GERMAN HOUSES AND GARDENS 
THE MUSINGS OK A NATIVE 
By A. W. FRED 
S I'RANGERS from America who come 
to our continent year after year and look 
at our buildings, must take with them a 
strange picture of German culture and Ger¬ 
man architecture. They walk, Baedecker in 
hand, through the streets of Berlin or Vi¬ 
enna ; the stars in their guide-book lead 
them to monumental buildings ; they see 
the old civilization in Vienna or Hamburg; 
they marvel at the rows of modern dwellings 
in Berlin ; and, at the end, they have failed 
to see the most essential, those buildings 
which influence civilization strongly : the real 
German homes. What does it signify, in the 
end, if one has seen a palace of justice in 
the style of the Renaissance, or a Gothic 
town-hall, or a house of Parliament in the 
form of a Greek temple ? To those edu¬ 
cated in the history of art, to those familiar 
with the development of architectural forms, 
it means a great deal to know what style pre¬ 
dominated at this or that period. But after 
all, the nineteenth century has seen such 
strong variations of taste in Europe, so 
many repetitions ol former styles and such a 
mixture of Germanic, Gallic and Roman 
architectural motives, that any single building 
can signify much less than the whole city. 
The monumental or official architecture is 
much less characteristic of a people than such 
necessary buildings as the apartment-houses 
and the smaller dwellings. The foreigner has 
the same limited experience when he ob¬ 
serves the gardens. Now and then he sees 
a public or a private park which has kept its 
old form for many decades and is opened to 
the public at certain hours. But foreigners 
never see how the citizen arranges his gar¬ 
den, how he expresses his individuality in 
lawns, bowers and garden-houses. And yet 
they read in our books of German romance, 
they sing our sentimental songs, and they 
must believe that the poetry which endears 
them to Schumann and Mozart and Schu¬ 
bert must have grown somewhere. They 
cannot help believing that somewhere there 
THE CHARM OF SIMPLICITY AS SEEN IN THE OLD GERMAN HOUSES 
M3 
