A Tramp Abroad — Volume 03
1880
Twain at his most observant and wickedly funny, "A Tramp Abroad" finds the great American humorist wandering through Germany with a bemused eye and a talent for finding the absurd in the picturesque. This third volume continues his journey down the Neckar River, where he trades the guided tour circuit for a rickety raft and discovers that the real comedy lies not in grand monuments but in the everyday details: hardworking women along the banks, children swimming in the shallows, and the peculiar machinery of German river traffic. What elevates this beyond mere travelogue is Twain's increasingly sharp perspective. Years have passed since "The Innocents Abroad," and his wonder has curdled into something more interesting: a traveler who sees through the tourist's illusion while still being genuinely charmed by what he finds. He recounts local legends with relish, dissects German customs with the eye of an outsider who refuses to pretend comprehension, and mines humor from the collision between expectation and reality. The result is both a vivid portrait of late 19th-century Germany and a meditation on what it means to be a stranger in a strange land, perpetually amused, perpetually bewildered, perpetually honest.
Editions
X-Ray
“That's the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don't care, individuals do.””
— Mark Twain
“Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print -- I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:Gretchen: "Wilhelm, where is the turnip?"Wilhelm: "She has gone to the kitchen."Gretchen: "Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?"Wilhelm. "It has gone to the opera.””
— Mark Twain
“Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen hundred thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me. I do not see any wisdom in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in, when you can get a better quality, outside, any day, free of expense.””
— Mark Twain
“A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.””
— Mark Twain
“The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called “separable verbs.” The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance. A favorite one is reiste ab”
— Mark Twain
“The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines; they are put up in tall, slender bottles, and are considered a pleasant beverage. One tells them from vinegar by the label.””
— Mark Twain
“His hair was short and parted accurately in the middle, and he had all the look of an American person who would be likely to begin his signature with an initial, and spell his middle name out.””
— Mark Twain
“I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the author considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me quite a nice compliment - but if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment.””
— Mark Twain
“It's a Catholic glacier. You can tell by the look of it. And the management." I said, no, I believed nothing but the extreme end of it was in a Catholic canton. "Well, then, it's a government glacier," said Harris. "It's all the same. Over here the government runs everything”
— Mark Twain
