls and 60 per cent. of
the boys were _nicht völlig normal_.
Moreover, there are whole classes of poor people in Germany whose
homes are not tidy and comfortable, who are crowded into cellars and
courtyards, and who have neither time nor strength for the decencies
of life. The "Sweater" flourishes in Berlin as well as in London, and
his victims are as overworked as they are here. He is usually a Jew,
it is said in Berlin, but I will not guarantee the truth of that, for
I have not observed that the Jew is anywhere a harder task-master than
the Christian. As Berlin grew, these spiders of society increased in
numbers, finding it easy and profitable to employ home workers and
spare themselves the expenses of factories and of insurance. Women who
could not go out to work were tempted by the chance offered them of
earning a trifle at home, and woman-like never paused to reckon
whether it was worth earning. As the city gets larger every evil
connected with the system increases. The worst paid are naturally the
incompetent rough peasant women who swarm into Berlin from the
country districts, because they think that it will be easier to sit at
a machine than to labour in the fields. These people have to buy their
machines and their cotton at high prices from their employers, and
then they get 10 pf. for making a blouse. A lady who spends her life
in working amongst poor people told me that many of them worked for
nothing in reality, because the trifle they earned only just paid the
difference between the food they had to buy ready cooked and the food
they might with more leisure prepare at home. They pay high rents for
wretched homes, £15, for instance, for a kitchen and one room in a
dark courtyard. Under £13 it is impossible to get anything in the
poorest quarter of Berlin.
"The house itself looked respectable enough from outside," says Frau
Buchholz, when she went to see a girl who had just married a poor man;
"but oh! those steep narrow stairs that I had to mount, those wretched
entrances on each floor, the miserable door handles, the sickly
bluish-grey walls, the shaky banisters! It was easy to see that the
outside had been devised with a view to investors, and the inside for
poverty." In houses of this class there are often three courtyards,
one behind each other, all noisy and badly kept. The conditions of
life in such circumstances are no better than in our own notorious
slums, but a slum seven storeys high, and presenting a decent front to
the world, does not suggest the real misery behind its regular row of
windows, nor does the quiet well-swept street give any picture of the
rabbit warren in the courtyards at the back. In the enormous
"confection" trade of Berlin the home-workers are nearly all widows
and mothers of families, as the unmarried girls prefer to go to
factories. A skilled hand can earn a fair wage at certain seasons of
the year, as the demand for skilled work in this department always
exceeds the supply. But the average wage of the unskilled worker is
only 10 marks a week, while it sinks as low as 4 marks for petticoats,
aprons, and woollen goods. A corset maker, who has learned her trade,
can only make from 8 to 10 marks a week in a factory, while a woman
who sits at home and covers umbrellas gets 1 mark 50 pf. _a dozen_
when the coverings are of stuff, and slightly more when they are of
silk. The extreme poverty of these home-workers is a constant subject
of inquiry and legislation, but for various reasons it is most
difficult to combat. The market is always over-crowded, because, badly
paid as it is, the work is popular. Women push into it from the middle
classes for the sake of pocket-money, and from the agrarian classes
because they fancy a city life. Efforts are being made to organise
them, and especially to train the daughters of these women to more
healthy and profitable trades. I went over a small _Volksküche_ in
Berlin, and was told that there were many like it established by
various charitable agencies, and that the effect of them was to make
the children ready to go into service; a life that has some drawbacks,
but should at any rate be wholesome and civilising,--a better
preparation for marriage, too, than to sit like a slattern over a
machine all day, and buy scraps of expensive ready-made food, because
both time and skill are wanting for anything more palatable. In the
kitchen I visited there were sixteen children from the poorest
families in the neighbourhood, and, assisted by a superintendent and
two teachers, they were preparing a dinner that cost 30 pf. a head for
250 people. The rooms were clean and plainly furnished. A small
laundry business was run in connection with the kitchen, so that the
girls should be thoroughly trained to wash and iron as well as to
cook. Of late years the working classes of Berlin have adopted what
they call _Englische Tischzeit_, and no one who knows the ways of the
English artisan will guess that the German means _late dinner_. He now
does his long day's work, I am told, on bread alone, and has the one
solid meal in the twenty-four hours when he gets home at night. _Durch
Arbeiten_, he calls it, and people interested in the welfare of the
poor say it is bad for all concerned, but especially bad for the
children, who come in too exhausted to eat, and for the women, who
have to cook and clean up when the day's business should be nearly
done. It is quite characteristic of some kinds of modern Germans that
they should in a breath condemn us, imitate us, and completely
misunderstand our ways.
The business women of Germany have organised themselves. _Der
Kaufmännische Verband für Weibliche Angestellte_ was founded by Herr
Julius Meyer in 1889, and, beginning with 50 members, numbered 17,000
in 1904. Its aim has been to improve the conditions of life for women
working in shops and businesses, to carry on their education, and to
help them when ill or out of work. It began by opening commercial
schools for women, where they could receive a thorough training in
book-keeping, shorthand, typewriting, and other branches of office
work. These have been a great success, have been imitated all over
Germany, and have led to an expansion of the law enforcing on girls
attendance at the State continuation schools. The society was founded
to remedy some crying abuses amongst women employed in shops and
offices, a working day of seventeen hours, for instance, dismissal
without notice, no rest on Sundays, no summer holiday, and not only a
want of seats but an actual prohibition to sit down even when
unemployed. All these matters the society, which has become a powerful
one, has gradually set right. A ten-hours' day for grown-up women,
and eight hours for those under age, the provision of seats, an 8
o'clock closing rule, a month's notice on either side, some hours of
rest on Sunday, and a summer holiday are all secured to members of the
organisation. The system of "living in" does not obtain in Germany.
