pointing in that direction. The city council of Berlin had already
decreed that all pictures and statues of the Hohenzollerns, “especially
those of the deposed Kaiser,” must be removed from the public halls and
schoolrooms. That of itself would constitute a decided change in the
capital. In these first days of May several hundred busts and countless
likenesses of Wilhelm II and his family had been banished to the cellars
of municipal buildings, not, be it noted, far enough away to make
restoration difficult. “Among the busts,” said one of the local papers,
“are some of real artistic value”—I cannot, of course, vouch for the
esthetic sense of the editor—“as for example the marble ones of Kaiser
Wilhelm I and of Kaiser Friedrich III, which for many years have adorned
the meeting-place of the Municipal Council itself.” For all this there
was no lack of graven images of the discredited War Lord and his tribe
still on exhibition; the portraits “adorning” private residences alone
could have filled many more cellars. It would be difficult to eradicate
in a few brief months a trade-mark which had been stamped into every
article of common or uncommon use.
In return for these artistic losses the city was taking on new
decorations, in the form of placards and posters unknown in kaiserly
days. To begin with, there were the violent representations in color of
what the Bolshevists were alleged to perpetrate on the civil population
that fell under their bloody misrule, which stared from every
conspicuous wall unprotected by the stern announcement that bill-posting
was _verboten_. These all ended with an appeal for volunteers and money
to halt “the menace that is already knocking at the eastern gates of the
Fatherland.” Then there were the more direct enticements to recruits for
newly formed _Freicorps_—“the protective home guard,” their authors
called it—usually named for the officer whose signature as commander
appeared at the bottom of the poster. Even the newspapers carried
full-page advertisements setting forth the advantages of enrolling in
the independent battalion of Major B—— or the splendid regiment of
Colonel S——, a far cry indeed from the days of universal compulsory
service. “If you will join my company,” ran these glowing promises,
after long-winded appeals to patriotism, “you will be commanded by
experienced officers, such as the undersigned, and you will be lodged,
fed, and well paid by the government. What better occupation can you
find?” These were the _freiwillige_ bands that composed the German army
of 1919, semi-independent groups, loosely disciplined, and bearing the
name of some officer of the old régime. They may not constitute an
overpowering force, but there is always the possibility that some man of
magnetism and Napoleonic ambition may gather them all together and
become a military dictator. Besides, there is still the trickery of
militaristic Germany to be reckoned with, genius for subterfuge that
will cover up real training under the pretense of police forces, of
turnvereins and of “athletic unions.”
Thus far these omnipresent appeals did not seem to have met with
overwhelming success. The soldiers guarding Berlin were virtually all
boys of twenty or under; the older men were probably “fed up with it.”
Nor did the insolent Prussian officer of former days any longer lord it
over the civilian population. He had laid aside his saber and in most
cases his uniform, and perhaps felt safer in his semi-disguise of
“civies” as he mingled with the throng. Military automobiles carrying
stiff-necked generals or haughty civilians in silk hats still
occasionally blasted their way down Unter den Linden as commandingly as
ever did the Kaiser, but they were wont to halt and grow very quiet when
the plebeian herd became dense enough to demand its right of way.
Before we leave the subject of posters, however, let us take a glimpse
at those appealing for aid to the _Kriegs und Zivilgefangenen_ which
inundated the city. The picture showed a group of German prisoners,
still in their red-banded caps and in full uniform—as if the
ravages of time and their captors had not so much as spotted a
shoulder-strap—peering sadly out through a wire barricade. It was plain
to see that some German at home had posed for the artist, the beings he
depicted were so pitifully gaunt and hungry in appearance. I have seen
many thousand German prisoners in France, and I cannot recall one who
did not look far better nourished than his fellow-countrymen beyond the
Rhine, more full of health, in fact, than the civilian population about
the detention camps. They may regret leaving comparative abundance for
their hungry Fatherland, when the day of exodus finally comes. But the
Germans at home were greatly wrought up about their eight hundred
thousand prisoners. Many had convinced themselves that they would never
be returned; the general impression of their sad lot brought continuous
contributions to the boys and girls who rattled money-cans in the faces
of passers-by, even those who wore an Allied uniform, all over Berlin.
Stories of the mistreatment of prisoners were quite as current and fully
as heartrending in Germany as they were on the other side of the
battle-line. Apparently captives are always mishandled—by the enemy, and
too well treated on the side of the speaker, a phenomenon even of our
own Civil War. I have no personal knowledge of the lot of Allied
prisoners of war in Germany, but this much is certain of those wearing
the field gray—that the French neglected them both as to food and work;
that the British treated them fairly in both matters, and that the
Americans overfed and underworked them. But it was a hopeless task to
try to convince their fellow-countrymen that they were not one and all
suffering daily the tortures of the damned.
