Inventors -- United States -- Biography; Pupin, Michael, 1858-1935
The German victory in France two years prior to that time, resulting as
it did in the creation of a united Germany, had encouraged Teutonism to
run riot wherever it met a current opposing it, as it did in Prague.
Nationalism in Bohemia was a reaction against Austrian Teutonism in
those days, just as it was a reaction against Magyarism in Voyvodina
and in the military frontier. Hardly a day passed without serious
clashes between the Czech nationalist boys and their German classmates.
That which made my stay in Panchevo impossible met me in Prague in an
even more violent form. Loyal to the traditions of the Serbian military
frontiersmen, I liked nothing better than a good fight, and I had the
physique and the practice, gained in the pasturelands of Idvor, to lick
any German boy of my age or even older. The German pupils feared me,
and the German teachers condemned what they called my revolutionary
tendencies, and threatened to send me back to Idvor. As time went on,
I began to wish that they would expel me and give me a good excuse to
return to Idvor. I missed the wide horizon of the plains of Banat in
the narrow streets of Prague. My little bedroom in a garret, the only
living quarters that I could afford, was a sad contrast to my mode of
life on the endless plains of Banat, where for six weeks each summer
I had lived under the wide canopy of heaven, watching the grazing
oxen, gazing upon the countless stars at night, and listening to the
sweet strains of the Serbian flute. The people I met on the streets
were puffed up with Teutonic pride or with official arrogance; they
had none of the gentle manliness and friendliness of the military
frontiersmen. The teachers looked to me more like Austrian gendarmes
than like sympathetic friends. They cared more for my sentiments toward
the emperor and for my ideas about nationalism than for my ideas
relating to God and his beautiful world of life and light. Not one of
them reminded me of Kos, the Slovenian, or of protoyeray Zhivkovich in
Panchevo. Race antagonism was at that time the ruling passion. If it
had not been for the affectionate regard which the Czech boys and their
parents had for me I should have felt most lonesome; from Banat to
Prague was too sudden a change for me.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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