Home Life In Germany - free ebook by Alfred Sidgwick

HOME LIFE IN GERMANY

Translations of foreign words and phrases in this book will be found in the Appendix at the back of the volume....

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CHAPTER IToC

I was once greatly impressed by a story of an officer in the German army, who told his English hostess that he knew the position of every blacksmith's forge in Yorkshire. I wondered at the time how many officers in the English army had learned where to find the blacksmiths' forges in Pomerania. But those are bygone days. Most of us know more about Germany now than we do about our own country. [1] We go over there singly and in batches, we see their admirable public institutions, we visit their f

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CHAPTER IIToC

In Germany the storks bring the children. "I know the pond in which all the little children lie waiting till the storks come to take them to their parents," says the mother stork in Andersen's story. "The stork has visited the house," people say to each other when a child is born; and if you go to a christening party you will find that the stork has come too: in sugar on a cake, perhaps, or to be handed round in the form of ice cream. Most of the kindly intimate little jests about babies have a

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CHAPTER IIIToC

German children go to day schools. This is not to say that there are no boarding schools in Germany; but the prevailing system throughout the empire is a system of day schools. The German mother does not get rid of her boys and girls for months together, and look forward to the holidays as a time of uproar and enjoyment. She does not wonder anxiously what changes she will see in them when they come back to her. They are with her all the year round,—the boys till they go to a university, the girl

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CHAPTER IVToC

There are no people in the world who need driving to school less than the Germans. There are no people in the world who set so high a value on knowledge. In the old days, when they lived with Jove in the clouds, they valued knowledge solely for its own sake, and did not trouble much about its practical use in the world. It is absurd to say, as people often do now, that this spirit is dead in the nation. You cannot be long in the society of Germans without recognising that it survives wherever th

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CHAPTER VToC

The word is untranslatable, though my dictionary translates it. Backfisch, m. fried fish; young girl; says the dictionary. In Germany a woman does not arrive at her own gender till she marries and becomes somebody's Frau . Woman in general, girl, and miss are neuter; and the fried-fish girl is masculine. But if one little versed in German wished to tell you that he liked a fried sole, and said Ich liebe einen Backfisch , it might lead to misunderstandings. The origin of the word in this applicat

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CHAPTER VIToC

When an English lad goes to the university he usually goes there from a public school, where out of school hours he has been learning for years past to be a man. In these strenuous days he may have learned a little in school hours too, but that is a new departure. Cricket and character are what an English boy expects to develop at school, and if there is stuff in him he succeeds. He does not set a high value on learning. Even if he works and brings home prizes he will not be as proud of them as

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CHAPTER VIIToC

Not long ago I heard a German professor say that anyone who wanted to speak with authority about the German family must read Die Familie by W.H. Riehl. He said that, amongst other things, this important work explained why men went to the Kneipe , because they were fond of home life; and also what was the sphere of women. I thought it would be useful to have both these points settled; besides, I asked several wise Germans about the book, and they all nodded their heads and said it was a good one.

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CHAPTER VIIIToC

Germany stands midway between France and England in its care for its womenfolk. French parents consider marriage the proper career for a woman, and with logical good sense set themselves from the day of a girl's birth to provide a dowry for her. When she is of a marriageable age they provide the husband. They will make great sacrifices to establish a daughter in prosperity, and they leave nothing to chance. We leave everything to chance, and the idea of marriage made by bargain and without love

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CHAPTER IXToC

In the Memoiren einer Idealistin , those genuine and interesting Memoirs that have been so widely read in Germany of late, Malvida von Meysenbug, the daughter of a highly placed official at a small German Court, describes her confirmation day and the long period of preparation and the spiritual struggle that preceded it. "During a whole year my sister and I went twice a week to the pastor's house to be instructed in the dogma of the Protestant Church," she says.... "The ceremony was to be on Sun

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CHAPTER XToC

"He was a pompous, stiff-jointed man," said my friends, "an official in a small town, who would go to the stake rather than break the letter of the law. But when he came to Berlin to attend a niece's marriage he thought he would have some fun. He arrived late on Polterabend , and he brought with him an enormous earthenware crock. Instead of ringing he hurled the crock against the outside door of the flat, so that it smashed to atoms with a noise like thunder. The inhabitants of that flat came fo

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CHAPTER XIToC

Rents are high in Germany. At least, the Germans say so, and so do the people whose books about Germany are crammed with soul-satisfying statistics and elaborate calculations. Over-crowding, too, is said to be worse in Germany than in English cities. But I have always seen the rent and the crowding judged by the number of rooms and not by their size. This is really misleading, because you could put the whole of a small London flat into many a German middle-class dining-room or Wohnzimmer . You c

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CHAPTER XIIToC

"Frenchwomen are the best housewives in Europe," said a German lady who knew most European countries well; "the next best are the English; Germans come third." The lady speaking was one whose opinions were always uttered with much charm, but ex-cathedra ; so that you found it impossible to disagree with her ... until you got home. But to hear the supreme excellence of the Hausfrau contested takes the breath away; to see her deposed from the first place by one of her own countrywomen dazzles the

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CHAPTER XIIIToC

In Germany the home is furnished by the bride's parents, and the household linen forms part of her trousseau and is marked by her monogram. In describing the furniture of a German flat, you must first decide whether you are going to choose one furnished to-day by a fashionable young woman in Berlin or Hamburg; or one furnished by her parents twenty to twenty-five years ago. Modern German furniture is quite easily suggested to the English imagination, because some of it looks as if the artist had

