But I am getting far ahead of my story. Long before I began to peer beneath the surface of Berlin I had to face the problem of legalizing even my superficial existence there. On the very morning after my arrival I hastened to grim-sounding Wilhelmstrasse, uncertain whether my next move would be toward some dank underground dungeon or merely a swift return to the Dutch border. The awe-inspiring Foreign Office consisted of several adult school-boys and the bureaucrat-minded underlings of the old régime. A Rhodes scholar, who spoke English somewhat better than I, greeted my entrance with a formal heartiness, thanked me for adding my services to the growing band that was attempting to tell a long-deceived world the truth about Germany, and dictated an _Ausweis_ which, in the name of the Foreign Office backed by all the authority of the new national government, gave me permission to go when and where I chose within the Empire, and forbade any one, large or small, to put any difficulties whatever in my way. Like a sea monster killed at the body, but with its tentacles still full of their poisoning black fluid, Wilhelmstrasse seemed to have become innocuous at home long before its antennæ, such as the dreadful Herr Maltzen at The Hague, had lost their sting. If it had been a great relief to see the eyes of passers-by fade inattentively away at sight of me in my civilian garb, after two years of being stared at in uniform, it was doubly pleasant to know that not even the minions of the law could now question my most erratic wandering to and fro within the Fatherland. With my blanket _Ausweis_ I was not even required to report to the police upon my arrival in a new community, the _Polizeiliche Anmeldung_ that is one of the banes of German existence. I was, of course, still expected to fill out the regulation blank at each hotel or lodging-house I occupied, but this was a far less troublesome formality than the almost daily quest for, and standing in line at, police stations would have been. These hotel forms were virtually uniform throughout the Empire. They demanded the following information of each prospective guest: Day of arrival; given and family name; single, married, or widowed; profession; day, month, year, town, county, and land of birth; legal residence, with street and number; citizenship (in German the word is _Staatsangehörigkeit_, which sounds much more like “Property of what government?”); place of last stay, with full address; proposed length of present stay; whether or not the registering guest had ever been in that particular city or locality before; if so, when, why, and how long, and residence while there. But under the new democracy hotelkeepers had grown somewhat more easy-going than in years gone by, and their exactions in this respect never became burdensome.