All in a Life-time
9781465650450
281 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I WAS born in 1856, at Mannheim, in the Grand Duchy of Baden. That was the old Germany, very different from the Prussianized empire with which America was to go to war sixty years later, and very different again from the bustling life of the western world to which I was to be introduced so soon and in which I was to play a part unlike anything which my most fanciful dreams ever pictured. Indeed, those were days of idyllic simplicity in South Germany and especially in that little city on the Rhine. The life of the people was best expressed by a word that was forever on their lips, gemütlich, that almost untranslatable word that implies contentment, ease, and satisfaction, all in one. It was a time of peace and fruitful industry and quiet enjoyment. The highest pleasure of the children was netting butterflies in the sunny fields; the great events of youth were the song festivals and public exhibitions of the “Turners” and walking excursions into the country; the recreation of the elders was at little tables in the public gardens, where, while the band played good music and the youngsters romped from chair to chair, the women plied their knitting needles over endless cups of coffee, and the men smoked their pipes and sipped their beer and talked of art and philosophy—of everything in the world, except world politics and world war. To us children who had seen no larger city, but had visited many small villages in the neighbourhood, Mannheim seemed quite an important town. It was at the point where the Neckar flows into the Rhine, and as this river flowed through the Odenwald, it constantly brought big loads of lumber and also many bushels of grain to Mannheim, which had become a distributing centre for various cereals and lumber, and was also a great tobacco centre. My father had cigar factories at Mannheim and also in Lorsch and Heppenheim and sometimes employed as many as a thousand hands. Nevertheless, the entire population of Mannheim was scarcely 21,000, and the thoughts of most of its inhabitants were bent on the sober concerns of their every-day struggles and on raising their large families, without ambition for great riches or hope of higher place. None but the nobles dreamed of such grandeur as a carriage and pair; the successful tradesman only occasionally gratified a modest love of display or travel by hiring a barouche for a drive through the hop fields and tobacco patches surrounding the city to one of the near-by villages. Those whose mental powers were of a superior order exercised them in a keen appreciation of poetry, music, and the drama; Schiller and Goethe were their demi-gods, Mozart and Beethoven their companions of the spirit. The Grand Duke’s fatherly devotion to his subjects’ welfare had won him their filial affection; with political matters they concerned themselves almost not at all. My childhood recollections reflect the quiet colours of this atmosphere. My father was prosperous, and our home was blessed by the comforts and little elegancies that his means made possible; it shared in the artistic interests of the community by virtue both of his interest in the theatre and my mother’s passion for the best in literature and music. I was the ninth of eleven living children, and I recall the visits of the music teachers who gave my sisters lessons on the piano and taught my eldest brother to play the violin. We children learned by heart the poems of Goethe and Schiller and shared the pride of all Mannheimers that the latter poet had once lived in our city and that his play, “The Robbers,” was first produced at our Stadt Theatre.
