The hours I spent together with the family passed in the same atmosphere of estrangement, I sat through one part of the evening in my parents’ company as if it were a debt, silently turning the pages of a book or magazine, while on the radio monotonous anonymous voices reported inconceivable events. Out of this period a cry breaks out of me. Why have we squandered these days and years, people living under the same roof, without being able to speak to or hear each other. What sort of disease is this that makes us so dreary, that fills us with such distrust and reticence, that we can no longer look one another in the eyes. And yet this period, which at the time seemed completely dead to me, contained expressions of a secret life. At night in my room or on Sundays, pictures, drawings, poems, hidden expressions of someone unknown and renounced came to life. In the depth of this total isolation there was a quiet deliberation as a result of which each month I put aside money for the future. In the late summer of the second year the break-up began with a violent blow. I had gone into the woods to work. The buzzing of the mosquitoes was like a light drone of bells; beetles and spiders rustled in the dry foliage. I settled down at the side of a mountain lake. I fell asleep, wishing that I might never wake again. I dreamed of my way through this forest. There was the old fear of being lost in the forest, of death in the bog, among the ferns in utter stillness. On a narrow path I encountered a man in a hunter’s outfit, a hunting bag and a gun over his shoulder. He went past me and it was as if I had met him once before, a long time ago. Then I wandered along a country road. The road led me through an immeasurably wide and confused life. Again I met the huntsman, he came straight toward me and I had to step aside to let him pass. Hastily he raised his hand in greeting. I came to a lake and let myself drift into the water and out there in the brightness of blurring reflections the huntsman popped up again in front of me, I recognized him and awoke. On a holiday trip many years before as a child I had met him in a wood. There was the resinous tang of freshly felled fir trees, and I twisted between my fingers a small round wooden disk that had fallen from the beginning of a bough of a sawed-off tree trunk. The huntsman appeared and asked me my name. I told him. He said, That’s my name too. He asked me insistently where I lived. I told him the name of the town. He said, I live there too. He asked me what street. I named it and he said, I live on that street too. He asked me for the number of the house, I told him, and he said, So we live in the same house. He moved off and left me behind in unspeakable astonishment. With the warning of this dream in my mind I jumped up. I could not interpret the dream but only felt that a change had come about, that my life was governed by new forces. I saw my footsteps in the sand at the edge of the lake. For a moment the vision of these steps that had led me from my birth onward to this place filled me. In a single instant I saw the dark pattern of their track. I recognized it and forgot it again immediately and in fear at my past I ran up into the undergrowth. Birds fluttered out of the trees, the sky was blood-red from the sinking sun. And the uneasiness that had now begun could no longer be contained, after weeks and months of slow inner changes, after relapses into weakness and discouragement, I took leave of my parents. The wheels of the railway thumped away beneath me with their ceaseless hollow drumbeats and the forces of my flying forward screamed and sang in incantatory chorus. I was on my way to look for a life of my own. (Leavetaking)

The war did not open my eyes. The frustrated struggle for my vocation had put me in a state of derangement. My defeat was not the defeat of the emigrant in face of the difficulties of living in exile, but the defeat of one who does not dare to free himself from his dependence. Emigrating had taught me nothing. Emigrating was for me a confirmation of the not-belonging that I had experienced from my earliest childhood. I had never possessed a native soil. I was left untouched by the fact that the struggle that went on outside affected my existence also. I had never come to any conclusions about the revolutionary conflicts in the world. The effort I had made to find some means of expression for my existence had claimed all my awareness. This period was for me a period of waiting, a period of sleepwalking. (Leavetaking)

