A Student in Post-War Berlin
I
’YOU are a total economic loss, an unnecessary expense to the community. My wife knows that a woman must stay at home beside her husband and children and not run around in all sorts of filthy places.’
No, I was not being admonished by a judge before whom I was on trial for vagrancy, but merely receiving my diploma as Doctor of Medicine cum laude from the famous University of Berlin. The petty official, a sort of glorified janitor to whose lot it falls to distribute the diplomas, was merely taking the occasion to air a few of his views on the status of women. Thus was spoken vale to the happy three years I spent in Germany finishing my medical course.
I had picked those three years during which Germany was absolutely at the lowest point of its post-war economic and social depression and was just starting to ‘come back.’ Working in the clinics of Berlin. I had occasion to witness the utmost misery and poverty. There are still some objects — perhaps a corsage of orchids worn by a friend, or a jeweled clock in the window of a Fifth Avenue jeweler — at which I cannot look without a slight twinge of conscience. I am neither a Socialist nor a Bolshevik; I find an increasing pleasure in most things as they are and note with astonishment that this conservatism becomes more deeply impressed in me with the passing of the years; but the imprint of the misery that I saw in the Germany of my student days has been graven too deep to be effaced by even the comparative comfort which we Americans always enjoy.
I arrived in Germany in the summer of 1922. I cannot reproduce my thrill at actually feeling myself on the North Sea, the rhythm of whose waves had been singing to me from childhood in the poems of Heine’s ‘North Sea Cycle.’ But in Bremen I found that though I had an appreciation of German poetry which moved me to repeat the immortal cadences of the ‘North Sea Cycle’ in the presence of a friendly audience, under the stimulus of moonlight and the imminent parting on the last evening on the boat, I could not manage to buy a bag of cherries from a woman on the street. I therefore decided that it would be best to pick some extremely quiet place where I could perfect my German during the summer and be ready to enter the University in the fall.
There is no place on the face of the globe better suited for quiet study and retreat from the world than a German sanatorium. ‘The world forgetting, by the world forgot,’ can truly be said of the group that stay there, cut off from their fellow creatures. These health resorts must be excellent refuges for criminals fleeing from justice; the one where my mother and I stayed was the hiding place of Roger Casement when he wanted to escape the British authorities. That they are sometimes used for other purposes than those of health may be deduced from the answer of an American who had stayed in one near Baden-Baden which was famed for its rural character. Someone asked him what they raised there, and he replied accurately and succinctly, ‘Hell!’
It is an amazing fact that there is scarcely a really sick person in these sanatoria. One finds very much the same sort of people who go on the Mediterranean and longer West Indies cruises. Last winter, on one of these tours to Venezuela and Central America, someone remarked, ‘This boat is full of people who, if they had n’t got away the minute they did, would have committed murder.’
Our particular haven was situated in a garden spot a short twenty-minute trolley ride from the heart of Berlin, so thoroughly hidden from the street by the trees that supper was served in the moonlight in the garden. Here in this small artificial community, thrown together by chance, was to be found a modern staging of the old Biblical story of the tower of Babel. Fourteen or fifteen nationalities were represented, and we finally got so bored with exotic folk that when a native of Afghanistan arrived no one even bothered to go down to see whether he brought his harem with him. It would have formed an ideal experimental field for those statesmen who were then attempting in Geneva to settle that most perplexing question of nationality by the criterion of language. The tables were made up according to the language spoken by the guests, and the Englishspeaking table, where we were placed, had eight Americans and an English couple.
At our table the situation was comparatively peaceful. Still working on the language criterion, however, the management had put at the Russian table, composed of members of the old régime, a newly arrived Bolshevist Commissar and his wife. The diplomatic error was soon rectified, but it cost the sanatorium half a dozen plates, and I believe the Oriental rug on the dining-room floor never recovered its pristine appearance after the bath of hot soup given in the authentic Russian fashion. The Bolsheviki were quickly moved to the central table, and, strongly entrenched between the proprietor and her husband, were protected from all but the deadly looks of the followers of the Little White Father. The adherents of Karl Marx finally found peace and security at the strictly neutral Scandinavian table, but they were a cause of constant anxiety because we expected them to be wiped out at any moment by the Loyalists. It was with a sigh of relief that we learned that six more Leninists had arrived, so that in a pitched battle at least the opposing forces would be numerically equal. I regret to have to state that bets ran rather high for the impending civil war.
