At the grand hotel, called the Hotel de la Ville de Paris, where we were staying, there was a sentimental orchestra that sobbed out Faust and Puccini and worse half the night, swooning over the rests and generally making the night horrible, so we moved to a little old hotel with plastered walls that fronted on the square where the Lutheran church is. It was quiet there and we had a room twice as big as the grand hotel for about two-thirds of the price. But we made the mistake of dining there one night, having been encouraged by some wonderful rolls with fresh butter, good coffee and plump huckleberries in the morning, and found the food mediocre.
They advertised peach ice on the dinner and brought us instead soggy apple fritters and when Mrs. [Hadley] Hemingway spoke to the waiter, he answered us that there was no more peach ice to be had anywhere in the town, a statement that cost him half his tip when we saw some being served a few moments later at the next table. No, under the circumstances, even remembering the big room and the fine view on to the square and the excellent way our boots were done and the enormous big beds, it would be hardly the thing to recommend the hotel by name.
The cathedral has the largest and finest dramatic clock in the world. The twelve apostles come out at noon every day and walk around and around, a large cock crows and flaps his wings and things come off in general. We didn’t see the spectacle. The Lutheran church, to put the cathedral in its place, has absolutely no clock at all.
As we left the town, at five o’clock in the morning, a couple of men were sitting on the damp stones at the side of one of the little rivers, fishing. They had probably gotten up early to get a start on the laundresses.
Homes on the Seine
The Toronto Daily Star
August 26, 1922
PARIS.—Instead of driving people back to the land, the Parisian apartment shortage is driving flat-dwellers on to the water.
A socially prominent Parisian, finding his rent tripled on the expiration of his lease, inaugurated the new movement by refusing to sign on at the advanced figure, buying an old canal barge, he remodeled it into a super-comfortable dwelling. The barge is large and roomy, the carpentry cost a fraction of the increased rent demanded, and the barge-dweller has a home he can moor in the Seine in the center of the most fashionable quarter. There are four bedrooms, a drawing room, kitchen, bathroom, dining room and billiard room in the floating flat and the owner is summering in it at present at Strasbourg, having crossed the width of France in a very enjoyable trip through the canal system of the Marne, Meuse and Moselle rivers.
Less pretentious “flat boats” are being launched at regular intervals and there is talk of a firm turning out standardized floating homes at popular prices for those Parisians who are desperate about the housing shortage.
The gravity of the housing situation was shown the other day by a rush on a Paris concierge who advertised a flat for rent through official channels. At nine o’clock in the morning the concierge informed the police that there was a flat vacant in the building at an annual rental of 1,800 francs. By five that afternoon the flat was rented.
In the next morning’s official journal appeared the notice that the flat was for rent. By noon nearly four thousand people had gathered to see about the flat. It looked like a riot and the concierge called the police, who dispersed the crowd and helped the concierge letter a big sign announcing that the flat was already rented.
Germans Desperate over the Mark
The Toronto Daily Star
September 1, 1922
FREIBURG, GERMANY.—The German people, according to their temperaments, are watching the plunge to worthlessness of their currency with dogged sullenness or hysterical desperation.
Last November the Austrian crown stood where the German mark does today—at 800 to the dollar. Now it has dropped to 22,000 to the dollar. That is the reason the German newspapers publish the daily price of the mark in black type in the most important place on their front pages.
The debacle of the mark has made a significant change in the attitude of the Germans toward foreigners. A year ago, with the mark 130 to the dollar, British, Canadian and American correspondents were accorded all sorts of special facilities by the German foreign office. The Germans hated the French and tried to make things as hard for them as possible, but the other nations were regarded as Germany’s possible friends in the future. Now there are no privileges for anyone. All foreigners are outlanders and enemies. For Germany is going to ruin and her only satisfaction is that she will probably take a nation or two, now supposedly in fairly sound financial shape, with her.
One of the strange results of the depreciation of German money is the money shortage. The more money is printed, the more is needed. As a result banks are frequently out of money since a factory owner with a weekly payroll to meet may come in and take out three bushels of marks. Every store has to have great packages of fifty- and hundred-mark notes for making change. The government, to meet the shortage, has printed five-hundred-mark “temporary” notes that are simply government I.O.U.’s printed on plain, white bank notepaper saying that in January, 1923, the holder of this note will receive a real five-hundred-mark note.
There is said to be wild spending because Germans have tired of seeing their money lose its purchasing power by half again and again and are buying jewels, fur coats, motor cars and other things that will have a certain amount of real value when the marks that bought them are being used for soap-wrappers.
These spending orgies, which you read about in the German papers but never encounter, are confined to Berlin, Hamburg and other places that were always more or less orgy centers. In a little town like Freiburg im Breisgau you run into a sort of dogged, blind resistance by the merchants to the fact that the mark is tobogganing, which keeps prices from going up in any sort of proportion to the fall of the currency.
Four of us stayed four days in a Freiburg hotel and the bill amounted to 2,200 marks, or about 20 cents a day apiece. The terrific taxes that you read so much about totaled less than 15 cents on the entire stay. Tips are included.
