Germany and the Germans from an American Point of ViewCollier, Price
History
Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View
Collier, Price
Germany; National characteristics, German
The minister of foreign affairs and the imperial minister of the
interior receive salaries of 36,000 marks, with 14,000 marks
additional for expenses. The Prussian ministers have the same. Other
ministers receive 30,000 marks and 14,000 additional for expenses. The
chancellor of the empire receives 36,000 marks and 64,000 additional
for expenses. The highest receivable pension is three-fourths of the
salary--not counting the additional sum for expenses, or, as it is
named, Repraesentationsaufwand -- after forty years of service. The
foreign ambassadors to the more expensive capitals, London, Paris,
Washington, Saint Petersburg, receive 150,000 marks a year. Where one
has seen something of the innumerable demands upon the income of a
foreign ambassador, one is the more amazed that a great democracy like
ours should so restrict the salaries of its representatives abroad
that only rich men dare undertake the duty. What could be more
undemocratic!
Germany is a rich, very rich, country in the sense that it has the
most intelligent, hardest-working, most fiercely economical, and the
most rationally and most easily contented population of any of the
great powers. But Germany is not rich in surplus and liquid capital as
compared with England, France, or America. It is the more to her
credit that her capital is all hard at work. There is just so much
less for luxury. The people in the streets; the shop-windows; the
scale of charges at places of public resort and amusement; the very
small number of well-turned-out private vehicles; the comparatively
few people who live in houses and not in apartments; the simplicity of
the gowns of the women, and their inexpensive jewelry and other
ornaments; the fewer servants; the salaries and wages of all classes,
point decisively to plain living on the part of practically everybody.
Let me say very emphatically, however, that this economy means no lack
of generosity. I doubt if there are people anywhere so restricted as
to means, and so delightfully hospitable at the same time. Berlin is
not as yet under that cloud that covers the new, uncultivated, and
rich society in America, that tyranny of money which makes men and
women fearful of being without it. Such people shiver at the bare
thought of losing what money will buy, for the shameful reason that
then there would be nothing left to them; and they are driven, many of
them, both in London and in New York, to any humiliation, often to any
degradation, to avoid it. They grossly overrate the value of money,
and they exaggerate the terrors of being without it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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