My sister’s death was the beginning of my attempts to free myself from my past. There were periods when I raged and stormed about, the suppressed revolt flared up and cursed the old forces that had dominated me and lashed out, but the blows fell wide of their aim and the insults reached no one’s ears. Hatred and violence were no longer of any use, the opportunities had been missed, the enemies were no longer tangible. I did not know where the enemy was concealed. I did not know what had happened to me. I was furious with myself for only in myself were there unprotected flanks to attack, only in myself was the past contained and I was the custodian of the past. Past events rose up in me like a gasping for breath, like the pressure of a straitjacket, the past would hem me around in a slow, black seepage of hours, and then suddenly recede and become nothing and allow a brief glimpse of freedom. Then I saw my parents and was full of sympathy and compassion. They had given us all that they had to give, they had given us food and clothing and a civilized home, they had given us their security and their orderliness and they could not understand why we did not thank them for it. They could never understand why we drifted away from them. In the confused knowledge of having made mistakes they bought themselves off with expensive presents, birthdays and bank holidays were the days fixed for paying out their unconscious guilt. And the presents were always wrong, however much we received we always stood there with dissatisfied faces asking for more. We never got what we wanted to have and we did not know what we wanted to have. Thus we confronted each other, children dissatisfied, parents insulted. And we were unable to explain ourselves to each other. And this obstacle I took over into myself. I took over my parents’ misunderstanding. My parents’ embarrassment became my embarrassment. Their voices live on in me. I chastised and beat myself and drove myself to forced labor. Again and again the swamp fever of inadequacy gripped me. There I was again, a failure at school, sitting locked into my room, and the warm seething life outside was unattainable. There sat my mother next to me and heard me repeat my lessons and I could get nothing right. Schwein is pig, pig comes from to pick—pick, pick, pick, and she took hold of me by the scruff of the neck and pressed my nose into the vocabulary book, pick, pick, pick, so now perhaps you’ll remember it. I remembered it. At times I could be startled out of my dream, still feeling the grip of my mother’s hand on my neck, still feel the slap of my mother’s hand on my cheek, and hear her furious voice, see her index finger next to me travel down the keys of the piano, to point out to me the correct note, the note that I was unable to find, and she did not find it either, her finger missed its mark, the dissonance still shrills in my ears. And I take my mother’s hands and put them aside and my hand strokes her hands and I see my mother sitting under the floor lamp, her hands busy with pieces of clothing, her hands active, a whole lifetime at our torn stockings, shirts, and trousers, her hands, devoted a whole lifetime to caring for us, her hands a whole lifetime holding us, cleaning us, disciplining us, and suddenly these hands lie down tired, suddenly they have served their time, and her face, lit up by the floor lamp, stared in front of her, and her mouth opened and the hard lines of her face relaxed, and the face listened for the incomprehensible, and the face’s listening is so intense that it takes on a look of nameless astonishment. This had always been a part of her, the fear of being stricken dumb, of becoming paralyzed, a fear that she resisted with all her energy, and which made her domineering and angry, and which at times overcame her with sudden fainting attacks. As if struck by a terrible blow she would sink to the ground, where she then lay, a ghastly sight, like a mountain, and as she aged these states came slowly and stiflingly, lay across her chest, encased her joints with lead, deadened the power of her voice. In her diary I found the following entry, Had a dreadful dream. Mamma took me by the hand and proudly introduced me to all the people in a large room. Then we came into a hall, where on a raised dais a bluish-red eagle sat. Everyone shut into the room was led up to it and the eagle slowly forced its talons into his mouth and ripped out his tongue. I too was led there. I woke with a loud scream. My mother once said to me, you’ve always been a stranger to me, I’ll never be able to understand you. To hear this was harder than to suffer her blows. The need to be embraced by her was not yet dead. (Leavetaking)

The coffin, the tombstone, the flowers had been chosen, the musical program to accompany the ceremony had been decided. I followed Gottfried to the funeral parlor. Margit’s body was already hidden in the coffin and the top screwed down over her. The coffin was lifted into the hearse, the hearse drove off to the graveyard with Margit shut into her coffin and with Gottfried and myself sitting next to the driver. Through the glass window of the hearse behind me I could see the white coffin laden with wreaths and bunches of flowers. The vibrations of the moving vehicle made the coffin shake, and inside the coffin my dead sister’s body shook in concert. At the funeral service we sat packed closely together in the narrow chapel pews. When the pastor’s voice had died away and the sound of the word sunshine thrust into me like a knife for the last time, and when the last prayer had evaporated into the rotting scent of the flowers and wreaths and we had all dazedly worked our way out of the pews, my mother got stuck between the hassock and the armrest. My father and Gottfried rushed to her rescue and pulled her out sideways. Outside spots of sunlight were dancing. With strong bending and stretching out of arms, with arched backs and muscle-play beneath jackets, with their tensed thighs thrust forward the black-coated men lowered the white coffin down on ropes into the black hole in the earth. The pastor filled a shovel with sand, it was a little green shovel like the one we had to play with in the sandpit. My mother stood hidden behind a thick black veil supported by my father and Gottfried. From the ranks of the mourners a girl of Margit’s age stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied to her and withdrew into the background, whereupon a second girl stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied to her and withdrew into the background, whereupon a third girl stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied and withdrew, whereupon a fourth girl stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied and withdrew, whereupon a fifth and a sixth girl and more girls and even more girls stepped forward, shook my mother’s hand, curtsied before her and withdrew, until all the girls from Margit’s class had come forward, shaken hands with my mother, curtsied to her and returned again to their places. On the way back we sat squashed together in one car. I crouched on the floor, Irene half lay over me, my younger brother almost disappeared between my father and my mother, my father’s knees dug into my chest and Gottfried’s knees were thrust into my back. My face was streaming with sweat. Outside the summery streets flew past and there someone stood in the dust, looking after us. This was the beginning of the break-up of our family. (Leavetaking)

