Free The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse by Hermann Hesse Page B

district Solemn and venerable administrative buildings and banks, theaters and churches arose on the wide, cheerful streets, where the first house made of wooden planks and tin had stood next to piles of ash and puddles. Students sauntered to the university and the library. Ambulances drove cautiously to the hospitals. A deputy’s car was noticed and greeted by onlookers. In twenty huge schoolhouses made of stone and iron, the founding day of the famous city was celebrated every year with songs and speeches. The former prairie was covered with fields, factories, and villages and traversed by twenty railroad lines. The mountains had moved closer and were connected by rail that went right into the heart of the ravines. In the mountains or far away on the seacoast, the rich people had their summer homes.
    One hundred years after its foundation, an earthquake shattered and devastated the city. It sprang up once more, however, and all the wooden structures now became stone; everything small was now big; everything narrow, wide. The railroad station was the largest in the country. The stock market was the largest in the world. Architects and artists decorated the rejuvenated city with public buildings, parks, fountains, and monuments. In the course of this new century the city gained the reputation of being the most beautiful and richest in the country and a city well worth seeing. Politicians and architects, technicians and mayors of foreign cities took trips to study the buildings, water system, administration, and other institutions of the famous city. At this time the new city hall was built, one of the greatest and most glorious edifices in the world. Since this time of new wealth and municipal pride coincided fortuitously with an upsurge in popular taste, in particular a taste for architecture andsculpture, the quickly growing city became a brazen and appealing work of wonder. A broad green belt of splendid parks surrounded the inner district, whose buildings were all made out of an elegant bright green stone, and on the other side of this ring, the lines of streets and homes extended until they became lost in the vast open country. A tremendous museum had numerous visitors and admirers, and its hundred rooms, courtyards, and halls portrayed the history of the city from its origins until its most recent development. The first gigantic entrance hall of this building complex had showcases and rooms depicting the former prairie, with carefully cultivated plants and animals and exact models of the earliest impoverished dwellings, alleys, and institutions. The young people of the city strolled through this hall and observed the course of their history from the tents and wooden sheds, from the first uneven rails to the splendor of the large municipal streets. Guided and instructed by their teachers, they learned all about the glorious laws of development and progress, how fine things were made from raw material, how human beings evolved from animals, how educated people developed from wild ones, and how culture was formed out of nature.
    In the next century the city reached the high point of its glory, which unfolded in rich opulence and grew rapidly until a bloody revolution of the lower classes set a limit to this splendor. The mob began by setting fire to the large oil works a few miles from the city, so that a great part of the country with factories, farms, and villages was either burned down or deserted. The city itself experienced slaughter and cruelty of all kinds, to be sure, but it continued to exist and slowly recovered once again in more sober decades. Still, it was never able to regain its earlier buoyant life. During its low period a distant country far across the seas suddenly began to flourish. It exportedwheat and iron, silver and other treasures in plenitude, due to an inexhaustibly fertile soil that willingly provided everything. The new country was tremendously attractive to people of the old world, whose