“Food really had become much cheaper, for at that time our krone was very high. I remember Mama coming home very happily one day last winter, and telling us that it was possible to live again, as a pound of lard cost only about twenty thousand kronen. And the apartments brought much joy to the Viennese. Just imagine, suddenly almost every house displayed a sign offering apartments or furnished rooms for rent. People used to go from house to house looking at apartments merely to pass the time. And moving vans were rolling through the streets all day long. “This lasted till Lent, but then the high spirits subsided. Suddenly there was much unemployment. The clothing industry was at a standstill--we’d hear of a new failure every minute. The papers said that the honest Christian merchants who had taken over the old Jewish concerns but were unable to cope with their task, should be subsidized by the state. But the unemployed raised a rumpus, paraded on the Ring, demolished a couple of stores, broke windows, and finally forced the state to pay them ten thousand kronen a day for the support of their families. Then the krone began to fall, for, as Papa explained, there was a tremendous increase in the circulation of bank-notes. Say what they would, the krone soon was lower than ever, and victuals became as expensive as before, if not more so. Today Mama told me, with much agitation, that butter has gone up to a hundred and fifty kronen. Since spring people have been sulky again, and there is much grumbling on the tram. Especially about the profiteers, who are pushing up all the prices--only, they don’t talk about Jewish profiteers, but in general. “You want to know whether I go to the theatre often? Oh, no, dear Leo! Except for the opera there’s nothing whatever going on in the theatre. All the houses are continually playing Ganghofer and Anzengruber, for they’re not allowed to produce anything written by a Jew, and the classics don’t draw the crowds. For a while they played a good deal of Shaw; but since he declared in an English paper that Vienna has become an international exhibition of asininity, he is taboo. Especially because he also said that he prefers one intelligent Jew to ten stupid Christians. The musical comedy houses are all high and dry. (Do you remember how I laughed when I first heard you use that expression?) It developed, you see, that all of our musical comedies, old and new, were either written or composed by Jews, if not both. Besides, they are short of singers, as practically all the tenors had to emigrate. Of course a few one hundred per cent Aryan musical comedies were quickly manufactured, but the audience hissed them, for they were fearful trash. Hofrat Tumpel declared that it was because Christian art is suited only for serious things, not for such frivolous stuff. Whereupon Papa smiled and said that people would soon realize how well the Jews and Christians complemented each other in Austria.