The Hotel Years

12. The Fraternity Member

The fraternity student is the only zoological creature whose natural distribution has nothing to do with natural factors — with geography and climate — but is dependent on nations and governments. While in countries whose biological conditions are similar to those in Germany he may already have become extinct, or never even have arisen, we get him here, and in innumerable variants. (The technical name for these is couleurs.)

One encounters him in bars, on duelling-grounds and at nationalist meetings (such as lectures by Professors Roethe, Freytag-Loringhoven and others), also in lecture rooms. The fraternity student can be identified at a glance: the hypothesis that God created man in his own image receives a practical rebuttal by the facial markings which are called “scars”. Askew on his closely cropped skull he sports a cap that would be the envy of any American messenger boy. Across his chest he wears a gaudy sash of two or three colours in which may be picked out a ringing phrase, as for example: “With God for King and country!” So he projects his innermost feelings and convictions, a slogan on two legs, nourished on beer and tradition, and kept in his paper life by the extraordinary long-suffering patience of German citizens. Since he has no contents, he lives on as a shell; a little like a paper lantern the day after a party.

In order to demonstrate the purpose of his existence all the same, he creates tumults and affrays — in the mistaken view that acoustic effects entitle one to exist. Even though this is where he betrays his outstanding past and present anachronism. His noise resembles the underworld stirrings of incompletely deceased ghosts.

Because he has slipped the bonds of time, he believes time is out of whack. Because he sleeps away the day, he only ever sees the world by night — and then often double. Therefore he fails to apprehend the dimensions of reality. Seeing ghosts, he is his very own ghost, seeming in the chime of a beer glass to hear the bells of Old Heidelberg. Drunkenness that saps others gives him strength. He lives from the mould of the past and decay. His sheen is as that of a dead body that phosphoresces at night. Even so — and because he is a corpse that history has failed to bury — he makes his way, called a career, protected from unsympathetic reality by laws and customs — to the top of the legal, political and medical professions. He pronounces sentences and prescribes castor oil. He becomes a professor and imagines he is spreading knowledge when he shares what he thinks he knows. Ideals from the nursery deck out his walls and hang in his brain. One day a young beer drinker becomes an old fart. Just as if he had never been alive, he wanders through the years, on the periphery of the world and yet thought to be a part of it, becomes grey and finally dies the death of the living, at the end of a life of the dead.

To his grieving fraternity, he bequeaths beer stein, sabre, swastika, cap, sash and whatever else he may possess in the way of student knick-knacks. Making haste to follow him, the next generation comes along, and plants their hopes, which to us are disappointments, on his grave…

Vorwärts, 24 February 1924

13. Guillaume the Blond Negro

The blond Negro, the self-contradiction, the living denial of his “black shame”, the manifest Negro with the blue eyes, a figure for Dinter, I addressed on the train from Wiesbaden to Koblenz.* A lot of stout citizens were on the train, and in a corner by the window sat the Negro. Did I say Negro? The man had thick lips, splendid white teeth, strong cheekbones — but also fair curly hair and eyes of forget-me-not blue. The whole carriage was staring at him. He was wearing a French army uniform and reading a book, a German book. Finally a fat gentleman, a traveller, a Tom, Dick or Harry, a helpful man who would offer unsolicited advice to anyone, and who knew the train timetable by heart, could help himself no longer. He leaned across to the blond Negro, and asked: “I say, what’s that book you’re reading?” The Negro replied: “It’s a Sven Elvestad, just a run-of-the-mill thriller.” Thus showing his superiority to the questioner, who had never heard of Sven Elvestad, and to whom a thriller was hardly run-of-the-mill.

Now the ice had been broken, and the Negro started to speak. He spoke German. A fluent German, with a deep, pleasant, sonorous voice. He had already been in Europe for four months. He knew some of the major German cities, such as Cologne, Frankfurt, Hanover, Koblenz and Düsseldorf. He felt very much at home in Germany. People were perplexed that he was blond. When he went out for a moment, the heavy gentleman said to his neighbour: “I say, will you ask him how he got to be blond?” But when the Negro came back, no one asked him.

