1905 2026
This is an AI modernization of A German Professor's Journey into Eldorado into contemporary English. The original is available from Internet Archive. Also available as an epub.
Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) was the Austrian physicist who explained heat as the motion of atoms and showed why a hot cup of coffee cools and never warms itself: of all the ways the molecules can be arranged, the disordered ones vastly outnumber the ordered. His formula for entropy is carved on his grave in Vienna. In 1905 he was sixty-one, a professor at the University of Vienna, famous, short-sighted, asthmatic and fond of his food, and still fighting a long argument with colleagues who doubted that atoms existed at all.
That summer the University of California invited him to teach at its summer school in Berkeley. He agreed to give thirty lectures in English, a language he had studied with a tutor in Vienna. He left straight from a Thursday meeting of the Vienna Academy, went by way of a meeting in Leipzig and a steamer to New York, crossed America by train in four days and nights, and came home through Yellowstone and Chicago. The trip took about two months. Back in Vienna he wrote it up as a comic essay and put it at the end of Populäre Schriften (Popular Writings), a collection of his lectures and essays published in Leipzig later that year.
It is a travel essay, not a physics lesson. Boltzmann writes about his stomach, the dry town of Berkeley where he had to buy his wine in Oakland and drink it in secret, the sung menus of his boarding house, the millionaire Phoebe Hearst's hacienda, the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, and the American sleeping car. He quotes Schiller constantly, because 1905 was the centenary of the poet's death, and he expects the reader to catch the lines. The encyclopedia he mentions at the start is Felix Klein's Encyclopedia of the Mathematical Sciences, for which he was writing the article on the theory of gases; Zermelo, the colleague he did not want writing it instead, had attacked his work.
Boltzmann died the following September, by suicide, on holiday at Duino near Trieste. Nothing in the essay foreshadows it.
This edition is translated from the German of the 1905 book. His English words and his phonetic attempts at English are kept as he wrote them, and his Schiller quotations are translated. One sentence, a joke about Black railway workers, and its punchline a page later have been left out.
A German Professor's Journey into Eldorado
I have been to America several times, and once each to Constantinople, Athens, Smyrna and Algiers, so people have often asked me to write up some of my travels for print. It always seemed too trivial to bother with. But my most recent trip, to California, was something rather special, so here goes: a little chat about it.
Please don't think I'm saying you have to go to California to see beautiful and interesting things and enjoy yourself. A hike in the lovely mountains of our own homeland can give you as much pleasure as a human heart has room for. You can be as happy as a king over a perfectly simple meal. But a trip to California is champagne, Veuve Clicquot, and oysters.
The first part of my journey was all haste, and so it will be told in haste. On June 8th I attended the Thursday session of the Vienna Academy of Sciences as usual. As I was leaving, a colleague noticed that I wasn't heading for the Bäckerstraße, the way I always do, but toward the Stubenring, and asked where I was going. "To San Francisco," I said, keeping it short.
At the restaurant in the Northwest Station I ate, in perfect comfort, roast young pork with sauerkraut and potatoes, and drank a few glasses of beer with it. My memory for numbers is usually decent, but it has never once managed to keep count of my glasses of beer.
Nobody who knows anything about travel will be surprised that I'm talking about eating and drinking. It isn't just one factor among others. It's the hinge everything turns on. The most important thing on a journey is to keep your body healthy through the whole variety of unfamiliar influences, and above all your stomach, and above all the spoiled stomach of a Viennese. No Viennese can eat his last goulash with little dumplings without a pang. The Swiss pours all his homesickness into the memory of the cow-herding song and the cowbells, and the Viennese pours his into smoked pork with dumplings. "Don't say old age has made me childish; it found me a true child still."
When I'd finished my meal, my wife and my children arrived with my luggage, already packed. A last goodbye, and off I went, first to the meetings of the Academy Cartel in Leipzig, which began at ten the next morning. On the train I cleaned myself up as well as I could (how I could have used the washing rooms of the American railroads!). When the train pulled in at Leipzig I jumped straight into a cab and arrived at the session right on time.
At the gate of the great hall I happened to meet my colleague Credner, who was also on his way to the meeting. He was kind enough to help me carry my bags, which I hadn't found anywhere to drop, up to the anteroom of the meeting chamber.
I didn't go to these cartel meetings without some fear, because a matter was going to come up that could turn out very bitter for me.
Will it bore the reader if I take him around a workshop of scientific labor for a little while, to show him how it's set up and explain a bit of how it works? I hope not. These days there's hardly an educated person who hasn't toured some big ironworks, or leather factory, or glassworks recommended in Baedeker, and I find satisfying our curiosity about how the things we use every day get into the shapes we know so well just as entertaining as it is instructive. So why shouldn't I assume some curiosity about the workings of a factory that, I dare say, matters more to human culture than the biggest leather works, and, I hope, is not so leathery?
Several German academies and learned societies have banded together to hold joint meetings every year and discuss matters of general importance. That is the Academy Cartel. Some years ago it decided to give financial support to a large publishing project, the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences. Mathematics grew enormously in bulk during the last century, and every author has his own notation and often writes so obscurely that only his closest colleagues can follow him, and only with the greatest effort. Yet buried in this obscure literature, often nearly impossible to find, scattered all over the world, there is an immense amount that is useful, valuable even to the practical man, and almost indispensable.
The job of the encyclopedia is to collect all this material in good order and to present it as clearly as possible. It should make everything achieved in mathematics easy for the mathematician to find, and at the same time build a bridge to practice, bringing mathematics closer to the practical man and practice closer to the mathematician. The need for such an encyclopedic summary of the mathematical literature is so glaringly obvious that Professor Klein in Göttingen called it a "mathematical public convenience."
A project like this wouldn't be nearly so difficult if all it took were listing the most prominent achievements without looking at them too critically, and registering the most important things, which are of course also the best known. But suppose you want to dig everything genuinely useful out of hiding in every field, throw out everything unimportant, achieve the greatest possible completeness in citing the literature, and present it all in a clear form that's convenient for the reader. Then the difficulties look almost frightening to anyone who has ever so much as peeked into the mathematical literature. Professor Klein, whom I just mentioned, was drawn to it. The academies put up the money for printing costs, authors' fees and travel allowances, and Klein and his scientific staff do the work.
For each special field, one has to find, among all the nations of the earth, the person who can handle it best. And in fact Germans and French, Russians and Japanese all work together in harmony. The person chosen is often a great personage with plenty of money and little time, perhaps not too much appetite for work either, but all the more stubbornness. First he has to be talked into promising a contribution. Then he has to be instructed and persuaded, by every art of persuasion, to write the contribution so that it fits into the frame of the whole. And last but not least, he has to keep his promise on time.
