{"id":80482,"date":"2014-12-04T14:32:59","date_gmt":"2014-12-04T19:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=80482"},"modified":"2018-12-04T14:44:55","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T19:44:55","slug":"a-crazy-mixed-up-day-thirty-brainteasers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/04\/a-crazy-mixed-up-day-thirty-brainteasers\/","title":{"rendered":"A Crazy Mixed-Up Day: Thirty Brainteasers"},"content":{"rendered":"

From 1927 to early 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote and delivered some eighty to ninety broadcasts over the new medium of German radio, working between Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt. These broadcasts, many of them produced under the auspices of programming for children, cover a fascinating array of topics: typologies and archaeologies of a rapidly changing Berlin; scenes from the shifting terrain of childhood and its construction; exemplary cases of trickery, swindle, and fraud that play on the uncertain lines between truth and falsehood; catastrophic events such as the eruption of Vesuvius and the flooding of the Mississippi River, and much more. Now the transcripts of many of these broadcasts are available for the first time in English\u2014Lecia Rosenthal has gathered them in a new book,<\/em> Radio Benjamin<\/a>. Below is one of his broadcasts for children, including thirty brainteasers. <\/em>(Want the answers? They\u2019re here<\/a>.)
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps you know a long poem that begins like this:<\/p>\n

Dark it is, the moon shines bright,
\na car creeps by at the speed of light
\nand slowly rounds the round corner.
\nPeople standing sit inside,
\nimmersed they are in silent chatter,
\nwhile a shot-dead hare
\nskates by on a sandbank there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Everyone can see that this poem doesn\u2019t add up. In the story you\u2019ll hear today, quite a few things don\u2019t add up either, but I doubt that everyone will notice. Or rather, each of you will find a few mistakes\u2014and when you find one, you can make a dash on a piece of paper with your pencil. And here\u2019s a hint: if you mark all the mistakes in the story, you\u2019ll have a total of fifteen dashes. But if you find only five or six, that\u2019s perfectly alright as well.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s only one facet of the story you\u2019ll hear today. Besides these fifteen mistakes, it also contains fifteen questions. And while the mistakes creep up on you, quiet as a mouse, so no one notices them, the questions, on the other hand, will be announced with a loud gong. Each correct answer to a question gives you two points, because many of the questions are more difficult to answer than the mistakes are to find. So, with a total of fifteen questions, if you know the answers to all of them, you\u2019ll have thirty dashes. Added to the fifteen dashes for mistakes, that makes a total of forty-five possible dashes. None of you will get all forty-five, but that\u2019s not necessary. Even ten points would be a respectable score.<\/p>\n

You can mark your points yourselves. During the next Youth Hour, the radio will announce the mistakes along with the answers to the questions, so you can see whether your thoughts were on target, for above all, this story requires thinking. There are no questions and no mistakes that can\u2019t be managed with a little reflection.<\/p>\n

One last bit of advice: don\u2019t focus on just the questions. To the contrary, keep a lookout for the mistakes above all; the questions will all be repeated at the end of the story. It goes without saying that the questions don\u2019t contain any mistakes; there, everything is as it should be. Now pay attention. Here\u2019s Heinz with his story. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"Radio<\/a>What a day! It all started early this morning\u2014I had hardly slept a wink, because I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about a riddle\u2014anyway, the doorbell rang early. I opened the door and there was my friend Anton\u2019s deaf housekeeper. She handed me a letter from Anton.<\/p>\n

\u201cDear Heinz,\u201d writes Anton, \u201cyesterday, while I was at your house, I left my hat hanging by the door. Please give it to my housekeeper. Best regards, Anton.\u201d But the letter continues. Below he writes: \u201cI just now found the hat. Forgive the disturbance. Many thanks for your trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s Anton for you, the absent-minded professor type. By the same token, he\u2019s also a great fan and solver of riddles. And when I looked at the letter, it occurred to me: I could use Anton today. Perhaps he knows the solution to my riddle; I made a bet that I would figure out the riddle by this morning. The riddle goes like this (Gong<\/em>):<\/p>\n

The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all. What is it?<\/p>\n

Yes, that\u2019s it, I thought to myself, I have to ask Anton. I was hoping to ask his housekeeper whether he was already at school\u2014Anton is a teacher\u2014but she had already left.<\/p>\n