We both got out at Koblenz. He left the carriage with a hearty South German greeting: “Grüss Gott”. A Grüss-Gott Negro. What a wonderful mixture — almost pure Aryan.

At the station in Koblenz he excited great interest. He was tall, broad-shouldered, high-hipped, a wonderful specimen. We waited together outside the left luggage office. He was leaving a heavy suitcase. I let him go first. He declined. We spent five minutes arguing about which of us should give in his case first. Things slowly escalated into a black shame. Finally we began talking personally, and this is what the blond Negro told me:

His name is Guillaume. But not just Guillaume, also Thiele. So his real name is Wilhelm Thiele, and he’s a sergeant, and a member of the occupying army, and hence an enemy of Germany. A Negro and blond and blue-eyed, a bundle of contradictions. A political, an ethnological paradox.

His father was in the Foreign Legion, his mother was black. So he got the blond hair from his father, and his mother tongue is German. His mother lived in Munich for a while, as a typist in a bank. He grew up with his grandparents. He’s not just German, he’s Bavarian. (Sometimes he says “nit” for “nicht”.)

What does it feel like being in Germany, as an “enemy”, I ask him.

It had made him very happy to be in Germany. He gave occasional lectures to his comrades. He read aloud to them from Goethe. His favourite poet is Lenau. And after a quarter of an hour I could see that not only did this Negro know far more than Hitler and the Negroes of Upper Austria, he also had a deeper and more intuitive grasp of the German character than any Professor Freytag-Loringhoven or Roethe; that in the purity of his soul this Negro Guillaume stood far above the ostensible racial purity of Dinter; and that he didn’t even need his blue eyes and blond hair to be German.

He lived in a little farmhouse not far from Koblenz, and I spent the afternoon with him. He played the violin. I saw that he was slimly built, with large hands and fingers. I saw the photo of his father, a man with blond upturned moustaches. He had died in the service of France. And then I saw the picture of a young girl from Munich, who is to be his bride. Later, of course, once everything is over.

I’m afraid it will be a long time before it is all over, at least in Munich, where the white Negroes dwell and where I’m sure it’s not possible to be the bride of a Franco-German blond Negro, not without being raked by swastikas.

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12 Uhr-Blatt, 28 December 1923

* Black Shame: Roth ironically deploys the term that was used for the perceived shame of parts of the Rhineland being occupied by Black African French soldiers when Germany fell behind with reparations.

Dinter: Artur Dinter (1876–1948), German racist writer and politician, obsessed with racial purity. The fact that his Nazi Party number was as low as 5 speaks for itself.

14. Adventurers

1. THE CAPTAIN OF KÖPENICK

The cobbler Voigt, who passed away a few days ago, was an adventurer of small scale and surprising consequence. His contribution was to extend the lexicon of crime by a single word: “Köpenick-iad”.*

It is to this coinage that he owes his survival; not the boldness of his criminal imagination. He was a stunted cobbler; his exterior alone marked him out as a butt of fortune’s joke. His enterprise allowed him a further coup. He himself hadn’t wanted it. It turned out that at a time of doughty militarism it had an extraordinary effect. His absurd appearance was overlooked. His orders were heard and obeyed. He proved that even the most rigid discipline is helpless in the face of stupidity.

Today his image has paled. When he died, his name flickered up again here and there. People remembered a time when fate still had a sense of humour. The present offers no such ridiculous adventurers; only dismal, humourless ones. The exploits of the cobbler Voigt come to us from a more innocent, pre-Revolutionary era: relatively harmless pranks, with a happy ending.

To each time its own adventurers.

2. COUNT SCHLIEFFEN

Our time boasts Count Schlieffen, who a few days ago was re-arrested in Hamburg.

