he is travelling: “To Karlsbad, if my constitution will stand it.”
Associated with this in memory is another story about a Jew who is
ignorant of French, and who has express instructions to ask in Paris for
the way to the Rue Richelieu. Paris was for many years the object of my
own longing, and I took the great satisfaction with which I first set
foot on the pavement in Paris as a warrant that I should also attain the
fulfilment of other wishes. Asking for the way is again a direct
allusion to Rome, for of course all roads lead to Rome. Moreover, the
name Zucker (English, sugar) again points to _Karlsbad_, whither we send
all persons afflicted with the _constitutional_ disease, diabetes
(_Zuckerkrankheit_, sugar-disease). The occasion for this dream was the
proposal of my Berlin friend that we should meet in Prague at Easter. A
further allusion to sugar and diabetes was to be found in the matters
which I had to talk over with him.
A fourth dream, occurring shortly after the last one mentioned, brings
me back to Rome. I see a street-corner before me and am astonished to
see so many German placards posted there. On the day before I had
written my friend with prophetic vision that Prague would probably not
be a comfortable resort for German travellers. The dream, therefore,
simultaneously expressed the wish to meet him at Rome instead of at the
Bohemian city, and a desire, which probably originated during my student
days, that the German language might be accorded more tolerance in
Prague. Besides I must have understood the Czech language in the first
three years of my childhood, because I was born in a small village of
Moravia, inhabited by Slavs. A Czech nursery rhyme, which I heard in my
seventeenth year, became, without effort on my part, so imprinted upon
my memory that I can repeat it to this day, although I have no idea of
its meaning. There is then no lack in these dreams also of manifold
relations to impressions from the first years of my life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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