It must have been disturbed self-awareness that caused a professor of natural history from Salzburg to box the ears of one of his pupils, for no reason at all, according to the pupil, who had then lost his hearing. The pupil’s father, a master plasterer who had visions of sending his son to the Technical University in Vienna and making a famous architect out of him, had an acquaintance who was an officially sworn appraiser calculate the sum his son would have earned by his sixty-fifth birthday if he had pursued in orderly fashion—as the expert witness’s testimony states—and successfully attained the career goals his father had intended for him, and he sued the professor of natural history for this amount. The sum of 230,000,000 schillings was the minimum sum that would be accepted and was thus to be recovered, stated the expert witness on the instructions of the father of the son who had been struck deaf and who had leaped into the well-known Liechtenberg gorge three days previously. The proceedings were adjourned. The professor of natural history was suspended for several months because the mistreatment of schoolchildren is forbidden. He testified before the arbitration tribunal charged with his case that he had forgotten that corporal punishment had long since been forbidden.

Question in the Provincial Parliament

QUESTION IN THE PROVINCIAL PARLIAMENT

It was significant, said a member of the Provincial Parliament at a session of the Salzburg Provincial Parliament—after that parliament had been discussing the fact that the number of schoolchildren who had killed themselves in Salzburg the previous year by jumping off a ledge on one of the steep hills in the city or by drowning themselves in the River Salzach had doubled since the year before—that the children who commit suicide in Salzburg come from the so-called middle classes. As is well known, Salzburg has the highest suicide rate among schoolchildren in the world. The more highly thought-of the beauty of a city is, according to the member of parliament, the higher the suicide rate, and not, as was previously assumed, the reverse. The question is, he said, how the problem of schoolchildren’s suicide in Salzburg, which has become one of its most urgent problems and has already become the subject of international discussion and astonishment, is to be dealt with officially. He, a socialist member, now faces the question, after the fourteen-year-old son of a gardener employed by the city had thrown himself off the so-called Humboldt terrace and had been smashed to pieces, whether this incident is not an indication that the working class has already moved up into the middle class and should possibly for some time have been reckoned part of the bourgeoisie.

Two Notes

TWO NOTES