THE SERVICE OF THE CITY IN GERMANY[19]
[19] Written in 1913.
I.
All English students interested in Germany owe a deep debt of
gratitude to the unremitting labours of Mr. William Harbutt Dawson in
the fields of Teutonic scholarship. He is one of a gallant band of
some half-dozen publicists who, amidst universal neglect, have done
their utmost to popularize amongst us a knowledge of German life and
German people. Mr. Dawson's last book is certain to take rank as a
political classic. It is a lucid exposition of "Municipal Life and
Government in Germany" (Longmans and Co., 12s. 6d. net). City
administration and city regulations are a subject which no literary
art can make very exciting, but, difficult and forbidding though it
be, it is a subject which yields in importance and interest to no
other. There is certainly no other subject which will reveal to us
more of the secrets of German greatness.
II.
For the greatness of Germany is not to be explained by her unwieldy
army, her red-tape bureaucracy, her impotent Reichstag, her effete
Churches. Her army, Parliament, and Churches are symptoms of weakness
and not of strength. The true greatness of Germany is largely due to a
factor ignored by most writers, ignored even by Mr. Dawson in all his
previous works--namely, the excellence of German municipal
institutions, the intensity of her civic life. We have been too much
accustomed to think of Germany only as a despotic empire. She might be
far more fittingly described as a country of free institutions, a
federation of autonomous cities. We fondly imagine that ours is the
only country where self-government prevails. Readers who might still
entertain this prejudice will carry away from Mr. Dawson's book the
novel political lesson that Germany, much more than Great Britain,
deserves to be called a self-governing nation, and that, at least in
her civic government, which, after all, affects 70 per cent. of her
population, Germany enjoys a measure of political liberty which is
absolutely unknown in our own country.
III.
The tradition of municipal freedom in Germany is as old as German
culture. It still lingers in the haunting charm of the German cities
to-day. The Holy Roman Empire possessed only the trappings and the
shadow of power; the reality belonged to the burghers of the towns.
The _Städtewesen_ gives its original character to the German Middle
Ages. The Hansa towns and the Hanseatic League recall some of the most
stirring memories of German history. The League still survives in the
three independent republics of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck. The
dominant fact that German medieval civilization was a civilization of
free cities is driven home to the most superficial tourist. In every
corner of the German Empire, in north and south, on the banks of the
Rhine and the Elbe, in Rothenburg and Marienburg, in Frankfurt and
Freiburg, the thousand monuments of the past prove to us the
all-important truth that in Germany, as in Italy and in Flanders, it
is the service of the city which has made for national greatness.
IV.
War and anarchy put an end to municipal prosperity. Protestantism
brought with it the confusion of spiritual and temporal power, which
brought with it the despotism of the Princes, which meant the
suppression of civic liberty. The Thirty Years' War completed the ruin
of the cities. The end of the seventeenth century put in the place of
city governance the tyranny of a hundred petty Princes. Everywhere we
see the ancient town halls crumbling into ruin, and we see arising
pretentious palaces built on the model of the Palace of Versailles.
Germany had to go through the bitter humiliation of Jena before she
realized the necessity of reverting to her glorious civic traditions.
The statesmanship of Stein (see Seeley's "Life and Times of Stein")
understood that such return was the prime condition of a German
political renaissance. By his memorable Municipal Law of 1808 Stein
restored civic liberty. He made local self-government the corner-stone
of German internal policy. The ordinance of Stein remains to this day
the organic law and Great Charter of the German city. It has stood the
test of one hundred years of change, and even the iron despotism of
the Hohenzollern has not been able to challenge it. In every other
political institution Germany is lamentably behind. Only in her
municipal life is she in advance of most European countries.
V.
