Group Portrait with Lady Read Online Free PDF

which—Schlocks is careful to stress—had no direct bearing, only an indirect one, on the matter, and second, the fact that for two successive years, at the ages of eleven and twelve, she won the title of “the most German girl in the school” that was awarded by a roving commission of racial experts who went from school to school. On one occasion Leni was even among those selected for “the most German girl in the city,” but she was relegated to second place by a Protestant minister’s daughter whose eyes were lighter than Leni’s, which at that time were no longer quite as light a blue. Was there any way that “the most German girl in the school” could be sent to a school for slow learners? At twelve Lenientered a high school run by nuns, but by the time she was fourteen it was already necessary to withdraw her as having failed. Within two years she had once fallen hopelessly short of promotion, once been promoted upon her parents’ giving a solemn promise never to take advantage of the promotion. The promise was kept.
    Before any misunderstanding can arise, let us now present, as factual information, an explanation for the dubious educational circumstances to which Leni was obliged to submit, or to which she was subjected. In this context there is no question of
blame
, there were not even—either at the primary school or the high school attended by Leni—any serious disagreements, at most there were misunderstandings. Leni was thoroughly capable of being educated, in fact she hungered and thirsted after education, and all those involved did their best to satisfy that hunger and thirst. The trouble was that the meat and drink offered her did not match her intelligence, or her disposition, or her powers of comprehension. In most—one can almost say all—cases, the material offered lacked that sensual dimension without which Leni was incapable of comprehension. Writing, for example, never posed the slightest problem for her although, considering the highly abstract nature of this process, the reverse might have been expected; but for Leni writing was associated with optical, tactile, even olfactory perceptions (one has only to think of the smells of various kinds of ink, pencils, types of paper), hence she was able to master even complicated writing exercises and grammatical nuances: her handwriting, of which she unfortunately makes little use, was and still is firm, attractive and, as the retired school principal Mr. Schlocks (our informant on all
essential
pedagogic details) convincingly assured us, nothing short of ideally suited for the evocation of erotic and/or sexual excitement.
    Leni had particularly bad luck with two closely related subjects: religion and arithmetic (or mathematics). Had even one of her teachers thought of explaining to the little six-year-old Leni that it is possible to approach the starry sky, which Leni loved so much, in terms of both mathematics and physics, she would not have resisted learning the multiplication tables, by which she was repelled as other people are by spiders. The pictures of nuts, apples, cows, and peas with which an effort was made to try, in primitive terms, to achieve mathematical realism, meant nothing to her; in Leni there was no latent mathematician, but there was most certainly a gift for the natural sciences, and had she been offered, in addition to the Mendelian blossoms that were forever cropping up in textbooks and on blackboards in red, white, and pink, somewhat more complex genetic processes, she would—as the saying goes—have “thrown herself into” such material with burning enthusiasm. Because the biology instruction was so meager she was denied many joys that she has had to wait until middle age to find, as she goes over the outlines of complex organic processes with the aid of a box of cheap water colors. As has been convincingly assured by Miss van Doorn, there is one detail dating from Leni’s preschool existence that she will never