118 THE OPPERMANNS The other two, when he had finished, were silent for a time. Then Mühlheim said: "All right, if that's your opinion. But perhaps you'll have another cognac and a cigar before it hap- pens," 21 I n the year 1905 there had appeared in Moscow a book with the title, T he Great in the Little, or, Antichrist as an I m- mediate Political Possibility, The author of the book was a cer- tain Sergius Nilus, an oflicial of the Synodal Chancery. The twelfth chapter had an appendix with the heading, "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion." These "Protocols" professed to transcribe the proceedings of a secret meeting of the leading Jews of the world, which was alleged to have taken place in the autumn of 1897, on the occasion of the first Zionist Con- gress in Basel, in order to determine the general lines of a plan for the eventual conquest of the world by the [ews, The book was translated into many foreign languages and made a deep impression, especially upon German university men. In the year 1921, a contributor to the London Times proved that these "Protocols" had been copied, largely word for word, from a pamphlet written by a certain Maurice Joly, which had appeared in the year 1868. In this pamphlet, certain supporters of Napoleon 111, Freemasons and Bonapartists, were accused of having concocted an enormous plot to achieve world do- minion for themselves. The author of the "Protocols" had sim- ply substituted the word "[ews" for "Freemasons and Bona- partists," In so far as the "Protocols" had not been copied from Joly's pamphlet, they were taken from the novel entitled Biarritz which had been published in the sarne year, 1868, by a certain Goedsche under the pseudonym of [ohn Retcliffe, In

BOOK ONE: YESTERDAY 119 this novel a description was given of how, once every hundred years, the princes of the twelve tribes of Israel, which had been dispersed throughout the world, met in the old Jewish ceme- tery at Prague and debated upon the further measures to be taken for the establishment of Jewish world dominion. A burst of laughter went up from the whole civilized world upon the discovery of this stupid forgery. It was only in Germany, espe- cially in the universities, that the "Protocols" were still be- lieved in. The "Protocols" and everything that concerned them had al- ways been a particular source of amusement to Gustav Opper- mann. He was interested in the documentary evidences of hu- man folly; he possessed a small, special collection, among them editions of the "Protocols" and relevant literature, On the last day of the year, Rector Franccis was in the habit of lunching at Gustav's, Franccis had picked up a particularly amusing edition of the "Protocols" hy one Alfred Rosen- berg and had hrought it as a little attention. Luncheon passed off merrily, with plenty of good talk. Rec- tor Franccis came of a French emigrant family. Reason and humanity had become a tradition with this family, whose members were proud to remember the great achievements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Now, to be sure, un- der the influence of Frau Emilie, Little Thundercloud, Rector Franccis had grown cautious and only referred to his ancestry in intimate circles. Here, with Gustav, Alfred Franccis was ahle to speak quite freely. His literary taste was the same as Gustav's, like hirn, he hated politics and was a fanatical cham- pion of the purity of language. Franccis could discuss his anxi- eties here. Both men were aware of human foIIy, which is as deep as the sea, But they also knew that in the end reason al- ways conquers folly with the same certainty that Odysseus con- quered the Cyclops Polyphernus, with the same certainty that the men of the Bronze Age overcame the men of the Stone