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In the Berliner Tageblatt, March 25, 1922, there appeared a humorous article by the actor, Ludwig Barnay, who had recently celebrated his eightieth birthday, on the marks of honour he had received both in former days and again recently. He mentioned jokingly that all the tokens of esteem which otherwise were only customary for the dead had fallen to him during his life-time. In one town a monument had been erected to him; in another a commemoration tablet had been put up on his dwelling-house; in a third a street had been named after him. He then raised the question what honours were left for him after his death, and gave the following reply:
At all events, burial, the usual funeral ceremony, and an obituary notice in the public press. But the funeral procession will even have to do without this three-fold celebration, since I have arranged in my will that my demise shall not take place before my cremation has taken place.
The blunder which appears in the last sentence shows very clearly the writer's wish not to die at all, and gives us a good insight into the deep unconscious conviction of every human being's idea of his own indestructibility.
It is worth noting that the words 'take place' are not the ones which ought to have been used. The right phrase should have been something like, 'My demise shall not be made known …' The blunder, however, wa s apparently aided by the words 'take place' contained in the same sentence.
No less interesting psycho-analytically is the fact that neither the editor nor the proof-reader had noticed the writer's mistake. I might add that readers of the paper had also read the passage without noticing the error, which indicates that they unconsciously sympathized with the writer's feelings.