In silence Gottfried looked at me and I knew that it was at an end. We went through the warm, dark streets. In the sickroom my parents were sitting hand in hand at the death bed. In the background the Catholic nurse moved about like a large black bird. A candle was burning on the bedside table. Trembling, I stood in front of the immovable, the extinguished. I felt as if I were floating a few inches above the floor. The bandages and the wire frame had been removed from the grazed face. It was a yellowed, squashed, completely strange face. The eyes had sunk deep into their hollows. The dead hands were folded over her chest, they were like the tapering, carved hands of a Gothic sculpture. A black crucifix, huge and incongruous, lay beneath the stiffened fingers. My parents too were like statues submerged in the half dark. My mother lay back completely exhausted in the open car as we slowly drove home. Home. There was no home any longer. The journey into the unknown had begun. Like survivors of a shipwreck in a boat we drove through the gently surging ocean of the city. (Leavetaking)

This period of my existence, full of bottled-up disaster, seems to lie endlessly far back, further back than the earliest days of childhood. I look at that time as if from another life, a stranger before the I from which I have emerged. I see the endless columns, hear the monotonous march beat, the clatter of nailed boots, the jingling of daggers on their belts. Again and again came the flags and the standards, the extinguished anonymous faces, the mouths opened in song, again and again came the drums, and above the city a vast fire seemed to glower. Ceaselessly the march beat throbbed, like a pulse in the city’s intestines, something was being charged and gained ground, seized me, seized all of us, a force that had throbbed for as long as I could remember, and even earlier, at the time of my birth and of the mythical years when the bombardments lay dully muffled along the horizons, when the wounded bled to death in field hospitals. I too was trapped in a merciless development, and even if I was one of those who fled, I too was melted down into this ceaseless marching, it was as if I had stood here from the beginning at the curb and had seen the mass pass by, linked together and grim, my brothers were with them, armed with knotty sticks, with a look of entrancement on their faces, with steel helmets and the emblems of a new and terrible crusade. Even if, in secret, I sought after other truths, the compulsiveness of a feeling of solidarity with this marching got hold of me, the compulsiveness of the crazy idea of a common destiny. The voices of dream were suppressed by the shouted commands of reality. My anxious protests, my tiny attempts at rebellion were nipped in the bud. I could not recognize my position. Recognition only comes later when it’s all over. Later I could understand and assess, but at the time I was blindly drawn along by the current. At that time I thought only of my poetry, my painting, my music. Had I not suddenly been faced with a drastic change I would have been borne along in the torrent of marching columns, into my destruction. This sudden change took place after hearing one of the speeches which in those days spewed out of the loudspeakers and which before my realization possessed an inconceivable power over me, but which afterward seemed like an incoherent screaming from hell. Next to me sat Gottfried, my half brother, and we listened to the hoarse screaming, we were overcome by this screaming, felt only that we were overpowered, we did not grasp its content, indeed there was no content, only emptiness of unprecedented dimension, emptiness filled with screaming. So overpowering was this emptiness that we completely lost ourselves in it, it was as if we were hearing God speaking in oracles. And when the hurricane of jubilant summons to death and self-sacrifice, which at the time seemed like so much cheering for a gold-gleaming future, had run its course, Gottfried said, What a pity you can’t be with us. I felt neither surprise nor fear at these words. And when Gottfried then explained that my father was a Jew, this came to me like the confirmation of something I had long suspected. Disclaimed awareness came to life in me, I began to understand my past, I thought of the gang of persecutors who had jeered at me in the streets and had thrown stones in instinctive obedience to a tradition of persecution of those who were different and had inherited contempt for certain facial features and essential characteristics. I thought of Friederle, who was one day to become a model of the heroic defender of the Fatherland, and at once I was entirely on the side of the underdog and the outcast, though I still did not understand that this was my salvation. I still only grasped my lostness, my uprootedness, I was still far from taking my fate into my own hands, and making the fact of my not belonging a source of power for a new independence. (Leavetaking)

My whole life was a fumbling and searching. I penetrated into music, into the architecture of fugues, into the tortuous labyrinths of symphonies, into the hard structure of jazz, into Oriental chimes, nothing was unfamiliar to me. I understood the wailing of Chinese flutes and the solemnity of medieval songs, I was filled to bursting with music, when I moved it was as if a veil of sound jingled within me, my steps evoked throbbing drumbeats, interior instruments played continuously. At home I lived like someone besieged. My room was like a fortress. I had filled its walls with pictures of masks and demons, and with my own drawings whose shrieking figures frightened off the intruder. I felt the explosive force within me and knew that I had to devote my life to the expression of this explosive force, but at home my attempts were regarded as aberrations of which one did not have to take serious account. (Leavetaking)

