unusually insignificant person—­causes me unusual trouble.  He does not like me, because he is conscious of my superiority.  He tries in every way to make me look ridiculous.  He is deceitful and cowardly.  No one finds him nice.  He likes nothing better than to provoke us against each other, to spread angry gossip, and to do as much damage as possible.  He knows how to stay in the background, to disappear at the right moment. -Once I was writing, suspecting nothing bad, in our spacious bath and w.c. (here I was safe from surprises) a longer work on the “Hoax of Genius”.  I explained that genius is a title, not a quality.  That fact is often overlooked, and engenders great confusion.  The name is accidental, generally suspicious.  Whoever is called a genius is therefore not a brilliant person.  Brilliant people usually do not attain the title, which is awarded by the crowd.  The most brilliant people of all time flowered in madhouses and prisons.  Someone who is understood by thousands of

every-day people, is loved... is worthless to me.-At that point I was startled by the slow, soulful screams of blind little Kohn, with whom I had established a friendship, in spite of my anti-semitic principles.  I leaped up, hurried out.  I saw how Max Mechenmal was running back and forth, pinching Kohn in the legs or doing other nasty things, while calling out:  “Catch me.”  The little Kohn was pale.  In his helplessness.  He pressed his back against a wall.  His thin, suffering hands groped in the air...  I have never seen such concentrated pain as lay in the dead eyes of little Kohn.  Without giving myself time to put my clothes in order, I hurried to Mechenmal, to beat him for his brutal behavior.  My trousers were damaged by a nail which was sticking out of the wall.  Mechenmal used the delay to slip by me, run into the w.c., which he locked behind him.  I beat on the door.  He said:  “Occupied!” I was very angry.  It occured to me that in my haste I had forgotten to take with me the paper on which the work on the hoax of genius was written.  I called to him to pass it out.  He did not answer.  Later I heard how loudly he giggled.  And I knew:  I would never see the manuscript which I had intended to send to the new newspaper, “The Other A.”  Sadly I went away-Ah, little Kohn unfortunately is now dead.  He has died of his ghosts, as he had often predicted to me.  The blind little Kohn had seen his ghosts.  Sometimes in stark daylight.  At such times he was found trembling, pale, in a corner.  He had drawn up his legs so far that his thigh was pressed against his sunken chest.  His head lay between his knees.  The tiny, frightened fingers clutched the tops of his shoes.  If someone touched him, he shrieked.  The shriek was so piercingly frightening that one instinctively let him go, as though one had been shoved.  Each time it happened one was as as helpless as the first time.  Doctor Mondmilch was called.  She stroked him a bit.  His rigidity dissolved in sobs.  He received drops, was put to bed, slept badly.  Mechenmal called out, so that it echoed in the street, “Kohn is mad again.”