Shops may only open for five hours on Sundays now, and large numbers
do not open at all. They may only keep open after ten on twenty days
in the year. Other reforms the society hopes to bring about in time;
and meanwhile it occupies itself both in finding work for members who
are out of place, and in protecting those who are sick and destitute.
The ladies of Germany have taken to philanthropic work with
characteristic energy and thoroughness. There is one society in Berlin
that has 700 members, some of whom devote their whole time to their
poor neighbours. I am not going to give the name of the society; so I
may describe one of its secretaries, who personified the best modern
type of German woman. She was about 27, a dark-haired, slim,
serious-looking person with delicate Jewish features and beautiful
grey eyes; a girl belonging to the wealthy classes, and able if she
had chosen to lead a life of frivolity and pleasure. But she had
chosen instead to give herself to the sick, the afflicted, the needy,
and even to the sinning; for she was a moving spirit of the
organisation that dives down into the depths of the great city, and
rescues those who have gone under. Her society also does a great deal
for the children of the very poor, not only for babies in crêches, but
for those who go to school. The members help these older ones with
their school work, and when the children are free teach them to wash,
cook, and sew, and to play open-air games. They teach the blind, they
look after the deserted families of men in prison, and the older
members act as guardians to illegitimate children; for in Germany
every illegitimate child must have a guardian, and women are now
allowed to act in this capacity. The secretary said they found no
difficulty in getting both married and single women to take up these
good works.
"What do the parents say when their daughters take it up?" I asked,
for I could not picture the German girl as I had always known her
going out into the highways and byways of the city, leaving her
cooking, her music, her embroidery, and her sentiment, and battling
with the hideous realities of life amongst the sick, the poor, and the
more or less wicked of the earth.
"The parents don't like it," my girl with the honest eyes admitted.
"When girls have worked for us some time they often refuse to marry;
at least, they refuse the arranged marriages proposed to them. But we
cannot stop on that account. If a girl does not wish to marry in this
way it is better that she should not. No good can come of it."
Then she went on to tell me how well it was that a child born to
utmost shame and poverty should have a woman of the better classes
interested from the beginning in its welfare, and responsible for its
decent upbringing. It implied contact with various officials, of
course, but she said that the ladies who took this work in hand met
with courtesy and support everywhere.
You have only to place this type of young woman beside the
_Backfisch_, who represents an older type quite fairly, to understand
how far the modern German girl has travelled from the traditional
lines. If you can imagine the _Backfisch_ married and mentally little
altered in her middle age, you can also imagine that she would find a
daughter with the new ideas upsetting. At present both types are
living side by side, for there are still numbers of women of the old
school in Germany, women who passively accept the life made for them
by their surroundings, whether it suits their needs or not; and who
would never strike out a path for themselves, even if by doing so they
could forget their own troubles in the troubles of others.
The State and Municipal establishments for the poor and sick have been
so much described lately, that everyone in England must be acquainted
with all that Berlin does for its struggling citizens. There are, of
course, large hospitals and sanatoriums for consumption; and the
admirable system of national insurance secures help in sickness to
every working man and woman, as well as a pension in old age. "The
club doctor and dispensary as we have them here do not exist," say the
Birmingham Brassworkers in their pamphlet. "In their stead leading
doctors and specialists (with very few exceptions) are at the service
of the working man or woman."
"Yes," said a leading doctor to me when I quoted this; "we get about
three half-pence for a consultation, and we find them the most
impossible people in the community to satisfy. As they get medical
advice for nothing they run from one doctor to another, and consult a
dozen about some simple ailment that a student could set right. We all
suffer from them." So that is the other side of the question.
But Berlin certainly manages its Submerged Tenth both more humanely
and more wisely than we manage ours. It begins, as one thinks any
civilised country must, by separating those who will not work from
those who cannot. The able-bodied beggar, the drunkard, and other
vagrants are sent to a house of correction and made to work. The
respectable poor are not driven to herd with these people in Germany.
They receive shelter and assistance at institutions reserved for the
deserving. In one of these old married people who cannot support
themselves are allowed to spend the evening of their lives together.
Anyone desiring to know more about the charitable institutions of
Berlin will find a most interesting account of them in the pamphlet
written by the Birmingham Brassworkers, and published by P.S. King &
Son. The bias of the authors is so strongly German that when you have
read to the end you begin to lean in the opposite direction, and look
for the things we manage better over here. "In 1900," they say, "there
was such a shortage of houses (in Berlin) that 1500 families had to be
sheltered in the Municipal Refuge for Homeless People." That is surely
a worse state of affairs than in London. But when you walk through
London or a London suburb in winter, and are pestered at every
crossing and corner by able-bodied young beggars of both sexes, you
begin to agree with the brassworkers. Berlin is clear of beggars and
crossing-sweepers all the year round, and you know that as far as
possible they are classified and treated according to their deserts.
It is not possible for the individual bent on his own business to know
at a glance whether he will encourage vice by giving alms or behave
brutally to a deserving case by withholding them. The decision should
never be forced upon him as it is in England every day of his life.