Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

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Shachermacher-workshop-booths

 

48 From the Author

48.1187-8

The lecture which I propose to append as a conclusion to this first series was more than once read by my, as they were then called, “pupils of the first rank” during the existence of the mentioned institution. Certain of them, by the way, turned out subsequently, to my personal sincere regret, to have in their essence a predisposition to the speedy transformation of their psyche into the psyche called Hasnamussian—a predisposition which appeared and became fully visible and clearly sensible to all more or less normal persons around them, when, at the moment of desperate crisis for everything I had previously actualized, due to the said accident, they, as is said, “quaking for their skins,” that is to say, fearing to lose their personal welfare which, by the way, I had created for them, deserted the common work and with their tails between their legs took themselves off to their kennels, where, profiting by the crumbs fallen from my so to say “idea-table” they opened their, as I would say, “Shachermacher-workshop-booths,” and with a secret feeling of hope and perhaps even joy at their speedy and complete release from my vigilant control, began manufacturing out of various unfortunate naïve people, “candidates for lunatic asylums.”