I have been asked by the Editor of _The Bookman_ to state my authority
for writing _The White Morning_; in other words for daring to believe
that a revolution conceived and engineered by women is possible in
Germany.
Before giving my own reasons, stripped of what glamor of fiction I have
been able to surround the story with, I should like to say that when I
began to put the idea into form I thought it was entirely my own. But
while it is always pleasant to offer this sort of incense to one's
vanity, I should have been more than glad to quote to my editor and
publisher some reliable male authority; a man's opinion, on all
momentous subjects, by force of tradition, far outweighing any theory or
guess that a woman, no matter what her intimate personal experience, may
advance.
Imagine then my delight, when the story was half finished, to read an
article by A. Curtis Roth, in the _Saturday Evening Post_, in which he
stated unequivocally that it was among the possibilities that the women
of Germany, driven to desperation by suffering and privation, and
disillusion, would arise suddenly and overturn the dynasty. Mr. Roth,
who was American vice-consul at Plauen, Saxony, until we entered the
war, has written some of the most enlightening and brilliant articles
that have appeared on the internal conditions of any of the belligerent
countries since August, 1914. He remained at his post until the last
moment and then left Germany a physical wreck from malnutrition. In
spite of the fact that he was an officer in the consular service of a
neutral country, with ample means at his command, and standing in close
personal relations with the authorities, he could not get enough to eat;
and what he was forced to swallow--lest he starve--completely broke down
his digestion.
On the other hand, he never ceased to observe; and having made friends
of all classes of Germans, and been given facilities for observation and
study of conditions enjoyed by few Americans in the Teutonic Empire at
the time, he noted every phase and change, both subtle and manifest,
through which these afflicted people passed during the first three years
of the war. They are in far worse case now.
Later (in November) I read an article by a German, J. Koettgen, in the
New York _Chronicle_, which was even more explicit.
Herr Koettgen is one of the agents in this country of Hermann Fernau, an
eminent intellectual of Germany, who escaped into Switzerland, and wages
relentless war upon the dynasty and the military caste of Prussia; which
he holds categorically responsible for the world war. There is a price
on Fernau's head. He dares not walk abroad without a bodyguard, and
cannon are concealed among the oleanders that surround his house. Not
only has he written two books, _Because I am a German_, and _The Coming
Democracy_, which if circulated in Germany would prick thousands of
dazed despairing brains into immediate rebellion, but he is the head of
those German Radical Democrats which have united in an organization
called "Friends of German Democracy."
Their avowed object, through the medium of a bi-weekly journal, _Die
Freie Zeitung_, and other propaganda, is to plant sound democratic ideas
and ideals in the minds of German prisoners in the Entente countries,
and to recruit the saner exiles everywhere. These publications reach men
and women of German blood whose grandfathers fled from military tyranny
after their abortive revolution in 1848, and, with their descendants,
have enjoyed freedom and independence in the United States ever since.
The best of them are expected to exert pressure upon their friends and
relatives in Germany. There are already branches of this epochal
organization in the larger American cities.
Herr Koettgen (who has written a book called _The Hausfrau and
Democracy_, by the way) walked into the office of the _Chronicle_ some
time in November and presented a letter to the editor, Mr. Fletcher. In
the course of the heated conversation that ensued, Herr Koettgen
exclaimed with bitter scorn: "Oh, so you think yourself as fiercely
anti-German as a man may be? Well, let me tell you that you are not
capable of one-tenth the passionate hatred I feel for a dynasty and a
caste that has made me so ashamed of being a German that I could eat the
dust."
In Herr Koettgen's article occur the following paragraphs: "At the first
glance German women hardly appear likely material for the coming
Revolution which will turn Germany into a modern country. But many
incidents point to the fact that German women are growing with their
increasing task. They are beginning to replace their men not only
economically but politically. Most of the public demonstrations in
Germany during this war have been led and arranged by women. The very
first demonstration in 1915 consisted of women. As Mr. Gerard tells us
in his book, they had no very definite idea of what they wanted; only
they wanted their men back. But since that time their political
education has made rapid progress.... With their men in the field and
their former leaders (Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Louise Zietz) in
prison, German women are learning to act for themselves. Their
demonstrations point to it, as do also letters written by German women
to their men who are now prisoners of war in France and England. In one
of these letters which escaped the watchful eye of the censor, a German
hausfrau described how she made the officials of Muenster sit up by her
energetic and persistent demands."
