A Journalist in Naziland

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Judas Had the Place to Himself. Schoenberner also found two other important examples of the gap between appearance and reality. One was the result of a visit to Oberammergau, where Bavarian peasants performed their world-famed Passion Play. Schoenberner discovered that the peasant who played the role of Christ was thereby enabled to charge tourists twice as much rent for his rooms as any of his followers (Judas, it was whispered, couldn't find a roomer at any price; and St. John, who was the handsomest of the Apostles, finally eloped to the U.S. with a rich American widow). The second lesson in perspective came through World War I, in which Private Schoenberner, who had hitherto been crazy about horses, was given the job of grooming them. "It is amazing how different a horse looks if seen from above, from the saddle, or from below, when you are standing ... up to the ankles in manure, half asphyxiated by the stench."

Army life turned out to be less bad than Schoenberner had expected—thanks partly to the friendship of a brilliant, amiable Jewish doctor who simply could not grasp the simplest elements of Prussian discipline. On sighting Schoenberner, stiffly at attention on parade, this officer would leap forward, crying cordially: "How do you do, Mr. Schoenberner; have you seen that highly interesting article about the possibilities of psychoanalytic treatment even in cases of dementia praecox?"

Democratic Tic. The Bavarian revolution that succeeded World War I had its own puzzles. Schoenberner was not one of the literati who suddenly felt a new and urgent need to join the proletariat. Nor did he have much respect for the Democratic Party, whose platform, he thought, matched the names of two of its prominent leaders, Rindskopf and Kalbskopf (Oxhead and Calfshead). The general confusion was epitomized by a Munich professor who was called before a huge audience to give the real lowdown on the problems of German reconstruction. Owing to a nervous tic, this professor always broke into a broad grin whenever he had something serious to say. So infectious was his ailment that his audience, after listening to his grim dissertation on Germany's total collapse, walked out convinced that the apparent tragedy was just a huge joke.

Schoenberner's first job was with the Musa Press—a big publishing house owned by an eccentric millionaire who also had aa interest in a vest-pocket calculating machine. Then young Schoenberner became the Sitzredakteur (Sitting Editor) of the Munich Auslandspost, an unpopular job which meant chiefly that if the owner fell foul of the law, Schoenberner had the privilege of sitting in prison for him. From there, Schoenberner advanced to the editorship of Jugend (Youth), a noted humorous-literary weekly in Munich.

Editor Schoenberner's task was to keep Jugend youthful—a job he did so well that soon he was offered the editorship of Jugend's chief competitor, Simplicissimus. While Jugend hunted feverishly for a new editor, Schoenberner performed, the hilarious, exhausting feat of editing both weeklies at the same time. After reading and rejecting hundreds of manuscripts in the Jugend offices, he would speed over to Simplicissimus—only to find that the manuscripts he had just rejected had been sent out again to Simplicissimus.