as much due to the fact that they had plenty to eat as to their release
from Teutonic bondage. The two things had come together. Being perhaps
the richest agricultural district of the late Empire, the province of
Posen was quick to recover its alimentary footing, once its frontiers
had been closed against the all-devouring German. With the exception of
potatoes, of which the supply was well in excess of local needs, the
exportation of foodstuffs toward the hungry West had absolutely ceased.
The result was more than noticeable in Poznan; it was conspicuous, all
but overpowering, particularly to those arriving from famished Germany.
Street after street was lined with a constant tantalization to the
new-comer from the West, arousing his resentment at the appetite that
was so easily satisfied after its constant vociferations in days gone
by—and still to come. Butcher shops displayed an abundance of everything
from frankfurters to sides of beef. Cheese, butter, eggs by the bushel,
candy, sugar, sweetmeats were heaped high behind glass fronts that would
have been slight protection for them in Berlin. In what were now known
as “_restauracya_” one might order a breakfast of eggs, bacon, milk,
butter, and all the other things the mere mention of which would have
turned a German _Wirt_ livid with rage, without so much as exciting a
ripple on the waiter’s brow. At the rathskeller of Poznan’s artistic old
city hall a “steak and everything,” such a steak as not even a
war-profiteer could command anywhere in Germany, cost a mere seven
marks, including the inevitable mug of beer and the “10 per cent. for
service” that was exacted here also by the _Kellners_’ union. With the
low rate of exchange—for Poznan was still using German money—the price
was considerably less than it would have been in New York at the same
date. Far from being short of fats, the Poles were overgenerous with
their grease and gravies. Bacon could be had in any quantity at six
marks a pound; eggs at thirty pfennigs each. Bread, brown but excellent,
was unlimited. Food-tickets, unknown in hotels and restaurants, were
theoretically required for a few of the principal articles in the shops,
but there was little difficulty in purchasing without them, at least
with the payment of a slight “premium.” On market-days the immense
square allotted to them was densely crowded from corner to corner by
curiously garbed female hawkers and countrymen offering every
conceivable product of their farms and gardens. Poznan still consumed a
few things that do not appear on the American bill of fare, such as
doves, gull eggs, and various species of weeds and grasses; but the fact
remains that the well-to-do could get anything their appetites craved,
and the poor were immensely better off than in any city of Germany.
There was only one shortage that irked the popular soul. Expression of
it rang incessantly in my ears—“Please tell America to send us tobacco!”
The queues before tobacconists’ shops were as long and as persistent as
in Germany. Ragged men of the street eagerly parted with a precious
fifty-pfennig “shin-plaster” for a miserable “cigarette” filled for only
half its length with an unsuccessful imitation of tobacco. The principal
café, having husbanded its supply of the genuine article, placed a
thousand of them on sale each evening at eight, “as a special favor to
our clients.” By that hour entrance was quite impossible, and though
only two were allowed each purchaser, there was nothing but the empty
box left five minutes later.
Unselfishness is not one of mankind’s chief virtues, particularly in
that chaos of conflicting interests known to the world as central
Europe. In view of all they had won in so short a time, and amid the
German shrieks of protest, it was disconcerting to find that the Poles
were far from satisfied with what had been granted them by the Peace
Conference. From high government officials to the man in the street they
deluged me with their complaints, often naïvely implying that I had
personally had some hand in framing the terms of the proposed treaty, or
at least the power to have them altered before it was too late. They
were dissatisfied with the western frontier that had been set for them,
especially in West Prussia; they were particularly disgruntled because
they had not been given Danzig outright. A nation of thirty million
people should have a harbor of its own. Danzig was essentially Polish in
its sympathies, in spite of the deliberate Germanization that had been
practised upon it. Strangely enough they accused America of having
blocked their aspirations in that particular. They blamed Wilson
personally for having shut them out of Danzig, as well as for the
annoying delay in drawing up the treaty. The Germans had “got at him”
through the Jews. The latter had far too much power in the American
government, as well as in American finances. The impression was
wide-spread in Poznan that Mrs. Wilson is Jewish. The Germans and the
Jews had always stuck together. Poland had always been far too lenient
with the Jews. She had let them in too easily; had granted them
citizenship too readily. As they spoke either Yiddish, an offshoot of
German, or Russian, they had always lined up with the enemies of Poland.
