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Chapter 4AdolescenceADOLESZENZ

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Most of all I loved to read travel-accounts. They were the only thing, too, that could move me to tears! But my father would then say: “Just don't imagine you'll ever be able to make great journeys round the world. Where do you mean to get the money for it? It's also much better to stay quietly at home. Your travel-notions are just as mad as your artistic whims! Wherever did you get such a restless spirit? It will come to a bad end with you yet, perhaps on the gallows!” — — — Very consistent my good father was not in this, to be sure. For soon afterwards he told me again of the adventurous journeys of the Africa-traveller Alexandrine Tinné1, who, of course, as he wisely added, was murdered by natives. Thus did her unseemly travel-urge avenge itself.

But soon my sensitive soul would nearly have believed in a murder of my own doing! Once again we were all driving in the carriage along a bumpy country road. I was clutching my father's hand, fearfully and tight. All at once a jet of blood shot up from his artery like a fountain, and it wanted but little for my father to bleed to death from it. Luckily a country doctor drove past who was able to apply a proper bandage. “Now do you see that you may yet come to the gallows?” my father cried reproachfully. — This incident cast deep shadows into my soul. And another likewise. During an autumn stay in the country, at the “Half Moon” in Heppenheim, where the ripe apricots grew into our windows and the whole fruit-abundance of the Hessian Bergstrasse welled into my soul, my mother took me along to a viewing of the giant provincial lunatic-asylum at Heppenheim.

That day made an indelible impression on me.

— “And now the ladies shall see the raving ones too, if only from afar,” smiled Dr. Ludwig, after first letting us be circled by sufferers of St. Vitus's dance. — “Little miss, just put your eye here to the keyhole, the door is bolted!” — I was fourteen years old then, and obeyed with a pounding heart. My eye fell on a woman with long grey hair, in a shift-like gown, who had her back to me. As if spellbound, my gaze clung to her. Could she have felt that she was being watched? She turned round suddenly, threw back her hair, approached the door. I knew it was locked, but even had it been open, I could not have stirred at all, I was as if paralysed.

And now the madwoman bent down — perhaps she had noticed feet below, through the crack of the door — she bent down and pressed a bloodshot eye close to the keyhole. I looked straight into the very hearth of madness, so long, until I collapsed unconscious.

“Your mother deserved a thrashing for this pedagogical deed,” said my old friend Theodor Storm2 later, when I told him of it.

One of my first poems was born at that time, ending: “And I understand even the madhouse.” Yes, I began to understand much, much. Only one thing not: why I was not happy. The hot hands of longing began softly to stroke over my heart and to lash up my blood.

In the house above us lived a Justizrat Meisenzahl with two daughters. The younger, Auguste, four years older than I, about eighteen, was to become a pianist, and played her runs, trills, and salon-pieces all day long over our heads. To my parents' despair and my secret admiration. Then I came to know her and went up to her often. But by chance my mother discovered that she was keeping a tryst with a young man, and now the friendship was forbidden me. I wrote of this despairingly to “her,” Auguste. Which earned my father a coarse letter from the Justizrat, and me a stricter ban.

Of this too I still have a notebook effusion, scrawled in pencil, half blurred by tears: “All over between me and Auguste, only admired from afar. She despises me for having done that to her.” — And then again: “Watched Auguste from afar on the swing.” — “The other day in the hallway, in the dusk, fell upon her neck.” — —

Then, little by little, the grief over Auguste ebbed away. Other cares, other experiences reared up. A snowy winter came, with blood-red sunsets. I attended lectures by Otto Roquette; then walked alone, in the sunset-glow, through the white gardens. There the verse came to me: Didst thou behold the sunset glow, / high above the cypresses, / and didst thou not sink groaning to thy knee: / oh, that I could forget — —

But I had as yet hardly ever seen cypresses, nor did I know what I was supposed to forget. But the verse pleased me greatly. —

Then the confirmation lessons with the friendly pastor. His friendliness was always, to me, his most striking quality. He conceived his office of preparing us for entry into the community of adult Christians neither highly nor deeply, but entirely by rote, “Schema F.” But he was friendly, always friendly. On the confirmation day itself we were all deeply moved as well. I knelt before a little wreath of blue-flowering forget-me-nots and received the text: “Be faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life3.” Ah, I have been faithful to myself, only far too much. And from that alone, all these endless sufferings.

Strangely, I can scarcely remember the course of my confirmation day — it cannot have been all too solemn. Religious conflicts had not come to me — not yet. I believe I always had far too much to do with myself. But for a while I read my Thomas à Kempis4 very diligently, morning and evening. And Feuchtersleben5's “Dietetics of the Soul.” I was now a grown-up girl and felt myself very important.

On our thank-you visit to Pastor S., each of us shyly slipped our twenty-mark obol into empty flower-vases, under embroidered doilies and antimacassars. Let us hope he really did find all the Easter eggs we laid him.