A girl upon one occasion said to Herr Koettgen: "Only women and children
were employed in our factory. We had more than one strike. Two women
would go round to every woman and girl in the shop and tell them: 'We
have asked for twenty or thirty pfennings more. To-morrow we are going
on strike. She who does not come out will have the thrashing of her
life.' We were all frightened and stayed away, for they really meant
it."
Herr Koettgen continues: "Novel circumstances are reawakening in the
meek German hausfrau some of that combative spirit which characterized
the Teuton women in the time of Tacitus, when they often fought
alongside of their men in the wagon camp.... German women will show
their men the way to freedom. Doing more than their share of the
nation's work, they insist upon being heard, and their growing influence
is one of the greatest dangers to German autocracy in its present
predicament. As politicians German women have the advantage of not
having gone through the soul-destroying, brutalizing school of Prussian
militarism, and of not being burdened with the rigmarole of theory which
formed the content of German politics before the war. They can be
trusted to make a bee-line for the real obstacle to peace and
liberty--to eradicate the autocratic militaristic régime which enslaved
the German people in order to enslave the world."
Now that the way has been cleared by two men of affairs who have never
condescended to write fiction, I will give my own reasons for belief in
the German women, and also for the general plan of _The White Morning_.
I had an apartment for seven years in Munich and spent six or eight
months alternately in that delightful city and traveling in Europe,
passing a month or two in England, or returning for an equal length of
time to my own country. During that long residence in Germany I
naturally met many of its inhabitants, and of as many classes as
possible. German women do not tell you the history of their lives the
first time you meet them, not by any means; they are naturally secretive
and the reverse of frank. But they are human, and when you have won
their confidence they will tell you surprising things. The confidences I
received were for the most part from girls, and one and all assured me
they never should marry. Having grown up under one House Tyrant, for
whom they were not responsible, why in heaven's name should they
deliberately annex another? Far, far better bear with the one whose
worst at least they knew (and who could not live forever), than marry
some man who might be loathsome as well as tyrannical, and who, unless
there happened to be a war, might outlive them?
The idea in my novel of the four Niebuhr girls and their initial
rebellion was suggested to me by a family of Prussian junkerdom that I
met at a watering place in Denmark. The baroness was a charming woman
who used a moderate invalidism in a smiling imperturbable fashion to
insure herself a certain immunity from the demands of her autocratic
lord. The girls were lively, intelligent, splendidly educated. They were
in love with society and court functions, but deeply rebellious at the
attitude of the German male, and determined never to marry. That is to
say the three younger girls; the oldest had married a tame puppy, and
anything less like a tyrant I never beheld. No American husband could be
more subservient. But there was no question that he belonged to a small
exceptional class: while his wife, with all the dominating qualities of
her father, was one of a rapidly increasing number of German women,
silently but firmly rebellious.
The Herr baron was a typical Prussian aristocrat and autocrat. The girls
could hardly have had less liberty in a convent. When they came from
their hotel to mine he escorted them over and often came in. Luckily he
liked me or I never should have had the opportunity to know them as well
as I did. Nor should I have been able to continue the acquaintance
after the day I wickedly induced them to run away with me to Copenhagen,
where we shopped, promenaded all the principal streets, then took ices
on the terrace of one of the restaurants. When we returned he was
storming up and down the platform of the station, and he fairly raved at
the girls. "And you dared, you dared, to go to Copenhagen, without
permission, without your mother, without me!" The girls listened meekly,
but whenever he wheeled laughed behind his military back. Then he turned
on me, but I called him a tyrant and gave him my opinion of his
nonsensical attitude generally. As I was not his daughter he gradually
calmed down and seemed rather to relish the tirade. Finally they all
came over to my hotel to tea.
"You see!" said one of the girls to me afterward. "I have not
exaggerated. Do you think I want another like that?" And, so far as I
know, they have never married.
I did not draw any of my characters on these four delightful girls, but
took the episode as a foundation for the incidents and characters that
grew under my hand after I got round to the story.
The episode of Georg Zottmyer was also told me by a German girl whom I
got to know very well in Munich, and who distantly suggested the
character of Gisela (that is to say in the very beginning. As Gisela
developed she became more like her own legendary Brunhilda).[1]
This young woman was as independent in her life and in her ideas as any
I ever met in England or the United States. But fortune had been kind to
her. Her father died just after her education was finished, and as he
left little money, she went to Brazil as governess in a wealthy family.