There were no French people and none would have been admitted, because this was at the time when the Ruhr occupation was imminent and feeling against the French was running very high. But, lest we forget the existence of that highly original Gallic race across the Rhine without Whom no gathering can truly be said to be cosmopolitan, an old German lady would arise at the conclusion of every meal, raise a glass of wine to her lips, and exclaim with the air of a prophetess from the Old Testament, ‘Oh, if this were only a glass of French blood!'
II
I applied at the University for a tutor in German, and a very earnest young woman was recommended to me. She was getting her doctor’s degree in English literature and was busily engaged in writing her thesis. My lessons were to pay for its publication. She told me that the title was ‘The Exclamation Point in Shakespeare,’ and I have always wondered whether or not she was pulling my leg. Seeing in me a supposedly cultured American, she would bring me choice bits of fourteenthand fifteenth-century English prose and verse to decipher, though my knowledge of English of that period was restricted to a few of the Tales of Chaucer, read under duress and with the help of a transcription into modern English. She would look at me superciliously, and I have the feeling that she does not believe to this day that I actually have a degree from Columbia.
My inability to converse in AngloSaxon soon began to get on my nerves, and I changed my tutor for a professor of English at the University. He was one of the most cultured men it has been my good fortune to meet. Instead of putting me on dry rules of grammar and disconnected sentences, he told me to take Macaulay’s Life of Frederick the Great and try to translate it into German. I made hundreds of mistakes, but I was working with material I loved. This teacher instilled in me an appreciation of the genius of Goethe that I shall retain forever. I stumbled through discussions of religion and evolution with him in German, and I can truly say that some of the finest thoughts that I have ever formulated for myself were couched in that language, so that I felt then and still feel a little toward it as a mediaeval scholar must have regarded his Latin — as a means for the expression of those thoughts and feelings which he regarded as the highest and best.
At this time Germany was in a particularly embarrassing situation, because many people driven from the countries of Eastern Europe by famine and revolution, and excluded by the German quota immigration system, sought to evade the law by registering as students. I had never in my life seen so many Bulgarians, Jugoslavs, and Albanians, and had not realized that the thirst for knowledge ran so high in those reputedly backward countries. I was very soon disillusioned, however, because all these ladies and gentlemen of exotic nationality turned out to be either Russians or Poles. As there were practically no passports from Eastern Europe at this time and everyone was living with League of Nations passports, it was possible for large numbers to get away with the deception.
The other day in a Fifth Avenue bus in New York I saw an advertisement of a Jazz School. One attraction, evidently sufficiently in demand to warrant its inclusion in the limited and expensive space devoted to such an advertisement, was ‘Registration in this school for non-quota residents entitles student to stay in New York.’ How some of those ‘Albanians’ would have relished such a school!
Day after day I haunted the various Ministries trying to get through the red tape of admission as a regular student and candidate for a degree. In one of these I encountered a sub-official who had never heard of Columbia University, and I had to trouble the American Ambassador to send an official statement that Columbia to the best of his knowledge had a certain standing as a university. I still own this unique document.
All these Ministries were magnificent structures viewed from the outside. Within, the rooms of the under-officials were furnished with bare-looking tables and kitchen chairs. In each little cubbyhole was a petty official with a shaven head, munching a sandwich and a measly-looking apple. Whatever time of day I came, this munching was going on. It seems that there was something wrong with the food at this time; everything was a ‘substitute,’ and appeared to have no sustaining qualities. In the street cars, in the theatres, everywhere one went one heard and saw this continual mastication. I was a guest in a box at the opera, and to my great surprise my host pulled out some hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches and devoured them.