Count Schlieffen is a bourgeois officer cadet; real name unknown. Nor can he do without his military lustre. He moves in distinguished circles in Hamburg and America, gets engaged to a singer, marries her on the strength of some false documents, is unmasked at the wedding, flees to Berlin with the help of a few left-wing politicians, and there becomes an aristocrat again. Till he returns to Hamburg, where he is finally nabbed.

He is a typical adventurer of the twentieth century; a touch of demonism, drawn to politics, origins shrouded in mystery, shading into the tragic. He is the complete hero of a revolutionary age; erotic and sentimental, played upon by war and fame, socially adept and ambitious. A profiteer of our turbulent times, dashing, but with a head for figures. Not to be defeated by border guards or lack of papers, a cool liar, cool as a film hero, and innately superior to those things that ultimately ensnare him.

He loses himself, likeably enough, in complications, because — walking talking testimony to the effect of the Eternal Feminine — he gives up his career for a woman. He is arrested on his way to the singer in Hamburg, in one final attempt to talk her round.

There was no need for him to do it. He could have lived a pampered life in Berlin, untroubled by his pursuers. But probably he loves his singer. Either that or his vanity is wounded. The fact that hundreds of people take him for a swindler bothers him little. But the fact that this woman, who once loved him, no longer trusts him, that hurts.

Count Schlieffen is no hard-boiled sinner. He is sympathetic at that point where he becomes vulnerable. His heart is his Achilles heel. One can understand “Count Schlieffen”. A woman was his undoing. That’s masculine.

3. COUNT AVALOV-BERMONT

This Count is a Russian commoner who has made a career in the army, has lived in Berlin since the Revolution, and has awarded, so to speak, posthumous medals to Baltic soldiers and officers. The police have therefore extradited him.

Count Avalov is an enthusiast, not a snake. He probably believes in his title and his significance. He lives in a middling B&B in the West End of Berlin with an adjutant, who is a former officer. A visit to the “Count” is one of those grotesque experiences Berlin has to offer.

The adjutant announces you, you wait in an ante-room, the door flies open, and the adjutant announces: “His Excellency”. And in clatters, rattles, jangles the lofty form of the Count, who is tall and presentable: a stately pine from the gardens of Tsarskoye-Selo.

His voice is rough and hoarse. The syllables march past, curt and clipped, and form up into companies of sentences. His speech is a military function, his gestures fictive rifle exercises.

Count Avalov believes in himself and his mission. He too can be understood as a victim of his times. The Czar has been murdered and Avalov feels compelled to represent the real Russia in the eyes of the world. He pulls on his costume as a personal demonstration against Lenin and Trotsky.

He is a brave man, no doubt, and no more dishonest to the world than he is to himself. He wishes to be a prop of the monarchy, and so offers himself as a theatrical prop.

He is an adventurer out of self-deception. He thinks of himself as a general and Machiavelli rolled into one. All he does is pin tin medals on people.

Berlin Börsen-Courier, 8 January 1922

* Köpenick-iad: a confidence trick, as when the cobbler Voigt got into a borrowed military uniform and occupied the town hall of Köpenick outside Berlin. The subject of Carl Zuckmayer’s enduringly popular tragicomedy of 1931, The Captain of Köpenick.

15. The Mother

Yesterday the nineteen-year-old labourer Franz Zagacki was sentenced to five years in prison. He had tried to kill his mother while she was peeling potatoes, first with an axe, then by asphyxiation, and finally by stabbing her. Then, supposing she was dead, he robbed her of a wallet in her petticoats containing two thousand two hundred marks, went to a tobacconist’s, paid his debts, bought cigarettes, invited his friends and his sweetheart who had helped him plan the deed to a cosy get-together in the flat of the apparently deceased woman, and went out to have himself a fun day. The mother though did not die, and the son was arrested and taken to prison for questioning.