Freiburg seemed to be going on very well. Every room in every hotel in town was filled. There were strings of German hikers with rucksacks on their backs going through the town all day long, bound for the Black Forest. Streams of clear water flowed in the deep gutters on each side of the clean, scrubbed-looking streets. The red stone gothic spire of the red stone cathedral stuck up above the red-tiled roofs of the houses. The marketplace was jammed on Saturday morning with women with white handkerchiefs over their heads selling the fruit and vegetables they had brought in ox carts from the country. All the shops were open and prices were very low. It looked peaceful, happy and comfortable.
We saw a girl in a coffee shop eating a breakfast of ice cream and pretzels, sitting across the table from an officer in full uniform with an Iron Cross on his chest, his flat back even more impressive than his lean, white face, and we saw mothers feeding their rosy-cheeked children beer out of big half-liter steins.
We saw no evidence of panic, republicanism or malnutrition. Everyone looked well fed, no one seemed panicky, no one seemed happy, and there were pictures of Frederick, King of Baden, and his queen on the walls of every inn and pub.
The alarming part of the business, and the reason that Germany has so far defied all the economic laws that indicated a complete collapse, is the way the German merchants are selling their goods. They are selling goods now at retail prices that are less than half of what the goods would cost them to buy again wholesale.
“But what can we do?” a storekeeper said to me. “If we charged any higher prices, the people would not buy. We have to sell.”
It is a solution to a problem that would set the average economist gibbering. He could have a good gibber at the problem and the German’s solution of it would intensify his gibber into the finest product of the gibberer’s art. If you have nothing else to do you might figure out what will happen to the German storekeepers when they have to replenish the stocks they
are selling at half under future cost price.
The great national fire sale cannot last forever. While it is going on, however, the German storekeeper takes out his wrath on the foreigners who buy from him by acting as nastily as he can without forcing them out of the shop. He believes they are the cause of the fire, but he seems to feel he is in the position of a shopkeeper who is forced to sell goods at a fire sale to the men who set his shop on fire. That is his attitude, and he manages to be pretty nasty about it.
Fishing in Baden Perfect
The Toronto Daily Star
September 2, 1922
TRIBERG-IN-BADEN, GERMANY.—If you want to go fishing in the Black Forest, you want to get up about four hours before the first Schwarzwald rooster begins to shift from one leg to the other and decide that it’s time to crow. You need at least that much time to get through the various legal labyrinths in order to get on to the stream before dark.
In the first place the Black Forest is not the sweep of black forest that its name suggests. It is a chain of mountains cut up by railroads, valleys full of rank potato crops, pasture land, brown chalets and gravel-bottomed trout streams, broken out all over with enormous hotels run by Germanized Swiss who have mastered the art of making four beefsteaks grow where only one was cut by the butcher and where you waken up in the morning to find that the falling mark has cut your hotel bill to $3.75 a week and that the price of James E. Pepper Kentucky rye whiskey is 90 cents a bottle.
A Swiss hotelkeeper can raise prices with the easy grace of a Pullman car poker shark backing a pat full house, but the mark can fall faster than even a Swiss in good training can hoist the cost of living. A properly run race between a well-conditioned Swiss hotelkeeper and a fast-falling mark would provide an international financial spectacle that would bring the financial fans to their feet as one man, but my last kronen would go on the mark. In spite of it being the monetary medium that is in daily use in the Einsteinian household, the mark still seems affected by the laws of gravitation.
All of which and none of which has anything to do with the trout fishing in the Black Forest. Triberg consists of a single steep street lined by steep hotels. It is in a steep valley and a cool breeze is said to blow down the valley in wintertime. No one has ever been in Triberg in the wintertime to verify this legend but eight hundred sweltering tourists would gladly lay their right hands over where their hearts ought to be, if their hearts are in the right place, and swear there never has been a breeze of any kind in the summertime.
We landed in Triberg after a five-hour train ride from Freiburg. We had originally planned to walk across the Black Forest but we gave this up when we saw the crowd of German tourists touring in and out of all the roads leading to the woods. Our first disappointment was in finding that the Black Forest was no forest but just a lot of wooded hills and highly cultivated valleys, and our second was in discovering that you couldn’t go fifteen yards along any of the wilder and more secluded roads without running into between six and eight Germans, their heads shaved, their knees bare, cock feathers in their hats, sauerkraut on their breath, the wanderlust in their eyes and a collection of aluminum cooking utensils clashing against their legs as they walked.
As I may have said, we landed in Triberg. It was the end of a five-hour ride with two changes and four hours of standing in the aisle while large and unhappy Germans and their large and marcelled wives pushed by us again and again with profuse apologies, and I don’t know what aims.
“The proprietor will fix it up for you,” said the head porter of the hotel. “He has a friend who has a fishing.”
We went into the bar where the friend who had the fishing and six of his friends were sitting at a table and playing a game that looked like pinochle. The proprietor talked with the friend, who has one of the porcupine-quill haircuts that are all the rage this year, and the friend pounded the table with his fist while the rest of the table roared and laughed.
The proprietor came over to our table.
