Such bulwarks of my early education have been shattered by the fact that in ten days in Germany, for living expenses alone, I have spent, with practically no effort at all, something over a million marks.
During this time, I have only once stopped at a deluxe hotel. After a week in fourth-class railway coaches, village inns, country and small-town gasthofs, finishing with a seven-hour ride standing up in the packed corridor of a second-class railway car, I decided that I would investigate how the profiteers lived.
On the great glass door of the Frankfurter Hof was a black-lettered sign, “French and Belgians Not Admitted.” At the desk the clerk told me a single room would be 51,000 marks “with taxes, of course, added.” In the Oriental lobby, out of big chairs, I could see heavy Jewish faces looking at me through blue cigar smoke. I registered as from Paris.
“We don’t enforce that anti-French rule, of course,” said the clerk very pleasantly.
Up in the room there was a list of the taxes. First, there was a forty percent town tax, then twenty percent for service, then a charge of 8,000 marks for heating, then an announcement that the visitors who did not eat breakfast in the hotel would be charged 6,000 marks extra. There were some other charges. I stayed that night and half the next day. The bill was 145,000 marks.
In a little railway junction in Baden a girl porter put my two very heavy bags onto the train. I wanted to help her with them. She laughed at me. She had a tanned face, smooth, blond hair and shoulders like an ox.
“How much?” I asked her.
“Fifty marks,” she said.
At Mannheim a porter carried my bags from one track to another in the station. When I asked him how much, he demanded a thousand marks. The last porter I had seen had been the girl in Baden, so I protested.
“A bottle of beer costs fifteen hundred marks here,” he replied, “a glass of schnapps, twelve hundred.”
That is the way the prices fluctuate all over Germany. It all depends whether the prices went up to the top when the mark had its terrific fall last winter to around 70,000 to the dollar. If the prices went up they never came down. In the big cities, of course, they went up. A full meal in the country costs 2,000 marks. On the train a ham sandwich costs 3,000 marks.
Last week, investigating the actual living conditions, I talked to, among others, a small-factory owner, several workmen, a hotelkeeper and a high school professor.
The factory owner said: “We have enough coal and coke for a few weeks longer, but are short on all raw materials. We cannot pay the prices they ask now. We sold to exporters. They got the dollar prices. We didn’t. We can buy coal from Czechoslavakia, where they have German mines they got under the peace treaty, but they want pay in Czech money, which is at par and we can’t afford to pay. We are starting to lay off workmen, and as they have nothing saved there is liable to be trouble.”
A workman said: “I cannot keep my family on the money that I am making now. I have mortgaged my house to the bank and the bank charges me forty percent interest on the loan. You see workmen who have plenty of money to spend, but they are the young men who are living at home. They get their board and room free and their laundry. Maybe they pay a little something on their board. They are the men you see around the wine and bierstubes. Maybe their father has some property in the country, a farm, then they are all right. All the farmers have money.”
The hotelkeeper said: “All summer the hotel was full. We had a good season. I worked all summer in the high season from six o’clock in the morning until midnight. Every room was crowded. We had people sleeping in the billiard room on cots. It was the best year we ever had. In October the mark started to fall, and in December all the money we had taken in all summer was not enough to buy our preserves and jelly for next season. I have a little capital in Switzerland, otherwise we would have had to close. Every other summer hotel in this town has closed for good. The proprietor of the big hotel on the hill there committed suicide last week.”
The high school professor said: “I get 200,000 marks a month. That sounds like a good salary. But there is no way I can increase it. One egg costs 4,000 marks. A shirt costs 85,000 marks. We are living now, our family of four, on two meals a day. I owe the bank money.
“People here in town cannot change their marks into dollars and Swiss francs so as to have them when the mark falls again, as it will as soon as they settle this Ruhr affair. The banks will not give out any dollars or Swiss or Dutch money. They hang on to all they can get. The people can’t do anything.
“The merchants have no confidence in the money, and will not bring their prices down. The wealthy people are the farmers who got the high prices for their crops, which were marketed just after the mark fell last fall, and the big manufacturers. The big manufacturers sell abroad for foreign money, and pay their labor in marks. And the banks. The banks are always wealthy. The banks are like the government. They get good money for bad, and hang on to the good money.”
The schoolteacher was a tall, thin man with thin, nervous hands. For pleasure he played the flute. I had heard him playing as I came to his door. His two children did not look undernourished, but he and his frayed-looking wife did.
“But how will it come out?” I asked him.
“We can only trust in God,” he said. Then he smiled. “We used to trust in God and the government, we Germans. Now I no longer trust the government.”
“I heard you playing very beautifully when I came to the door,” I said, rising to go.
“You know the flute? You like the flute? I will play for you.”
“If it would not be asking too much.”
So we sat in the dusk in the ugly little parlor and the school-teacher played very beautifully on the flute. Outside people were going by in the main street of the town. The children came in silently and sat down. After a time the schoolmaster stopped and stood up very embarrassedly.