Yesterday the mother stood in court and explained that she had forgiven her son. No sooner were the wounds healed that he had dealt her, than she was setting off to her son’s prison bringing preserves and other delicacies she had forgone. Even while she lay in hospital she was trembling for the well-being of her son, and if she had had the strength and if her lust for life had not prevailed when she was near death, then she would have remained quietly under the bedding in which he had tried to asphyxiate her, in order to spare him. What was her view of her child? she was asked. Nothing but the best. Oh, it wasn’t his fault, bad company had led him astray, it’s always bad company that’s to blame. She didn’t know anything about his girlfriend, he was impressionable, but when he was younger he had been a good boy.

The mother will now be able to visit her son regularly in prison. With trembling fingers she will pack up preserves for him for Christmas and the other holidays, she will scrimp and save for her son, and her old soul will weep for him and hope. And it will be exactly as though her son was not in prison at all, but at university or abroad somewhere, or in some other kind of place that is not easy to return from for professional or some other reasons.

The mother’s day is full of work and painstaking, sometimes dirty labour. But between each thing and the next, the scrubbing of the floorboards and the chopping of the kindling, there will be a brief, secretive folding of her hands. And each time she sits down to peel potatoes, as when the axe struck her, she will cry from pain; but stronger than her woe is her hope, stronger than her pain her faith, and slowly from her love of the child, like young leaves from fertile soil a kind of shy pride will sprout, without cause, she couldn’t say why, not based on qualities, but simply on the fact of this boy’s existence.

And each time she looks at the hatchet or thinks of it, a terrible day will loom up at her out of the past. And for all its terror it’s still weaker in outline and force than the other day, approaching, when her son will come home, upright, healed, and full of regret.

Full of regret? He has nothing to regret. The others are to blame, of course! Any moment the door will open, and he’ll walk in. And even though it’s five years, five lots of three hundred and sixty-five days, it could be any day.

Because the mother doesn’t stick to facts, she denies the solar calendar and the year.

Berliner Börsen-Courier, 25 April 1922

16. Rose Gentschow

Rose Gentschow is the daughter of a landowner near Danzig. Her father died of paralysis of the brain. Her mother is addicted to morphine, and is in an institution. Three sisters have taken the prescribed way into middle-class life that ends with marriage to a well-situated man. Rose Gentschow too could have followed that path. She was even prepared for it by the girls’ academy she attended until the age of sixteen. Then she became a secretary. A harmless event undergone by many girls on the path to material self-sufficiency left Rose Gentschow with a bad and painful illness. She was twenty-one at the time. Her mother gave her morphine to relieve her pain. She lost her job. Relatives supported her. Then she met a “friend”. He sent her out on the street. She stole from the flats of gentlemen she accosted in bars, abetted by her friend. Her habit was to slip opium into the glasses they drank from. One, Hemel, a businessman, died. She had slipped a little too much in his drink. He fell off his barstool and was dead. Rose was arrested.

Today she is thirty-three. She looks younger. Hers is the deceptive youth of women who are professionally young because they live off their looks; who have experienced nothing but passion which doesn’t always age, but sometimes keeps them young; whose life consists of alternating waves of ecstasy and unconsciousness; who drown anxieties, age and illness in intoxication, and forget them in the moment. Rose Gentschow has the beguiling expression of the incurable vice girl. It comes from the faraway sins of dreams. It goes into dreamy sins. Rose Gentschow has remained slender and light. She has never known the everyday worries of the middle class that make one fat and heavy. She lives in consuming passion. But also in consuming poverty. Sometimes she had to earn money to buy her beloved morphine. She sold herself so that she could afford to intoxicate herself.

On no fewer than fifteen occasions she has tried to escape her fate. Fifteen times she went on a detoxification cure. Fifteen times she lapsed back into morphine dependency. She would have extended her life and her method to an early grave, had Hemel had a stronger constitution. That he didn’t was blind chance. A stroke of fortune interrupted the activity of the lady poisoner. That’s how she’s referred to in the court reports. The one who is poisoned though is she. Her hands are thin, and her gestures awkward and embarrassed. She cries a lot. She tries to hide her face. Then she dries eyes and tears with a fist. The childish movement is charming. Little girls dry their tears with their fists.