As we hinted at the outset, the municipality has far greater powers in
Germany than in Great Britain. It is true that the police authority is
under the control of the central power, that education inspection is
under the control of the Church, which is another kind of spiritual
police. It is true that the City Fathers are debarred from mixing with
party politics. But within those limitations, and in the province of
economics and social welfare, municipal powers are almost
unrestricted. It is thus that German towns have been the pioneers in
school hygiene. Every German child is under the supervision of the
school dentist and the school oculist. It is thus that German cities
have established their public pawnshops, and have saved the poor man
from the clutches of the moneylender. It is thus that they have
initiated gratuitous legal advice for the indigent. They have even
established municipal beerhouses and _Rathhauskeller_. In one word,
they have launched out in a hundred forms of civic enterprise.
VI.
One of the most striking fields of municipal enterprise is the policy
of Land Purchase. The people were encouraged to enter on this policy
by the evils of private land speculation, and by the shocking housing
conditions in some of the big cities, and especially in Berlin, where
the curse of the barrack system still prevails.
Nearly every German city is an important landowner, owning on an
average 50 per cent. of the municipal area.
"While the powers of English urban districts in relation to land
ownership are severely restricted by law, German towns are free to buy
real estate on any scale whatever, without permission of any kind,
unless, indeed, the contracting of a special loan should be necessary,
in which event the assent of the City Commissary is necessary. This
assent, however, entails no local inquiry corresponding to the
inquiries of the Local Government Board, simply because the German
States have no Local Government Board, and no use for them; the
proceeding is almost a formality, intended to remind the communes that
the State, though devolved upon them their wide powers of
self-government, likes still to be consulted now and then, and it is
arranged expeditiously through the post. For, strange as it may sound
to English ears, the Governments of Germany, without exception, far
from wishing to hamper the towns in their land investments, have often
urged the towns to buy as much land as possible and not to sell"
(Dawson, p. 123).
"Within the present year the little town of Kalbe, on the Saale,
expended just £14 a head on its 12,000 inhabitants in buying for
£468,000 a large estate for the purpose of creating a number of
smallholdings and labourers' allotments. During the period 1880 to
1908 Breslau expended over one million and a half pounds in the
purchase of land within the communal area. Berlin has an estate more
than three times greater than its administrative area. In 1910 alone
seventy-three of the large towns of Germany bought land to the
aggregate extent of 9,584 acres and to the aggregate value of over
four million pounds sterling. Charlottenburg now owns 2,500 acres of
land as yet not built upon, with a value of over a million and a
quarter pounds, and the value of all its real estate is about four and
a half million pounds sterling. In 1886 Freiburg, in Baden, owned
nearly 11,000 acres of land with a value of £925,000. In 1909 its
estate was only 2,000 acres larger, but its value was then
£2,300,000."
"Since 1891 Ulm, under the rule of a mayor convinced of the wisdom of
a progressive land policy and strong enough to carry it out, has
bought some 1,280 acres of land at different times for £316,000, while
it has sold 420 acres for £406,000, showing a cash profit of £900,000,
apart from the addition of 860 acres to the town estate. As a result
of Ulm's land policy, its assets increased between 1891 and 1909 from
£583,500 to £1,990,000, an increase of £1,407,000, equal to £25 a head
of the population. Another result is that of the larger towns of
Würtemberg only one has a lower taxation than Ulm. It is solely owing
to its successful land policy that this enterprising town, without
imposing heavy burdens on the general body of ratepayers, has been
able to undertake a programme of social reforms which has created for
it an honourable reputation throughout Germany."
VII.
In quite a different direction, in the encouragement of Art and
Literature, the German municipality plays a leading part.
"The budgets of most large and many small German towns contain an
item, greater or less according to local circumstances, which is
intended to cover 'provision for the intellectual life of the town.'
This item is independent of expenditure on schools, and, if analyzed,
will be found often to include the maintenance of or subsidies to
municipal theatres, bands, and orchestras, as well as grants to
dramatic and musical societies of a miscellaneous order. In this
provision the theatre takes an altogether dominant position, and the
fact is significant as reflecting the great importance which in
Germany is attributed to the drama as an educational and elevating
influence in the life of the community. It may be that the practice of
subsidizing the theatre is not altogether independent of the fact that
the repertory theatre is universal in Germany, except in the smallest
of provincial towns, with the result that a far more intimate tie
exists between the drama and the community than is possible in the
case of travelling companies."
