"They know nothing in England," he said gloomily. "With us a passport is necessary; but what is a passport twenty-three years old?" I admitted that, from the official point of view, it was not much, and he made no further difficulties. As a rule you need not go to the police bureau at all. The people you are with will get the necessary papers, and fill them in for you; but I wanted to see whether the German jack-in-office was as bad as his reputation makes him. Germans themselves often complain bitterly of the treatment they receive at the hands of these lower class officials. "I went to the police station," said a German lady who lived in England, and was in her own country on a visit. "I went to _anmelden_ myself, but not one of the men in the office troubled to look up. When I had stood there till I was tired I said that I wished someone to attend to me. Every pen stopped, every head was raised, astounded by my impertinence. But no one took any notice of my request. I waited a little longer, and then fetched myself a chair that someone had left unoccupied. I did not do it to make a sensation. I was tired. But every pen again stopped, and one in authority asked in a voice like thunder what I made here. I said that I had come to _anmelden_ myself, and he began to ask the usual questions with an air of suspicion that was highly offensive. You can see for yourself that I do not look like an anarchist or anything but what I am, a respectable married woman of middle age. I told the man everything he wanted to know, and at every item he grunted as if he knew it was a lie. In the end he asked me very rudely how long a stay I meant to make in Germany. "Not a day longer than I can help," I said; "for your manners do not please me." All the pens stopped again till I left the office, and when I got back to my mother she wept bitterly; for she said that I should be prosecuted for _Beamtenbeleidigung_ and put in prison. "But the really interesting fact about the system is that it doesn't work," said a German to me; "when I wanted my papers a little while ago I could not get them. Nothing about me could be discovered. Officially I did not exist." Yet he had inherited a name famous all over the world, was a distinguished scientific man himself, and had been born in the city where his existence was not known to the police.