“Bless my soul, you’re not going to be locked up all the time! There are a number of Englanders here. Most of them are up and down these stairs the whole day.” With this he went out and shouted for some one. Another N.C.O. appeared. “Take this man to Block Twenty-three and lock him up. Here’s his slip.” The slip, I saw later, was a piece of paper stating my name and nationality, and marked with a cross which stood for “solitary confinement.” It was to be fastened to the outside of my cell door. CHAPTER XII THE STADTVOGTEI AND “SOLITARY” In its original meaning _Stadtvogtei_ denotes the official residence of the _Stadtvogt_. This was an official appointed in feudal times by the overlord of the territory, as keeper of one of his castles, around which an early settlement of farmers and a few artisans had grown into a medieval town or _Stadt_. Later on, as a fit successor of the old Stadtvogtei, a prison arose in its place, which was modernized from time to time, until in 1916 a new modern building stood where once victims had vanished into dungeons, and, later, political prisoners (among them Bebel, in 1870) had languished in dark, musty, insanitary cells. Bricks, iron, concrete, and glass had been used in the construction of this building, the scanty furniture and the cell doors being the only wood to be found in it. I never came to know the whole of the Stadtvogtei, but learned gradually that it enclosed a number of courtyards. These were triangular in shape and just sixty paces in circumference. Around them the walls rose five stories high, and made deep wells of them rather than yards. The regularly spaced windows, tier upon tier, with their iron bars increased the dreariness of their aspect. With a yard as a center, each part of the prison surrounding it formed a structural entity, a “block,” separated from the next one by a space about eight feet wide, and extending from the ground floor right up to the glass roof above. The aggregation of blocks was enclosed by the outer walls as the segments of an orange are enclosed by the peel. With the cell windows toward the yards, the doors were in the circumference of the blocks. In front of them, frail-looking balconies, or gangways, extending around the blocks, took the place of corridors, and overhung by half its width the space separating the component parts of the prison. Their floors consisted in most places of thick plates of glass, fitting into the angle-irons of the cantilevers. Iron staircases and short bridges permitted communication between the different floors and blocks.