Half the German spies, every one of the Russian spies with whom Polish
territory had been flooded during the war, had been Jews. The Poles in
America had gathered money for the alleviation of suffering in their
home-land, and had given it to Jews, Germans, and Poles, irrespective of
race. The Jews in America had collected similar funds and had expended
them only among the Jews. From whatever point of view one approached
him, the resident of Poznan had nothing good to say of the Chosen
People.
The story of Posen’s existence under German rule, now happily ended, was
largely a repetition of what had already been told me in Bromberg. In
some ways this region had been even more harshly treated, if my
informants were trustworthy. Polish skilled workmen “clear down to
button-makers” had been driven out of the province. Great numbers had
been more or less forcibly compelled to migrate into Germany. There were
at least four hundred thousand Poles in the mines and factories of
Westphalia. Saxony was half Polish; the district between Hamburg and
Bremen was almost entirely Slavish in population. The _Ansiedler_—the
German settlers whom the government had brought to Posen—had acquired
all the best land. On the other hand, German Catholics were not allowed
to establish themselves in the province of Posen, lest they join their
coreligionists against the Protestant oppressors. Perhaps the thing that
rankled most was the banishment of the Polish language from the schools.
One could scarcely speak it with one’s children at home, for fear of
their using it before the teacher. Many of the youngsters had never more
than half learned it. In twenty years more no one would have dared speak
Polish in public. Men had been given three, and even four, months in
prison for privately teaching their children Polish history. The schools
were hopelessly Prussianized; the German teachers received a special
premium of one thousand marks or more a year over the regular salaries.
All railway jobs went to Germans, except those of section men at two
marks a day. There had been Polish newspapers and theaters, but they had
never been allowed any freedom of thought or action.
“The trouble with the German, or at least the Prussian,” one new
official put in, “is that it is his nature to get things by force. He
was born that way. Why, the Prussians stole even their name; it was
originally Barrusen, as the little corner of Russia was called where the
robbers first banded together. They marauded their way westward and
southward, treading first little people and then little nations under
their iron heels. The very word the German uses for “get” or “obtain”
tells his history. It is _kriegen_, to win by war—_krieg_. You seldom
hear him use the gentler _bekommen_. Everything he possesses he has
_gekriegt_. Then he is such a hypocrite! In 1916, when we Poles first
began to suffer seriously from hunger, some German officers came with
baskets of fruit and sandwiches, gathered a group of Polish urchins,
filled their hands with the food, and had themselves photographed with
them, to show the world how generous and kind-hearted they were. But
they did not tell the world that the moment the photographs had been
taken the food was snatched away from the hungry children again, some of
the officers boxing their ears, and sent back to the German barracks.
How do you think the Poles who have been crippled for life fighting for
the ‘Fatherland’ feel as they hobble about our streets? What would you
say to serving five years in the German army only to be interned as a
dangerous enemy alien at the end of it, as is the case with thousands of
our sons who were not able to get across the frontier in time? No, the
Germans in Poznan are not oppressed as our people were under their rule.
We are altogether _too_ soft-hearted with them.”
The German residents themselves, as was to be expected, took a different
view of the situation. When the Polish authorities had decorated my
passport with permission to return to Berlin, I took no chances of being
held up by the cantankerous dyspeptic at Kreuz and applied for a new
visé by the German _Volksrat_ of Posen. It occupied a modest little
dwelling-house on the wide, curving avenue no longer recognizable under
its former title of “Kaiser Wilhelm Ring.” Barely had I established my
identity when the gloomy Germans took me to their bosom. Had I been
fully informed of _their_ side of the situation? Would I not do them the
kindness to return at eleven, when they would see to it that men of high
standing were there to give me the real facts of the case? My
impressions of Posen would be wholly false if I left it after having
consorted only with Poles.
As a matter of fact I had already “consorted” with no small number of
German residents, chiefly of the small-merchant class. Those I had found
somewhat mixed in their minds. A few still prophesied a “peasants’ war”
in the territory allotted to Poland; a number of them shivered with
apprehension of a “general Bolshevist uprising.” But fully as many
pooh-poohed both those cheerful bogies. One thing only was certain—that
without exception they were doing business as usual and would continue
to do so as long as the Poles permitted it. The feeling for the
“Fatherland” did not seem strong enough among the overwhelming majority
of them to stand the strain of personal sacrifice.