After besieging the Ministries for a period of three weeks, I was at last informed that the document I craved would be mailed to me on payment of the few pfennigs postage. I went home jubilant, but alas, my rejoicing was short-lived. They had sent a grandlooking document permitting me to practise medicine in the State of Prussia — that is, to take an examination for the privilege — in case I ever finished medical school. Then I understood all the difficulties that had been placed in my way, because the Germans are extremely reluctant to allow foreigners the privilege of practising medicine on an equivalent basis with native Germans. I began inquiries again, and, moving my activities to the proper Ministry, was duly equipped in but a few days with a student card testifying that I was entitled to all the rights and privileges of a student in the University.
III
From the very first day my contacts with German petty officials were painful, but they are extremely amusing in retrospect. One must truly have been brought up in the atmosphere of the Golden Age of Germany before the great debacle to have acquired the exactly proper shade of amused deference with which to treat them. When I look back now I see that a foreigner can never develop the necessary technique with these underpaid people whose only reward is a sort of artificial dignity which must be maintained at all costs. Adler, the Viennese psychologist, would probably see in them a good example of the manifestation of his famed ‘inferiority complex,’and our own talented countryman, Mr. Mencken, might easily find them similar to our lodge members who dress up in their fancy regalia and seek thus to compensate in some measure for the essential drabness of their lives.
I have already related what one such official said to me on handing me my diploma. I can now give his parting shot: ‘My wife knows that her only business in life is to keep her eyes in the washtubs and the cooking pots and to see that I am properly served. Please pay me for the postal card and you may have your diploma.'
One of these petty officials almost landed me in jail. Owing to the prevailing economic conditions, it was my custom to wear shabby clothes while attending classes. One day, however, a family friend arrived and invited me to luncheon. Knowing that if I appeared poorly dressed a report would go to my parents that I was starving to death, I dressed as I should have in New York.
On the way to my appointment I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to change the solutions in which some microscopic preparations were resting and that they would be ruined if left thus. So I went back. The allimportant gatekeeper did not recognize me in all my finery. ‘Whom do you want?' he growled. ‘ You must be crazy not to recognize me,’I replied. ‘You say I am crazy?' he retorted. I fled.
About a week later I got a note from my professor saying that I had been reported for insulting an official of the government. My high diplomatic error had been reported by the gatekeeper to the superintendent of the building, by him to the director of the department where I was working, by the director to the dean and thence to the rector of the University, who had reported it back to my professor. Because I was an American, I was forgiven, on condition that I apologize.
In the Berlin subway, tickets are issued and punched when one enters and then must be given up as one leaves. Rushing to my pathology examination at six in the morning, nervous as a cat after cramming till three o’clock the night before, I managed somehow to slip into the subway without getting my ticket punched. As I emerged, the ticket taker (here a petty government official) looked at the ticket and then at me. ‘How did you get in without having your ticket punched?’ ‘I don’t know. All I do know is that I have to get out of this subway, and quickly, too.’ ‘You cannot leave till I report this to the controller, who does not come till seven. Wait here.’ He put me under a shed. ’On your honor I rely on you to stay here.’
Must I confess it? As soon as his back was turned I fled. For the first time in my life I knew how hard is the lot of the criminal who comes into conflict with the law of the country, as I dodged down side alleys expecting to hear the clang of the Black Maria at any moment.
The Professor Ordinarius of Pathology had a most agreeable habit of giving his first lecture at 7 A.M. and his pathological demonstrations at 5 A.M. However, since his courses were almost the best to be found in Germany, everybody dragged through the darkness of the early northern dawn of Berlin to attend them. One student who had never attended the course, though enrolled, and did not know what the professor looked like but was fully aware of his reputation for ferocity and for flunking half the students appearing before him for examination, came to the laboratory to ask for an appointment for his final test. Seeing a small bearded figure, in overalls, he approached and slapped the little man on the back so hard that he nearly tumbled over.
‘How is the Herr Geheimrat?’ said the student. ‘Is he as nasty as ever? What is he asking these days?'
‘He is asking about the pathology of the lung,’ was the reply. ‘You may come to-morrow, at seven o’clock, for your examination.’
The next morning the poor student fainted when he saw his mistake. For those readers who arc curious I can say that when he was revived he was asked only about the lung.