The debates take hours: should we run an article now, though it would fit better later, simply because we happen to have it and the ones that were supposed to come before it are still missing? Klein himself and his apostles travel to every country in the world, sparing no expense, so that the man who owes an article gets no relief from the full force of a personal talk. One gap stayed open for a long time because the person chosen for it, a Russian officer with a mathematical education, was shut up in Port Arthur. I've sat through many such encyclopedia meetings, and German playwrights could learn something from their dramatic excitement.
Now, back to myself. When Klein first asked me for an encyclopedia article, I refused for a long time. At last he wrote to me: "If you won't do it, I'll give it to Zermelo." Zermelo happens to hold exactly the opposite view from mine, and that view shouldn't become the one that sets the tone in the encyclopedia. So I answered by return mail: "Before the Pestalutz does it, I'll do it myself." (All quotations, mostly from Schiller, in honor of the Schiller year, are in quotation marks. Look them up if you dare.)
Now the time has come when my article is due. I would have liked to recover from the strains of travel in the country in September, but I gave my word, so in September I'll have to be rooting through the literature, and finishing the article together with a small cohort of Vienna physicists. "Eternity to oaths once sworn." Professor Wirtinger seems to have had the same experience, because for the emblem of the encyclopedia he drew a mousetrap: the bacon lures, and the professor is caught.
But what draws people so irresistibly to this whole enterprise? There's no special fame in it, except the satisfaction of having done something useful, and I won't even mention the money. What makes Klein, with a psychological insight that philosophers might envy, hit the sore spot in each person he has his eye on, the exact spot where that person can be talked around? Nothing but idealism. And if we open our eyes, we find idealism everywhere, all the way to the Pacific. There two fat white towers greet us, the Lick Observatory, the work of an idealist who was also a hundred-times millionaire. More about that later. I have wondered for a long time which is stranger: that in America millionaires are idealists, or that idealists become millionaires. Happy the land where millionaires think ideally and idealists become millionaires! With all due honor, of course, to smoked pork with dumplings. Idealists everywhere need a good stomach.
The idealism of Klein and his colleagues bore good fruit. Right after the first installments appeared, the print run had to be increased. A French translation has been started, and an English one will soon follow. The academies made a good bet, and the bookseller did good business.
The Berlin Academy of Sciences, unfortunately, doesn't belong to the cartel and takes no part in the project. It also wasn't represented at all at the meteorologists' congress in Southport or at the solar research congress in St. Louis. I fear that by this principle of taking no part in anything it didn't start itself, it will harm itself and Germany even more than it harms science. It annoyed me when, at Southport and St. Louis, the French were always given first place among the foreigners (the non-English). We Germans surely don't have to take second place to them! But what could I do, as an Austrian? If only Hann had been there among the meteorologists, whom everyone missed so! But he can't be talked into traveling either!
Once I get to chatting, I let my tongue run entirely free. So I won't keep quiet about the fact that an American colleague spoke of a general decline of Berlin. Indeed, in the days of Weierstrass, Kronecker, Kummer, Helmholtz and Kirchhoff, American mathematicians and physicists mostly went to Berlin to study. Now they prefer Cambridge and Paris. And by learning less from the Germans, America declines in turn, and the world with it. That colleague also claimed that a good deal would have gone better if I hadn't turned down the call to Berlin. Certainly not through my lectures, least of all; but a single person, working with Klein's idealism and Klein's nerve, can carry real weight in appointments and new creations. Some who couldn't be had could have been had if someone had really wanted them. A small cog that always works properly in the right place can accomplish a lot.
If I linger this long in every city the size of Leipzig, I won't get far. "But you shouldn't count the inhabitants, you should weigh them." By which I mean, of course, their intellectual importance.
After some very congenial, intimate dinners, and one official one at which I met in person for the first time the Saxon minister of education, Seydewitz, under whom I had served as professor for two years, I went on to Bremen, and from there to New York with a Hohenzollern prince. That isn't to be understood as if I'd been honored to accompany this prince on a trip to America. He simply carried me on his back. It was Crown Prince Wilhelm on the way out, and Kaiser Wilhelm II on the way back.
Dear reader! I'm in a great hurry, but I can't bring myself to dispose of the voyage from Bremen to New York with that banal joke alone. The great ocean liners are among the most admirable things man has ever made, and a trip on one seems more beautiful every time you repeat it. The wonderful roaring sea, different every day and every day more astonishing! Today white with foam, wild and storming. Look at that ship over there! Now the waves have swallowed it! No! Already the keel rises again in triumph.
Tomorrow the weather is calm, the sea smooth but fog-gray, and the sky fog-gray too, the way you'd paint melancholy. Then the sun breaks out of the fog, and yellow and red sparks dance on the waves between the deep black patches of the cloud shadows, and golden light marries darkness. And then the whole sky is blue again, and the sea, azure and white, shines with such overwhelming brilliance that you have to close your eyes. Only on chosen days does it dress in its loveliest gown, the ultramarine blue, a color so dark and yet so luminous, edged with milk-white foam as if with lace! I once laughed when I read that a painter searched days and nights for a single color. Now I don't laugh at it anymore. Looking at this color of the sea, I have wept. How can a mere color make us cry? Then again there is the glitter of moonlight, or the phosphorescence of the sea, in pitch-black night! To give any idea of all these glories, you would have to be a painter, and then you still couldn't do it.
If anything deserves our admiration even more than this beauty of nature, it is the skill of man, who has won such a complete victory in the struggle with this infinite sea, a struggle that has been going on since the days of the Phoenicians and much longer. How ruthlessly the keel cuts through the flood, how the sea god foams wildly under the boring screw! Truly, the highest wonder of nature is the inventive mind of man!
If I were asked, as Solon once was, who was the happiest of mortals, I would name Columbus without hesitation. Not that other discoveries don't equal his, that of the German Gutenberg for one. But happiness depends in part on the effect on the senses, and that must have been highest for Columbus! I can never land in America without a certain feeling of envy toward him, or perhaps better, a feeling of bliss that I can share a small part of his joy. True, Columbus didn't travel on the Kronprinz Wilhelm, and he didn't see New York with his bodily eye either. But with his mind's eye he may have seen more than we do: the New York of a hundred, two hundred years from now!
That is why Columbus has become the prototype of all discoverers. His "ever, ever westward" stands for their perseverance, his "Land, land!" for the joy of success, and his whole deed for the conviction that life is not the highest of goods. "If you don't stake your life, the highest prize can never be won."
Not only the sense of beauty but all the other senses too find full satisfaction on a sea voyage. A rich and good kitchen looks after taste, a quite decent orchestra after hearing. Our Viennese composers often march out here again, not the very greatest, of course, but Strauss, Ivanovici, Waldteufel and many others. The "Blue Danube" waltz was warmly applauded over the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. And truly, when we think of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven, we can say of the Danube, as Schiller said of the Ilm, that "its gentler waves, as they flowed past, overheard many an immortal song."
