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Hermann.”
    “That was entirely new. That jolted me. I saw a different Alfred Rosenberg. Reading Chamberlain has emboldened him.”
    “Maybe that has its bright side. Perhaps other books may yet come along to inflame him in a different way. In general, though, you say he is not a lover of books?”
    “Oddly, it’s hard to answer that. Sometimes I think he loves the idea of books, or the aura, or perhaps only the covers of books. He often parades
around school with a stack of books under his arm—Hauptman, Heine, Nietzsche, Hegel, Goethe. At times his posturing is almost comical. It’s a way of showing off his superior intellect, of bragging that he chooses books over popularity. I’ve often doubted he really reads the books. Today I don’t know what to think.”
    “Such passion for Chamberlain,” remarked the Headmaster. “Has he shown passion for other things?”
    “That’s the question. He has always kept his feelings very much in check, but I do remember a flash of excitement in local prehistory. On a few occasions I’ve taken small groups of students to participate in archeological digs just north of the church of St. Olai. Rosenberg always volunteered for such expeditions. On one trip he helped uncover some Stone Age tools and a prehistoric hearth, and he was thrilled.”
    “Strange,” said the headmaster as he rifled through Alfred’s file. “He elected to come to our school rather than the gymnasium, where he could have studied the classics and then been able to enter the university for literature or philosophy, which seems to be where his interests lie. Why is he going to the Politechnikum?”
    “I think there are financial reasons. His mother died when he was an infant, and his father has consumption and works only sporadically as a bank clerk. The new art teacher, Herr Purvit, considers him a reasonably good draftsman and encourages him to pursue a career as an architect.”
    “So he keeps his distance from the others,” said the headmaster closing Alfred’s file, “and yet he won the election. And wasn’t he also president of the class a couple of years ago?”
    “That has little to do with popularity, I think. The students don’t respect the office, and the popular boys generally avoid being class president because of the chores involved and preparation required to be the graduation speaker. I don’t think the boys take Rosenberg seriously. I’ve never seen him in the midst of a group or joking around with others. More often he is the butt of pranks. He’s a loner, always walking by himself around Reval with his sketchbook. So I wouldn’t be too concerned about his spreading these extremist ideas here.”
    Headmaster Epstein stood and walked to the window. Outside were broad-leafed trees with fresh spring foliage and, further off, stately white buildings with red-brick roofs.

    “Tell me more about this Chamberlain. My reading interests lie elsewhere. What’s the extent of his influence in Germany?”
    “Growing fast. Alarmingly fast. His book was published about ten years ago, and its popularity continues to soar. I have heard it has sold over a hundred thousand copies.”
    “Have you read it?”
    “I started but grew impatient and scanned the rest of it. Many of my friends have read it. The trained historians share my reaction—as does the church and, of course, the Jewish press. Yet many prominent men praise it—Kaiser Wilhelm, the American Theodore Roosevelt—and many leading foreign newspapers have reviewed it positively, some even ecstatically. Chamberlain uses lofty language and pretends to speak to our nobler impulses. But I think he encourages our basest ones.”
    “How do you explain his popularity?”
    “He writes persuasively. And he impresses the uneducated. On any page you may find profound-sounding quotations from Tertullian or St. Augustine, or maybe Plato or some eighth-century Indian mystic. But it’s just the appearance of erudition. In fact he has simply