I wish to recall to my mind my childhood, as my current circumstances make this a fascinating and instructive task. I was a boy who liked to lean back against warm heating stoves. Doing this made me fancy myself both important and sad, and I would wear a simultaneously self-satisfied and melancholy expression. What’s more, I donned felt slippers whenever possible for indoor wear — changing shoes, exchanging wet ones for dry, gave me the greatest pleasure. A warm room always struck me as ravishing. I was never ill, and always envied people who could fall ill, as they were then cared for and had somewhat more delicate words addressed to them. For this reason I often imagined myself falling ill and was touched when I heard, in my fantasy, my parents speaking tender words to me. I had a need to be treated with affection, but this never happened. My mother frightened me because she uttered affectionate words so infrequently. I had a reputation for being a scallywag — not without cause, as I recall — but it was nonetheless sometimes hurtful always to be reminded of that. I would so have loved to be coddled; but when I saw it was out of the question that attentions of this sort would be shown me, I became a ruffian and made a point of provoking the children who enjoyed the advantage of being well-mannered and loved — my sister Hedwig and my brother Klaus. Nothing gave me greater pleasure than when they boxed my ears, for this demonstrated that I’d been skillful enough to arouse their ire. I don’t have many memories of school, but I know I found it a sort of compensation for the minor affronts I suffered in my parents’ home: I was able to excel. I took great satisfaction in bringing home good grades. School frightened me, and so I always behaved well there; whenever I was at school my conduct was diffident and restrained. The teachers’ weaknesses didn’t remain hidden from me for long, but I found them more terrifying than ridiculous. One of the teachers, a cloddish, monstrous person, had a real drunkard’s face; it nonetheless never occurred to me to suspect him of drinking, and yet a mysterious rumor was circulating in the world of the school about another teacher, saying drink had been his downfall. The expression of suffering on this man’s face is something I shall never forget. I considered Jews more refined than Christians, for there were several enchantingly beautiful Jewish girls who set me trembling when I met them on the street. Often my father would send me on errands to one of the elegant Jewish homes; it always smelled of milk in this house, and the lady who would open the door to me there would have on wide white dresses and would bring with her a warm spicy scent that at first I found distasteful, but later I came to love. I think I can’t have worn such nice clothes as a child, in any case I would gaze with malicious admiration at a few of the other boys who wore beautiful high-topped shoes, smooth stockings and well-tailored suits. One boy in particular made a deep impression on me because of how delicate his face and hands were, and the softness of his movements and the voice that came from his lips. He was exactly like a girl, dressed always in soft fabrics, and with the teachers he enjoyed a respect that bewildered me. I felt a pathological longing to have him deign to speak to me, and was overjoyed when one day he suddenly addressed me before the window of a stationery store. He flattered me, saying I wrote so beautifully, and that he wished his own handwriting were that beautiful. How it delighted me to be superior in at least this one respect to this young god of a boy, and I fended off his compliments blissfully blushing. That smile! I can still remember how he smiled. For a long time his mother was my dream. I overvalued her to the detriment of my own mother. How unjust! This boy was attacked by several pranksters in our class who put their heads together and declared him to be a girl, a real one just dressed up in boy’s clothes. Naturally this was pure nonsense, but the claim struck me like a thunderbolt, and for a long time I imagined I ought to be worshiping this boy as a girl in disguise. His overripe figure provided ample fodder for my high-strung romantic sentiments. Naturally I was too shy and proud to declare how fond I was of him, and so he considered me one of his enemies. What elegant aloofness he could convey. How curious to be thinking of this just now! — In religion class I once delighted one of my teachers by finding just the right word for a certain feeling; this too I shall never forget. In various subjects I was indeed quite good, but it always felt shameful to me to stand out as a model pupil, and I often practically made an effort to get bad marks. My instincts told me that the students I surpassed might hate me, and I liked being popular. I found the thought that my schoolmates might hate me rather frightening — a calamity. It had become fashionable in our class to detest all swots, and therefore it often happened that clever, intelligent pupils would try to look stupid as a precaution. This conduct, when it was recognized, counted among us as exemplary behavior, and indeed, there was no doubt something heroic about it, even if only in a misunderstood sense. To be singled out for praise by teachers therefore carried with it the danger of being held in low regard. What a curious world: school. One of my earliest years at school, I had a classmate, a little squirt of a thing with blotches on his pointy face, whose father was a basket weaver and swillpot known to all and sundry. The little fellow was constantly being made to pronounce the word “schnapps” before the entire mocking classroom, which he couldn’t do — he always said “snaps” instead of “schnapps” because of some miserable speech impediment. How we howled with laughter. And when I now think back on it: How crude this was. Another boy, a certain Bill, a jovial little fellow, was always late for school because his parents lived in a remote, rugged mountain region far from town. The latecomer would always be forced to hold out his hand as punishment for his tardiness, whereupon he would receive a biting, sharply painful blow of the cane. Every time, the pain would force tears from the lad’s eyes. How intently we witnessed this castigation. Let me emphasize, by the way, that I have no wish to make accusations about anyone — the teacher in question, say — as one might easily suspect, but am simply reporting what I recall from those days. — Up on the mountain, in the forest above the town, all sorts of rough unemployed derelicts — then even more than now, I would assume — were in the habit of gathering to drink from schnapps bottles in the thickets, play cards or court the womenfolk who were present, recognizable as women by the scraps of clothes they wore, their faces home to misery and affliction. These people were known as vagrants. One Sunday evening we — Hedwig, Kaspar and I — were out walking with a girl we called Anna, who was fond of us all, on a narrow path that led over this mountain, and as we stepped out into a forest clearing full of rocks, we saw a man seize one of these rocks in his fist and smash it audibly into the face of another man, his opponent, so that blood came spurting out and the man who had been struck fell at once to the ground. This fight, whose end we didn’t witness, as we immediately fled, appeared to have started because of a woman; at any rate I can still see clearly before me the dusky tall figure of a woman who at the time was standing by, nonchalant, observing the fight with a wicked expression. This encounter filled me with a profound distress and terror that kept me from eating and made me avoid that part of the forest for a long time. There was something horrifyingly primitive, even primeval about the sight of those men doing battle—