“It is a very nice instrument, the flute,” he said.
Starvers Out of Sight
The Toronto Daily Star
May 9, 1923
COLOGNE.—Traveling on fast trains, stopping at the hotels chosen for him by the Messrs. Cook, usually speaking no language but his own, the tourist sees no suffering in Europe.
If he comes to Germany, even traveling quite extensively, he will see no suffering. There are no beggars. No horrible examples on view. No visible famine sufferers nor hungry children that besiege the railway stations.
The tourist leaves Germany wondering what all this starving business is about. The country looks prosperous. On the contrary in Naples he has seen crowds of ragged, filthy beggars, sore-eyed children, a hungry-looking horde. Tourists see the professional beggars, but they do not see the amateur starvers.
For every ten professional beggars in Italy there are a hundred amateur starvers in Germany. An amateur starver does not starve in public.
On the contrary no one knows the amateur is starving until they find him. They usually find him in bed. A very hungry person does not walk the streets after a certain length of time. It sharpens that feeling that is dulled by bed. In writing of amateur starvers no reference is meant to the inhabitants of breadlines, soup kitchens or rescue missions. They have violated their strictly amateur standing.
A few case histories of amateur starvers are appended.
No. 1—Frau B. is the widow of the owner of an apothecary shop, who died before the war. She has a yearly income of 26,400 marks, the interest on mortgages. Before the war this yielded her $100 a week. Her 29-year-old daughter is suffering from lung trouble and cannot work. Her 21-year-old son passed the final examination of the grammar school, but cannot go to the university, and is earning his living as a miner. Another 13-year-old boy is in school. The family was formerly very well-to-do. Today their income for one year is the minimum for the existence of a family of four persons for a period of two weeks.
No. 2—The married couple P., 64 years old, who have been blind for the last ten years, receive from their capi
tal, which they earned by hard work, an income of 3,400 marks a year. They were formerly able to live comfortably on this income. Today it represents half a week’s wages of an unskilled laborer.
No. 3—Frau B., widow of an architect, is obliged to live with her two children of 9 and 6 years on a yearly income of 2,400 marks. This represents less than two days’ earnings of a laborer.
No. 4—The married couple K. receive 500 marks a month from rent of their house. The husband, formerly a farmer, is suffering from heart trouble. A short time ago he was in bed a number of weeks as a result of poisoning. For six months the wife has been almost completely paralyzed. The medicines necessary to their illness cost more than their income. In normal times the income derived from the rent would have afforded these people a comfortable existence.
No. 5—The widow H., 48 years old, has four children, three of whom still attend school. She has a capital of 100,000 marks. This gives her 15,000 marks yearly. On this the family can live for one week.
These cases are not exceptional. They are typical of the situation of the middle class in Germany who are dependent on a fixed income from savings. Neither are they German propaganda cases. All are taken from an appeal for the starving of Cologne signed by Mr. J. I. Piggott, commissioner, the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission, and Mr. D. W. P. Thurston, C.M.C., H.M. (His Majesty’s) consul general, Cologne.
Cologne itself looks prosperous. The shop windows are brilliant. Streets are clean. British officers and men move smartly along through the crowds. The green-uniformed German police salute the British officers rigidly.
In the evening the brilliant red or the dark blue of the officer’s formal mess kit that is compulsory for those officers who live in Cologne colors the drab civilian crowds. Outside in the street German children dance on the pavement to the music that comes from the windows of the officer’s club.
Coming down the broad floor of the Rhine on a freight boat from Wiesbaden through the gloomy brown hills with their ruined castles that look exactly like the castles in goldfish bowls, in fourteen hours on the river we only passed fifteen loaded coal barges. All were flying the French flag.
Last September, in an express passenger boat, we passed an endless succession of them moving up the river toward the canal mouth that would take them, by a network of quiet waterways, to feed the Lorraine furnaces. Then France was getting the hundreds of barges of coal as part of German reparation payment. Now the fifteen barges we passed were part of the thin stream of coal that trickles out of the Ruhr through the mazes of arrested industry and military occupation.
Hate in the Ruhr Is Real
The Toronto Daily Star
May 12, 1923
DÜSSELDORF .—You feel the hate in the Ruhr as an actual concrete thing. It is as definite as the unswept, cinder-covered sidewalks of Düsseldorf or the long rows of grimy brick cottages, each one exactly like the next, where the workmen of Essen live.
It is not only the French that the Germans hate. They look away when they pass the French sentries in front of the post office, the town hall and the Hotel Kaiserhof in Essen, and look straight ahead when they pass poilus (French soldiers) in the street. But when Nationalists and workers meet, they look each other in the face or look at each other’s clothes with a hatred as cold and final as the towering slag heaps back of Frau Bertha Krupp’s foundries.