When I returned at eleven the _Volksrat_ had been convoked in unofficial
special session. A half-dozen of the men who had formerly held high
places in the Municipal Council rose ostentatiously to their feet as I
was ushered into the chief sanctum, and did not sit down again until I
had been comfortably seated. The chief spokesman had long been something
corresponding to chairman of the Board of Aldermen. His close-cropped
head glistened in the sunshine that entered through the window at his
elbow, and his little ferret-like eyes alternately sought to bore their
way into my mental processes and to light up with a winsome naïveté
which he did not really possess. Most of the words I set down here are
his, though some of them were now and then thrown in by his subservient
but approving companions.
“With us Germans,” he began, “it has become a case of ‘_Vogel friss oder
starb_’—eat crow or die. We are forced, for the time at least, to accept
what the Poles see fit to allow us. The German residents of Posen are
not exactly oppressed, but our lives are hemmed in by a thousand petty
annoyances, some of them highly discouraging. Take, for instance, this
matter of the street names. Granted that the Poles had the right to put
them up in their own language. It was certainly a sign of fanaticism to
tear down the German names. More than a fourth of the residents of Posen
cannot read the new street placards. There is not a Polish map of the
city in existence. When the province of Posen came back to us the Polish
street names were allowed to remain until 1879—for more than a hundred
years. It is a sign of childishness, of retarded mentality, to daub with
red paint all the German signs they cannot remove! It isn’t much more
than that to have forbidden the use of our tongue in governmental
affairs. We Germans used both languages officially clear up to 1876. We
even had the old Prussian laws translated into Polish. It is only during
the last ten years that nothing but German was permitted in the public
schools; and there have always been plenty of Polish private schools. I
am still technically a member of the Municipal Council, but I cannot
understand a word of the proceedings, because they are in Polish. Our
lawyers cannot practise unless they use that language, although the
judges, who pretend not to know German, speak it as readily as you or I.
Yet these same lawyers cannot get back into Germany. At least give us
time to learn Polish before abolishing German! Many a man born here
cannot speak it. There are German children of eighteen or twenty, who
have never been outside the province, who are now learning Polish—that
is, to write and speak it correctly.
“Oh yes, to be sure, we can most of us get permission in three or four
weeks to leave the province, but only by abandoning most of our
possessions and taking an oath never to return. No wonder so many
Germans become Poles overnight. You can hardly expect otherwise, when
they have lived here all their lives and have all their property and
friends and interests here. No, military service is not required of
Germans, even if they were born here; but many of our youths have
voluntarily become Polish soldiers, for the same reason that their
parents have suddenly turned Poles. Naturally, there is fighting along
the boundary of the province. The Poles _want_ to fight, so they can
have an excuse to keep their men under arms, and what can Germany do but
protect herself? Poland is planning to become an aggressive,
militaristic nation, as was falsely charged against the Fatherland by
her enemies.
“The complaints of the Poles at our rule were ridiculous. We paid German
teachers a premium because they had harder work in teaching German to
Polish children and in seeing that they did not speak the language that
was unwisely used at home. Railroad jobs, except common labor, were
given to Germans because they were more efficient and trustworthy.
Besides, does not Germany own the railroads? They complain that the best
land was taken by German settlers; but the Poles were only too glad to
sell to our _Ansiedler_—at high prices. Now they are attacking us with a
fanaticism of the Middle Ages. Eighteen hundred German teachers, men who
have been educating the Poles for twenty or twenty-five years, have
suddenly been discharged and ordered to vacate government property
within four weeks—yet they are not allowed to go back to Germany. The
Pole is still part barbarian; he is more heartless than his cousin the
Russian.
“Seventy per cent. of the taxes in the province of Posen are paid by
Germans. Yet no German who was not born here can vote, though Poles who
were not can. I know a village where there are seventy Germans and five
Poles—and the five Poles run things to suit themselves. Husbands, wives,
and sons often have different rights of suffrage. The family of Baron X
has lived here for a hundred and fifty years. The baron himself happens
to have been born in Berlin, because his mother went there to see a
doctor. So _he_ cannot vote, though his Polish coachman, who has not
been here ten years, has all the rights of citizenship. The result is
that government affairs are getting into a hopeless muddle. An ignorant
fellow by the name of Korfanti—a Polish ‘German-eater’—has now the chief
voice in the Municipal Council. The Poles boycott German merchants. They
deluge the city with placards and appeals not to buy of Germans. For a
long time they refused to trade even a miserable little Polish theater
for our splendid big _Stadttheater_. When the director of that finally
got permission to take over the wholly inadequate little playhouse for
next season he had to advertise in order to find out how many Germans
intend to stay in Posen—as you have seen in our German paper. What can
the Poles do with our magnificent _Stadttheater_? _They_ have no
classics to give in it, nor people of sufficient culture to make up an
audience. We are still allowed to give German opera, because they know
they cannot run that themselves, and a few of the more educated Poles
like it. But our splendid spoken classics seem to be doomed.
