In a German Pension joins that small subset of books that the author didn’t want to see republished. It was Katherine Mansfield’s first published collection, although most of the stories had been previously published in various magazines. Because of the war and problems with the publisher (it went into liquidation) the book was quickly forgotten, and when the idea of republishing it was later floated by her then husband, John Middleton Murry, Mansfield refused. She considered the stories juvenalia and feared, I am sure rightly, that they would contribute to post-war anti-German sentiment.

Have the stories weathered the passage of the following century, or should Mansfield’s wishes have been respected? I would strongly argue the former – the tone of the collection might be uneven, and some of the portraits are caricatures, but overall this is a powerful group of stories in which the focus is not so much the German residents of the pension (a boarding house) with which the earlier stories are concerned, but the role of women in German and European society in the later stories which emerges as a more dominant theme.

The stories were written after her stay in a German spa before the first world war broke out. Mansfield was there to recuperate after a miscarriage. The collection is formed of thirteen stories, some only a few pages long, with the whole collection barely a hundred pages in total. The early stories are slightly whimsical observations of the characters in the pension, observed by a narrator who captures the chatter of the residents with the minimum of commentary. The Germans are boorish and judgmental towards the English narrator, although already the themes of maternity and women’s role in society are beginning to emerge:

“Is it true,” asked the Widow, picking her teeth with a hairpin as she spoke, “that you are a vegetarian?”

“Why, yes; I have not eaten meat for three years.”

“Im—possible! Have you any family?”

“No.”

“There now, you see, that’s what you’re coming to! Who ever heard of having children upon vegetables? It is not possible. But you never have large families in England now; I suppose you are too busy with your suffragetting. Now I have had nine children, and they are all alive, thank God. Fine, healthy babies—though after the first one was born I had to—”

“How wonderful!” I cried.

“Wonderful,” said the Widow contemptuously, replacing the hairpin in the knob which was balanced on the top of her head. “Not at all! A friend of mine had four at the same time. Her husband was so pleased he gave a supper-party and had them placed on the table. Of course she was very proud.”

This is carefully nuanced writing. What is not said is as important as what is, and the reader is able to gain a picture of the narrator’s situation without it ever being made explicit. After a few more short stories in which German attitudes to class are lightly mocked, the collection takes a more serious turn. Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding is a chilling portrait of an abusive marriage. Herr Brechenmacher is a bully who orders his wife around. She has five children under the age of nine, but is looking forward to a night off attending a wedding celebration. This is how the author closes the story:

“They walked home in silence. Herr Brechenmacher strode ahead, she stumbled after him. White and forsaken lay the road from the railway station to their house—a cold rush of wind blew her hood from her face, and suddenly she remembered how they had come home together the first night. Now they had five babies and twice as much money; but—

“Na, what is it all for?” she muttered, and not until she had reached home, and prepared a little supper of meat and bread for her man did she stop asking herself that silly question.

Herr Brechenmacher broke the bread into his plate, smeared it round with his fork and chewed greedily.

“Good?” she asked, leaning her arms on the table and pillowing her breast against them.

“But fine!”

He took a piece of the crumb, wiped it round his plate edge, and held it up to her mouth. She shook her head.

“Not hungry,” she said.

“But it is one of the best pieces, and full of the fat.”

He cleared the plate; then pulled off his boots and flung them into a corner.

“Not much of a wedding,” he said, stretching out his feet and wriggling his toes in the worsted socks.

“N—no,” she replied, taking up the discarded boots and placing them on the oven to dry.

Herr Brechenmacher yawned and stretched himself, and then looked up at her, grinning.

“Remember the night that we came home? You were an innocent one, you were.”

“Get along! Such a time ago I forget.” Well she remembered.

“Such a clout on the ear as you gave me…. But I soon taught you.”

“Oh, don’t start talking. You’ve too much beer. Come to bed.”

He tilted back in his chair, chuckling with laughter.

“That’s not what you said to me that night. God, the trouble you gave me!”

But the little Frau seized the candle and went into the next room. The children were all soundly sleeping. She stripped the mattress off the baby’s bed to see if he was still dry, then began unfastening her blouse and skirt.

“Always the same,” she said—“all over the world the same; but, God in heaven—but stupid.”

Then even the memory of the wedding faded quite. She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in.”

That last line is like a punch in the face – “She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt”. The narrative is now much darker. Women are cursed with eternal pregnancies which are dangerous and potentially fatal (“my insides are all twisted up with having children too quickly” on character observes) and children are a burden not a joy. The stories are often told from the perspective of servants who are also oppressed, a situation which finds its apotheosis in The Child Who Was Tired, in which an exhausted child is expected to be the principal carer for her younger siblings, and finds the burden too much:

“I don’t believe Holy Mary could keep him quiet,” she murmured. “Did Jesus cry like this when He was little? If I was not so tired perhaps I could do it; but the baby just knows that I want to go to sleep. And there is going to be another one.”

She flung the baby on the bed, and stood looking at him with terror.

From the next room there came the jingle of glasses and the warm sound of laughter.

And she suddenly had a beautiful marvellous idea.

She laughed for the first time that day, and clapped her hands.

“Ts—ts—ts!” she said, “lie there, silly one; you will go to sleep. You’ll not cry any more or wake up in the night. Funny, little, ugly baby.”

He opened his eyes, and shrieked loudly at the sight of the Child-Who-Was-Tired. From the next room she heard the Frau call out to her.

“One moment—he is almost asleep,” she cried.

And then gently, smiling, on tiptoe, she brought the pink bolster from the Frau’s bed and covered the baby’s face with it, pressed with all her might as he struggled, “like a duck with its head off, wriggling”, she thought.

She heaved a long sigh, then fell back on to the floor, and was walking along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all—nobody at all.”

Powerful, distressing stuff. Mansfield may have wanted to forget this collection when she moved on to later work, but I am glad these stories remain in print. The anti-German sentiment has faded and we can now see these stories as a very personal and rather touching narrative.

The collection can be read online for free here.