So there is nothing cozier than life on board ship, especially for the man to whom a god has given immunity to seasickness, and who can look with a calm mind on so many people stretched out flat. The fun reaches its peak when, thanks to some hydrodynamic accident, a wave suddenly and unexpectedly splashes over the side, and the half-dozing sufferers jump up shrieking.
And when I sail into the harbor of New York, I'm always seized by a kind of intoxication. Those towering buildings and the Statue of Liberty rising above everything with her torch! And all around, the whistling and singing of the ships, all at once: one a harsh warning, another a startled cry, one whistling cheerfully, another wailing mournfully in fourths. And over there, the inimitable tones of the sirens! If I were a musician, I would compose a symphony: The Harbor of New York.
But at that time I had no time for sentimentality!
I had arranged right away at Hoboken for a cab to take me first to the office of the Southern Pacific Railroad and then directly from there to the station, all for 3 dollars. But at the office I learned that the special express train, for which I had a reduced fare, runs only twice a week, and that I would have to wait two days in New York. So I sent my cab on to the Westminster Hotel and had time to knock around New York for two days.
It isn't boring there, either. What rich material for entertainment and observation even a simple streetcar ride offers! No tickets are issued, there are no rules against overcrowding, and no different prices. The conductor spots every new passenger with a hawk's eye. The passenger presses 5 cents into his hand, he gives a pull on a cord, and the payment is registered on a counter mounted up in the car. At the same moment a bell rings that everyone present can hear. If you have a seat near the driver, you can admire feats of leadership that surely can't fall much short of those of a Napoleon I or a Moltke. How wildly fast a clear stretch is covered, how the car stops dead in front of an automobile (for they simply swing in a sharp curve around the carriages and streetcars): all of this you should go and see in person, along with a few other things worth seeing in New York.
On the third day things went all the faster. In four days and four nights I got from New York to San Francisco. You are simply hurled along, shot forward, you might say. The jolts you take as you walk through the endlessly long train to the dining car, the observation car and so on are not exactly pleasant. The observation cars are completely open at the back. You can sit on the railing at the end or lean out over it, and all you have to do is take care not to fall off at a sudden jerk.
The landscape was mostly monotonous, admittedly, but even watching the speed of the trip directly is interesting. When you look backward from the observation car, the rails look like an endless ribbon being pulled out from under the car at furious speed. The ride on the huge wooden causeway straight across the Salt Lake was interesting too, and so were the wide fields before and after it, covered with salt crystals as if with snow. Toward the end of the trip, the crossing of the Sierra Nevada is wonderful. It reminds you of the Semmering, though not quite so picturesque, but far more grand in the length of the line and the height of the mountains.
Thanks to my delay in New York, I got to Berkeley too late. The summer school began on the 26th, and I arrived only on the evening of the 26th. Since that day was frittered away with nothing but opening speeches, enrollments and so on, I wouldn't have missed a single hour if I had started the next day at 9 in the morning. But I declared myself unable to do that. The effect of four days of shaking and hurtling only showed itself now. On steady ground I couldn't take a single step with confidence, and at night in bed I kept waking up in fright that I wasn't being shaken, and yet I dreamed of being shaken.
Now I have to confess that I always have a little stage fright before the first lecture. Here it was worse, since I was supposed to speak English. On the trip I'd had less chance to practice English conversation than I'd hoped. The Germans who could have spoken English switched back to German after a few English words, and the real Englishmen said nothing at all.
My English conversation followed this pattern. Me: When lunch will be served? He: ieeöö. Me: I beg you, could you say me, at what hour lunch will be served? His gargling is now a good fifth lower: aoouu. I realize my plan of attack has failed, and cry out in despair: Lönch, lanch, lonch, launch, and so on. I produce vowels you would search for in vain in Gutenberg's type case. Now his face shows some understanding: Ah, loanch? Now the bridge of understanding is built. Me: When? at what hour? When o'clock? He: Half past one! We have understood each other. And now I was supposed to give thirty lectures in this language! So I declared myself unable on Tuesday, June 27th, and only began on Wednesday. At the first lecture I was timid, but at the second I was already more at ease. And when I finally heard that the students understood me well, and even found my presentation very clear and orderly, I soon felt quite at home.
I can't help thanking my English teacher in Vienna, Miss May O'Callaghan, for this success. Without her tireless efforts to help my unwilling tongue along, I couldn't have achieved it. With what pride I used the words Blackboard and Chalk, as though I'd known them all my life, when I had to get myself some chalk that would actually write and a decent board! How well the pronunciation of Algebra, Differential Calculus, Chemistry, natural Philosophy and so on came off!
Yes, I even owe an excellent lobster salad to my diligence. The menu said lobstersalad. I remembered at once the lesson where I could hardly believe that Hummer is called lobster. So, bring on the lobster! And it tasted absolutely superb.
The University of Berkeley, where I was to teach, is the most beautiful thing you can imagine. A park of one square kilometer, with trees that have surely seen centuries, or is it millennia? Who could say so quickly! In it are handsome, modernly equipped buildings, though many are already too small. But they're putting up new ones. Building lots and money are there, after all.
There is a certain philosophical air over the place. The name Berkeley is that of a highly respected English philosopher, whom people even credit with inventing the greatest folly a human brain ever hatched, philosophical idealism, which denies the existence of the material world. That is idealism in a different sense from the one I used the word in. Philosophy there has a building of its own. Not a building made of phrases and pipe dreams (pardon me, I meant logical inferences and rational concepts) but a genuine building of stone and wood, where the psyche is investigated with tuning forks, color disks, kymographs and recording drums.
Another building mattered more to me. A speculative innkeeper had read in the encyclopedia that Berkeley was an English bishop whose residence was called Cloyne Court. So he built a boarding house for professors and called it Cloyne Court, and that's where I lived too. He hadn't put any weight on a certain outward resemblance to an old English bishop's seat. It stood on Euclid Avenue, and it had the exact shape of a parallelepiped, without a trace of anything non-Euclidean. But inside it was comfortable. I had a small bedroom, a somewhat larger study, and a bathroom, all electrically lit. In the rooms you could run hot water through some thick pipes and so get moderate heating, which in July, at the latitude of Palermo, was often welcome, since the wind blowing in from the Pacific Ocean is sometimes so icy. On the other hand, in Berkeley the winter is only a little colder than the summer, just rich in rain, which is completely absent in summer. The food was good. At least you could usually choke down something from one of the dishes put in front of you. There were no printed menus. The waitresses, who mostly wore glasses, rattled off the menu before every meal, so that it sounded more like a monotonous song sung in a muffled voice.