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CHAPTER XIVToC

The first thing that English people notice about German servants is, that they are allowed to dress anyhow, and that the results are most unpleasing. In Hamburg, the city that gives you ox-tail soup for dinner and has sirloins of beef much like English sirloins, the maids used to wear clean crackling, light print gowns with elbow sleeves. This was their full dress in which they waited at table, and fresh looking country girls from Holstein and thereabouts looked very well in it. This costume is

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CHAPTER XVToC

Although the Germans as a nation are large eaters, they begin their day with the usual light continental breakfast of coffee and rolls. In households where economy is practised it is still customary to do without butter, or at any rate to provide it only for the master of the house and for visitors. In addition to rolls and butter, you may, if you are a man or a guest, have two small boiled eggs; but eggs in a German town are apt to remind you of the Viennese waiter who assured a complaining cus

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CHAPTER XVIToC

Berlin people compare their Wertheim with the Bon Marché at Paris, or with Whiteley's in London; only always adding that Wertheim is superior to any emporium in France or England. So it really is in one way. A great artist designed it, and the outside of the building is plain and stately, a most refreshing contrast to most Berlin architecture. On the ground floor there is a high spacious hall that is splendid when it is lighted up at night, and a staircase leads up and down from here to the vari

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CHAPTER XVIIToC

A few years ago a German economist reckoned that there were only 250,000 families in the empire whose incomes exceeded £450, a year. There were nearly three million households living on incomes ranging from £135 to £450, and nearly four millions with more than £90 but less than £135. But there were upwards of five millions whose incomes fell below £45. Since that estimate was made, Germany has grown in wealth and prosperity; and in the big cities there is great expenditure and luxury amongst som

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CHAPTER XVIIIToC

If a German cannot afford to ask you to dinner he asks you to supper, and makes his supper inviting. At least, he does if he is sensible, and if he lives where an inexpensive form of entertainment is in vogue. But even in Germany people are not sensible everywhere. The headmaster of a school in a small East Prussian town told me that his colleagues, the higher officials and other persons of local importance, felt bound to entertain their friends at least once a year, and that their way was to in

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CHAPTER XIXToC

There was to be singing in the forest on Sunday afternoon, we were told, when we arrived at our little Black Forest town; and we were on no account to miss it. We did not want to miss anything, for whenever we looked out of our windows or strolled through the streets we were entertained and enchanted. From the hotel we could see women and girls pass to and fro all day with the great wooden buckets they carried on their backs and filled at the well close by. As dusk fell the oldest woman in the c

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CHAPTER XXToC

The word Sport has been taken into the German language lately, but Germans use it when we should use "hobby." "It is my sport," says an artist when he shows you furniture of his own design. He means that his business in life is to paint pictures, but his pleasure is to invent beautiful chairs and tables. When the talk turns on the absurd extreme to which the Marthas of Germany carry their housekeeping zeal, a German friend will turn to you in defence of his countrywomen. "It is their 'sport,'" s

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CHAPTER XXIToC

English people who have travelled in Germany know some of the big well-kept hotels in the large towns, and know that they are much like big hotels in other continental cities. It is not in these establishments that you can watch national life or discover much about the Germans, except that they are good hotel-keepers; and this you probably discovered long ago abroad or at home. If you are a woman, you may be impressed by the fineness, the whiteness, the profusion, and the embroidered monograms o

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CHAPTER XXIIToC

As rents are high in Germany, it is usual for people of small means to let off one or two rooms, either furnished or unfurnished. But it is not usual to supply a lodger with any meal except his coffee and rolls in the morning. If you wish to take lodgings in a German town, and work through the long list of them in a local paper, you will probably find no one willing to provide for you in the English fashion. "Cooking!" they say with horror,—"cooking! You want to eat in your room. No. That can we

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CHAPTER XXIIIToC

If you choose to leave the railroad you may still travel by diligence in Germany, and rumble along the roads in its stuffy interior. As you pass through a village the driver blows his horn, old and young run out to enjoy the sensation of the day, the geese cackle and flutter from you in the dust, you catch glimpses of a cobble-stoned market-place, a square church-tower with a stork's nest on its summit, Noah's Ark-like houses with thatched or gabled roofs, tumble-down balconies, and outside stai

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CHAPTER XXIVToC

The peasant proprietors of Southern Germany are a comfortable, prosperous class. "A rich peasant" begins your comic story as often as "a rich Jew." The peasants own their farms and a bit of forest, as well as a vineyard or a hop garden. They never pretend to be anything but peasants; but when they can afford it they like to have a son who is a doctor, a schoolmaster, or a pastor. Unless you have special opportunities you can only watch peasant life from outside in Germany, for you could not stay

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CHAPTER XXVToC

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 the

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CHAPTER XXVIToC

Once upon a time a German got hold of Aladdin's lamp, and he summoned the Djinn attendant on the lamp. "Build me a city of broad airy streets," he bade him, "and where several streets meet see that there is an open place set with trees and statues and fountains." All the houses, even those that the poor inhabit, are to be big and white and shining, like palaces; but the real palaces where princes shall live may be plain and grey. There are to be pleasure grounds in the midst of the city, but the

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CHAPTER XXVIIToC

The most amusing columns in German daily papers are those devoted to family advertisement. There you find the prolix intimate announcements of domestic events compared with which the first column of the Times is so bare, so nichtssagend . "The birth of a second son is announced with joy by Dr Johann Weber and Wife Martha, born Hansen."—Dresden, 22 May 1907. "Emil Harzdorf and wife Magdalene, born Klaus, have the honour to announce the birth of a strong girl."—Hamburg, 26 May 1907. Boy babies are

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