Part 15 (1/2)
Of the army of people with t.i.tles of Ober-Regierungsrat, Geheimer Regierungsrat, Wirklicher Geheimer Regierungsrat, Wirklicher Geheimer Ober-Regierungsrat, Wirklicher Geheimerat, who also carries the additional t.i.tle of ”Excellenz” with his t.i.tle; Referendar, a.s.sessor, Justizrat, Geheimer Justizrat, Gerichts-a.s.sessor, Amtsrichter, Amtsgerichtrat, Oberamtsrichter, Landgerichtsdirector, Amtsgerichtsprasident, Geheimer Finanzrat, Wirklicher Geheimer Ober Finanzrat, Legationsrat, Wirklicher Geheimer Legationsrat, Vice Konsul, Konsul, General Konsul, Commercienrat, Wirklichercommercienrat, Staatsanwalt, Staatsanwaltschaftsrat, Herr Erster Staatsanwalt, where the ”Herr” is a legal part of the t.i.tle; of those who must be addressed as ”Excellenz,” and in addition military and naval t.i.tles, and the horde of handles to names of those in the railway, postal, telegraph, street- cleaning, forestry, and other departments, one must merely throw up one's hands in despair, and bow to the inevitable disgrace of being quite unable to name this Noah's-ark procession of petty dignitaries.
In the department of post and telegraph a new order has gone forth, issued during the last few months, by which, after pa.s.sing certain examinations, the employees may take the t.i.tle of Ober-Postschaffner and Ober-Leitungsaufseher. After thirty years' service the postman is dignified with the t.i.tle of Ober-Brieftrager. It is difficult to understand the type of mind which is flattered by such infantile honors. At any rate, it is a cheap system of rewards, and so long as men will work for such trumpery ends the state profits by playing upon their childish vanity. During the year 1912 more than 7,000 decorations were distributed, and some 1,500 of these were of the three cla.s.ses of the Order of the Red Eagle. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reign of the present Emperor, in 1913, still another medal is to be struck, to be given to worthy officials and officers.
All the professions and all the trades, too, have their pharmacopoeia of tags and t.i.tles, and you will go far afield to find a German woman who is not Frau Something-or-other Schmidt, or Fischer, or Miller.
Every day one hears women greeting one another as Frau Oberforstmeister, Frau Superintendent, Frau Medicinalrat, Frau Oberbergrat, Frau Apothekar, Frau Stadt-Musikdirektor, Frau Doktor Rechtsanwalt, Frau Geschaftsfuhrer, and the like. All these t.i.tles, too, appear in the hotel registers and in all announcements in the newspapers. Even when a man dies, his t.i.tle follows him to the grave, and even beyond it, in the speech of those left behind.
These uniforms and t.i.tles and small formalities do make, I admit, for orderliness and rigidity, and perhaps for contentment; since every man and woman feels that though they are below some one else on the ladder they are above others; and every day and in every company their vanity is lightly tickled by hearing their importance, small though it be, proclaimed by the mention of their t.i.tles.
It pleases the foreigners to laugh and sometimes to jeer at the universal sign of ”Verboten” (Forbidden) seen all over Germany. They look upon it as the seal of an autocratic and bureaucratic government.
It is nothing of the kind. The army, the bureaucracy, the autocratic Kaiser at the helm, and the landscape bestrewn with ”Verboten” and ”Nicht gestattet” (Not allowed), these are necessities in the case of these people. They do not know instinctively, or by training or experience, where to expectorate and where not to; where to smoke and where not to; what to put their feet on and what not to; where to walk and where not to; when to stare and when not to; when to be dignified and when to laugh; and, least of all, how to take a joke; how, when, or how much to eat, drink, or bathe, or how to dress properly or appropriately. The Emperor is almost the only man in Germany who knows what chaff is and when to use it.
The more you know them, the longer you live among them, the less you laugh at ”Verboten.” The trouble is not that there are too many of these warnings, but that there are not enough! When you see in flaring letters in the street-cars, ”In alighting the left hand on the left-hand rail,” when you read on the bill of fare in the dining-car brief instructions underlined, as to how to pour out your wine so that you will not spill it on the table-cloth; when you see the list of from ten to fifteen rules for pa.s.sengers in railway carriages; when you see everywhere where crowds go and come, ”Keep to the right”; when you see hanging on the railings of the ca.n.a.ls that flow through Berlin a life-buoy, and hanging over it full instructions with diagrams for the rescue of the drowning; when you see over a post-box, ”Aufschrift und Marke nicht vergessen” (Do not forget to stamp and address your envelope); when you see in the church entrances a tray with water and sal volatile, and the countless other directions and remedies and preventives on every hand, you shrug your Saxon shoulders and smile pityingly, if you do not stand and stare and then laugh outright, as I was fool enough to do at first. But you soon recover from this superficial view of matters Teutonic. In one cab I rode in I was cautioned not to expectorate, not to put my feet on the cus.h.i.+ons, not to tap on the gla.s.s with stick or umbrella, not to open the windows, but to ask the driver to do it, and not to open the door till the auto-taxi stopped; one hardly has time to learn the rules before the journey is over.
