The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig Page B

den Strich has gone into the German language as an expression for street-walking or being on the game.
    5 Paul Ehrlich, 1854-1915, distinguished German immunologist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1908.

UNIVERSITAS VITAE
    A T LAST THE LONG-AWAITED MOMENT CAME, and with the last year of the old century we could also close the door of the hated grammar school behind us. After we had passed our final school examinations, not altogether easily—what did we know about mathematics, physics, and the rest of the scholastic curriculum?—the school principal honoured us with a valedictory speech, delivered with great feeling, an occasion for which we had to wear black frock coats. We were now grown up, he said, and our industry and efficiency must do credit to our native land. Eight years of companionship thus came to an end, and I have seen very few of my comrades in adversity since then. Most of us registered at the university, and those who had to reconcile themselves to other careers and occupations regarded us with envy.
    For in those long-distant days in Austria there was still a special, romantic aura about university. The status of a student brought with it certain privileges that gave a young scholar a great advantage over all his contemporaries. I doubt whether much is known outside the German-speaking countries about the old-fashioned oddity of this phenomenon, so its anachronistic absurdity calls for explanation. Most of our universities had been founded in the Middle Ages, at a time when occupying your mind with academic knowledge appeared out of the ordinary, and young men were given certain privileges to induce them to study. Medieval scholars were not subject to the ordinary civil courts, they could not have writs served on them or be otherwise pestered by bailiffs in their colleges, they worespecial clothing, had a right to fight duels with impunity, and were recognised as an exclusive guild with its own traditions—be they good or bad. In the course of time, with the gradual coming of democracy to public life and the dissolution of all other medieval guilds, academics in the rest of Europe lost this privileged position. Only in Germany and German-speaking Austria, where class consciousness still had the upper hand, did students cling tenaciously to privileges which had long ago lost any meaning. They even based their own student code of conduct on them. A German student set particular store by a specific kind of ‘student honour’, existing side by side with his honour as an ordinary citizen. Anyone who insulted him must give him satisfaction, meaning that if the man offering the insult was ‘fit to give satisfaction’ they must fight a duel. This smug student criterion of ‘fitness to give satisfaction’, in turn, could not be met by someone like a businessman or a banker, only a man with an academic education, a graduate, or a military officer—no one else, among millions, was good enough to have the honour of crossing swords with one of those stupid, beardless boys. Then again, to be considered a real student you had to have proved your courage, meaning you had fought as many duels as possible, and even showed the signs of those heroic deeds on your face in the form of duelling scars; unscarred cheeks and a nose without a nick in it were unworthy of an academic in the genuine German tradition. This meant that the students who wore fraternity colours, showing that they belonged to a particular student body, felt obliged to go in for mutual provocation, also insulting other perfectly peaceful students and officers so that they could fight more duels. In the fraternities, every new student had his aptitude for this worthy occupation tested on the fencing floor, and he was also initiated into other fraternity customs. Every ‘fox’, the term for a novice, was assigned to an older fraternity member whom he had to serve with slavish obedience, and who in turn instructed him inthe noble arts required