The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of the city. The have discovered the cafe and the factory and the bar and the hotel. Berlin's bourgeoisie and its banks, the watering holes of the rich and the slums of the poor. Sin and vice, the day of the city and the city by night.
The dull sergeant came to represent Germany under Bismarck. Behind the sergeant stood the engineer who supplied him with weapons, the chemist who brewed poison gas to destroy the human brain, and at the same time formulated the drug to relieve his migraine, the German professor who is in fact the most dangerous (and dogmatic) enemy of European civilisation, the inventor of the philological equivalent of poison gas.
