摘要：Years ago, in a provincial town in eastern Germany, there lived a man whose only remarkable or distinguishing feature seemed to be his enduring loyalty and devotion to the state, proved by years of unstinting and reliable service. So regular in fact were his habits, so perfectly did he seem to mesh with the machinery of daily life, that the local townspeople set their clocks according to his comings and goings. Yet, one day, quite late in life, an event occurred which, as he put it, shook him out of his "dogmatic slumbers". In the aftermath of this profound shock, he wrote a book which revolutionized the thought of his time, and catapulted its author to world fame.