I thought to myself, Anton must be at school. I put on my hat and just as I was heading down the stairs, it occurred to me that summer daylight saving time began today, so everything starts an hour earlier. I pulled out my watch and set it back one hour. When I reached the street, I realized that I had forgotten to shave. Just around the corner to the left I saw a barbershop. In three minutes I was there. In the window hung a large enamel sign: \u201cA shave today ten pfennigs, a shave tomorrow free.\u201d (Gong<\/em>): A shave today ten pfennigs, a shave tomorrow free. The sign struck me as odd. I wish I knew why. I went in, took a seat and got a shave, all the while looking in the large mirror hanging before me. Suddenly the barber nicked me, on my right cheek. And sure enough, blood appeared on the right side of my mirror image. The shave cost me ten pfennigs. I paid with a twenty-mark note and got back nineteen marks in five-mark coins, along with five groschen and twenty five-pfennig coins. Then the barber, a jolly young man, held open the door and said to me as I went out: \u201cSay hello to Richard if you see him.\u201d Richard is his twin brother who has a pharmacy on the main square.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m thinking: the best thing is to go straight to Anton\u2019s school and see if I can\u2019t track him down. On my way there, walking down a street, I saw a large crowd of people standing around a carnival magician performing his tricks. With chalk he drew a tiny circle on the sidewalk. He then said: \u201cUsing the same center point, I will draw another circle whose circumference is five centimeters greater than the first.\u201d After doing so he stood up, looked around with a mysterious smile and said (Gong<\/em>): \u201cIf I now draw a gigantic circle, let\u2019s say as big as the circumference of the Earth, and then I draw a second one whose circumference is five centimeters greater than that of the giant circle, which ring is wider: the one that lies between the tiny circle and the one five centimeters larger, or the ring between the giant circle and the one five centimeters larger?\u201d Yes, I would like to know this, too.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d finally managed to push my way through the crowd, when I noticed that my cheek still hadn\u2019t stopped bleeding, and as I was on the main square, I went into the pharmacy to buy a bandage. \u201cGreetings from your twin brother, the barber,\u201d I said to the pharmacist. He\u2019s old as the hills and a bit of an odd bird to boot. And more than anything, he\u2019s terribly anxious. Whenever he leaves his ground-floor shop, not only does he double-lock the door, he also walks around the whole building, and if he sees he\u2019s left a window open somewhere, he reaches inside to close it. But the most interesting thing about him is his collection of curiosities, which he\u2019ll show to anyone who comes into his shop. Today was no exception and, before long, I was left to admire everything at my leisure. There was a skull of an African Negro when he was six years old, and next to it a skull of the same man when he was sixty. The second was much larger, of course. Then there was a photograph of Frederick the Great, playing with his two greyhounds at Sanssouci. Next to it lay a bladeless antique knife that was missing its handle. He also had a stuffed flying fish. And hanging on the wall was a large pendulum clock. As I paid for my bandage, the pharmacist asked (Gong<\/em>): \u201cIf the pendulum on my clock swings ten times to the right and ten times to the left, how often does it pass through the middle?\u201d This, too, I wanted to know. So, that was the pharmacist.<\/p>\n

Now I needed to hurry if I wanted to make it to the school before lessons were over. I jumped onto the next streetcar and just managed to get a corner seat. A fat man was seated to my right and on my left was a small woman talking to the man across from her about her uncle (Gong<\/em>): \u201cMy uncle,\u201d she said, \u201chas just turned one hundred years old, but has only had twenty-five birthdays. How can that be?\u201d This, too, I wanted to know, but we had already reached the school. I went through all the classrooms looking for Anton. The teachers were very annoyed at being disturbed.<\/p>\n

And they asked the oddest questions. For example, I walked into a math class where the teacher was getting cross with a young boy. He had not been paying attention and the teacher was going to punish him. He said to the boy (Gong<\/em>): \u201cAdd up all the numbers from one to a thousand.\u201d The teacher was more than a little surprised when, after a minute, the boy stood up and gave the right answer: 501,000. How was he able to calculate so fast? This I also wanted to know. First I tried it with just the numbers one through ten. Once I came upon the quickest way to do this, I had figured out the boy\u2019s trick.<\/p>\n