“They all make jokes,” he said. “He says if you pay him two dollars you can fish all you want for the rest of your life.”
Now we are all very familiar with the German when he starts making jokes about the dollar, and suggests that he be paid for such-and-such in dollars. It is a foul and nefarious habit. If it were allowed to go unchecked, it would soon force all Canadians and Americans back to Sarnia, Ontario, or Kokomo, Indiana. It is a habit that needs to be sat on with all severity.
There was a lot of dickering. The friend and his friends ceased laughing. We grew stern and strong and silent. The porter grew placatory. The atmosphere grew tense. We finally compromised by agreeing to pay 1,200 marks for the fishing unseen. We went to bed happy. We were the owner of a fishing in the Black Forest. We turned over in our thirty-seven-cents-a-night bed in the regal suite of the largest hotel in Triberg and kicked the eiderdown quilt onto the floor. After all, there seemed to be some justice in the world.
In the morning we got our tackle together and went down to breakfast. The porter, who is another Swiss passing as German, came up.
“I have news for you. It is not so easy. You must first obtain the permit of the police. You must get a fischkarte.”
I pass over the next two days. They were spent in the offices of the Kingdom of Baden, now doing business as a republic of sorts, and consisted of conversations like the following:
We enter an office where a number of clerks are sitting around while stern-looking soldiers scratch the small of their backs with the pommels of their swords, or is it only saddles that have pommels?
We, Mr. [William] Bird and myself, speak. “Vere ist der Burgomeister?”
The clerks eye us and go on writing. The soldiers look out of the window at the large stone monument to the war of 1870. Finally a clerk looks up and points to an inner door. There are a line of people outside. We are at the end of the line and finally get in.
Us, Mr. Bird, who is the European manager of the Consolidated Press, and myself speak: “Bitte, Herr Burgomeister. We wollen der fischkarten. We wollen to gefischen goen.”
The Burgomeister looks at us and says, “Nix. Nein.” That is the only understandable point of his discourse.
“Das fischenkarten,” we explain sweetly.
“Nix,” he says. “Nein,” and points to the door.
We go out. This continues indefinitely.
When we finally, by tracing the person who owned it down at his factory where he makes lightning rods or hairbrushes, found where the fishing was located we were informed by another fine-looking burgomeister that we would have to give up our attempts at getting a fishing license in Triberg altogether and go to Nuss-bach. We didn’t know where Nussbach was. It looked hopeless. We resolved to fish instead.
The stream was a beauty. The friend who owned it was evidently so busy making hair tonic or shoe buttons in his factory that he never fished himself and the trout bit as fast as you could wet a line. We took all we wanted and repeated the next day. On the third day my conscience bothered me.
“We ought to go to Nussbach and get that permit to fish,” I suggested.
We went to Nussbach with the aid of a map. No one seemed to know where the burgomeister’s office was. Finally we found him in a little shed across the street from the churchyard where a group of schoolboys were being given squad drill. We had been informed as to the dire penalties that were waiting for those who fished without a Badischer permit. Poaching was rigorously punished.
Mr. Bird, who answers to the name of Bill, can talk German. But he doesn’t think he can. I, on the contrary, cannot talk German at all, but I think I can. Therefore, I usually dominate the conversation. Mr. Bird says that my system of talking German is to pronounce English with an Italian accent.
“Ve wishen der fischenkarten,” I said, bowing low.
The Burgomeister looked at me over his steel-rimmed spectacles.
“Ja?” he said.
“Ve wishen der fischenkarten comme ça,” I said ve
ry firmly, showing him the yellow card the friend had loaned us to locate the water.
“Ja,” he said, examining the card. “Das ist gut wasser.”
“Can ve gefischen in it?” I asked.
“Ja, ja,” answered the Burgomeister.
“Come on, Bill,” I said, “let’s go.”
We have been fishing the water ever since. No one has stopped us. Some day, doubtless, we will be arrested. I shall appeal to the Burgomeister of Nussbach. He is a splendid man. But I remember distinctly his having told us we could fish all the good water.
German Innkeepers
The Toronto Daily Star
September 5, 1922
OBERPRECHTAL-IN-THE-BLACK-FOREST.—We came slipping and sliding down the steep, rocky trail through the shadowed light of the pine trees and out into the glaring clearing where a sawmill and a white plaster gasthaus baked in the sun.
A German police dog barked at us, a man stuck his head out of the door of the gasthaus and looked at us. We were not sure this was the place we had been sent to, so we walked a little way down the road that ran through the clearing to see if there was another inn in sight. There was nothing but the valley, the white road, the river and the steep wooded hills. We had been walking since early in the morning and we were hungry.
Inside the inn Bill Bird and I found the proprietor and his wife sitting at a table eating soup.
“Please can we get two double rooms?” Bill asked.
The proprietor’s wife started to answer and the proprietor glared at her while onion soup dribbled through his mustache.
“You can’t get rooms here today or tomorrow or any other time, Auslanders,” he snarled.
“Herr Trinckler in Triberg recommended us to come here for the fishing,” Bill said, trying to mollify him.
Dateline- Toronto Page 22
