The Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum was a brick block in central Rome that turned German-speakers into priests. In the summer of 1948 the Collegium lay sleepy and deserted in the sun while its students spent their holidays at a butter-yellow villa in San Patore, thirty kilometres outside Rome. At the Collegium, a skeleton staff caught up with paperwork, shelved books, and prepared for a new intake of neophytes in the autumn.
The college librarian was a thirty-five-year-old Sudeten German called Frank Pax. He was smart and good at his job, although didn’t seem to be around much. The students liked him. Pax claimed to be a writer but no-one had ever seen anything he published. His switching of apartments every few months was tolerated as an eccentricity.
Pax lived with an unmarried Italian woman called Magda Bolsi and kept on good terms with a German ex-girlfriend who worked as translator at the Anglo-Italian Society. He had a wife called Lieselotte living in Switzerland. If the Jesuit seminary authorities knew about their librarian’s tangled love life, they forgave him. Everyone has vices.
CHRISTOPHER OTHEN 