“Then there is their ridiculous hatred of the Jews. The race may have
its faults, but the five or six thousand Jews of Posen province play a
most important business and financial rôle. They have always understood
the advantages of German _Kultur_ far better than the Poles. There is a
Jewish _Volksrat_ here that tries to keep independent of both the other
elements of the population; but the great majority of the Jews stand
with the Germans. They have no use for this new Zionism—except for the
other fellow—unless you take seriously the aspirations of a few
impractical young idealists”—a statement, by the way, which I heard from
Jews of all classes in various parts of Germany.
“We Germans lifted the Poles out of their semi-savagery. We brought them
_Kultur_. Do not be deceived by what you see in Posen. It is a
magnificent city, is it not?—finer, perhaps, than you Americans found
Coblenz? Yet everything that gives it magnificence was built by the
Germans—the well-paved streets, the big, wide boulevards, the splendid
parks, all the government buildings and the best of the private ones,
the street-cars, the electric lights, even the higher state of
civilization you find among the masses. There is not a Pole in the
province of Posen who cannot read and write. Do not make the mistake of
thinking all these things are Polish because the Poles have stolen them.
Before you leave, go and compare Posen with the Polish cities _outside_
Germany. That will tell the story. In non-German Poland you will be
struck by the appalling lack of schools, roads, doctors, hospitals,
education, culture, by the sad condition of the workmen and the
peasants—all those things that are included in the German word _Kultur_.
In Galizia, where Austria virtually allowed the Poles to run themselves,
the houses are only six feet high, and you could walk all day without
finding a man who can read and write, or who can even speak German.
Their cities are sunk in a degradation of the Middle Ages. Posen will
fall into the same state, if the present Municipal Council continues in
power. There are already frontier troubles between German and Russian
Poland, and quarrels between the different sections that confirm what we
Germans have always known—that the Poles cannot govern themselves.
Warsaw does not wish to keep up our splendid system of workmen and
old-age insurance because there is none in Russian Poland. Galizia
complains that farm land is several times higher in price in the
province of Posen, without admitting that it is German railroads and
German settlers that have made it so. That advantage will soon
disappear. The Poles will make a mess of the whole province and will
have it sunk into the degradation in which we found it by the time a
real ruling nation takes charge of it again.”
Just how much truth there was mixed in with the considerable amount of
patent nonsense in the ex-chairman’s declamation only a long stay in
Poznan, or time itself, would show. The fact that the Poles allowed many
of these statements, particularly the protests against the sudden change
of language, to be published in the local German newspaper speaks at
least for their spirit of tolerance. Though the new government was
visibly making mistakes, and had not yet settled down to the orderliness
that should come from experience, no one but a prejudiced critic could
have discovered immediate evidence that it was making any such complete
“mess” of matters as the German _Volksrat_ testified. Even if it had
been, at least the mass of the population showed itself happy and
contented with the change, and contentment, after all, may in time
result in more genuine and lasting progress than that which comes from
the forcible feeding of German _Kultur_.
