And oh, what a lovely recollection I have from Alexanderplatz! Do you know, Hänschen, what Alexanderplatz is? The month-and-a-half stay that I had there left gray hairs on my head and rent my nerves in such a way that I will never get over it. And yet I have a small recollection from there that pops up like a flower in my memory. Night began there as early as 5:30 – it was late autumn, October, and the cell had no lighting at all. There was nothing left for me to do in that eleven square meter space than to stretch out on the plank bed, which was stuck in between indescribably ugly pieces of furniture, and amidst the hellish music of the municipal transit trains continually thundering by, making the cell shake as bits of red light flashed on the vibrating window pane, I recited my Mörike in a low voice to myself. After 10 p.m. the diabolic concert of the city trains would grow somewhat softer, and soon after that the following little episode from the life of the streets would become audible. First you could hear dimly a hoarse male voice, which had something demanding and admonishing about it, then in reply, a young girl singing, probably around eight years old; she sang a children's ditty while hopping and jumping and at the same time letting go with silvery peals of laughter which had a bell-like purity of tone. The man's voice must have been that of a tired, bad-tempered janitor, who was calling his little daughter home to go to sleep. But the little rascal didn't want to obey, let the deep gruff voice of her father go in one ear and out the other, kept flitting around in the streets like a butterfly, and countered the oncoming strictures and threats with a merry children's rhyme. One could vividly picture the short skirt flapping and the thin legs flying in dance steps. In the hoppity-hop rhythm of a children's song, in the rippling laughter, there was so much carefree and triumphant joy of life that the whole dark and musty building of the central police headquarters was enveloped as though by a silver cloak of mist and in my foul-smelling prison cell the air was suddenly scented with the perfume of dark-red roses falling through the air …