7.39 Zweig — «Buchmendel» (opening) — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the opening of Stefan Zweig's story Buchmendel (1929): a narrator takes shelter from the rain in a Viennese café and slowly remembers the extraordinary book dealer who once sat there every day. Follow Zweig's long, rhythmic sentences, full of comparisons, and his way of building a portrait from exaggerated, admiring images: ein Lexikon, … ein Universalkatalog auf zwei Beinen . Recognise Viennese café culture and its vocabulary: Kaffeehaus, Kellner, Marköre, Billard, Zahlkasse . Understand the Yiddish and Hebrew words in the text: Parch, Sechel, Amhorez, Cheder, Oiweh . Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the German aloud; all of them come back below. German English Glücklicherweise wartet nun in Wien an jeder Ecke ein Kaffeehaus Fortunately in Vienna there is a café waiting on every corner wie sie mechanisch Zucker und Löffel für jede Kaffeetasse dem Kellner austeilte how she mechanically handed out sugar and spoon for each cup to the waiter denn mein Gedächtnis ist sonderbar geartet, gut und schlecht zugleich for my memory is strangely made, good and bad at the same time diese verschollene, in mir selbst ertrunkene Erinnerung this lost memory, drowned in myself der Bibliothekar, den ich argloser Neuling um Auskunft gebeten the librarian whom I, an unsuspecting newcomer, had asked for information die dicke Brille hart ans Buch gedrückt his thick glasses pressed close to the book Prerequisites : 7.38 — you need Viennese German from 7.38 Reading and 11.3 Background , the subjunctive of comparison from 7.36 Reading , and the vocabulary of reading and books from 5.16 Vocabulary . About this text Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was born in Vienna into a wealthy Jewish family and became, between the wars, one of the most widely read and translated authors in the world, with novellas, biographies and essays. He left Austria in 1934, lived in England and then Brazil, and died there by his own hand in 1942, in despair at the destruction of the Europe he had loved. His memoir, Die Welt von Gestern , describes the Vienna of his youth. The syllabus planned his last story, the Schachnovelle (1942), for this lesson. No transcription of it is available under terms this course can use, so it is replaced by Buchmendel , a story of 1929 about the same theme that runs through the Schachnovelle : a mind that has given itself completely to a single passion, and what history does to such a mind. The text is the transcription in German Wikisource of the first printing, in three parts in the Vienna newspaper Neue Freie Presse , 1 to 3 November 1929. This lesson reads its first nine paragraphs, about 3,800 words, unchanged. The rest of the story, summarised here, tells what happened to Mendel. He was a Russian subject, born near Petrikau in Russian Poland, who never read a newspaper, and in 1915 he did not know that there was a war. He sent postcards to book dealers in Paris and London, the censor intercepted them, and he was interned for two years in a camp for enemy civilians, a Konzentrationslager in the language of the First World War, years before the word came to mean the camps of National Socialism. Released through the intervention of collectors, he returned to the café a broken man, forgot books, was thrown out by the new owner, and died. The narrator hears all this from the old woman who looked after the café's washrooms; she has kept one of Mendel's books as a keepsake, without knowing what it is: an old bibliography of erotic literature. Zweig portrays Mendel with deep admiration. Some of his physical descriptions, the hunched back and the comparisons with animals, use images of Eastern European Jews that were common in his time and that a modern reader will notice. Grammar in the text Long sentences with comparisons. Zweig builds his effects with chains of comparisons introduced by wie : wie eine Qualle ungewiß leuchtend auf dem untersten Grund des Bewußtseins ; wie der Nagel im Holz ; wie an der Angel der Fisch . Mendel reads wie andere beten, wie Spieler spielen und Trunkene betäubt ins Leere starren . When a sentence seems endless, look for the main verb and treat each wie as a separate picture added to it. The subjunctive of comparison and of the unreal past. als ob dieses unvergleichliche, dieses diamantene Buchgehirn solch grober Hilfsmittel jemals bedurft hätte , as if this incomparable diamond book-brain had ever needed such crude aids , with a genitive object, as in 7.36 Reading . And: Eingesetzt in ein Seminar, an eine öffentliche Stelle, hätte das Gehirn Tausende … belehrt , placed in a university seminar, this brain would have taught thousands : the condition is expressed by a participle, without wenn . Reported speech without a verb of saying. Mendel's question is reported by the narrator as an indirect question, without er fragte : Ob ich auch über die Somnambulisten etwas wissen wollte …? wollte is not Konjunktiv I (that would be wolle ); it keeps the form of the past tense, and the question mark shows that the narrator is passing on Mendel's question. Mendel's speech. Mendel speaks German mit stark östlichem Jargon : mit graue Haar for mit grauen Haaren , bei die Bücher for bei den Büchern , nix , dos is . His words from Yiddish and Hebrew: Parch , a scab, a wretch ; Sechel , good sense ; Amhorez , an ignorant person ; Oiweh , oh dear ; and the Cheder , the Jewish primary school, which Zweig explains himself. Viennese café words. The Kaffeehaus has a Zahlkasse , where you pay; waiters and the Marköre , the billiard attendants; newspapers on wooden holders; and regulars who sit for hours. The narrator calls it Mendel's Hauptquartier , his headquarters. Austrians stress Kaffee on the second syllable, as you learned in 11.3 Background . Reading it a second time, section by section Shelter from the rain (paragraphs 2–3). Caught in a downpour on the outskirts of Vienna, the narrator steps into the nearest café, an ordinary suburban one, and sits watc