"But life's unmixed joy is granted to no mortal" — not even on a trip to Berkeley. First, the stomach gets the floor. Until then I had never drunk water, neither from open bottles nor from the sealed ones filled with river water and carbonic acid, and that had kept my stomach healthy despite the unfamiliar food. But Berkeley is abstinent. Drinking or serving beer and wine is strictly forbidden. I had no intention of dying of thirst, so I tried the water, though without ice, since maybe it's healthier in Berkeley than in New York or St. Louis. Sadly, no! My stomach revolted, and once, when I had to keep my clothes on all night so I wouldn't have to keep taking them off and putting them back on, I got up the courage, doubled over with colic, to ask a colleague where I could find a wine shop. The effect reminded me of a scene in the smoking compartment of the train between Sacramento and Oakland. An Indian had joined us, and with complete innocence he asked about a (since he was an Indian, let's say) bayadere house in San Francisco. Most of the people in the compartment were from San Francisco, and girls with the motto "give me money, I give you honey" certainly exist in San Francisco, but everyone made a baffled, embarrassed face. My colleague made exactly the same face when I asked about a wine shop. He looked around nervously to see whether anyone was listening, sized me up to decide whether he could trust me completely, and finally came out with an excellent Californian wine dealer in Oakland. I did manage to smuggle in a whole battery of wine bottles, and the road to Oakland became very familiar to me from then on. My stomach said amen to this too and recovered with admirable speed, even though my diet otherwise stayed the same. But I had to drink my glass of wine after dinner carefully hidden, so that I almost began to feel I was indulging a vice. So temperance is well on its way to adding a new species to hypocrisy, of which the world already has plenty.
No sooner was my stomach soothed than other troubles showed up. My tiresome asthma had always disappeared as soon as I set foot on a steamer, and it stayed gone until I stood on European soil again. This time was no different, until I came to California. But the very thing people praise about its climate, the damp coolness, lured the uninvited guest, my asthma, back onto my neck.
Then I got a boil under my arm (I think from a newly bought shirt that I put on without washing it). I had to have it lanced at Roosevelt Hospital. It was of the highest interest to get to know an American hospital so thoroughly, one that is no less elegant than the Kaiser Wilhelm II (the steamship, of course), but it cost 35 dollars. It was the most expensive luxury I allowed myself on the whole trip, and it robbed me of a less doubtful pleasure.
You see, Tuesday, the 4th of July, was independence day, the greatest American holiday, and since I had no lecture on Saturday or Sunday, all I had to do was skip Monday's or make it up later, and I would have had four days free for a quick visit to Yosemite Valley. That had to be dropped. Instead, on Sunday, July 2, I heard the half hour of music that is given free of charge every Sunday in the Greek Theater. This theater is a faithful copy of the theater of Sophocles in Athens, only, it seemed to me, made even bigger. Since it never rains in Berkeley in summer, and yet the sun also shines little because of the frequent fog, the completely uncovered theater does good service. Only the music was infinitely thin in that architecturally beautiful space, ringed with eucalyptus and live oaks. That's where Mahler should have been, with the Philharmonic, playing the Third Symphony, so that the trees would have trembled with delight and the Pacific Ocean, listening closely, would have gone stiller still. The people there wouldn't have understood it anyway.
On Tuesday I watched, from the roof of Cloyne Court, the magnificent fireworks that are set off every year to celebrate independence day. Cloyne Court stands on the hillside and has a view of San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate, Mount Tamalpais and so on, as fine as the old English bishop could hardly have had from his own Cloyne Court.
The good Lord himself seemed to take pleasure in the celebration, because at sunset he went first with a fireworks display worthy of his own greatness and that of his creation. Once again, as so often on this American trip, I wished I could paint!
When the last rays of the sunset had vanished and the lights of San Francisco were shining brightly across the bay, the fireworks of mankind began. Now a colored light would flare up wonderfully at our feet, now a glowing star would blaze far out on the horizon. Where should you look? In Berkeley and San Francisco it shines and flames, but over there in Oakland, what a beautiful effect! You've barely looked, and you've missed an even more beautiful one in Alameda. I resolved to set off a little fireworks display in my garden every evening of the 4th of July. The struggle of Washington and his band was not merely of local patriotic importance but of world-historical importance.
Schiller says somewhere: "A few thousand more fellows like me, and Germany will become a republic that will make Rome and Sparta look like convents." That never happened, of course. A few thousand fellows like you? The world hasn't produced a single other one. But ideas don't die. The republic that makes Rome and Sparta look like convents does exist, though across the ocean, and how colossal it is, and how it grows! "Freedom hatches colossi."
After that I was invited somewhere every Saturday and Sunday. The first time was at Mrs. Hearst's, at her magnificent country estate near Livermore. Who is Mrs. Hearst? It's not easy to make that clear to a European. The closest you could come to the truth would be to say that she is the University of Berkeley. In Europe the alma mater is an ancient ideal figure. In America she's a real lady and, what matters most, one with real millions, of which she gives away quite a few every year to expand the university. My American trip, of course, was paid for out of her money too. The president of the university (what we would call the rector, except that he holds the job for life) is only the executive organ of the trustees, and Mrs. Hearst stands at their head. The current one had to bargain for a list of liberties when he was appointed, so that he could still do a few things for the university on his own authority.
Even worse — but how can I say worse? Someone who owes such lovely hours to Mrs. Hearst's hospitality, as I do, how could he claim that an alma mater like that is anything bad? So let me say the situation is starker still at Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto, which I visited for one day.
Mr. Leland Stanford senior had directed the building of the first Pacific railroad, that is, the first railroad to create a continuous rail connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific. In Congress, where he was also influential, he knew how to put the importance of the enterprise in the right light, and he got Congress to resolve to bear half the construction costs, for which it reserved certain sovereign rights while essentially leaving the income to the railroad's builder. Mr. Stanford then founded a company with a completely different name, of which he was again the head, and which was to supply the railroad construction company with all its materials and labor. Since he was the head of both companies, he easily arranged that the first bought everything from the second at double the price, so that the state nominally paid half and in fact paid the whole thing, while he took in all the revenue.
When he had become enormously rich, a sudden misfortune snatched away his only son, for whom he had piled it all up. He, and especially Mrs. Stanford, fell into a kind of religious madness. In Europe, when an old lady goes a little off her head, she buys a dozen cats or a parrot. Here she summoned architects of the first rank (what can't you get for money!) and built a university that will surely be a blessing to future generations.
While the University of Berkeley is built on the pavilion system, Stanford University is laid out on a single unified plan, architecturally handsome, though it strikes me as impractical for teaching. Architects are the same everywhere. The university church is especially splendid, richly decorated with murals and ceiling paintings, stained glass and sculpture. The organ, which was played while I was there, sounded so wonderful that at those tones I was glad to be devout.
