79. The Installation of Naturalist Busts on the Potsdam Bridge

Local patriots in Berlin are getting angry. The city fathers have decided to erect monuments to four natural scientists on the newly built Potsdam Bridge. We will be able to see Gauss, Werner Siemens, Helmholtz and Röntgen in the future, when we no longer have to work our way through the desolate rubble and debris that currently divides Potsdamer Strasse into two parts. Although it is a fact that our age is one of science and technological progress, some people would like to emphasize the specific Berlin character when a bridge is being built - but probably with the help of modern technology and not with the specific Berlin character. Such people now rail against the city fathers who pay homage to the spirit of science and place Gauss the Brunswicker, Siemens the Hanoverian, Helmholtz the Brandenburger and Röntgen the Rhinelander on the Potsdam Bridge. Not a single native Berliner among them, people say. Röntgen is only there because he is popular with the court. Well, I wish they would only recognize people who deserve to be as popular at court as Röntgen. If the decision to place the ingenious discoverer of X-rays on the Potsdam Bridge was a service to the court, I only wish that by being subservient, the needs of the time would always be met as they have been in this case.