Perhaps the greatest surprise that Berlin had in store for me was the
complete safety which her recent enemies enjoyed there. With German
delegates to the Peace Conference closely guarded behind barbed wire in
Versailles, and German correspondents forbidden even to talk to the
incensed crowds that gathered along those barriers, it was astounding to
find that American and Allied officers and men, in full uniform,
wandered freely about the Prussian capital at all hours. Doughboys were
quite as much at home along Unter den Linden as if they had been
strolling down Main Street in Des Moines. Young Germans in iron hats
guarded the entrance to the princely Adlon, housing the various enemy
missions, but any one who chose passed freely in or out, whatever his
nationality, his business or lack thereof, or his garb. Olive drab
attracted no more attention in Berlin than it did in Coblenz. German
chauffeurs drove _poilus_ and their officers about the streets as
nonchalantly as if they had been taxi-drivers in Paris. To be sure, most
uniformed visitors stuck rather closely to the center of town, but that
was due either to false impressions of danger or to lack of
curiosity—and perhaps also to the dread of getting out of touch with
their own food-supply. For as a matter of experience they were fully as
safe in Berlin as in Paris or New York—possibly a trifle more so—they
seemed to run less risk of being separated, legally or forcibly, from
their possessions. The hair-raising tales which correspondents poured
out over the wires _via_ Copenhagen were chiefly instigated by their
clamoring editors and readers at home. Let a few random shots be fired
somewhere in the city and the scribes were at ease for another day—and
the world gasped once more at the bloody anarchy reigning in Berlin,
while the stodgy Berliner went on about his business, totally oblivious
of the battle that was supposed to be seething about him.
In January, 1919, a group of American officers entered one of the
principal restaurants of Berlin and ordered dinner. At that date our
olive drab was rare enough in the capital to attract general attention.
A civilian at a neighboring table, somewhat the worse for bottled
animosity, gave vent to his wrath at sight of the visitors. Having no
desire to precipitate a scene, they rose to leave. Several German
officers sprang to their feet and begged them to remain, assuring them
that the disturber would be silenced or ejected. The Americans declined
to stay, whereupon the ranking German apologized for the unseemly
conduct of an ill-bred fellow-countryman and invited the group to be his
guests there the following evening.
Now I must take issue with most American travelers in Germany during the
armistice that the general attitude of courtesy was either pretense,
bidding for favor, or “propaganda” directed by those higher up. In the
first place, a great many Germans did not at that date admit that the
upstarts who had suddenly risen to power were capable of directing their
personal conduct. Moreover, I have met scores of persons who were
neither astute enough nor closely enough in touch with those outlining
national policies to take part in any concerted plan to curry favor with
their conquerors. I have, furthermore, often successfully posed as a
German or as the subject of a friendly or neutral power, and have found
the attitude toward their enemies not one whit different under those
circumstances than when they were knowingly speaking to an enemy.
There were undoubtedly many who deliberately sought to gain advantage by
wearing a mask of friendliness; but there were fully as many who
declined to depart from their customary politeness, whatever the
provocation.
Two national characteristics which revolution had not greatly altered
were the habit of commanding rather than requesting and of looking to
the government to take a paternal attitude toward its subjects. The
stern _Verboten_ still stared down upon the masses at every corner and
angle. It reminded one of the sign in some of our rougher Western towns
bearing the information that “Gentlemen will not spit on the floor;
others _must_ not,” and carrying the implication that the populace
cannot be intrusted to its own instincts for decency. If only the German
could learn the value of moral suasion, the often greater effectiveness
of a “Please” than of an iron-fisted “Don’t”! Perhaps it would require a
new viewpoint toward life to give full strength to the gentler form
among a people long trained to listen only to the sterner admonition.
The great trouble with the _verboten_ attitude is that if those in
command accidentally overlook _verboting_ something, people are almost
certain to do it. Their atrophied sense of right and wrong gives them no
gage of personal conduct. Then there is always the man to be reckoned
with who does a thing simply because it _is verboten_—though he is
rarely a German.
It is in keeping with this commanding manner that the ruling class fails
to give the rank and file credit for common horse sense. Instead of the
Anglo-Saxon custom of trusting the individual to take care of himself,
German paternalism flashes constantly in his face signs and placards
proffering officious advice on every conceivable subject. He is warned
to stamp his letters before mailing them, to avoid draughts if he would
keep his health; he is _verboten_ to step off a tramcar in motion, lest
he break his precious neck, and so on through all the possibilities of
earthly existence, until any but a German would feel like the victim of
one of those motherly women whose extreme solicitude becomes in practice
a constant nagging. The Teuton, however, seems to like it, and he grows
so accustomed to receiving or imparting information by means of placards
that his very shop-windows are ridiculously littered with them. Here an
engraved card solemnly announces, “This is a suit of clothes”; there
another asserts—more or less truthfully—“Cigars—to smoke.” One comes to
the point of wondering whether the German does not need most of all to
be let alone until he learns to take care of himself and to behave of
his own free will. Then he might in time recognize that liberty is
objective as well as subjective; that there is true philosophy in the
Anglo-Saxon contention that “every man’s home is his castle.” Perhaps he
is already on his way to that goal. There were promising signs that
Germany is growing less _streng_ than she used to be, more easy-going,
more human—unless what seemed to be that was the merely temporary apathy
of under-nourishment.
