Die Mondscheingasse

The narrator has landed in a small French harbor town and bridges the waiting time for the missed night train to Germany with an exploratory walk through the moonlit alleys of the harbor district. He gets into an amusement restaurant, where the waitress immediately orders a beer and sits down - falsely smooching - next to the guest. The woman, who also speaks German, treats a second guest who enters rather harshly, calling him a miser. The constant, increasingly harsh attacks on this guest become too much for the narrator and he finally leaves the restaurant. Outside in Mondscheingasse, the insulted man approaches the narrator and tells his story. Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was an Austrian writer. In 1934 he fled from the Nazis via London and New York to Brazil. In the night.