Art Of Being Agreeable, The Book

Probably the task the author set for himself cannot be done, at least not easily: A descriptive rather than prescriptive essay on manners. If you describe manners from a neutral standpoint, you'll end up doing ethnography, and leave the subjectivity of the essay form behind. And if you remain essayistic, you'll not get rid of your super-ego, prescriptive notions of manners. So let's assume Asserate was only paying lip-service in the preface of this book and never really intended to write a mere description of German or European manners. Throughout the book he doesn't hold back the usual "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts" of the genre. The reader doesn't need to follow these, yet the book is overall not uninteresting. That's because Asserate is a member of the Ethiopian imperial family as a grand-nephew of the last emperor Haile Selassie. He's had European education since his childhood, and lives exiled in Europe ever since the monarchy was overthrown. So he is at the same time an aristocratic insider and an observing outsider when it comes to exploring manners - which have traditionally been formed by the upper classes, be they aristocratic or bourgeois.