After her husband's death Mrs. Stanford was for a long time the university all by herself. Now she too has died, though not before making generous provision for the university in her will.
At Stanford University, it is said, a professor of economics once let loose in his lectures against founders' swindles. The president thought he'd win points with Mrs. Stanford by dismissing this professor at once. But Mrs. Stanford herself was magnanimous enough to call him back and to reprimand the overeager president.
That at such universities the male and female elements are equal among the students and on the faculty goes without saying, and I want to give only one drastic proof of how far the rule of the feminine extends. One of my colleagues on the teaching staff (I kept her name), Miss Lilian Seraphine Hyde, a not unattractive lady, gave a course, announced in exactly the same way as mine and, as we would say, two hours a week, on the preparation of salads and dessert. I can still show you the course catalog today.
All the rooms of the university swarm with ladies, who can't be much fewer in number than the male students. What stands out especially is that every room seems to have a lady's hat deposited in it. In the professors' room, a lady's hat. In the room that serves as washing room, telephone booth and something else besides, a lady's hat. In the darkroom, a lady's hat. In fact, when I left, a little weakened and confused after the operation I mentioned, I nearly put on a lady's hat that was lying there instead of my own, in my absent-mindedness.
But now back to Mrs. Hearst, the alma mater berkeleyensis. As I said, she had invited me, along with a number of other professors teaching at the summer school, to her country estate near Livermore, a jewel of the kind that luxury, wealth and good taste can create only in such lavishly endowed nature. At the railway station carriages received us, and soon we were driving through a rather fantastic but not unattractive entrance gate into a park of fabulous trees and flowers. Here wealth turns into water, and where water isn't spared, California produces a bloom of flowers that keeps flowering just the same, summer and winter. We drove a long time through the park, though for me still too short, and it also offers the finest viewpoints toward Mount Diablo and Mount Hamilton. Finally we reached the residence. It is built in Portuguese-Mexican style, a ring of buildings around a courtyard closed off by heavy iron gates, obviously a kind of fortress. In the middle of the courtyard stands an antique marble well, which the owner herself bought in Verona and had shipped all the way to the Pacific. The whole estate is named after it: "Hacienda del pozzo di Verona."
My neighbor in the carriage explained to me that the owner had specially engaged a German architect named Schweinfurt, who created the place after studying all the old Spanish and Portuguese buildings in Mexico. I remarked: "He must have had good taste!" My companion replied: "Yes, and it killed him." I asked: "How did that happen?" He said: "The Californian wines tasted too good to him, so he kept drinking until he died." These Californians have a dreadful idea of their wines, which are admittedly very strong. In the end it probably wasn't even that bad. I'm going to die some day too, and then I'll stop drinking, so I'll also keep on drinking until I die.
The inside of the hacienda is a little treasure chest full of the most magnificent works of art and rarities, which the owner has bought up in every region of the old and new world, the most original mixture of Greek and Roman, medieval, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese and Indian curiosities.
At dinner I sat at Mrs. Hearst's right hand, the only European present. The first course was blackberries. I said no thank you. Then came a melon, which the hostess had salted for me with her own hands, quite appetizingly. I said no thank you again. Then came oat-meal, an indescribable paste of oat flour that you might perhaps use to fatten geese in Vienna, though I think probably not, since Viennese geese would hardly eat it. By then, when I turned down the melon, I had already noticed a slightly ungracious look from the alma mater. Even an alma mater is proud of her kitchen. So I choked it down with my face turned away, and I thank God that nothing human happened to me in the process. That is the unpleasant thing about being invited to someone's home in America. In restaurants you may leave what you don't eat on the plate. But what do you do when facing a hostess who is proud of the quality of American cooking in general and her own in particular? Luckily, poultry came next, and stewed fruit, and a few other things that let me cover up the taste again.
After dinner we went into the music room, a space, if I estimate right, about as big as the Bösendorfer Hall, but with what fantastic baroque decoration! For beauty I couldn't compare it to any of the smaller Viennese concert halls. Word of my wretched piano playing had reached the hacienda. I was asked to open the concert. After some protesting I sat down at the grand piano, a Steinway of the very highest price class. I put my fingers on the keys without any idea what was coming. My ear had perhaps heard a piano with such beauty of tone at some concert, but my fingers had never touched one. If I had ever regretted the hardships of my Californian journey, from that moment on I no longer did. I played a Schubert sonata. At first, admittedly, the action felt a little strange to me, but how easily one gets used to the good! The second part of the first movement already went well, and in the second movement, an Andante, I forgot myself. It wasn't I who played the melody, it was the melody guiding my fingers. I had to hold myself back by force from playing the Allegro as well, and that was just as well, because my technique would have given out there. After me a student of Barth's in Berlin played, with as much technique as musical understanding. Among those present was also a professor of music from Milwaukee, a martial, manly figure, surely an excellent bear hunter, but also thoroughly educated in music. He too had studied piano with Barth, though you can't say he learned it. He knew that Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and that the ninth of them is the last. He did me an undeserved honor. During a debate about whether music can also be humorous, he asked me to play the Scherzo from the Ninth. Was I supposed to say I couldn't, to a professor from Milwaukee? So I got humorous too and said: "Gladly, but I'd ask him to play the timpani. It comes off better when a second person joins in." After that he went quiet with his request.
I slept that night at the hacienda in a wonderful bedroom with an attached bathroom, with a Black servant at my exclusive disposal, who also polished the boots. Right above my bed hung a picture of a guardian angel of ideal beauty. I love art especially when it also serves an idea. What use to me in living quarters is even the most beautiful picture of the Battle of Aboukir? But a guardian angel above the place where I rest expresses, in a way, the host's wish that I sleep well in his house. Yes, I'm superstitious. Just then I was suffering badly from asthma and had already had doubts about going to the hacienda. This guardian angel comforted me, and truly, from that night on the malice of the asthma was broken.
The next day there was no end to the sights to see in the house and yard, forest and field. Among other things we drove out to giant live oaks with enormous, widely spreading branches. Over the boughs of one of them a whole hut had been built, with a staircase leading up to it, a kind of Hunding's hut from Wagner's Valkyrie, one story up. I didn't drive back until the afternoon and reached Berkeley late in the evening, so that I could show up in the lecture hall on time the next day.
The following Saturday and Sunday were devoted to the Lick Observatory. I went to the friendly little town of San Jose already on Friday afternoon, where some of the streets are avenues of palms. There you don't just stroll under palms, you ride the tramway, the bicycle and the automobile under palms. The next day at seven in the morning I set out in a rather beat-up stagecoach for Mount Hamilton, which is about as high above sea level as the Semmering Pass, but seems higher because the starting point of the trip lies only a little above sea level. The road is very good and winds up in switchbacks, rising slowly and evenly the whole way, between vineyards and orchards, and also forest and meadows. At this time of year, though, the meadows hold only hay. There the cows eat hay in summer and fresh grass in winter.