Most of the workers of the Ruhr district are Communists. The Ruhr has always been the Reddest part of Germany. It was so Red, in fact, that before the war troops were never garrisoned here, both because the government did not trust the temper of the population and feared that the troops would become contaminated with the Communist atmosphere. Consequently when the French moved in they had no barracks to occupy, and had a very difficult time billeting.
At the start of the occupation all of the Ruhr united solidly to back the government against the French. The night of the demonstration when [August] Thyssen came home from his trial at Mayence, a German newspaperman told me he identified over a hundred men in the mob, singing patriotic songs and shouting for the government, who had been officers or non-coms in the Red Army during the Ruhr rebellion. It was a great revival of national feeling that molded the country into a whole in its opposition to France.
“It was most uplifting,” an old German woman told me. “You should have been here. Never have I been so uplifted since the great days of the victories. Oh, how they sang. Ach, it was wonderful.”
That is finished now. The leaders of the workers are saying that the government has no policy, except passive resistance, and they are sick of passive resistance. Their newspapers are demanding that the German government start negotiations with the French. The French have seized millions of marks of unemployment doles, and as soon as the unemployment pay doesn’t come in the workers begin grumbling.
It was beginning to look as though the workers would not hold out in the passive resistance, and the industrialists were extremely anxious to provoke an incident between the workmen and the troops. Something to stir up a little trouble and revive the old patriotic fervor. They ordered sirens blown to summon the workers for a passive resistance demonstration whenever. French troops appeared for requisitionings.
On the Saturday before Easter the incident occurred. It cost the lives of thirteen workmen. It would not have happened, perhaps, if the young officer in charge of the platoon that came to requisition motor trucks had not been nervous. But it did happen.
I have heard at least fifteen different accounts of what actually happened. At least twelve of them sounded like lies. The crowd was very thick and pressed tight around the soldiers. It was in a big courtyard. Those that were in the front rank of the crowd were killed or wounded. You are not allowed to talk to the wounded. The troops are not giving interviews. In fact, they were sent a very long way away very soon after the last ambulance-load of wounded had gone. Hearsay evidence is worthless, and there are plenty of wild stories.
Two things stand out. The French had no reason to make bloodshed and wanted none. On the contrary, they had every reason to avoid any sort of conflict, as they were making every effort to win over the workers from their employers. The industrialists, on the other hand, had been provoking incidents and advising the men to resist.
Twenty different workmen swore to me that there were Nationalist agitators, former German “Green police,” in the crowd. The workmen say these men egged on the workers and told them they could swarm over the French, disarm them, and kick them out of the courtyard.
All the workmen said the crowd ran at the first volley, which was fired over their heads. They had all served in the army and had no desire to attack armed troops unarmed once they saw they meant business and would really shoot. It is there that the question arises whether or not the lieutenant proceeded to fire unnecessarily. I do not know. All the men I have talked to swear they were running after the first volley and did not see anything. After the first volley the troops fired independently.
The funeral at Essen was delayed the last time because the French and German doctors could not agree on the nature of the bullet wounds. The Germans claimed eleven of the workmen were shot in the back. The French surgeon claims that five were shot in the front, five bullets entered from the side and two in the back. I do not know the claims on the two men who died since the argument started.
At present the Ruhr workmen are feeling decidedly unpatriotic. They believe that sooner or later negotiations will start, their steadily dwindling unemployment pay will stop, the mark will plunge down again, and that they will not be able to work full-time, due to various sabotages and the general disorganization. None of them have any illusions that the government will be able to pay them unemployment pay indefinitely and they are demanding that the government start something.
The French seem to run the administration of the occupation admirably. The troops are kept out of sight as much as possible, and there is a minimum of interference with Germans going through from unoccupied to
occupied Germany. They are all required to have red-card passes, but the examination of these passes is purely perfunctory. A non-com sees the red card, says, “bon,” and the line of Germans passes through the barrier.
They run the military end smoothly but are only able to move six trains of the hundred and thirty-three from Essen each day. In three months of occupation France has obtained the same amount of coal she had been getting each day from Germany for nothing, before the Ruhr seizure.
M. Loucheur, millionaire ex-minister of the devastated regions under Briand, went to London and felt out public opinion on his own hook, although he told [Raymond] Poincaré he was going, and reported to him on his return. Poincaré was reported furious at Loucheur’s trip, which he regarded as a first step in a Loucheur drive for the premiership when the Chamber of Deputies again sits in May. Loucheur suffers in France from being called the French Winston Churchill, and has a record for brilliant performances and brilliant failure. His very sound credentials for the premiership will be that he has always opposed the Ruhr venture.
Aristide Briand is now working on a speech that he hopes will return him to power. He is planning to attack Poincaré by stating the number of millions Briand got out of the Germans in reparations while he was prime minister and compare them with the money Poincaré has lost since he came into office.
The Caillaux Liberal camp have started a new paper in Paris. Léon Daudet says the first thing he will ask the chamber when it reopens is why M. Loucheur was allowed to go to England as an alleged representative of the government against the wishes of the government, etc.
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