Chapter 12The End of the MiracleDES WUNDERS ENDE
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
The twenty-third of January 1897.
The day had been blue and glorious. But I was not feeling well and was lying in bed.
Konrad in the armchair by the window1, Helga at his feet, Inge Assunta on his lap.
“The child is still so tiny; I am afraid we shall never raise it.”
I: “If I had the choice today of losing you or the child — I should not hesitate; much as I love it, I would give up the child.”
Konrad: “Now I must go and dress for the rout at the Palazzo Caffarelli, where my wicked wife is letting her poor husband go alone.”
I: “Had I better get up after all, and you stay at home?”
Konrad: “Never mind — it is all arranged now, I am going to dress.”
I: “Give me a kiss first.”
Konrad: “Sick wives who let their poor husbands go into company alone do not deserve a kiss2.”
Exit Konrad, Inge on his arm, Helga at his side.
Vecchia Maria (entering with the supper tray): “Ecco Signora baronessa, la cena.”
I make an excellent meal of sausage, fried potatoes and beer.
Helga rushes in, screaming: “Mammi, Papa is lying on the floor!”
I, out of bed, raced across; there he lay, in his shirtsleeves — dress coat and tie beside him — there he lay stretched out full length next to the divan on which he wrote his works.
“Fetch a mirror, Helga.”
The child brings a little hand mirror. No breath from his lips clouds the surface. — Dead — dead — dead!!
There lay my kingdoms! There lay my whole future, there lay my life!
But I could not grasp it, have never been able to grasp it, and now — I have been moving away from it for twenty years3.
I sent Vecchia Maria with the two children and a letter to my friend Maria's father. The old Herr von Bülow was envoy to the Papal See4. Daughter and son were out at the party.
They only came at two in the morning and sat up the night with me. The children were to stay at the Bülows' until the dead man had been fetched away and burned.
The next day, in the greying morning, I am sitting in front of his bed, onto which we lifted him yesterday. I am sitting at the easel and painting! What use is all my art if it cannot do this. — Did not Titian too paint his dead daughter?5
And I paint, and paint, and refuse food and drink.
By the time it grew dark I had caught the features. The rest will be finished later. Then the death mask was taken. Late in the evening the men came with the coffin. The most frightful thing — the way the dangling limbs were lifted into it. The rigor was not yet complete.
And then the hammering shut.
I go into the Christmas room, bury my head in the sofa, my hands over my ears. But the hammering in of the coffin nails drowns everything out, drowns out all the harmony of life. —
Maria's brother saw to all the business.
The next morning the hearse comes. It drives to San Lorenzo. The cremation is there6. Many flowers had been sent for him. The coffin is completely covered with them. As we turn away, sightseers try to steal some of the flowers. Disgust at the world and at life takes hold of me! Then the coffin is pushed onto the grate — in the cremation furnace.
The Bülows drag me home with them. The children are there, after all. At supper I push the dish away: “How can I eat while he is burning!”
The next morning I walk back with the children through the Via Nazionale. Crowds of people! Helga suddenly stops, looks up into the air, screams with all her might — “Papa — Papa — Papa!” And then, turning to me, in tears: “He does not hear me — he does not answer — but you say he is in heaven!” —
At home more glorious flowers have come, countless white callas. The children are asleep — I feel it, I must go mad or give my misery a form — in bitterness and scorn:
Ringed round with studies of pigs for the Circe picture, life teaches me the truth of those old words: the pig brings luck!7 Out of that doorway they carried your coffin down, and rooted out the grave of my happiness!
And then:
One more white, slender calla flower, which I had grown at the edge of the balcony, I laid in your pure human hand, that my gold ring still encircles. Then the lid sank down on the wonder-flower that I had cherished at my poor heart — snapped off, torn from me in the pains of death. — — One more white, slender calla flower.
And this:
Two rings I loosened from the marble hands, marked blue-black at the rim of the nails, and I wound you a crown of laurel of blossom and of fruit! For you, to whom life had given only the shoots of the laurel, towards flowers to come and fruit to come. — But he ripens fast, does Death! So take the crown!
Yes, I felt it: madness would have mastered me if I had not been able to hurl his requiem out into the night of my life.
The following year my book “Noch einmal Mors Imperator, Requiem für Konrad Telmann”8 came out with Reissner. And I published his last poems, together with the very best of his earlier ones, in a sifted selection. “Von jenseits des Grabes.” Glorious as they are, they have never become nearly well enough known, which is a constant pain to me.
Now I knew it, now I felt it — now I had to chase after it, the phantom:
“To find one spark of his immortal soul. — Sooner than not, I would embrace death.”
And the black courser9 that pursued me from childhood on, and the black courser I had to chase after — from childhood on as well (they had sunk out of sight in the bright years at his side) now they rose up again like wild fever-fantasies — I had to find a spark of his soul — I had to! Through heavens and hells I had to search for it. And I searched for half a lifetime — never, never to find it!
In the drawing room I laid the death mask on the cushions of his divan, with blankets and cloths and his brown silk dressing gown arranged round it, and at its feet the calla flowers and palms.
In the dusk, when I came in, I could imagine that everything was still as in the old days, when I still stood over on the other side, behind the terrible abyss that has destroyed my whole life.
