regardless of risk, they were partly indebted for not having been torn to pieces by the Red mob a few years previously and strung up to the lamp-posts?

One day these lamentable phenomena fired the late but unforgotten Prefect Pöhner--a man whose unbending straightforwardness forced him to hate all twisters and to hate them as only a man with an honest heart can hate--to say: "In all my life I wished to be first a German and then an official, and I never wanted to mix up with these creatures who, as if they were kept officials, prostituted themselves before anybody who could play lord and master for the time being."