In April, 1913, more laws are to come into effect for the street traffic. People may not walk more than three abreast; they may not swing their canes and umbrellas as they walk; they may not drag their garments in the street; they may not sing, whistle, or talk loudly in the street, nor congregate for conversation; there will follow, of course, a regulation as to the length of women's dresses to be worn in the street, and no doubt the police commissioner, an amiable bachelor, will decree that the shorter the better. All these fussy regulations are ridiculous to us, but in reality they are horrible and give one a feeling of suffocation when living in Germany. In the days when everybody rode a bicycle, each rider was obliged to pa.s.s an examination in proficiency, paid a small tax, and was given a number and a license. Women who persisted in wearing dangerous hat-pins have been ejected from public vehicles.
After April 1, 1913, no shop in Berlin can advertise or hold a bargain sale without permission of the police. The changed prices must be affixed to the goods four days before the sale for inspection by the police, and only two such sales are permitted a year, and these must take place either before February 15, or between June 15 and August 1st. All particulars of the sale must be handed to the police a week in advance. In a carriage on the Bavarian railroad, a husband who kissed and petted his tired wife was complained of by a fellow- pa.s.senger. The husband was tried, judged guilty, and fined. There was no question but that the woman was his wife; thus there is no loop-hole left for the legally curious, and thousands of male Germans hug and kiss one another on railway-station platforms who surely ought to be fined and imprisoned or deported or hanged! All this may be a relic of Roman law. Cato dismissed Marilius from the Senate because he kissed his own wife by daylight in the presence of their own daughter.
Shortly after leaving Germany, I returned from a few weeks' shooting in Scotland. We bundled out of the train onto the station platform in London. Dogs, gun-cases, cartridge-boxes, men and maid servants, trunks, bags, baskets, bunches of grouse, and the pa.s.sengers seemed in a chaotic huddle of confusion. In Germany at least twenty policemen would have been needed to disentangle us. I was so torpid from having been long Teutonically cared for, that I looked on momentarily paralyzed. There was no shouting, not a harsh word that I heard; and as I was almost the last to get away, I can vouch for it that in ten minutes each had his own and was off. I had forgotten that such things could be done. I had been so long steeped in enforced orderliness, that I had forgotten that real orderliness is only born of individual self-control. I forgot that I was back among the free spirits who govern a quarter of the habitable globe and whose descendants are making America; and even if here and there one or more, and they are often recently arrived immigrants, are intoxicated by freedom and shoot or steal like drunken men; I realized that I am still an Occidental barbarian, thank G.o.d, preferring liberty, even though it is punctuated now and then with shots and screams and thefts, to official guardians.h.i.+p, even though I am thus saved the shooting, the screaming, and the thieving.
In the nine years ending 1910, our Fourth of July celebrations cost America in killed, 18,000; in wounded, 35,000; but even that is better than the civic throttling of the German method. It seems to be forgotten that the men who keep the world fresh with their saline vigor, love risks as they love fresh air. They should be curbed, but not strangled!
You read their history, you watch closely their manners, you prowl about among them, in their streets, their shops, their houses, their theatres; you accompany the crowds on a holiday in the trains, in the forests, in the summer resorts, at their concerts or their picnics, in their beer-gardens and restaurants, and you soon see that the orderliness is all forced upon them from without, and not due to their own knowledge of how to take care of themselves.
In a recent volume by a distinguished German prison official he writes that, after a careful study of the figures from 1882 to 1910, he has discovered that one person now living in every twelve in Germany has been convicted of some offence. Doctor Finkelnburg shows that the number of ”criminals” in Germany is 3,869,000, of whom 3,060,000 are males, and 809,000 females. Every 43d boy and every 213th girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen has been punished by fine or imprisonment. This does not mean that the Germans are criminal or disorderly, but, on the contrary, it shows how absurdly petty are the violations of the law punished by fine or imprisonment.