She is facing three judges and six jurors. This is the composition of the new courts, following the ministerial decree of 24 January 1924. The jurors sit up alongside the judges. The jurors’ bench is empty. When Rose Gentschow speaks, she speaks to nine men. She looks at them all. Sometimes her look catches on one or other of them. Perhaps he seems kinder, better, more benevolent than the others. Then the controlling consciousness corrects the stalled look, and she goes back to watching all nine.

Her voice is thin and low. With all her self-control, tears are never far away. In spite of herself, a sob catches in her throat. Sometimes she is hoarse, creaky, as though speaking without vocal cords. She sounds choked, as though she kept her hand in front of each of her words.

Her former neighbours are in attendance. They are curious and lacking compassion. It is possible they are vindictive. Naïve people often are. Some share the destiny of the accused. Morphine lurks in their eyes. Their hands shake. Do they feel they have something in common? Are they suffering with her? Are they looking into their own future? I watch them eating their sandwiches. Perhaps one can see one’s destiny accomplished before one’s very eyes and still feel hungry. Men are there, both as witnesses and onlookers. Their constitution survived her opium. An army officer speaks. He is as calm and objective as a lawyer. He is not at all excited. But he too was one of her victims. His constitution withstood the opium. He met the girl on Potsdamer Platz. She wasn’t the first, nor the last. These are the women he crosses paths with. He doesn’t become her destiny, nor she his. They are his episodes, and luckily he too is just an episode. He wanders along on the fringes of danger, and nibbles at them.

Rose Gentschow is still hoping for reprieve. But her small, fogged brain is not equal to the sharpness of the judge. He asks: “How did you come to steal?” She answers: “I didn’t know what I was doing. I had already taken a lot of morphine.” The judge: “Were you stealing on the orders of your friend?” She, swiftly espying possible salvation: “Yes, yes!” The judge: “Then how can you claim not to have known what you were doing?” She is baffled by the logic. From a world of inebriation and thoughtless exhaustion, she suddenly finds herself in a sphere of implacable reason. Dazzled by the luminosity of logic, she leans back, closing her eyes. She loses herself, she is lost.

She can go on no longer. The world is sinking. She opens her eyes once more. Then she lapses into a kindly oblivion.

Prager Tagblatt, 10 April 1924

17. Two Gypsy Girls

The sun had an unusual, animating shine, it was as brisk as early morning, and as warm as noon, and lots of people were hurrying along the busy street. They were coming out of department stores carrying parcels, they were bustling about, dressed in bright and cheery clothes, as though they were on their way to a great party. The screaking trams, the tooting cars, the clattering buses were creating a joyful tumult. The whole city felt as cheerful as an adult become childish with joy.

Just then two young gypsy girls came along.

They were very brown and were wearing bright colourful clothes, red blouses and blue and white floral skirts, red ribbons in their hair and big yellow amber necklaces at their throats. On their feet they had red sandals. They had suddenly sprung up from somewhere, maybe they had come out of a shop. Even in their haste, the people stepped aside, so that they walked into an unoccupied space, and the looks that were sent their way were in equal part astonished and suspicious. They had little childish faces, pointy chins on which smiling dimples barely managed to find room, and brimming violet eyes. (Even their whites had a bluish shimmer.) Their blouses seemed to be casually unbuttoned, and yet were chastely closed, and the stout amber necklaces made their slender throats look even nobler, narrower, aristocratic. Under the flowing garments one sensed they were well-grown.

