Like a diligent bird clinging to one perch or a single theme, Professor Ostermann’s thoughts clung to one subject: his own Waterloo with the girl. Sometimes, just for a change, his thoughts shifted to the girl herself, and then anxiety would overwhelm him. It was in one of those moments that he telephoned the dean of her faculty and tried to make an enquiry. But the enquiry backfired like a faulty gun, shattering the silence with the words: “There is no such student here!” “How about earlier?” “There has never been a student of that name here since the founding of the university!”
It was a relatively modern university which had only been opened in the time of Kaiser Wilhelm prior to the First World War, but that didn’t make it any better. Magda was not registered in any of the other facul
