Four or five years ago one of the most celebrated of European prodigies was the Polish dwarf, Herman Zeitung, at one time one of the chief attractions at the Folies Bergere. Latterly Zeitung has been little in the public eye, or rather was until the other day, when he started in to carry out an interesting exploit which very nearly succeeded. He had himself fastened up in a box addressed to a large importing house at Madrid and labelled “Fragile. With Care. Top.” Holes had been made in this box for breathing purposes, and one of its sides was so constructed that it could be opened from within to give the little dwarf a way of getting out unnoticed when he reached his destination. The box was fitted up with a cushioned seat, and an abundant supply of provisions was placed within it. The start was made at Vienna, where Zeitung had been living for some time, and after the dwarf had placed himself inside and fastened himself in two lusty porters carried him off to the station, having been paid beforehand a fee of 60 cents each. They gave the box in charge to the station master to be shipped to Madrid by express. According to Zeitung the journey was an uninteresting one and without incident, but when he got to the Spanish capital his troubles began. The Madrid station master evidently had a poor knowledge as to the fragility of glass, for he turned the box over and over, and at last came to the conclusion that its contents ought to be investigated. His aides therefore opened it, and dragged the dwarf out more dead than alive from the shaking he had received. It would have puzzled a man less full of expedients how to further punish Zeitung, but the station master solved the problem by having him arrested for trying to swindle the railroad companies out of their fares. The dwarf’s defense was that he was traveling in this manner on a bet of 3,000 francs, the terms of the wager being that he was to get to Madrid without a cent in his pocket. Three hundred francs, however, were found concealed in his shoes. The real reason of his traveling in this remarkable manner was that he might save railroad fare and also get a good advertisement for the engagement in Madrid, for which he was billed.
A couple of sites in Swedish seem to indicate that Zeitung shipped himself to Paris from Vienna, not Madrid, somewhere around 1890 or ‘91. My Swedish is pretty much non-existent, so that’s all you get. One of the sites seems to be saying something about the Circus “Bergman”–perhaps this is the source for the Folies Bergere reference? Since the “130 ans d’histoire” skips over the period from 1879-1890, I wonder if the source for this article or the editor of the paper was just putting random details in. Or, perhaps someone was confounding Zeitung with another famous dwarf who was truly associated with the Folies Bergere: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
There is no other easily-discernable information about Mr Zeitung, since his name means “newspaper” in German and Herman isn’t exactly unusual.
So, I search again with “Hermann Zeitung” just in case our unreliable source missed on that point, too. And indeed I found something…. Freud. In Spanish. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life–you know, the one that talks about “Freudian” slips, though he called them parapraxes–mentions Mr Zeitung, but apparently not in the English translation by A.A. Brill which is on the web. At least, not that I can find. However, Google translate does a not-bad job:
Veamos how I could commit a day the error to read in a newspaper: “In barrel (Im Faß), by Europe”, instead of “A foot (Zu Fuß) by Europe.” The solution of this error took long time to me and was full of difficulties. The first associations that appeared were that In barrel? it had to talk about to the barrel of Diogenes, and soon, who in a History of the art had read just a short time did something on the art at the time of Alexander. Of there was more no a passage here until the memory of the well-known phrase of this king: “If not outside Alexander, wanted to be Diogenes.” I remembered also, very vaguely, something relative to certain Hermann Zeitung that had made a trip locked up in a drawer. Here they stopped to appear new associations, and it was not either possible to find the page of the History of the art in which it had read the observation to that before I have talked about. Months later I became to occupy of this problem of interpretation, that had left before getting to solve it, and this time appeared already accompanied of its solution. I remembered to have read in a newspaper (Zeitung) an article on the manifold and sometimes outlandish means of transport (Beförderung) used in those days by the people to be transferred to Paris, where the Universal Exhibition was celebrated, article in which, according to I create, I humoristically commented the intention of certain individual to make the way until Paris put within a barrel that another subject would make roll. As he is natural, these eccentrics did not set out more with these madnesses than to call the attention on their people. Hermann Zeitung was, in fact, the name of the individual that had given the first example of such average unaccustoming of transport (Beförderung)
So how did Mr Zeitung become known by Sigmund Freud to have transported himself “in a drawer”?