The two young gypsy girls were walking slowly, casually, a little taken aback, a little confused by the sunny throng, like a pair of alarmed young queens. Even so, their sandals barely brushed the paving stones; the teetering steps of young ladies in heels were heavier and stayed longer on the ground, even though they were in a hurry. The young gypsies wanted to cross the main road, but they were afraid of the vehicles that clattered by so merrily and dangerously to life and limb. Three times they walked out into the middle of the road, only to flee back to the pavement like alarmed colourful birds. A great panic came over their pretty faces. People laughed a little.

So I went up to the gypsies, stepped between them, took them by the arm, and led them across, feeling how they trembled.

When I got to the other side, I tipped my hat to them and let them go their ways.

A gentleman with a large blond moustache that went out into a couple of butchers’ hooks threw me an angry look from his sky-blue eyes, full of contempt and menace and inexpressible rage.

The two young gypsy girls didn’t turn back, they walked on. A puff of wind blew out their skirts, and they looked like two wandering flags.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 12 May 1924

18. Grock

Grock is in Berlin. Grock, the great clown.

First of all a bespectacled gentleman in dinner jacket walks on stage. He is a violinist, a virtuoso, a ten a penny virtuoso, a civilized being, there is nothing out of the ordinary about him. As he holds the violin under his chin, lifts the bow with a graceful and practised movement and begins to play, it is all of exemplary mediocrity, unobtrusive and routine.

Then the right wall lifts quietly, and very carefully, sheepishly, and with the modest air of someone who has no business being there, a very striking creature walks onto the stage in baggy grey tails, falling too far over the baggy grey trousers, and with a round grey bowler hat on his head. The bulging eyes, which from the shape of them must be exceedingly stupid, though they have a sort of unnatural cunning, carefully test the atmosphere. A long, very soft and well-behaved chin hangs sadly down, resigned, disappointed a thousand times over, ten thousand times over, but still with a little optimism. No doubt about it: this is Grock.

Grock is carrying a large suitcase. It contains a minuscule violin. The gentleman in the dinner jacket is vastly surprised. Grock is beginning to feel at home. Oh, it’s so nice being here! What a kindly gentleman! Now Grock will play you something. He settles himself on the chair arm, with his big, soft, yellow shoes on the seat, and plays very nobly, very movingly, and with plenty of feeling, proper grown-up notes on his tiny violin.

Next he is to accompany the gentleman at the piano. But first he has to change. He returns in a set of tight black tails, with pitifully bowed, wavy legs in tight, implacably form-hugging trousers. And now begins the fight against life, the brutal unremitting struggle against the resistance of everything in the world, the wickedness and unfittedness of things, the grotesque illogic of ordinary circumstance. The piano is too far from the stool: he needs to move it. The lid is open: if he tries to put his top hat on it, it will fall to the floor. It’s impossible to hit the correct notes, because he is wearing thick white gloves. So he had better take them off. How is a man to come to such a conclusion unaided? Luckily, he has his sensible friend to tell him.

Grock takes off his gloves and rolls them up. They look like an egg. An egg! Did you ever?! An extremely amusing scene surfaces in Grock’s memory: a man juggling with eggs. A conjuror. Just at that moment juggling seems more important than music making. A pair of white gloves in the guise of an egg leaves Grock with no option. It takes quite some time. Finally the gentleman calls him back to the piano.

Grock has a wonderful, round, almost cylindrical mouth organ. It’s capable of sounding like an organ. Because of course it is a terribly dignified, positively sacred object. But when you hold it in your hands, sometimes it plays itself. It makes singular very high squeaky sounds. Grock is afraid of these sounds that seem to leap of their own accord from the interior of the instrument, exuberant little beasts, unable to stand their long imprisonment. Grock leaps away. He still has the mouth organ. A little note squirts out. Grock turns round. There is a titanic battle between the man’s will, his fingers and the obstinate instrument.

Several times this fight reaches a sort of climax: when Grock starts to look for his cufflinks way past his elbow, where a normal person gets his vaccination; when Grock takes the violin in his right hand, the bow in his left, and is unable to play; when Grock tosses the bow high up in the air and is unable to catch it. Then he goes behind a partition to practise. Comes out, throws the bow in the air and catches it. A minute passes. Then Grock remembers he has pulled off his difficult trick, and he cheers, a cheer that is half grunt, half whoop. It is the great joy of an adorable idiot.

