“One after another the doors of the best houses opened to me. They accepted me into their circle as if I were not a foreigner. What little merit there was in me they appreciated. They respect all other nations just as much as they love their own. They do not proclaim international principles — they practice them. The Germans are instinctively welcoming. There was a place for me too at their table. I’ll not conceal, however, that here too I was surprised at this and that. At the end of dinner, for instance, they serve a longish, stick-shaped, dead-white, very smelly cheese, which they call ‘Dead Man’s Finger’ (Leichenfinger). They filled my glass with a dark red liqueur the name of which was, according to the manufacturer’s label, ‘Blood Blister’ (Blutgeschwür). As a well-brought-up person I sank my teeth into the dead man’s finger and washed it down with the sticky secretion of the blood blister.
“There was one thing that I couldn’t accept for a long time: their mustard pots. On the best families’ tables there is a very strange mustard pot from which — as I later found out — the manufacturer had become wealthy; his product was in demand everywhere and he could not make enough. This mustard pot was in the shape of a tiny, white porcelain lavatory pedestal, with a brown wooden lid that closed, a deceptively faithful replica with only the inscription ‘Mustard’ (Senft) to betray what it was. In this they keep the yellowish-brown mustard which they put on their blood sausage during a meal. At first they didn’t understand that I could only eat with limited appetite when that witty, risible little object was set playfully before me. They found it amusing. Even engaged couples looked at it with a smile and knew in advance that their future home would contain one like it. Respectable mothers of families, in whose presence it would be unthinkable to make the slightest risqué remark, passed it nonchalantly to guests. Small boys screwed up their faces as they sniffed at it and licked off the brown fragments that stuck to the porcelain bowl, and little girls, whom their doting parents had photographed with hands clasped in prayer, took a delight in scraping at the paste that had congealed in it and, like enthusiastic mudlarks, softening it with vinegar.
“I confess that for a while I found that healthily studentish good humor repulsive. Previously, however, I’d been through the school of Paris, enjoyed all the coarse slapstick and thinly veiled double entendres of the bawdy theater of Montmartre; I’d studied decadent poetry too, which often enthrones indecency and filth. This, however, was repugnant to me. It was the openness that shocked me, the cosy sniggering at this devilment. But who can understand a people?
“I repeat, this people is unfathomably enigmatic. They are loyal, clever, and attentive. If I was unwell, my landlady herself made my bed, plumped up my pillow and smoothed it down, made up embrocations, took my temperature, made me drink linden leaf tea, and nursed me with motherly love and with such knowing skill. Only German women know how to nurse the sick. A doctor would be called too. German doctors have no equal. The least of them is worth more than a university professor in another country. Their forget-me-not-blue eyes would look at my fevered brow with inexpressible objectivity and concern. Their medicines, prepared in a million forms by the best factories on earth, cure us the moment we look at them. I’ve often said that I’d like to be sick and die only among the Germans. But I’d rather live somewhere else — here in Hungary, and when I’m on holiday, in France.
“However, I hadn’t gone there to live, but to study. First and foremost, to study their rather difficult, harsh, tortuous, complex, but splendid and ancient language, in which as yet I could only stammer incompetently and inadequately. I frequently didn’t understand what they said. They frequently didn’t understand what I said. These two defects didn’t cancel one another out, they increased each other. It was my sole ambition to learn German. I listened like a secret policeman. I talked to everybody. Living grammars and dictionaries were all around me. I tried hard to turn the pages. I even spoke to three-year-old children, as they spoke better German than I did although I had read and understood Kant’s Prolegomena in the original. If I failed to understand a snatch of conversation in the street, my pride was injured. Once I almost felt disposed to commit suicide when a shopkeeper noticed the foreign accent of my otherwise tolerable speech and didn’t answer my questions but — no doubt out of consideration — made signs like a deaf-mute or a savage would. I worked with indefatigable industry and lost no opportunity to ensure progress. Unfortunately, numerous disasters befell me. I went home by cab late one night after a student feast. I asked the driver what I owed him. I presumably misunderstood him and didn’t give him enough. He began to shout, called me a lousy villain, even threatened me with his whip, but all that I could do was admire his wonderful command of strong verbs, the masterly way that he maneuvered subject and predicate, his rich and varied vocabulary, and took out a pencil with which to make notes of it all. At that the cabby too was amazed, but at the patient way I had borne his filthy tirade. He thought that I was either the founder of a religion or mad. But I was only being a linguist.
“And so I went everywhere that German was spoken, publicly or privately. There were few visitors at the Germania and other cultural institutions as keen as I. At all costs I meant to hear spoken German, the more the merrier, and I didn’t care what.
“Allow me, after this long but necessary digression, to return to Baron Wüstenfeld, the president, who was asleep when we left him, and I assure you is still asleep. What did the people of Darmstadt have to say about this? Well, they were used to it. So was I eventually. At first, however, I recall, at one lecture I turned to a citizen of Darmstadt who was sitting beside me and asked him why the president was always sleeping. He was surprised at my question. He looked at me, then at the president, and replied — dispassionately — that he was in fact asleep, but he was, after all, the president, and he shrugged as if I’d asked why the sun was shining. The president was president in order to sleep. It was accepted at that time, and they went on with the agenda regardless.
“I apologized for my inquisitiveness. As time went by I realized that they were right. The president was an old man. A very old man. Very old and very tired. Clearly, that was why he was always known as the ‘tireless fighter for public education.’ He was also called ‘the watchman of public education,’ and not out of weary contempt or without good reason. He was a man of great culture and great breadth of vision, with a long career behind him, who functioned actively from morning to night in public life. He would open an extraordinary meeting early in the forenoon, convene a preparatory subcommittee at noon, chair a political council in the afternoon, and in the evening propose the toast to the guest of honor at a banquet. In general he presided everywhere, rang the bell everywhere, spoke the introductory or closing words everywhere. In the meanwhile he appeared everywhere that he had to, and his name was never missing from the list of those present. Was it any wonder that the burden of the years weighed on him and he was worn out with so much feverish and useful activity?
“No, indeed. Gradually I too came to regard as natural what all of Darmstadt, all Hesse, all Germany did. When as a scatterbrained student I rushed headlong into the distinguished, paneled hall of the Germania and wanted to be certain that I had arrived in time, I didn’t look at the table or at the audience, only at the presidential dais. If the president was asleep, I knew that the session had begun. If he was not, I knew that the session had not yet begun, and stepped outside for a cigarette or two. I became firmly assured that the sleeping of the president was at the same time the beginning of intellectual work and an infallible indicator and scientific measure of it.