Altogether, there is too much putting-in-place and impatient one-upmanship in this colorful Berlin speech, with its delicate undertone of Semitic singsong. These trapped émigrés are cultivating it with some verve, and eventually it becomes unbearable for Austrian ears. The increasingly irritated silence of the Aryans would have long since warned more keenly perceptive urbanites that a regrettable and perilous trade-off is in the making: namely, that a virtually physical repugnance toward anything Prussian is creating an alibi for a perhaps suppressed but no less ingrained hatred of anything Jewish. Stella is the only one who appears to sense this. She remains sovereignly neutral; and wherever she can, she mellows the fervor, which lets justified indignation degenerate all too often into tongue-lashing. She has skillful objections and intelligent arguments ready, but she makes no headway against the passionately concentrated Berlin snottiness and certainly not against the obnoxious wittiness of the élégant from Lemberg or Kecskemét.

He is a lawyer, he claims, and sees things as a professional who has given up wasting even one iota of his intellect on the perversions of justice committed by a horde of savages (he calls them “Hitler’s brown mob”). “So what d’you want, anyway?” he yiddles spiritedly. “When dey let the goyim go after us poor Jews, it’s alvays de same thing, I tell you. Whether it’s de Inqvisition in de thirteent’ century—” “The fourteenth,” the count corrects him. “I’m talking about the Spanish Inqvisition, but t’ank you anyway,” the snappy dresser from Kecskemét parries. “Didn’t it go on from around 1230 till 1834? A good six hundred years, if you please—even if it wasn’t always against us Jews—de killers also went at each other’s troats. And in our enlightened twentieth century, it’s exactly the very same thing. De goyim like their blood, they relish it. So should we tear our hair out thinking whether things are a little smidgen less just here or a little crueler there than for de past two thousand years? I ask you.”

He, by the way, is the only one here who is personally acquainted with the Nazi authorities’ rigorous methods. He was arrested right after the Anschluss and held in custody until recently. His experiences have left him—to the general amusement—with a wealth of anecdotes, which he tells very wittily, leaving open the question of whether one should be enraged at the stupidity and inventive cruelty of the examining judges, guards, and attendants or follow his example in taking the whole thing stoically and ironically, as an absurd nightmare.

“Yet still and all, you were examined by judges?” the host throws in ambiguously. But the breezy lawyer crows proudly, amid universal jubilation, “What do you want from me, I’m no political prisoner, I’m a criminal!”

One of the women from Berlin leaps up and kisses him spontaneously: “Darling, you’re wonderful! You I love!”

This is the signal for the count to rise (his head almost bangs against the ceiling) and to beg the hostess (who is suddenly very embarrassed) to please excuse him: he must, alas, go on to a late meeting. “But we were expecting you to stay for dinner,” she pleads helplessly, looking at her husband. But she gets no support from him, instead is tersely informed, “I suppose Max must have misunderstood. In any case, his meeting is more important.”