Even if you don't know a word German, it's Mark Twain, and therefore well worth a read. If you don't know German, the essay makes you want to learn German so that you, too, can suffer along with the author.
"She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."