I dropped in at the Teatro Apollo one evening, chiefly to find out how
it feels to see a play without understanding a word of it. An immense
barnlike building, that looked as if it had once been a skating-rink or
a dancing-pavilion, was crowded to suffocation with Poles of every class
and variety, from servant-girls in their curious leg-of-mutton sleeves
to colonels in the latest cut of Polish uniform. The actors—if they
could have been dignified with that title—had recently been imported
from Warsaw, and the alleged play they perpetrated could scarcely have
been equaled by our silliest rough-and-tumble “comedians.” The herd-like
roar with which their inane sallies were unfailingly greeted testified
that the audience found them entertaining. But it may be that Poznan was
in a particularly simple-minded mood during its first months of relief
from a century of bitter oppression. I hope so, for I should regret to
find that the startling contrast between this Polish audience and the
German one at the artistic _Stadttheater_ the following evening fairly
represented the difference between the two races. I believe I am not
prejudiced by the fact that the _Volksrat_ presented me with a free
ticket when I say that the latter performance was one of which any
manager might have been justly proud. The audience, too, resembled the
other about as a gathering of college professors resembles a collection
of factory hands. There was a well-bred solemnity about it that could
not, in this case, have been due merely to hunger, for there was no
munching whatever between the acts, none even under cover of the
darkened house, except here and there of candy, a luxury so long since
forgotten in Berlin that the happy possessor would never have dreamed of
giving his attention at the same time to the merely esthetic appeal of
the theater. There may have been Poles in the house, but at least the
new army was conspicuous by its absence. Not a uniform was to be seen,
with the exception of three scattered through the “peanut gallery.” Two
crown boxes, destined only for Hohenzollern royalty or its
representatives, sat empty, with something of the solemn demeanor of the
vacant chair at the head of the table the day after the funeral. Who
would occupy them when the Poles had taken over the playhouse? What,
moreover, would they do toward maintaining the high standards of the
stage before us? For the most indefatigable enemy of the Germans must
have admitted that here was something that could ill be spared. If only
they had been contented with bringing the masses these genuine benefits,
without militarism, with more open competition, without so much appeal
to the doctrine of force—but it has ever been Germany’s contention that
only by force can the mass of mankind be lifted to higher levels; that
only an army can protect the self-appointed missionaries of a loftier
civilization.
Armed with what those who read Polish assured me was permission to do
so, I set out on foot one morning to the eastward. Beyond the last group
of guards wearing the silver double-eagle on their threadbare German
uniforms, I fell in with three barefooted Polish peasant women. They
were barely thirty, yet all three were already well-nigh toothless, and
their hardy forms and faces were plainly marked with the signs that
testify to grueling labor and the constant bearing of children. The
German they spoke was far superior to the dialects of many regions of
purely Teutonic population. Their demeanor was cheerful, yet behind it
one caught frequent glimpses of that background of patient,
unquestioning acceptance of life as it is which distinguishes the
country people of Europe.
The most energetic of the trio showed a willingness to enter into
conversation; the others confined themselves to an occasional nod of
approval, as if the exertion of keeping pace with us left them no
strength to expend in mere words. It was plain from the beginning that
they were not enthusiastic on the subject then uppermost in the city
behind us. They greeted my first reference to it with expressions that
might have been called indifferent, had they not been tinged with
evidence of a mild resentment.
“What does it matter to us people of the fields,” retorted the less
taciturn of the group, “whether Poles or Germans sit in the comfort of
government offices, so long as they let us alone? Things were all right
as they were, before the war came. Why trouble us with all these
changes? Now they are breaking our backs with new burdens, as if we had
not had enough of them for five years. First they take our men and leave
us to do their work. I have not a male relative left, except my husband,
and he is so sickly that he is no longer a man. He is paid twelve marks
for eight hours’ work; fifteen for ten. But what help is that when he
cannot work ten hours, or even eight? They offered him the iron cross.
He told them he would rather have something to feed his family with at
home. They asked him if he was not already getting forty marks a month
for the support of his family. How could I feed four children, even
after the other two had died, with forty marks a month? For three
winters I had nothing but dried potatoes and salt. I could not have
bread for myself because the flour for the children took all the
tickets. Now the war is over, yet they are still taking away what we
have left. The same soldiers come and drive off our horses—for the
silver eagle on their caps has not changed their natures. Pay for them?
_Ach_, what is eight hundred marks for a horse that is worth six
thousand? And how can we cultivate our fields without them? Who started
the war? _Ach_, they are all arguing. What does it matter, so long as
they stop it? Will the Germans sign? They should, and have done with it.
If they don’t, all the men over fifty, including the Germans and even
the Jews”—there was a sneer in this last word, even in the country—“will
be at it again. We have had enough of it. Yet if the soldiers come and
tell my husband to go he must go, sick though he is.”
The basket each of the trio carried contained the midday lunch of her
husband in the fields. I turned aside to the grassy slope on which two
of the couples assembled. The men insisted that I share their meal with
them. It was more nourishing than a ten-mark repast in a Berlin
restaurant, but the absence of bread was significant. When I gave the
men each a pinch of tobacco crumbs they announced themselves delighted
at the exchange, and mumbled halting words about the well-known
generosity of Americans. As I turned my kodak upon them they greeted it
with a laughing “Oh, là là!” There was no need to ask where they had
picked up that expression. It oriented their war experiences as
definitely as it will distinguish for years to come the Americans, in
whatever garb one finds them, who were members of the A. E. F. in
France.