She remained in South America for several years, gaining, of course,
poise and experience. Then a relative died and left her a comfortable
fortune. When I met her she was living in Munich from choice, like so
many other Germans who were bored with routine and rigid class lines.
She was a beautiful young woman, with dark hair and eyes and a brilliant
complexion, and dressed to perfection, although she wore no stays. This
may have been a bit of vanity on her part, as the awful reformkleid was
in vogue, and fat German women were displaying themselves in lumps and
creases and billows and sections that rolled like the untrammelled waves
of the sea. Her own figure was so firmly molded and so erect and supple
that it was, for all her fashionable clothes, quite independent of the
corset. She had charming manners combined with an imperturbable
serenity, and always seemed faintly amused. On the other hand, she
displayed none of the offensive German conceit and arrogance.
We spent several days together at Partenkirchen, one of the most
picturesque spots in the Bavarian Alps, and as we were both good
walkers, and there was no one else in the hotel who interested us, we
became quite intimate. She was one of the first to talk to me about the
deep discontent and disgust of the German women, and of her own utter
contempt for the meek hausfrau type, and for the tyrannies, petty,
coarse, often brutal, of the man in his home. Nothing, she was
determined, would ever tempt her to marry, and she could name many
others who were making an independent life for themselves, although,
lacking fortune, often in secret. No matter how much she might fancy
herself in love (and I imagine that she had had her enlightening
experiences) she would not risk a lifelong clash of wills with a man who
might turn out to be a medieval despot.
It was then that she told me of the tentative proposal of one of her
beaux (she had many) "Georg Zottmyer," which I have recorded almost
literally in the scene between this passing character and Gisela in the
Café Luitpolt. My object in doing so was to give as realistic an
impression as possible of what the German woman is up against in
dealings with her male. I knew Zottmyer personally, and he interested me
the more (as one is interested in a bug under a microscope) because he
had less excuse for his conceit and arrogance than most German men: he
was brought up in California, where his father is a successful doctor.
But that only seemed to have made him worse. He returned to Germany as
soon as he was of age, more German than the Germans, and despising
Americans.
I had often wondered what became of this highly interesting young woman,
and when I began to write _The White Morning_ she popped into my mind. I
believe she could be a leader of some kind if she chose. Perhaps she is.
The cases could be multiplied indefinitely. The Erkels and Mimi Brandt
are drawn, together with their conditions, almost photographically.
"Heloise" finally married a Scot and went with him to his own country,
but her sisters were dragging out their tragic lives when I left Munich.
A few days ago I met a highly intelligent American woman of German
blood who, before the war, used to visit her relatives in Germany every
year. I told her that I had written this story and she agreed with me
that it was on the cards the women would instigate a revolution.
"Never," she said, "in any country have I known such discontent among
women, heard so many bitter confidences. Their feelings against their
fathers or husbands were the more intense and violent because they dared
not speak out like English or American women."
There is no question that for about fifteen years before the war there
was a thinking, secret, silent, watchful but outwardly passive revolt
going on among the women of Germany. I do not think it had then reached
the working women. It took the war to wake them up. But in that vast
class which, in spite of racial industry, had a certain amount of
leisure, owing to the almost total absence of poverty in the Teutonic
Empire, and whose minds were educated and systematically trained, there
was persistent reading, meditating upon the advance of women in other
nations, quiet debating unsuspected of their masters; and they were
growing in numbers and in an almost sinister determination every year.
Of course there were plenty of hausfraus cowed to the door mat, and,
like the proletariat, needing a war to wake them up; but there were
several hundred thousand of the other sort.
Now, all these women need is a leader. The working women have their Rosa
Luxemburgs, who think out loud in public and get themselves locked up;
and, moreover, do not appeal to the other classes--for Germany is the
most snobbish country in the world. If there were--or if there is--such
a woman as Gisela Döring, who before the war had acquired a widespread
intellectual influence over the awakening women of her race, and then,
when they were approaching the breaking point, had gone quietly and
systematically about making a revolution, there is no question in my
mind as to the outcome.
Just consider for a moment what the German women have suffered during
this war--a war that they were told was forced upon their country by the
aggressive military acts of Russia and France, but which, owing to
Germany's might, would hardly last three months. For nearly three years
they have never known the sensation of appeased hunger, and, having
always been immense eaters, have suffered the tortures of dyspepsia in
addition to hunger. But, far worse, they have listened almost
continuously to the wails of their children for satisfying food,
children who are forever hungry and who often succumb. Karl Ackerman,
whose accuracy no one has questioned, states in his book, _Germany, The
Next Republic?_, that in 1916 sixty thousand children died of
malnutrition in Berlin alone.
