WHY SHOULD GERMANY PERISH'?
BY H. W. MASSINGIIAM.
T HERE is one thing about the condition of Germany which struck me as rather horrible. That is that 71- a great nation looks as if she might die in a kind of half- strangled silence. Here is an ill-fed, poorly-clothed people, at its wits' end for money. It works, after its habit, with an ant-like industry. But it never knows what the fruits of its day's labour will be, or whether there will be any fruit at all. Not a German housewife can tell on Monday what her Saturday's marketing will work out at. Not an hotel-keeper can reckon his charges, nor a doctor or a dentist his fees, not a workman his wages, for more than a few hours ahead. Gambling with us is a pleasant change from the fixed routine of working, saving, and spending. In Germany existence itself is a gamble, not for amusement, but for bare livelihood. The average German man or woman lives the life of a sports- man struggling to hedge on a bad bet. When you watch the process, you see how tragic it is. But a greater tragedy still is that the German nation cannot get any real echo of its misery past the closed ear of Europe. Amid the wreck of a giant economy, millions of human beings are sinking, or floating distractedly, like the passengers of the 'Titanic.' Their faint, drowning cries are all but unheard. Take a few rough facts from my traveller's note-book. When I entered Germany I cashed my first five-pound note, at the rate of 780,000 marks to the pound. As I left it, my last converted " flyer" would have brought me in a modest return of one hundred million marks. [There are said to be now in circulation in Germany over one hundred million million paper marks, whose exchange value may doubtfully range from one to three millions sterling.] I engaged a lady to do a little translation for me. The fee she asked yielded her a week later a handsome wage of about twopence a day. On a Monday I engaged a motor to take me from Bad-Kissingen to Frankfort-on-Main. The fee, thirty-three million marks, meant, at the moment of hiring, about seven English pounds. Forty-eight hours later, three pounds made an ample cover for it. Add a few more hours, and it might have exchanged for about £1 12s. Within a fortnight the official " multiplicator " of the pre-War hotel tariffs rose in three jumps from 27,000 to 100,000, and you might reckon your expenditure at anything between five shillings and (at the extreme of sumptuosity) a pound to-day.
Shopping being a mere struggle between the shop- keeper to get on to a dollar or a real money basis, and the buyer to keep out of it, varies between a swindle and a gift. The universal quest was the substitution for the dissolving mark of the solid comfort of pounds, dollars, Dutch gulden or Swiss francs. As for the mark, the average town household would as soon dream of sleeping on a store of it as of couching with a viper. The moment it is received it must be marketed for what it is worth.
Delay might cost a week of short commons, even a sickly child's life—and there are many sick children in Germany.
If the town-worker is lucky, and numbers a friendly farmer among his acquaintance, he will make haste to pedal out to the country on salary-days and save a few thousand marks of middleman's profit. If you would test what these manceuvrings to keep the wolf from the door come to in the economy of a German household, accept [once] the invitation of a middle-class friend to take a meal with him.
That morals should go under in a world where nothing is stable, where saving is a sin, and the old economic order being broken, every man has to invent a new one for himself, is as inevitable as are casualties in war. Petty cheating ? Yes, plenty of it. A loss of the old rigid code of official honour ? Yes, that too. A delique- scence of character ; a softness, evasiveness, which Goethe half-described when he said that his countrymen lacked personality, and which mark the slip down from a state of security to one in which Europe, in letting France destroy the German Government, bids every German fend for himself. "You blame the German people," said a friend to me, " for this or that, but if each individual had not made a shift for life, the whole nation might have perished." Take the hoarding of foreign currencies. It is unquestioned, as the action of the Stresemann Government in breaking open the cash- boxes shows. But how German industry can live when the stores of these currencies in Holland, Sweden, and London are depleted, as they very soon will be, I do not profess to know. There can be an agricultural Germany ; but scientific, industrial Germany, with France's tiger-claw fixed in her bosom, is so nearly dead already that another stab or two from its enemy, and another tug or two from its own Government (by no means as strong a Government as ours)*, may suffice to kill it outright. And then ?
But is not Germany worth preserving ? I should say so. If it is for the advantage of Europe to let go the race with whom, above all her other children, knowledge is • Already the Berlin Government is In rather acute controversy with the Bavarian Ministry on Bavaria's objection to allow Berlin to pledge her railways in gilaranalla
of reparations.
a passion, and ideas, rather misty ideas, may be, an incessant occupation of the mind, and let French one- ideaness and selfish clarity rule all, then the notion of civilization as a varied contribution of many stocks to a general order will have to go too. The deterioration of stock has set in. One sees, for example, a difference in the travelling classes who settle down in the German health resorts. The East European immigration has begun, Poles, Roumanians, Czechs, and Southern Slays, and, above all, a swarm of Jews from the Danubian lands abound ; the incursion of many thousands of low- type Hebrews is notoriously a concern of Berlin. The physical types of these sojourners seem rather fleshy and coarse ; and if their native speech is unknown, one can usually distinguish" dollars" as minute-guns of their con- versation. "I see and hear nobody I can talk to to-day, though I still travel," said a lady, who mourned the loss of the old entente of culture in Western Europe. But culture in Germany travels no more. It lives on a little bread and margarine in an allotted living-space in a Berlin flat, cut down to the barest need. The German aristocracy is dead, the middle-classes are dying, and the standard of the workman's life, which has been fairly well pre- served, is sinking fast.
Not that Germany has lost its attractiveness. You can still sit in a German concert-room, and see, in row on row of still, absorbed faces, what Mozart and Beethoven mean to the people whom they lift above their much-troubled world of sense and outward things. And if you are in Bavaria, and witness the most wonder- ful wayside cult of Christianity that the world has ever known, and, turning from its tender fancies, observe the order of the villages, where nearly every dwelling is a small farmstead in itself, and the bright trailing of geraniums and petunias in the blue-shuttered windows proclaims how the love of flowers lives in these peasants' hearts, you may think that so manly a race, quit of its bad directors, deserves a better fate than to be harried to death. At least I did.
Previous page