My coachman, a gnarled, grumpy old man, is also the postal official. Right after leaving the inn he sorts the mail with a lot of grumbling, some sacks of it lying at our feet. Soon we're outside the town. Out in front of the gate of a big fenced property a handsome dog greets us with lively barking. My coachman sticks a few letters into a newspaper bundle and skillfully throws it into the mutt's mouth, and the dog immediately slips away with it under the fence. This kind of postal service repeats itself at very many properties. At others a wooden pole with a big nail is planted in the ground. Without stopping the wagon, my coachman deftly takes down the mail meant to be sent out and hangs the arrivals on it. Only twice, where baskets of food or other large parcels had to be handed in, were there maids waiting, whose race I'm too little of an anthropologist to say. We changed horses twice and lunched once (but please don't ask me how!).
Around half past one we arrived at the top, at the observatory. Only the younger astronomers were there, with Dr. Tucker at their head, since Director Campbell and the older ones were already in Spain preparing to observe the total solar eclipse. Since I myself was still planning at that time to go and see it, I asked Dr. Tucker where the eclipse would be observed. "In Daroca-Ateca-Almazan," he answered. I was a little alarmed and said without thinking: "That's all Greek to me." But he replied calmly that no, it was in fact a Spanish village, northeast of Madrid. I don't know, the name made no favorable impression on me. Spain was starting to seem a little Greek to me.
Then they showed me all the equipment of the magnificently outfitted observatory, which, thanks to its favorable location, can also be put to very fruitful use. The most impressive is the giant telescope with the 28-inch lens ground by Alvan Clark ("the big glass," they simply call it), with which one of the most interesting astronomical discoveries of modern times, that of the two moons of Mars, was made. Inside the huge pier that carries the telescope lies buried the citizen Lick, who had the entire observatory built out of his private means. Isn't that idealistic? I see through him. He surely knew that it makes no difference to him where his bones rest, but he wanted to give the world a visible sign of what the ultimate goal of a millionaire should be. Truly! He bought himself immortality with his money.
If I were a poet, I would like to write, under the title "Two Idealists," the meeting of Schiller and Lick in heaven. Schiller has wisdom say to wealth: I don't need you. Lick proves the opposite. True, the enthusiasm you get for money is only second-rate enthusiasm, and the love you get for money isn't even third-rate. But a Steinway grand you can get for money, an Amati violin, a Böcklin, and now immortality too.
Here I'll tell one more story that connects idealism and money-making. The great American physicist Rowland had given a speech saying that a scholar must not strive to make money. A year later he feels unwell, has himself examined by a doctor, and learns that he has three more years to live at most. He had a wife and four children with no provision made for them. In the conflict of duties, love of family wins. He invents a printing telegraph, has it patented, and so, when he did in fact die soon afterward, he secured for his widow a fortune of 200,000 dollars, about a million crowns. But he himself gave the lie to the principle of his speech. Do you know, dear reader, what I admire most about Rowland? That he had such a lucrative discovery ready at hand right away. May he shake Schiller's hand in heaven too!
The American businessman, though, is strictly realistic about making money. A very sensible merchant, to whom I explained the purpose of my trip, absolutely could not understand why I was traveling all the way to San Francisco if my earnings only cover the travel costs.
I had been dreaming in front of the pier that carries the giant telescope on its crown and the bones of the citizen Lick in its belly. Now we went on through all the rooms of the observatory. A rich body of material is put to excellent use here. Every zone of the sky has its own box, and in it every star has its own drawer, so that all the observations can be found again right away and used. The contents of the drawers grow rapidly. It's no wonder that the astronomers don't get bored with so much work in this mountain solitude. Besides, there are of course pretty women astronomers there too.
After I had also seen Mars that evening through the big telescope, large and bright, almost like the disk of the moon, we went back down into the valley in the night. The boundary of the fog was remarkable. We had the starry sky above us and, below us, the fog like a flat sea. With a jolt the wagon entered the fog, the stars vanished, and the light of the carriage lantern reached only a few steps ahead.
The next day, a Sunday, I used to look around San Jose, but I came back early in the afternoon so I'd have plenty of time to sleep and prepare for my lecture.
My next Sunday excursion was no less interesting. It took me to the seaside resorts of Monterey, Pacific Grove and Santa Cruz on the Pacific. I had once before gone far enough out from San Francisco to enjoy a full view of the great ocean, but now I had the chance to admire the rocky shores and the play of the waves over a wide stretch of coast. But far more than any of that, I was interested in a little house in Pacific Grove, where Professor Loeb has his laboratory.
What a difference there is between the giant works of industry and the workshops of science! What impressive colossi the ocean liners are! But once you've traveled on them a few times, it becomes clear that the ship's officers, the engineers and the sailors do the same job every day. In the passenger rooms the same people are always talking about the same things, stretching out in the same deck chairs, and tossing the same discs at the same targets on the upper deck. Enormous bulk, but not a single new idea! In science, too, a good deal has been achieved by sheer mass (we saw that at the Lick Observatory). But what is truly great (our Minister of Education mustn't hear this, of course) is always produced with the smallest means.
It must be grand to command millions for the good of a great people, or to win battles at the head of hundreds of thousands of men. But it seems to me even grander to discover truths, in the humblest of rooms with the humblest of equipment, that will still be the foundation of our knowledge when the memory of those battles can only be dug out of the history books with effort. What is left of the whole Greek and Roman world that is still fully alive today, and works on richer and stronger than ever? The fighters of Marathon were outdone at Vionville and Liaoyang. The people who read Homer or Sophocles for pleasure are dying out, but the Pythagorean theorem and the principle of Archimedes are truly immortal.
Those are my general views. How far they apply to Pacific Grove, only the future will show. The discovery made there put me in serious embarrassment years ago, when it was still brand new. I explained it with great enthusiasm at a social gathering, never suspecting that something so purely factual, with no aim at all of arousing sensual feelings and not even capable of it, could be indecent. Only the sudden, rather conspicuous departure of the lady sitting next to me made me suspect it. Later the same lady sang a very dubious song by Aletter. I couldn't help remarking that I was surprised people considered that decent and my subject indecent. "Well, your subject we don't understand," said the lady, and without thinking I answered, "But Aletter you do understand." That's one of our old hypocrisies, and now the temperance people want to add a new one. I'll have to wriggle a good deal to explain the object of Loeb's research without giving offense.
