Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Europe -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Walking -- Fiction
Consider what a fifth part of the reading-matter of an American daily
paper issued in a city of one hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants
amounts to! Think what a mass it is. Would any one suppose I could so
snugly tuck away such a mass in a chapter of this book that it would be
difficult to find it again if the reader lost his place? Surely not.
I will translate that child-murder word for word, to give the reader a
realizing sense of what a fifth part of the reading-matter of a Munich
daily actually is when it comes under measurement of the eye:
"From Oberkreuzberg, January 21st, the DONAU ZEITUNG receives a long
account of a crime, which we shortened as follows: In Rametuach,
a village near Eppenschlag, lived a young married couple with two
children, one of which, a boy aged five, was born three years before the
marriage. For this reason, and also because a relative at Iggensbach had
bequeathed M400 ($100) to the boy, the heartless father considered him
in the way; so the unnatural parents determined to sacrifice him in the
cruelest possible manner. They proceeded to starve him slowly to death,
meantime frightfully maltreating him--as the village people now make
known, when it is too late. The boy was shut in a hole, and when
people passed by he cried, and implored them to give him bread. His
long-continued tortures and deprivations destroyed him at last, on the
third of January. The sudden (sic) death of the child created suspicion,
the more so as the body was immediately clothed and laid upon the bier.
Therefore the coroner gave notice, and an inquest was held on the 6th.
What a pitiful spectacle was disclosed then! The body was a complete
skeleton. The stomach and intestines were utterly empty; they contained
nothing whatsoever. The flesh on the corpse was not as thick as the back
of a knife, and incisions in it brought not one drop of blood. There
was not a piece of sound skin the size of a dollar on the whole body;
wounds, scars, bruises, discolored extravasated blood, everywhere--even
on the soles of the feet there were wounds. The cruel parents asserted
that the boy had been so bad that they had been obliged to use severe
punishments, and that he finally fell over a bench and broke his neck.
However, they were arrested two weeks after the inquest and put in the
prison at Deggendorf."
Yes, they were arrested "two weeks after the inquest." What a home sound
that has. That kind of police briskness rather more reminds me of my
native land than German journalism does.
I think a German daily journal doesn't do any good to speak of, but at
the same time it doesn't do any harm. That is a very large merit, and
should not be lightly weighted nor lightly thought of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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