Pomes Penyeach

On a main street of the Ruhr Valley city of Gelsenkirchen one morning last week, a schoolgirl marched up to a young man and popped an odd sort of question. "Herr Huett," said she, "what about Goethe's Prometheus?" Without a moment's hesitation, the young man threw back his head and began to recite:

Curtain thy heavens, thou Jove, with clouds and mist,

And, like a boy that mows down thistle-tops,

Unloose thy spleen on oaks and mountain-peaks . . .

When the young man with the excellent memory had finished, the schoolgirl slipped him two pfennigs, and with her morning's lesson safely in mind, skipped happily off to school. Thereupon, Horst Eberhard Huett, 22, continued on his way in search of another customer, another question--and more pfennigs.

In the last few months, Horst Huett has made quite a business of answering odd questions: it is his way of scraping together enough money to put himself through a university. The well-read son of a refugee minister from Pomerania, he had always wanted to be a philologist, but his wages from the local pipemaking factory were far from enough. Then one night he heard a radio quiz program, found that he could answer all the questions.

After that, Huett turned himself into a kind of street-corner John Kieran, with a sign on his back: "Ich sage Verse Dir; Gib einen Pfennig mir" ("I'll tell you a verse; you give me a penny.") Customers have flocked to him: schoolchildren who need help on their homework, and adults who want the words of the latest song. Huett has answered everything from "What happens in Schiller's Joan of Arc?" to "Recite some verses from Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz," has even been known to recite a geometric theorem or two. About the only question that has stumped him: "What is the size of a kangaroo at birth?"*

By last week Huett felt he was well on his way to winning his education. But for business reasons, he refuses to say exactly how much he has earned. When anyone asks him that, he holds out his coin box, smiles, and quotes a line from Gustav Schwab: "The springs of poetry give you much . . ."

* Answer: about an inch long.

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