The war had made fewer changes in the public and business world of
the Fatherland than in Allied countries. Pariserplatz and
Französischestrasse retained their names. Down in Munich the finest
park was still the Englische Garten. Most American stocks were
quoted in the newspapers. One might still get one’s mail—if any
arrived—through the American Express Company, though its banking
business was in abeyance. The repertoire of the once Royal Opera
included the works of Allied composers, given only in German, to be
sure, but that was the custom even before the war. Shopkeepers of
the tourist-baiting class spoke English or French on the slightest
provocation—often with provoking insistence. I found myself suddenly
in need of business cards with which to impress the natives, and the
first printing-shop furnished them within three hours. When I
returned to the capital from one of my jaunts into the provinces
with a batch of films that must be developed and delivered that same
evening, the seemingly impossible was accomplished. I suggested that
I carry them off wet, directly after the hypo bath, washing and
drying them in my hotel room in time to catch a train at dawn. Where
a Frenchman or an Italian would have thrown up his hands in horror
at so unprecedented an arrangement, the amenable Teuton agreed at
once to the feasibility of the scheme. Thus commerce strode
aggressively on, irrespective of the customer’s nationality, and
with the customary German adaptability.
Some lines of business had, of course, been hard hit by the war. There
was that, for instance, of individual transportation, public or private.
Now and then an iron-tired automobile screamed by along Unter den
Linden, but though the government was offering machines as cheaply as
two thousand marks each, the scarcity and prohibitive price of “benzine”
made purchasers rare. In the collections of dilapidated outfits waiting
for fares at railway stations and public squares it was a question
whether horse, coachman, or carriage was nearest to the brink of
starvation. The animals were miserable runts that were of no military
use even before the scarcity of fodder reduced them to their resemblance
to museum skeletons. The sallow-faced drivers seemed to envy the beasts
the handful of bran they were forced to grant them daily. Their vagabond
garb was sadly in keeping with the junk on wheels in which they rattled
languidly away when a new victim succumbed to their hollow-eyed
pleading. Most of Berlin seemed to prefer to walk, and that not merely
because the legal fares had recently been doubled. Taxis might have one
or two real rubber tires, aged and patched, but still pumpable; the
others were almost sure to be some astonishing substitute which gave the
machine a resemblance to a war victim with one leg—or, more exactly, to
a three-legged dog. The most nearly successful _Ersatz_ tires were iron
rims with a score of little steel springs within them, yet even those
did not make joy-riding popular.
On this subject of _Ersatz_, or far-fetched substitutes for the real
thing, many pages might be written, even without trespassing for the
moment on the forbidden territory of food. The department stores were
veritable museums of _Ersatz_ articles. With real shoes costing about
sixty dollars, and real clothing running them a close race, it was
essential that the salesman should be able to appease the wrathful
customer by offering him “something else—er—_almost_ as good.” The shoe
substitutes alone made the shop-windows a constant source of amazement
and interest. Those with frankly wooden soles and cloth tops were
offered for as little as seven marks. The more ambitious contraptions,
ranging from these simple corn-torturers improved with a half-dozen iron
hinges in the sole to those laboriously pieced together out of scraps of
leather that suggested the ultimate fate of the window-straps missing
from railway carriages, ran the whole gamut of prices, up to within a
few dollars of the genuine article. Personally, I have never seen a
German in _Ersatz_ footwear, with the exception of a few working in
their gardens. But on the theory of no smoke without some fire the
immense stocks displayed all over the country were _prima-facie_
evidence of a considerable demand. Possibly the substitutes were
reserved for interior domestic use—fetching styles of carpet slippers.
On the street the German still succeeded somehow in holding his
sartorial own, perhaps by the zealous husbanding of his pre-war
wardrobe.
Look where you would you were sure to find some new _Ersatz_ brazenly
staring you in the face. Clothing, furniture, toys, pictures, drugs,
tapestries, bicycles, tools, hand-bags, string, galoshes, the very money
in your pocket, were but imitations of the real thing. Examine the box
of matches you acquired at last with much patience and diplomacy and you
found it marked, “Without sulphur and without phosphorus”—a sad fact
that would soon have made itself apparent without formal announcement.
