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Shut your eyes to these sights and your mind to these thoughts. The city was proud and

splendid, lighted at night like the Great White Way in New York. The shop windows were filled

with displays of elegance, and there were swarms of people gazing, and some buying. Tell

yourself that the stories of distress were exaggerated; that the flesh of boys and girls had been

for sale in Nineveh and Baghdad, and was now for sale in London and New York, though

perhaps they used a bit more Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy. Prostitution has been the curse of great

cities ever since they began; swarms of people come piling into them, lured by the hope of easy

wealth, or driven from the land by economic forces which men have never learned to control.

This was something about which Freddi Robin should have been able to speak, he being now

a duly certified Herr Doktpr in the science of economics. He reported that the great

university had left it still a mystery to students. The proper academic procedure was to

accumulate masses of facts, but to consider explanations only historically. You learned that the

three-stage pattern of primitive economic progress as taught by Friedrich List had been

abandoned after the criticisms of anthropologists, and that Roscher's theory of national

economics as a historical category had been replaced by the new historical school of Schmoller.

It was all right for you to know that in ancient Rome the great estates, the latifundia, had been

worked with slave labor, thus driving independent farmers to the city and herding them into

ramshackle five-story tenements which often burned down. But if in the class you pointed out

that similar tendencies were apparent in Berlin, you would be looked at askance by a professor

whose future depended upon his avoidance of political controversy.

To be sure, they were supposed to enjoy academic freedom in Germany, and you might listen

to a Catholic professor in one lecture hall and to a Socialist in the next; but when it came to

promotions, somebody had to decide, and you could hardly expect the authorities to give

preference to men whose teachings fostered that proletarian discontent which was threatening

to rend the country apart. At any rate, that is the way Freddi Robin reported the situation in the

great University of Berlin.

IV

The Budds arrived a week or so before the national elections in September 1930. The city was

in an uproar, with posters and placards everywhere, hundreds of meetings each night, parades

with bands and banners, crowds shouting and often fighting. The tension was beyond anything

that Lanny had ever witnessed; under the pressure of the economic collapse events in Germany

were coming to a crisis, and everybody was being compelled to take sides.

The young people wanted to see these sights. Hansi and Bess must attend a big Communist

gathering the very night of their arrival, and the others went along out of curiosity. The great

hall in the Moabit district was draped with red streamers and banners having the hammer and

sickle in black. Also there were red carnations or rosettes in people's buttonholes. The crowd

was almost entirely proletarian: pitiful pinched faces of women, haggard grim faces of men;

clothing dingy, generally clean but so patched that the original cloth was a matter of

uncertainty, many a man had had no new suit since the war.

The speakers raved and shouted, and worked the crowd into a frenzy; the singing made you

think of an army marching into battle. A quartet sang chants with hammering rhythms, the

repetition of simple words, like lessons repeated by children in school. Lanny translated for his

wife: "Be ready to take over! Be ready to take over!"

Irma had learned a lot about this subject during her sojourn in these two strange families;

she had listened to Uncle Jesse, and to Hansi and Bess arguing with Lanny, and now and then

with Hansi's father. They didn't want to kill anybody—not unless somebody resisted. All they

wanted was to reproduce in Germany what they had done in Russia; to confiscate the property

of the rich and reduce them to their own slum level. Johannes had smiled and said they would

make a museum out of his palace, and that would be all right with him, he would buy another

in London, and then one in New York, and then one in Tahiti—by which time Russia would have

restored capitalism, and he would return to that region and make his fortune all over again.

The financier made a joke of it, but it was no joke at this Versammlung. Not one single laugh

in a whole evening; the nearest to it was mocking jeers, hardly to be distinguished from cries of

rage. This was what they called the "proletariat," the creatures of the slums, threatening to

burst out, overcome the police, and raid the homes of those whom they called "exploiters." The

speakers were seeking election to the Reichstag, where they would pour out the same kind of

tirades. Irma looked about her uneasily, and was glad she had had the sense not to wear any of