And now with cigarettes!
Seriously, it’s a reference to cigarettes, in a post-WW2 era short story that I’m trying to track down. It might be by Heinrich Boll, but I’m not certain. I actually have a bachelor’s degree in German literature, and I had to read this story in one of my classes. However: (a) I got my degree back when our vertebrate ancestors were just wriggling up out of the swamp, and (b) when you study a foreign language literature it takes a bachelor’s degree just to learn the language well enough, in my opinion.
In the story, which is set in the period of post-war Allied occupation, there’s one point where the narrator is able to tell that an American soldier is nearby because he can smell “very good tobacco” being smoked.
Now that cigarettes are considered worse the content of Satan’s chamberpot, it’s rather fascinating to think that they were once a typically American product, of which we were considered to manufacture the highest quality, and that the writer of that story used this plot device.
Anyone recall this story?