These women have lost their fathers, husbands, sons--well, that is the
fortune of any war; but they are beginning to understand that they have
lost them, not in a war of self-defense, but to gratify the insane
ambitions and greed of a dynasty and a military caste that are out of
date in the twentieth century. Their parents, when over sixty, have died
from the same cause as the children. Their daughters, both unmarried and
newly widowed, are "officially pregnant," or the mothers of brats the
name of whose fathers they do not know. The young girls of Lille hardly
have suffered more. The German victims are sent for, then sent home to
bear another child for Germany.
Now, we know what the German men are. These women are the mothers and
wives and sisters of the German men; in other words, they are Germans,
body, and bone and brain-cells, capable of precisely the same ruthless
tactics when pushed too hard--if they have a leader. That, to my mind,
is the whole point. Given that leader, they would effect a revolution
precisely as I have described in my story. Nor would they run the risk
of failure. The German race is not eight-tenths illiterates and
two-tenths intellectuals, emotional firebrands, anarchists and
sellers-out like the Russians. They are uniformly educated, uniformly
disciplined. They will do nothing futile, nothing without the most
secret and methodical preparation of which even the German mind is
capable. It will be like turning over in bed in camp: they will all turn
over together. They are damnably efficient.
It may be said: "But you may have spoiled their chances with your book.
You not only have revealed them in their true character to their men,
but all the details of their probable methods in working up and
precipitating a revolution. You have, in other words, put the German
authorities on their guard."
The answer to this is that no German of the dominant sex could be made
to believe in anything so unprecedented as German women taking the law
into their own hands, uniting, and overthrowing a dynasty. Nothing can
penetrate a German official skull but what has been trained into it from
birth. Unlike the women, the system has made the men of the ruling
class into the sort of machine which is perfect in its way but admits of
no modern improvements. That has been the secret of their strength and
of their weakness, and will be the chief assistance to the Allies in
bringing about their final defeat. I am positive they go to sleep every
night murmuring: "Two and two make four. Two and two make four."
The women could hold meetings under their very noses, so long as they
were not in the street, lay their plans to the last fuse, and apply the
match at the preconcerted moment from one end of Germany to the other
unhindered, unless betrayed. The angry and restless male socialists
would not have a chance with the alert members of their own sex--who
regard women with an even and contemptuous tolerance. Useful but
harmless.
I made Gisela a junker by birth, because a rebel from the top, with
qualities of leadership, would make a deeper impression in Germany than
one of the many avowed extremists of humbler origin. On the other hand,
it was necessary to drop the von, and take a middle-class name, or she
would have failed to win confidence, in the beginning, as well as
literary success; from opposite reasons. It is very difficult for an
aristocratic German of artistic talents to obtain a hearing.
Practically all the intellectuals belong to the middle-class, the
aristocrats being absorbed by the army and navy. The arrogance and often
brutal lack of consideration of the ruling caste, to say nothing of
common politeness, have inspired universal jealousy and hatred, the more
poignant as it must be silent. But even the silent may find their means
of vengeance, as the noble discovers when he attempts recognition in the
intellectual world. But if he were a propagandist, with the welfare of
all Germany at heart, and won his influence under an assumed name, as
Gisela Döring did, the revelation of his identity, together with proof
of dissociation from his own class, would enhance his popularity
immensely. Moreover, it would be incense to the vanity of classes that
never are permitted to forget their inferior rank.
In this country there is a snobbish tendency to exalt and boom any
writer who is known to belong to one of the old and wealthy families;
and the more snobbish the writer the more infectious the disease. But
then in this country, which has never suffered from militarism, there is
a naïve tendency to worship success in any form. In Germany my heroine
would have doomed herself to failure if she had signed her work Gisela
von Niebuhr. But her early education, surroundings, position,--to say
nothing of her four years in the United States--were just what gave her
the requisite advantages, and preserved her from many mistakes. She
starts out with no prejudices against any caste, and an intense sympathy
for all German women who lack even the compensation of being
_hochwohlgeboren_.
No one knows what the future holds, or what unexpected event will
suddenly end the war; but I should not have written _The White Morning_
if I had not been firmly convinced that a Gisela might arise at any
moment and deliver the world.