Another class was geography. (Gong<\/em>): The teacher drew a square on the blackboard. In the middle of this square he drew a smaller square. He then drew four lines, each connecting one corner of the small square with the nearest corner of the large square.This resulted in five shapes: one in the middle, this was the small square, and four other shapes surrounding the small square. Every boy had to draw this diagram in his notebook. The diagram represented five countries. Now the teacher wanted to know how many different colors were needed so that each country was a different color than the three, or four, countries that it bordered. I thought to myself, five countries need five colors. But I was wrong, the answer was smaller than five. Why? This, too, I wanted to know.<\/p>\n

I then entered another class, where students were learning to spell. The teacher was asking very strange things, for example (Gong<\/em>): \u201cHow do you spell dry grass with three letters?\u201d And (Gong<\/em>): \u201cHow can you write one hundred using only four nines?\u201d And (Gong<\/em>): \u201cIn your ABC\u2019s, which is the middlemost letter?\u201d To conclude the lesson he told the children a fairy tale (Gong<\/em>):<\/p>\n

\u201cAn evil sorcerer transformed three princesses into three flowers, perfectly identical and planted in a field. Once a month, one of them was allowed to return to her house for the night as a human. On one of these occasions, one of the princesses said to her husband just as dawn broke and she had to return to her two friends in the field and become a flower again: \u2018If you come to me this morning and pluck me, I will be redeemed and can stay with you for evermore.\u2019 This came to pass. Now the question is, how did her husband recognize her, since the flowers looked identical?\u201d This, too, I wanted to know, but it was high time for me to get hold of Anton, and because he wasn\u2019t at school, I headed to his home.<\/p>\n

\"Walter_Benjamin_vers_1928\"<\/a>

Benjamin in 1928.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anton lived not far away, on the sixth floor of a building on Kramgasse. I climbed the stairs and rang the bell. His housekeeper, who had been at my house in the morning, answered right away and let me in. But she was alone in the apartment: \u201cHerr Anton is not here,\u201d she said. This irritated me. I thought the smartest thing to do was to wait for him, so I went into his room. He had a gorgeous view onto the street. The only hindrance was a two-story building across the way, which obstructed the view. But you could clearly see the faces of passersby, and on looking up, you could see birds fluttering about in the trees. Looming nearby was the large train station clock tower. The clock read exactly 14:00. I pulled out my pocket watch for comparison and sure enough, it was 4 pm on the nose. I had waited for three hours when, out of boredom, I started browsing the books in Anton\u2019s room. (Gong<\/em>) Unfortunately a bookworm had gotten into his library. Every day it ate through one volume. It was now on the first page of the first volume of Grimm\u2019s Fairy Tales<\/em>. I thought to myself, how long will it need to reach the last page of the second volume of Grimm\u2019s Fairy Tales<\/em>? I wasn\u2019t concerned about the covers, just the pages. Yes, this is something I wanted to know. I heard voices outside in the hallway.<\/p>\n

The housekeeper was standing there with an errand boy, who had been sent by the tailor to collect money for a suit. (Gong<\/em>) Because the errand boy knew the housekeeper was deaf, he had handed her a piece of paper with one word written on it in large capital letters: MONEY [GELD<\/em>]<\/small>. But the housekeeper had no money with her, so to convey her request that he be patient, she drew just two more letters on the piece of paper. What were these two letters?<\/p>\n

I had had enough of waiting. I headed out to find a little something to eat after such a tedious day. As I reached the street the moon was already in the sky. There had been a new moon a few days prior, and by now it had waxed to a narrow crescent that looked like the beginning of a capital German \u201cZ\u201d hovering over the rooftops. In front of me was a small pastry shop. I went in and ordered an apple cake with whipped cream. (Gong<\/em>): When the apple cake with whipped cream arrived, it didn\u2019t appeal to me. I told the waiter I would prefer a Moor\u2019s Head [i.e., a mallomar<\/em>]. He brought me the Moor\u2019s Head, which was delicious. I stood up to go. As I was just on my way out, the waiter ran after me, shouting: You didn\u2019t pay for your Moor\u2019s Head!\u2014But I gave you the apple cake in exchange, I told him.\u2014But you didn\u2019t pay for that either, the waiter said.\u2014Sure, but I didn\u2019t eat it either! I retorted, and left. Was I right? This, too, I\u2019d like to know.<\/p>\n

