"Dandy would trot off, tail wagging, toward the merchants set up at the weekly market on the square.

He would dodge under the baskets and bags of shoppers, scoot past the tub makers and the children jockeying for bottles of homemade lemonade. He'd pass under the Austrian tightrope walker, who had fastened his highwire to the Hotel Hungarian King and strung it all the way across to the County Hall. Arthur Strohschneider, better known as “Professor,” would slink from a top window at the hotel out onto the rope. Blindfolded and balancing in his hands a long pole, he would walk, in the air, on a wire, across Kossuth Square, never looking down at the crowd gaping up.”

This paragraph is from a scene that was cut from the book. (Dandy was Kronberg’s dog.) Strohschneider was famous throughout Europe in the 1920s. You can find postcards of him on eBay. Sometimes he’d ride a bicycle across his tightrope. Sometimes he’d set up a table and chair on it, sit down and eat lunch.

Read more about Strohschneider here (German).