The Eternal Philistine by Odon Von Horvath Read Free Book Online Page A

Hanoverian accent.
    The young wife of a businessman was standing on the platform among others. She was excitedly waving goodbye to her husband, who was in the front car, traveling abroad in order to cheat another businessman.
    Kobler nudged his way into the scene. He leaned out ofthe window and gave the young lady a condescending nod, but she merely grimaced and made a dismissive gesture with her hands. “Now she’s upset,” rejoiced Kobler, and thought of Fräulein Pollinger. “Anna’s probably also upset right now,” he continued this line of thought. “Right now it’s precisely eight and this is when her office opens up. I’d be upset too if my office opened up at this time. Nothing beats self-employment. What a disaster it’d be if everybody were an employee, like Marxism envisions it. As an employee, I would never have gone the extra mile to cheat Portschinger. If the convertible had been state property, I’d just have had it melted down as scrap metal, which would have been the right and proper thing to do anyway. But so many potentially exploitable objects of value would lie idle as a result of this menacing socialization. And that’s just how it’d be because the personal incentive would be eliminated.”
    He sat down mischievously at his window seat, riding proudly through the dismal suburban train stations and past the suburban travelers who stood motionlessly waiting for their suburban trains. And then the city gradually came to an end. The landscape became increasingly dreary; Kobler languidly observed the person sitting across from him, a gentleman with a vigorous demeanor who was absorbed in his newspaper. It was written underneath the newspaper’s headline, NOW MORE THAN EVER! , that any German who said he was proud to be a German because, were he not proud of being a German, he would still be a German all the same and would, therefore, naturally be proud to be a German—“such a German,” read the newspaper, “is no German, but rather an asphalt-German.”
    Kobler had also equipped himself with some reading material for the trip, namely a magazine. In it there were adozen young girls who, in the shadow of mounted photographs of skyscrapers, were shouldering their legs as if they were rifles. The caption read THE MAGIC OF MILITARISM , and said that it actually came across as spooky that pin-up girls have heads as well. Then Kobler also saw a whole pack of feminine beauties, one of whom was smiling sensuously as she stood atop an enormous tortoise that had been tamed. Apart from that he had no other reading material with him.
    Just a number of dictionaries, each containing around twelve thousand words printed in an exceedingly tiny font: German-Italian,
Français-Allemand
, German-French,
Español-Aleman
, etc. He had also got himself a booklet with useful phrases for traveling in Spain (with the pronunciation clearly spelled out). It had been edited by a secondary-school teacher in Erfurt whose daughter still hoped to marry the rich German-Argentinian who had given her his promise during the period of hyperinflation. In the preface, the secondary-school teacher lamented the deeply distressing fact that Spanish was rarely learned in the German-speaking lands, even though the Spanish world supplied us Germans with myriad natural products while itself lacking in industry. These facts had not yet been adequately appreciated by the young world of commerce, not by a long shot. And then the secondary-school teacher enumerated the countries in which Spanish was spoken, for instance Spain and Latin America, minus Brazil.
    Kobler read further: I’m hungry, thirsty.
Tengo hambre, sed
. Pronunciation: tango ambray, said. How do you say that in Spanish?
Como se llama eso en Castellano
? Pronunciation: como say yama ay-so en casteyano. Could you please speak more slowly?
Tenga ustay la bondahd day ablar mas despassio?
Please repeat that word. You have to speak a little louder.He commands a proud language,