He thanks the audience for their applause, comes out in front of the curtain, bows, and then can’t find his way offstage. Grock is cut off from the scenery, left to the mercy of the people in the stalls who now, of all things, applaud him — but for how long, how long? Soon, they will start to laugh at his helpless condition just as they laughed at his intentional jokes before — evil people. No one makes a move, no one shows him where to go, the curtain has innumerable pleats, yes, it seems to consist of nothing but pleats, one of them must be the way out, but which one. What an awful pickle. Mustn’t show that he’s stuck, whatever he does! Another nice, smiling, adorable bow. The people are to believe that he’s staying out of gratitude, sheer heartfelt gratitude. Then while they’re still clapping, quickly pick up the curtain, and slip under it! Saved.

Grock appears once more, but it is a different Grock, a Grock without bald patch, with a sad face full of noble ugliness, an aristocrat in a crude world, a man of noble truth betrayed a thousand times, an honest, yes, a humble striver who always comes a cropper, a man born for despair who forces himself to believe, a clumsy so-and-so, a hero, a lofty man in the depths, defeated a thousand times but always victorious.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 10 December 1924

19. The Dapper Traveller

The dapper traveller enters the compartment carrying in his hand a small case of soft leather, accompanied by a porter who hoists a suitcase of tough leather into the luggage net. The dapper traveller pays him quietly without looking and without responding to his goodbye. Straightaway he drops into the seat and bounces up once before his body comes to rest. He peels off his grey leather gloves and lays them in the soft little case, from which he takes out a pair of grey thread gloves. These he puts on, stroking each finger straight. Thereupon he looks in a mirror with leather backing, runs his right hand lightly through his hair, and looks out of the window without fixing any particular object or person.

The traveller is clad in a discreet grey, set off by an exquisite iridescent purple tie. With complacent attention he examines his feet, his leather shoes, and the fine knots in the broad laces. He stretches out his legs in the compartment, both arms are casually on the arm rests to either side. Before long the grey traveller pulls out his mirror again, and brushes his dense, black parted hair with his fingers, in the way one might apply a feather duster to a kickshaw. Then he burrows in his case, and various useful items come to light: a leather key-holder, a pair of nail scissors, a packet of cigarettes, a little silk handkerchief and a bottle of eau de cologne.

Then the traveller pushes a cigarette between his lips and pats his pockets for matches. Now, where are his matches? Yes, where are they, the elegant, flat matches for his waistcoat pocket, with their little yellow youthful phosphorus heads?

They are forgotten, lost, stolen, spoiled, disappeared, they are not there. The dapper traveller no longer dominates the compartment. Yes, he even feels a little trivial, with his impeccable outfit and no matches. His distinguished, sensual, olive-yellow face takes on a pale brown coloration. With his soft little leather case in his hand, he marches off in the direction of the dining car.

When he returns, fed, a little grease at the corners of his lips, he pulls a leather-bound volume from the pocket of his travelling cloak. He writes with a silver pencil, engrossed, dreamy. He is surely a poet.

Yes, clearly, a popular poet. He invents female characters so ethereal, so morphinistically thin that one may not see that they are spun from nothing at all. He is a poet on laid paper, his hand signs three hundred and fifty-one book jackets a year.

But as he leans forward and puts his book down on his knee, I see that what he was writing and totting up were columns of figures. The beautiful book contains profane calculations.

Then he puts a cigarette between his lips and his olive yellow face turns brown, and because I am getting off soon, I offer him my matches. But he refuses them. Because mine is a common or garden matchbox, bulky, just the thing to spoil the line of a waistcoat pocket, and full of common or garden red-tipped matches, not to be carried in a leather case without compromising oneself.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 8 August 1924