In the Persian Gulf we made the acquaintance of a German librarian whom the German government had, for political reasons, as he himself stated, transferred from the University of Marburg on the Lahn to a town on the Persian Gulf. We visited the librarian, of whose existence we had learned in Shiraz, where we had been living for several weeks for the purpose of studying the customs of the inhabitants of this stereotypical Persian town, in a hospital in Shiraz and were shocked at his condition. The man was almost totally paralyzed and could scarcely make himself understood. He said he had contributed an article to a learned journal published in Frankfurt attacking the German legal system and had been posted to the Persian Gulf as a result. Initially he had come to terms with the situation because he was interested in the Persian Gulf and thought he would be able to pursue scholarly studies there. But the climate in the Persian Gulf, which is truly deadly, had laid him low in a very short time and had finally destroyed his health. He maintained that his greatest mistake was entering the so-called civil service, which had meant nothing for him but his systematic destruction, first his intellectual and then his physical destruction. Anyone, he said to us, who enters the civil service, no matter for what reason and no matter in what capacity, will be laid low and destroyed. He told us that he had addressed hundreds of requests to the German government asking them to take him out of, as he expressed it to us, the hell of the Persian Gulf, but all of these requests remained unanswered. In his opinion he had quite consciously been driven to death by the state he had wanted to serve but which he had allowed himself on one single occasion to criticize. We were unable to help the librarian. Four days after our visit we learned of his death. Three weeks later, the German government, as we subsequently learned, published an obituary notice in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which it expressed its regret at the librarian’s death. The civil service destroys anyone who enters it. No matter which master a person serves in the state, it is the wrong one.

After You

AFTER YOU