IV
One of the most delightful features of German academic life is its ‘ migratory possibilities.’ In other words, you just take your registration book and your student card, on which appears your photograph, and go to whatever university you feel like entering. This enables you to go for the winter semester to Berlin or Munich, with its concerts and theatres, and then spend a most delightful spring semester at a country university such as Halle or Freiburg in the far-famed Black Forest of legend. Many students migrate every single semester. All students may thus enjoy the instruction of some particularly famous master in a special field, since they can come to his university for a semester at any time they wish. The result is that such lecture halls as that of the world-famous Aschoff at Freiburg or Lubarsch in Berlin arc so full that the walls seem to bulge.
This is all made possible through the absolutely elective system open to the German university student, who is presupposed to be an adult. Those pictures of the beer-drinking, duelfighting German student are the exact equivalent of our motion pictures of ‘college’ life. Any traveler who has visited Heidelberg will testify to a lot of noisy students drinking beer and trying to kiss the waitress in a cafe. But these are the German equivalent of the ‘rah-rah boy,’ and most of them do not want to study. I have just read that the students in one of the universities, on being asked to pose for a talkie, refused on the ground that such pictures were a libel on their academic life.
The character of the students has changed since the war, for many have to earn their living in order to study. But that this earnestness is not a postwar phenomenon can be seen from the number of scientific papers, some world famous, that were published during the student days of men now well known. I saw plenty of the duel fighters striding around in their bright-colored caps, and singing their drinking songs, but the great majority of the students were mature-minded individuals eager to profit intellectually from their university years. Many a cold winter afternoon we walked home through the fresh snow of the Tiergarten disputing some problem brought up in the lecture room we came from.
I have never lived as simply — rather, as penuriously — as during my student years in Germany. I rode third class only because there was no fourth class, though the difference in my American money was perhaps one hundredth or one thousandth of a cent. In normal times I should have lived as I was accustomed, but I could not bring myself to allow my friends to think I was profiting by their misery. At the theatre I sat always in the back of the gallery, when the best seat in the orchestra could be obtained for ten cents.
Here I want to say a word about the Americans who went to Germany and lived off that poor country like locusts. To see a person striding up and down the lobby of the Adlon Hotel, where he was living more cheaply than at the hotel on the Bowery to which he was suited by birth, education, and economic standing, was painful in the extreme, as well to cultured Germans as to any fine-feeling American. It is a well-known fact that sometimes we pass over the great injuries done us, while the little ones rankle. The sight of these blustering, domineering ‘millionaires’ has remained implanted in the minds of the German people, and it will take a generation to uproot it.
V
Some day someone with a more ready pen than mine will write the epic of those Russian girls and boys who filled the universities of Central and Western Europe in a quest for the knowledge denied them at home — a tattered army, always a little dirty, snubbed and despised by the weliwashed Teuton, living God knows where, subsisting on God knows what, going through the streets of Berlin or Zurich with torn shoes, filling the gallery of every theatre, thronging every concert, and delighting in the warmth of the religious and political freedom of Western Europe, denied them under the century-long oppressions of the Tsars. Now they are scattered in laboratories all over the world. Among the great names — Besredka, Minkowski, Lydia Rabinowitch, Lina Stern, and others — are surely some who belonged to this exiled, starving group.
I want to express my humble tribute to that company, which was well personified in my dear friend Vera.
She came from Minsk, her whole family having been killed during the counter-revolutionary invasion of the White Army. She alone managed somehow to survive. Her black hair, drawn tight back, the depth of those sad eyes, had something of the simplicity and sorrow to be seen in the best of the primitive wooden Madonnas in the oldest of the Gothic churches. She managed to keep alive on the few lessons she gave and to get together her tuition money by means little short of miraculous. I can still see her trudging through the streets of Berlin during that long, terrible winter of ’23, with the snow coming into the gaps in her old shoes. One would sooner have tried to shake hands with the Tsar in the days of his glory than have offered to help her.