There are scenes in a book of which I hardly know the title or author, scenes that are as unforgettable to me as scenes from The Red and the Black, Hunger, Pan, and The Idiot. There is a river in a jungle and from one bough that stretches far out over the river hangs an Indian, ready to throw himself onto the approaching canoe, a moment of extreme suspense. There is a room in a house in a provincial town, I do not know what happened in this room, nor who is in this room, there is only this room with a cupboard, a bed, and closed shutters, perhaps it is Sunday and everyone in the house is sleeping, and someone is eavesdropping here in this muffled room and is planning something and is full of expectation. There is the island on which the shipwrecked of the Pacific have landed, their reed huts rise, clearly outlined between the tall, slender palm trunks. My thought of flight to far-off lands was concentrated in this picture. The curious thing was that, considering the out-of-the-way places and sights, something like recognition arose in me, nothing was so surprising and exotic that it did not find an understanding echo somewhere within me. My reading was not selective. I was attracted or repelled according to hidden laws. Countless books I merely skimmed through, I had scarcely thumbed through their pages before I knew that they were nothing for me, many that were later to be of value to me passed meaningless through my hand. Others captivated me with a single word. The Possessed, The Insulted and Injured, The House of the Dead, The Devil’s Elixir, Black Flags, Inferno—these were the titles that suddenly flared up in front of me and lit up something within me. There was something magical about these titles, they went straight to my heart. Reading them, the fumbling and searching that I had experienced in front of the door with the red and blue panes and upstairs in the loft matured. (Leavetaking)

These long stony passages, in which rows of animal-smelling raincoats hung, while from within behind the doors I heard the litany of the school children from which occasionally one single voice would ring out high and clear, these stony passages, paced by the all-seeing Headmaster under whose annihilating gaze I sank onto my knees, these stony passages, among the flagstones throughout which fossils were interspersed, millions of years old, shaped like comets. From here I was supposed to go on into the corridors of office blocks, to the filing cabinets, the clatter of typewriters, into the rooms where the business affairs of this world were handled. But I had found other things in my search for nourishment for my expanding needs, things that gave me answers to my questions, words of poetry that suddenly stilled my restlessness, pictures that took me up into them, music that touched an answering chord within me. In books I encountered the life that school had kept hidden from me. In books I was shown another reality of life than that into which my parents and teachers wanted to force me. The voices of books demanded my collaboration, the voices of books demanded that I open myself up and reflect upon myself. I hunted through my parents’ library. I was forbidden to read these books, so I had to remove them secretly and carefully even out the gaps, my reading took place at night under the blankets by flashlight, or on the toilet seat, or camouflaged behind schoolbooks. The chaos within me of half-baked longings, of romantic extravagances, of terrors and wild dreams of adventure, was reflected back at me in countless mirrors, I preferred the seamy, the suggestive, the lurid, I sought after sexual descriptions, devoured the stories of courtesans and clairvoyants, of vampires, criminals, and libertines, and like a medium I found my way to the seducers and fantasts and listened raptly to them in my inner confusion and melancholy. But the more I became aware of myself, and the less I shrank back from myself, the stronger became my desire for the voice of the book to speak to me in the plainest terms and conceal nothing from me. Soon I could tell the character of the narration from the first words of a book. I wanted it to excite me straightaway, I wanted to feel its glow and inner conviction at once. Long descriptive passages made me impatient. I wanted to be drawn into the middle of things right from the very start, and to know at once what it was about. I read poems only rarely, for here everything was too highly wrought, too much subject to a formal framework. I distrusted well-rounded and perfected things and I found it tiresome to search for the hidden meaning beneath all the artistry and polish. Often the well-planned work of art left me cold while the raw and only half formed caught hold of me. My logical thinking was underdeveloped. When I tried to counteract this lack by reading scientific or philosophic works, the letters blurred before my eyes, I could not piece them together into living words, I felt no breath in them. What I retained belonged less to the realm of general knowledge than to that of sensations, my knowledge was composed of picturelike experiences, of memories of sounds, voices, noises, movements, gestures, rhythms, of what I had fingered or sniffed, of glimpses into rooms, streets, courtyards, gardens, harbors, workshops, of vibrations in the air, of the play of light and shadow, of the movements of eyes, mouths, and hands. I learned that beneath logic there was another form of consistency, the consistency of inexplicable impulses; here I discovered my own nature, here in what was apparently unorganized, in a world that did not obey the laws of the external order. My thinking allowed no particular goal, but drove me from one to the other, tolerated no superimposed guidelines, often threw me into pitfalls and abysses from which no explanations but only secret, unexpectedly discovered paths could guide me out again. In the course of years the dialogue I sought for in books, in ever more decisive and immediate form, turned ever more deeply toward the personal sphere, and thus it became an ever rarer experience, for only a few could express some part of the things that touched the roots of being. (Leavetaking)