Their whole history, from Charlemagne down until the last fifty years, is a series of going to pieces the moment the strong hand of authority is taken away from them. The German, and especially the Prussian policeman, has become the greatest official busybody in the world. No German's house is his castle. The policeman enters at will and, backed by the authorities, questions the householder about his religion, his servants, the attendance of his children at school, the status of the guests staying in his house, and about many other matters besides. If one of his children by reason of ill health is taught at home, the authorities demand the right to send an inspector every six months to examine him or her, to be sure that the child is properly taught. The policeman is in attendance on the platform at every public meeting, armed with authority to close the meeting if either speeches or discussion seem to him unpatriotic, unlawful, or strife-breeding.
Professors, pastors, teachers are all muzzled by the state, and must preach and teach the state orthodoxy or go! A young professor of political economy in Berlin only lately was warned, and has become strangely silent since.
The de-Germanizing of the German abroad is in line with this, and a constant source of annoyance to the powers that be. Buda-Pesth was founded by Germans in 1241, and now not one-tenth of the population is German. As the Franks became French, as the Long Beards became Italians, so the Germans become Americans in America, English in England, Austrian and Bohemian in Austria and Bohemia. It has been a problem to prevent their becoming Poles where the state has settled Germans for the distinct purpose of ousting the Poles.
In China, in South America, and even in Sumatra I have heard German officials tell with indignation of how their compatriots rapidly take the local color, and lose their German habits and customs and point of view.
One of the half dozen best-known bankers in Berlin has lamented to me that he must change his people in South America every few years, as they soon go to pieces there. Army officers came home from China indignant to find their compatriots there speaking English and unwilling even to speak German. Even as long ago as the time of the Thirty Years' War a forgotten chronicler, Adam Junghaus von der Ohritz, writes: ”Further, it is a misfortune to the Germans that they take to imitating like monkeys and fools. As soon as they come among other soldiers, they must have Spanish or other outlandish clothes. If they could babble foreign languages a little, they would a.s.sociate themselves with Spaniards and Italians.” Wilhelm von Polentz, in his ”das Land der Zukunft,” writes: ”die Deutsch-Amerikaner sind fur die alte Heimat dauernd verloren, politisch ganz und kulturell beinahe vollstandig.”
Bismarck knew these people and the present Emperor knows these people, better than do you and I! Bismarck even insisted upon using the German text, and once returned a letter of congratulation from an official body because it was written in the Latin text. Even the Great Elector must have recognized this weakness when he said: ”Gedenke da.s.s du bist em Deutscher!” The present Kaiser lends his whole social influence to keep the Germans German. He will have the bill of fare in German, he prefers the dreadful word Mundtuch to napkin. His officers very often demand that the bill of fare in a German hotel shall be presented to them in German and not in French. And they are quite right to do so, and quite right to hang the German world with the sign ”Verboten”; quite right to distribute t.i.tles and medals and orders, for the more they are uniformed and decorated and ticketed and drilled, and taken care of, the better they like it, and the more contented these people are. Overorganization has brought this about. Their theories have hardened into a veritable imprisonment of the will. They have drifted away from Goethe's wise saying: ”That man alone attains to life and freedom who daily has to conquer them anew.”
Let me refer again just here to the socialist propaganda, which seems to the outsider so strong here in Germany. Even this is far flabbier than it looks, as I have attempted to explain elsewhere. In such strong and out-and-out industrial centres as Essen, Duisburg-Muhlheim, Saarbrucken, and Bochum, where a vigorous fight has been made against socialism, the following are the figures of the last election in 1912 when the socialists largely increased their vote throughout other parts of Germany:
NATIONALLIBERAL ZENTRUM SOCIALDEMOKRAT
Essen............ 25,937 42,832 40,503 Duisburg-Muhlheim 33,934 31,559 34,187 Saarbrucken...... 25,108 24,228 4,157 Bochum........... 42,257 37,650 64,833
I cite this example because it seems as though the growth of socialism in Germany were in direct contradiction to my argument that they are a soft, an impressionable, an amenable, and easily led and governed people.
State socialism as thus far put into practice in Germany is, in a nutsh.e.l.l, the decision on the part of the state or the rulers that the individual is not competent to spend his own money, to choose his own calling, to use his own time as he will, or to provide himself for his own future and for the various emergencies of life. And by the minute state control, they are rapidly bringing the whole population to an enfeebled social and political condition, where they can do nothing for themselves.
They have been knocked about and dragooned by their own rulers and, be it said and emphasized, they have received certain compensations and gained certain advantages, if nothing else an orderliness, safety, and care for the people by the state unequalled elsewhere in the world.
But there is no gainsaying, on the other hand, that they have lost the fruits that are plucked by the nations of more individualistic training.
They have clean streets, cheap music and drama, and a veritable mesh of national education with interstices so small that no one can escape, and they are coddled in every direction; but they have no stuff for colonizers, and they have been not infrequently wofully lacking in stalwart statesmen, and leaders.