Taking many of the courses with us was the son of a great German industrialist, a little older than most of us because of the time he had lost during the war in the service of his country. His worldly experience, combined with his superb tact, made him that highest product of European civilization, the cultured Continental gentleman. From the instant he laid eyes on Vera he seemed to see in her the reincarnation of one of the Madonnas of his world-famous collection. He paid her assiduous court and we were all happy at the Cinderella tale which was unfolding before our eyes. But we had reckoned without our host. ‘I do not love him,’ said Vera. ’How can I marry him?’ She would have thought nothing of living with any man she loved, but could not be bought by wealth and position.
‘Crazy,’ said some. ‘Russian,’ said others, dismissing the matter with a shrug of their shoulders. ‘An idealist,’ said I.
In the summer of 1929, at the world physiological conference in Boston, there was to be seen a small dark woman — here, jesting in French; there, giving the Dutch professor’s wife, in her native tongue, a description of present-day conditions in Russia; now, pausing at a demonstration to give instructions to one assistant in Russian and to another in Polish; again, making addresses in French, German, or English, as seemed most appropriate to the occasion. Later I met her at a dinner party of some Boston Brahmin, at a time when the word ‘Bolshevik’ was enough to raise everyone’s blood pressure at least twenty degrees. She told of conditions in Russia — how they had worked in half-frozen laboratories just after the revolution, hungry and desolate.
‘You see,’ she continued, ‘I was a professor at Geneva and had a huge ten-room apartment, where all the world that I cared to have could and did come to me. But I received a call to go back to my ravaged country, and I went. Now I am isolated in a little two-room flat, without water or modern improvements. But I feel that the little spark of Russian culture that has meant, so much should not be allowed to die out during the political upheavals, and I am doing my best to see that it does n’t. What are a few material wants when one feels that a moral obligation is being fulfilled?'
‘Crazy,’ said some. ’Russian,’ said others. ‘Another idealist,’ said I.
VI
There is something in the make-up of people accustomed to the ravages of long-continued poverty that helps them to adjust themselves with the minimum amount of friction to the forces that govern life. However, it is very different with those who have had no contact with extreme poverty and suddenly find themselves, through some external circumstance, forced to live in want. They have developed no mechanism for neutralizing the unpleasant elements of such a life. On all sides throughout Germany could be found people suddenly plunged, by the inflation of the currency, into situations of this kind.
In a research department of one of our great American universities is a director who, with his family, literally almost starved to death in Germany during the years after the war. At night even now, in the midst of security and comfort, he wakes up sometimes in a cold sweat because he thinks he hears his baby calling for food.
In the free clinics where we students were stationed it was our habit to talk to each other in a sort of dog Latin — or, as the Germans call it, Küchenlatein — in order that the patients should not understand what was being said. Sometimes a patient would correct our grammar, for many of them were of the educated classes that lost everything during the inflation period. One would notice a slight elevation of the eyebrows on the part of some woman dressed in rags, as a too broad jest passed in French among the doctors — a look of pain, since she knew that here, dependent on charity, it would ill behoove her to assert that old spirit that would have demanded the dismissal of a doctor committing such a breach in her presence.
One girl who came to the clinic again and again was the daughter of a Saxon army colonel and had lived in Potsdam in the military escort of the Kaiser. She would not work, since ladies did not work. As soon as we let her out of the hospital, where she ‘high-hatted’ us one and all, she would wander around the streets till brought in again, simply exhausted from cold and starvation. One of the women doctors said to her, ‘Don’t you see that I work for a living?’ A lift of the eyebrow spoke as plainly as words: ‘But you are not a lady!’ It was exactly the same spirit that made captured Prussians refuse to stand up in the presence of the Allied officers.
Again, I saw a shopgirl come in to have a toe taken off because she could not afford a special shoe and she always had to look neat and trim. It must be remembered that at this time the income of the shopgirl was utterly insufficient to support life, and she had to supplement it by means not approved by the moralists and usually referred to as the oldest profession.
Even to-day, in very few countries of the world can a woman earn enough to enable her to live decently. If a working girl in Europe appeared in a fur coat and asserted that she bought it with her own wages she would be laughed out of court. Many a foreign friend on a visit to this country has asked me where the girls of our working classes get their clothes, and their figures. I have inevitably replied, ‘The figures they are born with, and the clothes they earn ’ — only to be met with a skeptical and sneering smile at my innocence and lack of worldly understanding. A great German manufacturer told me that half the women in his shops were on the streets, and he seemed to regard this as quite the normal thing for women born without money.
