Emil and the Three Twins (page 42)
"Es liegt in Korlsbüttel an der Ostsee. Irgendwo zwischen Travemünde und Zinnowitz." -- Erich Kästner, novelist
Suddenly a very tall, spare man sat down at my side. He was older than I, wore pince-nez, and looked at me with a smile. After smiling a bit, he said: ‘A funny business, eh? You think you are experiencing something real, and all the time it’s only an imitation.’ Then I think he said that art was only an illusion of reality. But he was not trying to make himself offensive, so for a while we went on talking like that.
— from Emil and the Three Twins, a novel for children published in 1935 by Erich Kästner (who watched Berlin students burn his and 23 other authors’ “un-German literature” on the evening of May 10, 1933, in the middle of Berlin’s Opernplatz, across from the university)
— It’s often the students who set fire to books, isn’t it? It’s an inflammatory age, no?
— As Erich Kästner himself wrote later in Emil and the Three Twins: “‘It’s a very common complaint. They call it adolescence.’ Herr Haberland nodded. ‘I know it from personal experience. I had it myself once.’”
— I, too, have had adolescence once. It seems to recur, and be a bit chronic in me. You, too?
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Emil Hering, the innkeeper from Vineta, of the Villa Undine, and his friend, companion, and perhaps new love Wilhelmina Wang, of Chang’an, and their friend Digory Kirke are drinking cacahuatl, green tea, and Coffee. Coffee will later come to be known as Kaffee, but not yet.
It felt a bit awkward, drinking hot beverages with Caffein next to the witch of the place, Miss Amelia Havisham, at her invitation. It felt more than a bit like being Hänsel and Gretel in the house of bread, cake, and sugar. The fantastical dekor of the Pheasant Mansion didn’t help, but only added to the feeling.
Emil didn’t know if he was in a fairy tale, or history, or a fantasy, or what. You think you are experiencing something real, and all the time it’s only an imitation, and art was only an illusion of reality, or something like that. He couldn’t remember the words exactly, where he had heard it before. Many people from inner Magna Germania come to the Baltic coastal resorts for summer holidays. There was a Herr Kästner who once stayed at Villa Undine, who might have said it to him. An older man, who, like Emil, had not grown up with the expectation of going to a universitas magistrorum et scolarium, having come from a humble background in Dresden, in the Kingdom of Saxony. I, too, come from a humble background, in Zhongyuan 中原, the cradle of Cathay. My father was the first in his family to learn to read. Thousands of years of written history, going back to guijiashouguwen 龜甲獸骨文, oracle bone script on tortoise shell, and I’m the second in my peasant line to learn to read. So with our humble backgrounds, Herr Kästner, his Emil Tischbein, and I have something in common.
Right now Miss Amelia Havisham was preparing a special green tea, matcha 抹茶. Because that’s how Li Po and Du Fu like to drink it. And she, being the witch of the place, was expecting them in the Wood Beyond the World.