For a long time people believed that all the chemical compounds characteristic of living organisms, the so-called organic compounds, could only be produced by a special force, the vital force. Today we know that many organic compounds can be assembled from their chemical elements by ordinary chemical reactions, without a trace of vital force. But many still believe that life itself is something quite special, totally different from the chemical processes that accompany it, and that the special effects of life can never be brought about by anything lifeless. Loeb's research has by no means refuted this view, but it has once again put a new weight on the scale against it.
As is well known, there are animal species in which, under certain circumstances, the egg of the female can develop without any fertilization at all (parthenogenesis). Loeb worked with species where this never happens, sea urchins and starfish, and showed that the effects otherwise produced only by male sperm can be produced on their eggs by completely lifeless acids. Eggs exposed under the right conditions to carbonic acid, butyric acid or propyl acetic acid develop exactly like normally fertilized ones.
You can see how important the discovery is: a process that until now was regarded as the result of a special living activity can also be brought about by purely chemical reagents. And if the same holds not only for sea urchins but for higher creatures, all the way up to human beings, what social upheavals will follow! An emancipation of women such as today's women's-rights campaigners never dreamed of. Man simply becomes superfluous. A little bottle filled with skillfully mixed chemicals replaces him entirely. Heredity, too, can then be managed far more rationally than now, when it is subject to so many accidents. Before long we'll find out which mixture produces boys and which girls, and since the boys are perfectly superfluous, only a few specimens will be produced, for the zoological gardens. Then, of course, wine will be superfluous too.
From Pacific Grove I went on to the seaside resort of Santa Cruz, which is remarkable above all because a great many of the vacationers live not in houses but in canvas tents with little canvas windows, rented out like country cottages. Others live in small wooden houses built on boats, which can be rowed first here, then there, in the shallow bays and the rivers that flow into the sea.
In general, the smallness of the houses, almost all built of wood, is surprising everywhere. In Berkeley there are many houses that vividly remind me of the house of the woodcarving farmer near Graz, who had built and whittled it himself out of boards on his little plot of land.
Then I also went to see the so-called big trees, whose age is counted in thousands of years. They show you one trunk, no longer alive, in whose rings you can tell exactly how many thousands of years old it got. I've forgotten again.
The weekdays, apart from Saturday and Sunday, were given over to work, but by no means without amusement. There were many social gatherings, a few of them quite formal. Before one of them, my colleague, who was coming to pick me up, had warned me with true English thoroughness to put on evening dress. When he walked in, I called out to him: "Don't I look fine?" But no, oh dear! I had forgotten to polish my boots. My colleague knew what to do. He led me to a room in the basement, took off his coat, vest and cuffs, found the necessary supplies in a cupboard, and polished my boots himself with real virtuosity. Then he drank from the glass he'd earlier used to drip water onto the polish. How American!
Ladies were not missing from our social circle either. The wives of the Berkeley professors were joined by those of visitors, then the landlady with her charming daughters, one of whom sang delightfully, and other friends. In circumstances like these I often come down, and did come down then, with an illness I haven't yet listed: poetitis. Since I did it for the other illnesses, I'll try to give an idea of how bad it got, and I'll include one of its products here:
To My Wife.
Shall I not chat with strange women, so far from home? Aren't they, of everything here, the most like you? Often I've kissed your picture on cardboard. Oh, forgive me If I've kissed your picture and found it in flesh and blood! Besides, I'm a theorist from my toes to the top of my head, So trust me: the kissing I did was theoretical only.
So forgiveness from all sides, and for the kissing too. It was nothing but a poetic necessity. I'd like to see the man who can finish a poem with nothing but walking together, conversation, tennis and music-making!
By the way, the women in California are strikingly big and strongly built, and since their growth of beard sometimes leaves nothing to be desired, I had to agree with a colleague who said: "Don't you find that the women in America have something masculine about them?" He didn't quite want to agree with me, though, when I replied: "And the men something feminine." That last part applies only to their lack of beards, incidentally. In strength of will, courage, enterprise and firmness of character, they stand their ground as men.
One of the things that broke up the weekdays was the visit of the American Secretary of War, who was passing through San Francisco on his way to the Philippines. Miss Roosevelt was said to be with him, but I never laid eyes on her. The Secretary of War attended a mass meeting in the great live-oak grove of the University of Berkeley. You should have heard the naive roughness, the go-getting spirit and the enthusiasm of the speeches! Just one sample. After a short speech, the mayor of Berkeley introduced the Secretary of War with these words: "This is Mr. Taft! A good Secretary of War, a good citizen, and in every respect a good old fellow." In English it sounds even more familiar: a good old fellow.
Yes, America will still accomplish great things. I believe in this people, even though I saw them at the one activity that suits them least, in the theoretical physics seminar, integrating and differentiating. They went at it about the way I do when I jump over ditches or run down hills, which you have to cross in such numbers on the grounds of Berkeley University.
At last the evening came when I listened for the last time to the monotonous singing of the bespectacled waitresses. When I had cut up my last omelette, my colleague next to me surveyed the number of pieces with a hawk's eye and said: "You've still got half a minute for each piece." Then the railroad grabbed me and tore me away, first to Portland (two nights on the train). Although there was an exposition to tempt me there, I went straight on to Livingston (two more nights in the car). The trip was wonderful, if only it could always have been daytime! The most magnificent sight is Mount Shasta with its high snow-covered head amid subtropical vegetation. I passed many a lake, ringed with mountains and wreathed in forest, next to which the lakes at Gmunden and the Attersee look insignificant. Here you don't see a single house on the shore, and I don't even know whether they all have names yet. About Yellowstone Park I'll say nothing. It's a wonder such as hardly exists anywhere else in the world. Read about it in Baedeker, or look at good pictures of it, or best of all, see it in person if you have enough time, money and good humor. But don't do it the way I did. Go at the beginning of June, when the heat isn't so great yet, and give it two weeks, or better a month, so you can look at everything at leisure and get from astonishment to actual enjoyment.
I had loaded myself with too much of a good thing. Now I was to spend four more nights on the railroad, and I was at the end of my capacity for enjoyment, just as I was at the end of my clean laundry. On top of that, the terrible heat. I always had a towel in my hand (American railroads give you as many as you like, luckily) to wipe off the sweat. Now I understand what a sweat cloth is. Besides, Americans love to seal their railroad cars hermetically, not from fear of drafts, which they don't know, but from fear of soot. The lovely observation cars right at the back, where there's less soot, don't exist on this line. Once I left the window open for a long while in my compartment, which was closer to the front, and got completely black.
