Montclair took Kant’s words to heart.  “Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination,” Kant had written in 1785.  As a successful fromager with big city connections, Montclair had all the access to what people defined as happiness.  But at some point in his life, he realized that the collections of furniture and paintings yielded no such happiness. 

The more you own, Montclair realized, the less you have.  The more you live, the more you love, the more you taste – this is surely what Kant meant.  Leave it all behind – walk out that door. 

The Great War would have eliminated any possibility for a man like Montclair to near the German border, but by 1925, the country had miraculously recovered its Enlightenment roots.  This was the Germany that was, in Montclair's mind, the end product of the Enlightenment: industriousness alongside art and architecture.  Science alongside poetry.  Dance and jazz and coffeehouses.  Progressive, liberal Democracy alongside a renewed interest in preserving the rich fabric of Germany's past.

Those were the elements that would have made entry into Germany possible.  But that was Kant's Germany, which, technically, was a very different Germany: the Germany north of the Rhein.

The Germany that interested Montclair, naturally, would have been the part that was brightest on his constellation.  The Germany of mountains and foothills and rolling grazing lands – Bavaria and the alps.