BTG XXXV <=> BTG XXXVII

XXXVI. Just a Wee Bit More About the Germans (pgs. B660 – B662)

Chapitre 36 Encore un petit rien sur les Allemands

Capítulo 36 Apenas uma pitadinha mais sobre os alemães.

Beelzebub, continuing his narration about the events that occurred during his sixth sojourn on the planet Earth, he tells Hassein that from St. Petersburg he first went to what are called the Scandinavian countries, and he finally settled in the chief point of beings of the contemporary grouping called “Germany”. Wishing to give Hassein a certain understanding of the peculiar psyche of the three-brained beings of this contemporary European grouping, he set him such a problem that from the solving of it he will exhaustively make clear to himself the specificness of the psyche of the beings of just this European grouping. The original problem which he had devised for him is that while actively meditating, he is to deduce those logical data, the totality of which should make clear to him the very essence of the reason why just among the beings of this contemporary European grouping, one innocent custom obtains, according to which, whenever they gather in any place for some feast or other, or simply for what is called a “spree”, they unfailingly and invariably sing one and the same song, composed by themselves and in the highest degree original.

In order to help him solve the problem, he informs him further concerning two facts. The first fact is that certain words of this song have no corresponding words in any other language, and the second fact is that they invented a certain so-called “grammatical-rule”, according to which they always during any kind of “exchange of opinions”, place the particle of negation after the affirmative, as for instance, they always, instead of saying “I-do-not-want-this”, say “I-want-this-not”. So either listener during an exchange of opinions, first of all receives a suggestion as if it were subject to actualization and thus there must proceed in him a certain “being-Diardookin”, or as they themselves would say, a certain “experiencing”, only later, when speaking according to their grammatical rule, do they pronounce their famous “nicht”; so that each time, as a result, there is accumulated in their common presences that which in totality actualizes this mentioned “specificness” in their common psyche, and from this fact, he should be able to elucidate this original problem he had set him.