VII
I have always been a little weak on the classics. Perhaps I should have done better to remember my Horace: Coelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt; it might have saved me some highly embarrassing moments. The Germans translate the above sentence very tersely and well by saying that eggs are cooked in water all over the world.
I came to Europe with great fear and trembling, convinced that if I went with a European man to the theatre I might expect him to murder me on the way home. I had also heard from some well-intentioned source that when a German goes to the theatre with a girl he presents a bill to her father. I thought I would take my bull by the horns, and offered a German gentleman my share of the bill. He accepted gladly — in fact, a little too readily. The girl who brings the wraps from the cloakroom forgot my fox fur, and I mentioned the fact to my escort. ’Well, run and get it,’ he replied. I stared at him in amazement. ‘And,’ he continued, ’if you intend to give me a lecture on chivalry, be assured that it will be wasted. An American would certainly have gone after the fur. So should I, if I were here with a lady; but you insist on being treated as a man, and I should never dream of going after another man’s hat if he were less than eighty years old.’
Again, coming home from the theatre, my escort started to display symptoms fairly common to the species everywhere. With my bugaboo of wicked Europeans, I protested more than vigorously. ‘All right,’ he answered, ‘ I will treat you exactly as though you were my mother.’ The next morning a bouquet of flowers arrived with a card on which was written, ‘I have an ɶdipus complex.’
After my first winter in Germany, when things were going from bad to worse, and the French took possession of the Ruhr and the dollar dropped from one thousand to forty thousand marks within a week, I found that I could not stand the depression and went to Italy, trying to forget in the warm sunshine there the horror behind me. When I left 1 took with me from a hotel a copy of the Yale Review, because I wanted to finish reading an article in it. I salved my conscience by reasoning that some American had left it there, because no German hotel would, on its own initiative, subscribe to the Yale Review. In this same number was an article on missionary education, or something of that kind. It needed no Sherlock Holmes to discover that the couple in my compartment were missionaries, and, since I was going to lunch in the dining car at the first serving and they at the second, I told them that I would leave the book open at a page that would interest them — and then promptly proceeded to forget all about it. I went into the dining car, leaving on my seat a copy of the Tauchnitz edition of Somerset Maugham’s Trembling of a Leaf, open to the story of Rain. When I came from lunch we were crossing the Alps, but the altitude alone was not enough to account for the sudden chill in the air.
VIII
Among my instructors in the medical school were many whose names were literally household words. First and foremost was my professor of medicine, Geheimrat Kraus, who probably knew all there was to be known of the weakness and frailty of human nature. ‘To know all is to forgive all,’says the proverb, and here was a man who indeed knew all. Kings and beggars, they lay exposed before him, body and soul. In the play The Green Pastures, the Negro pastor tells the children that when he thinks of God it is in the person of an old Negro minister who preached in his church. In similar fashion there is a generation of people in Germany who see in this whitebearded omniscient savant a personification of their conception of God.
There is a story told of his clinic just before the war, when an American millionaire waited impatiently for two hours and then went to the head nurse to complain. She replied, ‘I’m sorry, but there are a king and two grand dukes ahead of you, so I guess you’ll have to wait.’
I stayed during one entire vacation in a Berlin orphan asylum, one of the most cheerful places of its sort one could find, because the kindly director endeavored to remove as far as possible the asylum atmosphere. He had a horror of the present-day cult of efficiency, and believed firmly that he would rather have a child of his brought up in the poorest tenement than in the finest and most modern institution. He emphasized again and again the need of a particular ingredient in the formula of each baby, believing that no formula, however correct chemically and calorically, could be complete without it. I refer, needless to say, to mother love.
