and theorizes that he may have learned "the narrative power of meter and rhyme" from books he read as a child, including The Hole Book by Peter Newell. Jonathan Cott noted that Mulberry Street is similar to "Der Erlkönig", a German poem by Goethe, "for both of them are about a father and a son and about the exigencies and power of the imagination". When Cott told Geisel about this, Geisel responded by quoting the first two lines of the poem, in German. He also noted that he was raised in a German-speaking home, minored in German in college, and had memorized the poem while in high school. Mary Galbraith makes a connection between Mulberry Street and Geisel's fears about the spread of Nazism. Geisel conceived of the story while returning from a European vacation that coincided with the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, and Galbraith contends that in the book the "mayor's small mustache and raised arm evoke Hitler, while the brass band and international cast of characters evoke the parade of nations at the beginning of the games". She argues that the horse and wagon at the beginning of the story evokes the peaceful German Americans of Springfield, and by extension the non-threatening actions of Germany. As Marco's story evolves, the horse and wagon transform into a parade, which Galbraith equates with "a military monolith ... marching down main street as an airplane drops confetti". Marco's relationship with his father Some analyses have examined the relationship between Marco and his father. Alison Lurie asserts that Marco's factual reply to his father at the end of the story suggests to the book's young readers that "it is sometimes, perhaps always, best to conceal one's inner imaginative life from adults", a message that appears again in The Cat in the Hat. To Matthew Pierlot, "The father serves as an external check on the boy's tendency to abandon the truth", a Socrates-like figure who insists on intellectual integrity and thwarts Marco's desire to mold mundane reality into something more exciting than it is. To Patrick Shannon, "Marco escapes into his imagination to combat the insipid character and conformity of the adult world". In this sense the book follows an individualist, child-centered trend in children's literature beginning in the mid-20th century, also seen in the works of Maurice Sendak and William Steig; this is in contrast to the norm in earlier children's