As I arrived home, imagine my astonishment at seeing Anton, who had been waiting there for five hours. He wanted to apologize for the silly letter he had sent to me early this morning via his housekeeper. I said that it didn\u2019t matter all that much, and then told Anton my whole day as I\u2019ve just told it to you now. He couldn\u2019t stop shaking his head. When my story was over he was so astounded that he was speechless. He then left, still shaking his head. As he disappeared around the corner, I suddenly realized: this time he really has forgotten his hat. And I\u2014of course I had forgotten something as well: to ask him the answer to my riddle (Gong<\/em>): The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all.<\/p>\n

But perhaps you\u2019ve found the answer by now. And with this, I say goodbye.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Repetition of the fifteen questions: <\/em><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The first question is an old German folk riddle: The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all. What is it?<\/li>\n
  2. What\u2019s fishy about a barber who hangs an enamel sign in his window reading, \u201cA shave today ten pfennigs, a shave tomorrow free\u201d?<\/li>\n
  3. If I have a small circle and then around its center point I draw a circle whose circumference is five centimeters greater than that of the original, this creates a ring between the two circles. If I then take a giant circle, one as big as the circumference of the Earth, and around the same center point I draw another one, whose circumference is five centimeters greater than that of the first giant one, there is then a ring between those two circles. Which of the two rings is wider, the first or the second?<\/li>\n
  4. If the clock pendulum swings ten times to the right and ten times to the left, how often does it pass through the middle?<\/li>\n
  5. How can a man who is a hundred\u00a0years old have had only twenty-five birthdays?<\/li>\n
  6. What is the quickest way to add up all the numbers from one to 1,000? Try it first with the numbers from one to ten.<\/li>\n
  7. A country is surrounded by four other countries, each of which borders the middle country and two of the others. What is the fewest number of colors needed so that each country has a different color than its neighbors?<\/li>\n
  8. How do you spell dry grass with three letters?<\/li>\n
  9. How can you write 100 using only four nines?<\/li>\n
  10. In your ABC\u2019s, which is the middlemost letter?<\/li>\n
  11. There are three identical flowers in a field. In the morning, how can you tell which of them has not been there overnight?<\/li>\n
  12. If each day a bookworm eats through one volume in a series of books, how long will it take for it to eat its way from the first page of one volume to the last page of the next, provided he eats in the same direction in which the series of books is arranged?<\/li>\n
  13. You have a piece of paper with the word money<\/em> [Geld<\/em>] written on it. Which two letters can you add to convey a request for patience [Geduld<\/em>]?<\/li>\n
  14. What\u2019s wrong with the logic of a man who orders a piece of cake, exchanges it for another once it arrives, and then won\u2019t pay for the new piece because he claims he traded the old piece for it?<\/li>\n
  15. The old riddle once more, whose solution is worth four points because it has now appeared twice: The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    You can find the answers to these fifteen questions, as well as a list of the fifteen mistakes, here<\/a>.
    \n<\/em><\/p>\n

    Translated from German by Jonathan Lutes. Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, probably on July 6, 1932. The <\/em>S\u00fcdwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung announced for the Youth Hour on July 6, 1932, at 3:15 pm, \u201c\u2018Denksport\u2019 [Mental Exercise], by Dr. Walter Benjamin (for children ten years and older).\u201d \u201cA Crazy Mixed-Up Day\u201d was most likely the text Benjamin prepared for this broadcast.<\/em><\/p>\n

    This transcript appears in <\/em>Radio Benjamin<\/a>, available now. Reprinted<\/em> with the permission of Verso Books.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Walter Benjamin<\/em> (1892\u20131940) was a German Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of <\/em>Illuminations,<\/em> The Arcades Project, and <\/em>The Origin of German Tragic Drama.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    From 1927 to early 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote and delivered some eighty to ninety broadcasts over the new medium of German radio, working between Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt. These broadcasts, many of them produced under the auspices of programming for children, cover a fascinating array of topics: typologies and archaeologies of a rapidly changing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":773,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[6397,16273,13807,247,16272,16274,339,16270,13012,16271,1725],"class_list":["post-80482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-berlin","tag-brainteasers","tag-frankfurt","tag-germany","tag-literary-criticism","tag-puzzles","tag-radio","tag-radio-benjamin","tag-riddles","tag-verso-books","tag-walter-benjamin"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCan You Solve Walter Benjamin\u2019s Brainteasers?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"From 1927 to 1933, the German literary critic had a radio show for children. 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