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today he was reasonably intelligible. He is a composer himself, a student of philosophy at the Institute for Social Research. He likes to use big words and is a fountain of obscure knowledge.
    Teddy poured icy water on the high-minded idealism of those who believe there is a connection between music and brotherly love. He called it nothing but wishful thinking, a silly bourgeois illusion. He said in August 1914 French and German lovers of Beethoven did not hesitate to begin slaughtering each other. Besides, what does Chinese and African music have in common with ours? The indisputable value of the exhibition, he said, is to reveal the hypocrisy of the bosses who call the tune. They want to sedate us by showing us beautiful things to see, to conceal the truth. Our ears tell us the truth: music divides rather than unifies.
    To my surprise, my old friend and fellow student of the violin, Luise Holzer, did not challenge Teddy. In fact, she seemed to agree with him. The last time I saw Luise was in Hamburg when we played the Bériot duets together. Now she lives in Berlin. Her husband is a physicist and a colleague of Albert Einstein’s at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She says she has hardly a moment to practise and spends all her time writing about architecture. She tried to talk one of the curators at the exhibition into letting her just hold — not even play — the Stradivarius the Italians are exhibiting here, the viola “Medicea” made for one of the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany. Of course she got nowhere.
    We reminisced about playing the Bériot together. I don’t know why nobody ever plays them, I said. Few violin duets are as rewarding. They are such a joy to play — pure bel canto. Not surprising since Bériot’s wife, Maria Malibran, was famous for singing Norma and for the concert aria Mendelssohn wrote for her. And for dying in Manchester, of all places, after falling off a horse. The other day, Luise said, she mentioned the duets to Einstein. He promised to have a look at them. She occasionally plays the Bach double with him — without a piano — behind closed doors.
    Of course, as soon as Einstein’s name was mentioned everybody wanted to hear more. And we were not disappointed. Luise said a couple of weeks ago she attended a dinner party with her husband, and Einstein was there. So was Alfred Kerr, whom we all know as the fearsome theatre critic of the Berliner Tageblatt . Since Einstein is not an actor and does not write plays, Luise said, he does not have to be afraid of Kerr. Einstein told us he was just reading a book by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl about primitive mythology. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if this scholar was right to state that our concept of causality had its origin in primitive thinking about demons. This was too much for Alfred Kerr. He accused Einstein of coming down on the side of crude superstition. The next thing would be some sort of religious credo. Luise somehow managed to whisper in Kerr’s ear and a moment later he asked Einstein outright if he was a gläubig , a believer. Einstein replied that if one tries to penetrate Nature with the limited means at one’s disposal, one cannot help but recognize something unintelligible, intangible and very elegant [ etwas ganz feines ] behind those connections that one does understand. That feeling of awe, he said, was his religion. Kerr was speechless.
    Then we talked about architecture. What Luise had to say about our architectural scene was quite extraordinary. Of course she is well informed about the flat-roofed Siedlungen — the public housing units — being built here in Frankfurt. The animating spirit was Landmann, but the man who actually built them was City Counsellor Ernst May, with lots of Licht, Luft und Sonne [light, air, and sunshine], for thousands of people who have been living in sordid conditions up to now. But she had just heard that I.G. Farben was planning to put up a huge administrative building on land bought from