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@Hamlet53
Dialects in Germany are still very strong and may not be mutually intelligible. It's easy to be fooled when meeting students because all education is given in "High German" (Hoch Deutsch) and they have to speak it at school. Same as in China: education is in Mandarin so everyone who is still studying can speak it, doesn't mean they don't speak something else at home. Come back 5 years later, they don't remember it...
I met Germans from the Constace Lake (Bodensee) who spoke Schwebish. I never understood what they say to another. Only kids could speak "High German", which I understood... Same with my host family: the father was from Thuringia (Thüringen). It took me months to understand him properly. I guess it must have been even worse in the early 1900s because schooling probably wasn't done in "High German".
I'm still at the beginning of the book, going very slowly because the German version available at the Gutenberg project doesn't contain any note (not even for dialects) and the German dictionary on the Kobo is a beginner dictionary: if I don't know a word, the dictionary doesn't either ^^.
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