Now my stomach catarrh came back, too. In the dining car you can get wine, but only reluctantly, and only after the meal, when most of the guests, especially the ladies, have already left. The first thing you get is a glass of ice water and a slip of paper on which you have to write down everything you want all at once. Then it takes an eternity for anyone even to pick up the slip, and you sit there, your palate dried out by the heat, always next to the ice water. I gave in to temptation (angels would have fallen) and drank the poison. Then suddenly I couldn't get any wine at all. It was explained like this: the whole state of North Dakota is abstinent, and while the train is going through it, no wine may be served. I protested: "What do I care about the state of North Dakota! All I want is to get to Vienna. Take me through the land where the pepper grows, for all I care!" "Oh, we grow plenty of pepper here," they answered. Damn it! Even our strongest curses are ruined here. In the end, for a tip, and a bigger one, and even more discreetly, I did get wine, but it had to be paid for under the table and couldn't appear on the bill of fare.
American railroad companies usually don't add a new car until the existing ones are full, and still the trains are enormously long. Each car has a name, like a ship, or you'd never find your way around at all. I rode in order in the cars Sant Jesabel, Pembina and Vernedal. They teem with people of every nationality and race, who in the great heat are often a bit casually dressed. One baby lay completely naked on the velvet armchair the whole time, and it reminded me of pictures of the Christ child, who of course never lay in a Pullman car. I wanted to tell the mother this as a compliment, but how ugly everything sounds in English: "az de tcheeld djeezus kryst!"
It's lucky I wasn't born an Englishman. I'd never have brought home a bride. You can imagine I was somewhat embarrassed when I proposed. "He looks as if he had to go into the lecture hall," says Mephistopheles. Yes, if only I'd had nothing more to face than the lecture hall, if nothing but Dame Physics and Metaphysica had stood in front of me! But in front of me stood a lovely young girl. The speech came hard. But when I got to the point, the wisdom and good taste of our ancestors came to my aid, who found for the highest of feelings the most beautiful-sounding word too, the word Liebe. As music rules the player at a Steinway grand, so now it was not I who ruled the language, but the language that swept me away, and I achieved a complete success. But if I'd had to say it in genuine English pronunciation, "Ei lowff ju," my chosen one would have run away like chickens from the wheezing breath of the goitrous Styrian who's calling them.
The whole colorful crowd of passengers has to be squeezed into beds in the evening. The arrangement of the American sleeping cars is as follows. A fairly narrow aisle runs through the middle of the whole car. On both sides are upholstered benches, each seating two people. Every passenger is assigned one of these benches. In the evening, the space above each pair of benches on the same side of the aisle, which always face one another, is turned into two beds, one above the other, closed off from the aisle by hanging curtains. The beds run lengthwise, parallel to the direction of travel. You can also have two beds, one above the other, to yourself (a whole compartment), but that costs double. Since you have no drawer, you have to pack your nightclothes, slippers and whatever else you need into your handbag, which the Black porter then puts in the bed. Then you have to undress behind the curtain, but stow your clothes and handbag in the bed itself, and then sleep without suffocating.
Each compartment has only one small opening to the outside, covered by a fine grille, and in hot weather it gets so stuffy that I slept in the costume of that baby, which also saved me the trouble of unpacking my laundry.
So as not to lose my watch, wallet, eyeglasses and so on, I put first my hat, and then all those little things inside it, in the wide-meshed net, the only storage place in the whole bed space. But when he made up the bed, the porter always hung the hat up out of reach, and it was funny how baffled he was that I needed my hat in bed.
The most critical time is the conversion of the benches into beds. You can't sit on the benches anymore, and the bed isn't ready yet. I flee to a washing room, but there one passenger is brushing clouds of dust out of his clothes, and another is splashing water in every direction as he washes. I try to reach the salon car, which many trains don't have anyway, but to get there I'd have to pass through the aisles of seven or eight cars, all closed off on both sides with bed curtains, and these are alive. From their hiding places, now an arm, now a foot, now something softer gives us a shove. On top of that you keep stumbling over the luggage sticking out at the bottom. At last I find room in a compartment that still has its benches intact. On the other side of the aisle there's already a bed whose curtain is in constant motion. There's something to that business about the Eternal Feminine. When I'm signing the students' record books in my Vienna lecture, I only ever see the students' hands, but I recognize every woman's hand immediately. So I was convinced that this curtain hid feminine limbs, and soon it opened, thanks to an incautious movement while undressing, and I saw that I was right.
I escaped many of the discomforts of the morning hours through my habit of getting up early. So I was alone while dressing and washing, and to those who crowded into the washing room later I called out the words from Mozart's Abduction that Bismarck had already quoted: "To outwit me, you'll have to get up early."
The heat and the soot, the stomach catarrh and the thirst had finally made me so tired of traveling that I not only gave up on the solar eclipse but even tried to catch the connection to the Kaiser Wilhelm II, which would bring me home fastest. But a telegraphers' strike had just broken out, and as a result we were six hours late. I flew into a rage over it. But you should see the phlegm of the Americans! They look at the person who's swearing almost with pity, as if to say, the poor man thinks that will help. In my case the conductor said curtly: "We don't want to risk a collision."
In Chicago I had only twelve minutes, and I still had to get from the Canal Street Union Station to the Nickel Plate station. Loaded with luggage, I hurried back and forth without a plan. Two people I had asked for directions hadn't answered. Then a young lady noticed this and asked me obligingly what I wanted. She couldn't give me any directions either, and maybe she didn't even understand my question, but she pointed out a policeman, whom, in my agitation, I hadn't noticed, big as he was. When I called out to her, not out of flattery but from the bottom of my heart, "You are an Angel," I saw only then that she was, feature for feature, the guardian angel from the pozzo di Verona. Could belief in guardian angels be more than a fairy tale? And how does a fairy-tale mood fit into the halls of the Canal Street Union Station in Chicago? So, away from the guardian angel to the guardian of the law, who quickly gave me the information I wanted, so that I still reached the other station in time.
In New York I had one more surprise. The beautiful pier that had led from the railroad to the ferry had burned down, and I had to stumble, still loaded with my luggage, over charred pieces of wood.
In spite of all the obstacles, I reached the Kaiser Wilhelm II in time. When I was aboard with all my luggage, big and small, how my heart leapt for joy!
"Strike up the joyful songs, For the ship is now turned Toward the fatherly hearth, And we're headed home again!"
The return voyage was blessed with the loveliest weather. The good ship's food also restored my stomach completely. I didn't drink a drop of water, and not much beer either, but all the more noble Rüdesheimer. That works out nicely on a ship: if you wobble a little, everyone puts it down to the motion of the ship.
Now just the tiny train ride from Bremen to Vienna, a dashing drive in a Viennese fiacre, and I'm home. Yes, a journey like this has a lot that's interesting and grand. California is beautiful, Mount Shasta is magnificent, Yellowstone Park is marvelous. But by far the most beautiful part of the whole trip is the moment when you're home again.