11 - Jürgen Finds Something in Lausanne That He Did Not Seek

Summary

GERMANY's POLITICAL VIOLENCE has claimed the lives of many over the years, drop by drop. These drops are edging the country towards insanity, just as drop after drop of ether falling on a particular spot on a person's head would do.

For the few who still have jobs, their incomes don't suffice even before taxes. Those who are still working have as much anxiety about losing their jobs as the others do about their poverty.

At this very moment in time two men, neither of whom is in possession of a dark red press card, find themselves on a train traveling up and down the heavenly-scented, blooming hillsides between Lausanne and Ouchy.

A radiant blue cloudless sky spans over the divine landscape like a glass globe.

Halfway up, the train carries these men past the lovely, fanciful, and delicate village of Jordils, where better-born young girls are sent to be prepared for “life,” or, to put it rather differently, for what a small percentage of mankind thinks of as life. In Jordils's closed-off, flower-strewn cleanliness far from any hint of dirt, there is no sense that in its sister town politics is deciding the fate of millions upon millions of people.

If one thinks about it, this area seems to have a psychologically unpleasant shadow side vis-à-vis politics. In the presence of such rejoicing nature, whose beauty words cannot express, how can anybody, even a politician, be anything other than optimistic?

Ouchy sits upon Lake Geneva like lovely jewels about the throat of a fashionable lady, while Lausanne rests like a gleaming clasp in this same lady's wavy hair. Close by, but not visible from here, on the western side of this sickle-shaped lake, is the great rival to these two towns, the no less lovely but quite bombastic city of Geneva. Here, so close to France, the Swiss element does take a bit of a back seat. Somewhat to the east of Lausanne is the cheerful, small, but elegant city of Montreux, with its residential character suggesting a quiet place where the chosen few retire.

Lausanne and Geneva! Here, in close proximity just as the giants Mont Blanc and the Dent du Midi are to each other, convenes the thirty-fifth reparations conference. Here the talk is about mustard gas, bomber squadrons, gold reserves, and the dangers threatening the whole world.