1917
STUDENT AND TEACHER
A TEACHER, whom his students highly respected and were even very fond of for his lively personality, one day caught one of these students doing something rascally in class, and this made him extraordinarily angry. The schoolboy who had the misfortune to incite his teacher’s displeasure and direct it upon himself to such a great extent had been, until that point, the favorite pupil of the man he so rashly and deeply offended, but from then on he was in the teacher’s eyes an abomination whom the teacher cruelly belittled and appallingly beat day after day in front of the whole class, treatment the enraged man promised the poor boy punctually and faithfully to continue. Doubtless the teacher was taking out a personal hatred on him, and he, the adult, was going, with respect to the child, too far. The boy, thrown so lightning-fast out of the comfy armchair of goodwill onto the hard bench of disfavor, and seeing himself so unexpectedly transformed from prize pupil into notorious criminal, did not know what to do. However, after bearing as bravely as he could for weeks the sad fate of a fallen favorite and the cruel and contemptuous treatment associated therewith, he one day, driven by necessity, took up his pen to try to bring about a change in his utterly unbearable situation and wrote to his wrathful persecutor and tormentor as follows: “I have, since I cannot confess to my parents, for I do not want to add another care to the many they already have weighing upon them, no one else to turn to but you yourself, to try, if it be possible, to gain some sort of favor with you again. Maybe this letter will cause you to stop covering me with ignominy. Since, as I already said, I cannot pour out my sorrow to my parents, I will pour it out to you. Since I do not want to ask them to take me under their protection, they who love me, I will bring my request to the one who hates me and vents his rage on me. So I ask for protection from the one before whom I seem to have been left unprotected, and I beg for mercy from the one who, because he feels offended by my conduct, treats me so mercilessly. I have the courage, as you can see, to pour out my sorrows to he who inflicts them, and confide my suffering to he who causes it. I don’t like school anymore.” This letter gave the teacher all sorts of things to consider and reflect upon, and he behaved more gently again with respect to the student from then on.
1917
A MODEL STUDENT
ONE OF my classmates was, even as a boy, frightfully respectable. The rest of us held him in meager esteem; his subservience repelled us. He had hardly any meat on his bones either; he was so thin he seemed transparent, and he walked around like a stick, disgustingly well-behaved and dainty. He was useless at games and jokes. You could laugh at the others, for instance Grüring, who stumbled over the poem “Firdusi,” but this fellow gave no occasion for even the slightest chuckle. As a result, he barely existed, although his lankiness, a field in which he apparently strove for the utmost achievement, was certainly noticeable enough. His parents lived in the new part of town. His father was a notary public; his mother stinted as buoyantly as her exemplar of a son in exhibiting qualities of physical amplitude. The memory of his staidness pains me. Is it permissible for us human creatures to be so uninteresting? The jokes of a schoolboy everyone considered a rascal made us laugh so hard, and his renown therefor did not prevent him from turning into a fine upstanding man. Today he acts as though he had never had a hilarious thought in his life. The other one, meanwhile, was beaten for his lack of flaws. God does not evince much appreciation for human inculpability. Oh, what the so-called dumb kids gave us by way of continual entertainment! Did we thank them for it? No, but we liked them, we respected them without being impressed by them. They were worth something, while this one, the most ambitious of us all, was felt to be a total stranger. How beastly it is to be so irreproachable. Returning after a long absence to the city that had witnessed my childhood, I discovered he had experienced misfortune. His rise went before a fall, and the good opinion he enjoyed in the eyes of his fellow citizens fell with him. Even the most striking can be struck down, no?
1925
THE TALE OF THE FOUR HAPPY FELLOWS
ONCE UPON a time there were four utterly happy fellows. One of them was named Ludwig. He was lowered down on a rope. The rope broke in the process; Ludwig fell and lay on the ground. He wrote a substantial diary about his lying on the ground, in total darkness, and when the other three fellows had pulled him back up again, he showed them what he had accomplished in the meantime. They were amazed at his talent as well as his industriousness, and, as a sign of their regard, hugged him. Ludwig had been through so much while he was missing! And now all of the lines he had written in stillest stillness and darkest darkness were read. The four young fellows were, as mentioned, the happiest of boys, namely because they dwelled with their parents in paradise, a paradise called Severity.
They had to present their backs or their heads all the time for the receiving of well-aimed blows and they did so with a pleasure that can properly be labeled indescribable. They grew up in this way, among spasms and terrors, and had gotten so used to trembling that they felt it as a kind of loss when they emerged into life and unlearned their sweet trepidation. You cannot possibly imagine how capable and hardworking these four young fellows became. One after another they became generals and fought like lions. They had magnificent hair, and treated their enemies in such a fashion that the latter had good reason to be exceedingly happy when the former chose to forgive them. Who would expect such conduct from boys raised amid such thrashings? Along with the abovementioned name of Ludwig were arrayed such appellations as Hugo, Julius, and Moritz. They grew very timid and afraid of their own capable efficiency.
Perhaps that is too witty a way to put it. The truth is that they did every honor to their respective whereabouts. At home they had had to give polite thanks for blows received. Their parents considered it advisable to demand that from the scamps — but can we truly speak of scamps when all four of them grew up to be generals who fought like lions? So that the father who had given them all such a solid education would not go to rack and ruin, they sent him money, and so that the dear mama from whom her sons reaped such chastisements might not seem neglected, they carried her, whenever the occasion to do so presented itself, in their arms. Now those are some real model children, they are, don’t you think! Their ears had grown long from erstwhile pullings, yet how could that have done the rascals any harm, but how can we call generals that? What an infraction, oh, oh!