One day we heard that a little girl of three and a half, having the mentality of a child of over five or six, had been admitted to the asylum, having been taken away from a poor mother who could not support her. We went down to see her. A most intelligent, elfish face smiled up at us from a little body crippled and stunted by rickets. As a rule children in orphan asylums do not talk or walk till long after children who are brought up in a home usually do, because there is no one to bother to teach them. The director, however, took an instant fancy to this child and used to go every day to talk with her so that she would not forget how to speak. One day we heard her saying to her doll, on whom she was trying to press a piece of chocolate, ‘Eat, now, or the visiting nurse will come and say I do not take care of you, and she will take you away from me as they took me from my mamma.’ The director was a very rich man; Süsschen went back to her mother.
The professor of children’s diseases was the world-famous Czerny. He had a slogan that there were only two measures, rather drastic ones, by which to reduce the infant mortality of Berlin: ‘Forbid the sale of thermometers, and kill all grandmothers.’ It was said that, crying babies, when handed to him, instantly became quiet. I had heard this and did not believe it, but when I saw it myself I began to realize how legends of miracles might be built up around personalities of this kind.
IX
Examinations for the doctor’s degree are conducted in public, and constitute a circus where young students are thrown to the lions. The victim stands in the centre of the arena, and question after question is fired at him. The little that one knows one forgets before that sea of mocking faces. As a charm against bad luck the students are accustomed to wish each other Hals und Beinbruch (‘Break your neck and leg’), and when I received a card conveying this message I must say that I was astonished.
There have been many embarrassing moments in my life, but none more so than when I was taking my obstetrics examination. Since I was a chemist, my knowledge of this oldest of the medical sciences was practically limited to the fact that women have babies, and I trembled before the towering figure of the examining professor, his six feet four of impressiveness flanked by a huge beard. His first question was hardly charitable to the poor foreigner stranded in the great arena in full view of ten grinning assistants and about three hundred students. ‘ Do you know anything?’ he bellowed at me. What could I answer? ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I should n’t advise you to call me as consiliaria, but I know a little.’ ‘Well,’ he answered, ‘you at least said consiliaria instead of consiliarius, which shows that they teach Latin now even in America.’
After the ordeal was over this professor said to me in a low voice, ‘Now speak a little more. I am having a dinner party to-night and I want to imitate your accent; I think I’ve got it down pretty well by now.’ I, who was proud as a peacock of my German, was put just where I belonged.
In some of the clinics the professors’ assistants were good-natured and would tell the poor student what sort of case he was going to get, and this sometimes resulted in unforeseen consequences. One of the students was told that he was going to get a case with a very much enlarged spleen that was plainly palpable. Instead, by some slip-up, a case of sore throat was given him. The unfortunate student walked bravely up to the patient and said, after a few cursory taps, ‘An enlarged spleen.’ He spoke with such positiveness that the professor, wondering if he had overlooked something, himself examined the patient and found, of course, an absolutely impalpable spleen.
Thereupon the professor handed the student a crayon and told him to map out the organ on the patient. The poor candidate, knowing how large the spleen was supposed to be, made one of the largest possible, restricting its size only so that it should not extend outside the abdomen. In certain rare cases the spleen has a scalloped appearance, and, remembering this, he added five or six beautiful scallops to the picture crayoned on the patient’s abdomen. ‘Failed!’ roared the professor. ‘I would have forgiven everything but those scallops. Come back in three weeks and try again.’
After receiving my diploma, I went to Paris for some postgraduate work. I am naturally allied to the French; I look like them, being distinctly Latin in appearance, and I must confess that emotionally and instinctively they lie nearer to me than the blond-haired Teutons. But intellectually I found a formalism and adherence to old tradition and moulds which amazed and dismayed me.
In Berlin I had known a most cultured woman who tried, with a large measure of success, to maintain an eighteenth-century salon in modern times. A governess who worked in her family at one time told me that before her guests came she would get down her Heine, Goethe, some of the Latin and Greek authors, and make eine geistige Toilette (‘dress up her mind’) to receive them. In Paris I bought myself some much-needed clothes, and when I got home it was, peculiarly enough, these few rags which the customs officials examined with care. That far more important thing which I brought from Europe — my geistige Toilette — was absolutely ignored. I have forgotten to look, however — perhaps the United States Government attends to that in the latest tariff bill!