Anjuman-i Zīr'shīrvānī: Persian 1403

People like us are a thorn in the world's eye. The world pulls this thorn out of its eye again and again and throws it away. It is our nature to be thrown away. If this world does not want us, we want another world in its place... Our secret society must scare it. Not out of evil, because evil is necessary for the emergence of good. In fact, evil is the midwife of the blind. We must scare stupidity! Stupidity is the root of all corruption. Every tragedy and crime is attributed to the stupidity of the Almighty. Stupidity is the mother of all lack, not lack of reason, because fools can also be reasonable. Stupidity is the lack of imagination. Why does the weight of everyday life crush people, why does it suffocate them under its gray duster? Because they have no imagination! I do not preach about escaping from everyday life, neither forward nor backward, but from above I call out to them: Wake up! Break the fence of your habits! Open your eyes and dream! (From the book) Ernst Kreider was one of the most unconventional German writers of the 20th century. When The Attic Society was published in 1946, it was a huge success and the first post-war German work to be translated into English. In the eyes of Alfred Andersch, Kreider's novel was "the first great hope of post-war German literature," and Hans Werner Richter found in it his idea of ​​"mysterious realism," which he considered the appropriate form for literature in the interwar period and a bulwark against the threat of the evasive and unreal movements of post-war German society.