The two of them were talking in their dialects about their respective regions. Where you had to pronounce the r and where not; they supplemented their stock of expletives; they both understood what lower German was about. Unfortunately, the German language hasn’t taken up its style: how much more expressive it is, more colourful, simpler and clearer – the best love-poetry in German has been written in it. And the people . . . the houses they had in old Lower Germany, particularly on the Baltic coast, were a dream-world of eccentricity, kindness and music, inhabited by an assortment of people like rare beetles, each one of them unique. A lot of its evocation has now fallen into the hands of stupid vernacular poets, may the devil take them, seemingly good-natured citizens with smoke-filled beards, brooding over steaming tankards, who have travestied the virility of their old language, and turned it into a deadly porridge of Gemütlichkeit: they are like head-foresters left in charge of the sea. Some have shaved off their beards and imagine they look like old woodcuts – but that doesn’t help; they can’t hear the woods or the sea, only their own beards rustling. Their good nature disappears the moment they turn confusedly to the present, and come up against political opposition; then the petit-bourgeois in them crawls out of the woodwork. Under their string vests, their hearts beat to the rhythm of a military parade.

That’s not our Platt German, not that.

But Lower Germany will never die – it lives and will go on living, as long as Germany exists. There has only ever been one comparable culture outside Germany, and that existed on the backs of an ill-treated, oppressed people: in Courland. The Lower German is a different animal. He chooses his words carefully and well. This was what the two of them were talking about. I knew that all the best things about the Princess came from that soil. In her I loved a part of this country which is usually so hard to love, and whose bewildered spirits think it a distinction to be hated. And there was Time again. No, I suppose there are no holidays for us.

The two of them chattered away non-stop. Each of them claimed their own version of Platt German as the only true and fair one, the other’s was entirely false. Now they had got around to telling stories.

The Princess told the one about the cobbler Hagen, to whom the administrator had called out his New Year’s greeting: ‘I wish you great happiness for the New Year, Master!’ Whereupon the other had yelled respectfully back across the market-square, ‘On the contrary, on the contrary, Herr Administrator!’ And the one about Mayor Hacher who had brought his ox along to the show, and said, ‘I’m not doing it for the money. I’m doing it for the disgrace!’