"If the question be asked, Is the higher drama encouraged by the
municipal theatre? the answer must be an emphatic affirmative of the
high standard of education in Germany. Speaking generally, no theatres
in Germany maintain the drama at a higher level than the municipal
theatres in the large towns. The lower forms of the drama will find no
home here, for public taste looks for the best that the stage can
offer, and as the demand is, so is the supply. Many a provincial
theatre of this kind presents more Shakespearean plays in a week than
the average English theatre outside London presents in a couple of
years. A glance at the repertory of any of the municipal theatres
which have been named is enough to convince one that an elevated aim
is steadily kept in view. For example, in a recent year the two
Mannheim municipal theatres presented 161 separate works, including 93
dramas, 62 operas and operettas, and 6 ballets, and of these works 442
repetitions were given in the aggregate, making for the year 604
performances, a number of which were at popular prices. The dramas
given included fifteen by Schiller, ten by Shakespeare, three by
Goethe, three by Lessing, five by Molière, four by Hans Sachs, four by
Sheridan, eleven by Grillparzer, two each by Kleist and Hebbel, and
several by Ibsen, while the operas included three by Beethoven, three
by Cherubini, six by Mozart, three by Weber, and several by Wagner.
Could an English provincial theatre--could all English provincial
theatres together--show a record equal to this? That plays of this
kind are given is proof that the German public looks to the municipal
theatre for the cultivation of the highest possible standard of
dramatic taste and achievement."
VIII.
The German city has managed to combine efficiency with freedom. She
has managed to establish a strong executive and yet to safeguard the
will of the people. In France the Mayor is appointed by the State, and
he is the tool of the Ministry. In Great Britain the City Fathers are
honorary and unpaid. In Germany they are salaried servants, and yet
elected by the people. In Great Britain magistrates are temporary,
ephemeral figure-heads. They are not even allowed time to serve their
apprenticeship. They remain in office one, two, or at most three
years, receive a knighthood in the larger provincial towns, and retire
into private life. In Germany the Burgomaster and Aldermen are
permanent servants, at first elected for twelve years, and on
re-election appointed for life. Their whole life is identified with
the interests of the city.
There lies the originality of German civic government, and there lies
the secret of municipal efficiency. The German Mayor and council are
experts. City government is becoming so technical a science that there
are now schools of civic administration established in several parts
of the German Empire. The city administrator is not a grocer or a
draper temporarily raised to office, nor are they only town clerks and
officials. They have both the confidence of the people and the
responsibility of power, and they are given time to achieve results,
to follow up a systematic policy.
IX.
The whole secret of German municipal government is told by Mr. Dawson
in a footnote of his book:
"The chief Mayor of Duisburg is about to seek well-earned rest after
thirty-four years of work. When in 1880 he took over the direction of
the town's affairs, Duisburg had 34,000 inhabitants. To-day Duisburg,
with the amalgamated Ruhrort and Meiderich, has a population of
244,000. This remarkable development is specially due to the
far-sighted municipal policy pursued by the chief Mayor, who made it
his endeavour to attract new industries to the State for the creation
of the docks--as the result of which Duisburg is the largest inland
port in the world--and the incorporation of Ruhrort and Meiderich in
1905."
This footnote illustrating the history of Duisburg might serve equally
well as an illustration for the history of other German towns. On
reading that footnote I could not help thinking of a famous English
statesman whose recent death has closed a stirring chapter of British
history. German and Austrian municipalities give the widest scope for
political genius and attract the ablest men. If the same conditions
had prevailed in this country, Mr. Chamberlain would have been content
to identify himself with the prosperity of his adopted city, as the
Mayor of Duisburg identified himself with the greatness of Duisburg;
as Lueger identified himself with the greatness of Vienna. And if
Birmingham had given full scope to the genius of Mr. Chamberlain, how
different would have been the life-story of the late statesman, and
how different would be the England in which we are living to-day!