The wood was still genuine; thanks to their scientific forestry, the
Germans have not yet run out of that. But many of their great forests
are thinned out like the hair of the middle-aged male—and the loss as
cleverly concealed. There has been much Teutonic boasting on this
subject of _Ersatz_, but since the armistice, at least, it had changed
to wailing, for even if he ever seriously believed otherwise the German
had discovered that the vast majority of his laborious substitutes did
not substitute.
As we are carefully avoiding the mention of food, the most grievous
source of annoyance to the rank and file of which we can speak here is
the lack of tobacco. In contrast with the rest of the country there were
plenty of cigars in Berlin—apparently, until one found that the heaps of
boxes adorning tobacconists’ windows were placarded “_Nur leere
Kisten_,” or at best were filled with rolls of some species of weed that
could not claim the most distant relationship to the fragrant leaf of
Virginia. I indulged one day, before I had found the open sesame to the
American commissary, in one of the most promising of those mysterious
vegetables, at two marks a throw. The taste is with me yet. American
officers at the Adlon sometimes ventured to leave food-supplies in the
drawers of their desks, but their cigars they locked in the safe, along
with their secret papers and real money. In the highest-priced
restaurant of Berlin the shout of, “Waiter, bring two cigarettes!” was
sure to focus all eyes on the prosperous individual who could still
subject his fortune to such extravagance. Here and there along
Friedrichstrasse hawkers assailed passers-by with raucous cries of
“English and American tobacco!” Which proved not only that the German
had lost all national feeling on this painful subject, but that the
British Tommy and the American doughboy had brought with them some of
the tricks they had learned in France.
These street-corner venders, not merely of the only real tobacco to be
publicly had in Berlin, but of newspapers, post-cards, and the like,
were more apt than not to be ex-soldiers in field gray, sometimes as
high in rank as _Feldwebels_. Many others struggled for livelihood by
wandering like gipsies from one cheap café to another, playing some form
of musical instrument and taking up collections from the clients, often
with abashed faces. Which brings us to the question of gaiety in Berlin.
Newspapers, posters, and blazing electric signs called constant
attention to countless café, cabaret, cinema, and theater
entertainments. Every one of them I visited was well filled, if not
overcrowded. On the whole they were distinctly immoral in tone or
suggestion. Berlin seems to be running more and more to this sort of
thing. There is something amiss in the country whose chief newspaper
carries the conspicuous announcement: “NAKEDNESS! Fine artistic postals
now ready to be delivered to the trade,” or with the city where scores
of street-corners are adorned by crowds of men huddled around a sneaking
vender of indecent pictures. Similar scenes offend the eye in most large
cities the world over, of course, but something seemed to suggest that
Berlin was unusually given to this traffic. The French claim that theirs
is at heart the moral race and that the Boche is a leader in immorality,
and they cite many instances of prisoners found in possession of
disgusting photographs as one of the proofs of their contention.
Peephole shows were not the least popular of the Berliner’s evening
amusements. His streets, however, were far freer of the painted stalkers
by night than those of Paris, and the outcasts less aggressive in their
tactics. Gambling, and with it the police corruption that seems to
batten best under the democratic form of government, was reported to be
growing apace, with new “clubs” springing up nightly. Under the monarchy
these were by no means lacking, but they were more “select,” more
exclusive—in other words, less democratic. Even the government had taken
on a Spanish characteristic in this respect and countenanced a public
lottery, ostensibly, at least, for the benefit of “sucklings.”
At the middle-class theaters the same rarely musical and never comic
inanities that hamper the advancement of histrionic art in other
countries still held sway, with perhaps an increasing tendency toward
the _risqué_. The crowd roared as of yore, munched its black-bread
sandwiches between the acts, and seemed for the moment highly satisfied
with life. In contrast there were always seats to be had at the
performances of literary merit and at the opera, though the war does not
seem to have subjected them to any special hardships. The investment of
a ticket at the house of song brought high interest—particularly to the
foreigner, for the best orchestra seats were still eight marks at
matinées and twelve in the evening, a mere sixty cents or a dollar at
the armistice rate of exchange. I remember with especial pleasure
excellent performances of “Eurydice” and of “Martha.” The audience was a
plain, bourgeois gathering, with evening dress as lacking as
“roughnecks.” In the foyer buffet, in contrast to Paris, prices were
exceedingly reasonable, but the most popular offerings, next to the
watery beer, were plates of potatoes, bologna, pickled fish, and
hard-boiled eggs, for, though I should not mention it here, the German
theater-goer of these days is as constantly munching as an Arab. In the
gorgeous Kaiser’s box sat one lone lieutenant and his wife, while a
cold-eyed old retainer in livery kept guard outside the locked door as
if he were still holding the place for his beloved emperor.