Herman Teichert

Heinrich Böll's story, "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" is charming. He seems to have borrowed from a passage in Plutarch's Life of Pyrrhus. The intro to the story says it "clearly defines the difference in attitude toward work between a capitalistic society and a traditional socialistic society, represented respectively by a tourist and a fisherman" - a simplistic and dismissive analysis of the sort one often finds in this type of textbook. I don't think one has to favor a socialist society on the East German model to admire the fisherman's relaxed attitude.… (meer)