Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In Germany, all trains go from left to right. Things were different during my grandfather's time: for him, trains would go from right to left, but that's because he was living in a completely different world. When my grandfather was eighteen he decided to kill the Romanian King. "Why would there still be a king in Romania when the entire world was moving forward towards democracy?" he would ask. My grandfather was a strange person. You wonder why he was actually so concerned about the Romanian king while he was living in his native Germany, not even eighteen years old, during the economic depression and with Adolf Hitler touring through the country in his borrowed airplane delivering bombastic speeches. But my grandfather thought that the Romanian king needed to be killed and if nobody would step forward to do it, he would have to do it himself. In the summer of 1928, almost on his eighteenth birthday, he bought himself a train ticket to Bucharest and traveled eastward. I know the exact date of his trip because he arrived in Berlin during the premiere of Berthold Brecht's Three Penny Opera, which took place on August 31. I know that he had even managed to get a cheap ticket for the premiere. It was one of those tickets that permitted you to listen to the music but made you stand (and not sit) behind a large pillar completely blocking the view. It was a listening ticket and not a seeing ticket.
Repository Citation
Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. "In Germany, All Trains Go from Left to Right." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1–8. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss4/8