My poems “Vom Mondberg,” on which Konrad Telmann had worked so much with his whole being, and of which he was so proud, appeared only now, immediately after his death. How bitterly they hurt me, in the memory of all our companionship of mind! How glorious this bond of souls had been, and this creating together in the spirit — in ever higher flight — for the two of us! And now everything was destroyed at a single blow! Like a garden sprouting and budding a thousandfold, whose coming splendour the hoarfrost has killed!
And in the next few days I dusted anxiously, so that outwardly at least everything should stay in order. It seemed to me this was a dam against the frightful, crushing recognition. No chair was allowed to stand differently. — The landlord came after two days, to put the grieving widow's rent up sharply!
Princess Baratov came very close to me after Konrad's death. She fetched me every day in her coupé to drive out to his grave. And then we would drive on into the Campagna, and she tried to open the beauty of the world to my eyes again.
In those days the news reached me of my father's sudden death from a stroke! —
My heart was like a sponge soaked full of grief. It could take up no new sorrow. I could scarcely take it in; I was dulled with pain. Mother and sister now moved to Wiesbaden. None of it touched me much. I was as though frozen stiff.
But then I fell ill; I got erysipelas of the face, a high fever, and lay in Konrad's room, in Konrad's bed. — The children were entrusted to an elderly cousin travelling to Germany; the “old lady” wanted to take care of them, and after my recovery from the erysipelas I was to go to Helwan10 for my cough, which was getting worse every day. When I had got up again, an old gentleman had himself announced. “You have two servants; one of them, Adela, is plotting against your life.” I smiled. She had probably allotted my furniture between herself and Maria, in her mind, in case I should die of the “erysipela.” That did not frighten me; nevertheless I gave her her marching orders and kept only Maria. — Soon afterwards I shut up the apartment, sent Maria home to her own country as well, and travelled to Africa. I was very ill; but I believe my throat trouble, which grew steadily worse in the dry Egyptian air, was half of it nerves. — In Cairo I was often with Maria Bülow's brother and his wife, who had their home there. They tried as hard as they could to distract me from my shattered life. — I painted little and brooded a good deal. And I was physically very, very wretched. At the end I made a Nile tour up to Aswan with the Tewfikieh company.
The great impressions of the immemorial Egyptian culture, with its strange splendour of temples, pulled me up somewhat. And so did the letters of an admirer of Telmann's, Stanislaus Artl of Dessau, who with other friends was planning a memorial tablet for the poet's birthplace in Stettin. But the Zitelmann family would hear nothing of a memorial tablet for “Konrad Telmann.” “Even if he had become a Goethe: he renounced the Zitelmann family11, not only by calling himself Telmann but by having his name legally changed to Telmann with the police. He therefore has nothing to do with us, and we have nothing to do with the memorial tablet for Konrad Telmann.”
Through Artl this fact got into the press and aroused indignation even abroad.
The compact majority had won! Konrad Telmann got no memorial tablet; but this refusal tore an unbridgeable gulf between me and the clan.
I returned by way of Taormina to Rome for the interment of Konrad's ashes under the new gravestone. His mother provided ample means for it. From the death mask the gifted sculptor Seeböck12 modelled his relief portrait, which was cast in bronze and rested on a recumbent gravestone of giallo antico. Beneath it stood the closing words of his last poem (written three days before his death):
“And when the Let-there-be of your age is spoken, out of our ashes the glow has broken that quietly flickers round the hearth of your peace.”
Konrad Telmann, 26 November 1854 to 23 January 1897 Hermione von Preuschen ...13
It was my wish that my urn should one day stand beside his. How many prejudices even the freest of people has. — —
A wreath of violets flowered round the grave. At its head I had planted three little beeches from his beloved Buchhaide. A poem from my requiem describes the grave:
“Come then, my dearest, do not keep me waiting, your garden is already flowering and green. Yellowish marble, your likeness in bronze, and over it a wilderness of violets in flower. Narrow is the bed, and the walls are slender, once, only once, reach me your hands.” “Dearest, I cannot fulfil your wish for you. Ash and dust is what came of a flaming will. Ash and dust is what came of the fires of living, and over them the waters of eternity flood!” “Come then, my dearest, do not keep me waiting, green and flowering already is your garden.”
And this one:
In my dearest's garden many black cypresses stand, the pyramid of Cestius can see over the wall! In spring the violets flower there, and white camellias in heaps — wait a little while longer, and I shall unlock your grave for you14. Wait a little while longer, and the harvest will be got in, and all your songs will flutter like birds through the world!
The day of the interment had come. Sudermann, who was in Rome at the time, was to make a speech; Björnson had sent his greeting. “Konrad Telmann was a great man and a great poet.” .... The numerous mourners were gathered at the vault and waiting for me, since I was to bring the urn across with Maria Bülow from the urn hall at San Lorenzo to the grave by the pyramid of Cestius. I had conquered a place for the beloved in the old Protestant cemetery, already so densely occupied — not far from Goethe's son and from Shelley. (The words on Shelley's tombstone always gave us something to think about: “Death is but a seechange — into something wild and strange!”15 Now this “wild and strange something” had showered down over my dead man too.)
Maria and I in the carriage — the great urn between us, reverently wreathed with callas. We had almost covered the long way.
Then Maria asks: “What does it actually say on the urn?” We read:
Emilio Pardi, figlio di Alessandro. We read it with pale horror; it was the wrong urn.
The mourners wait. The carriage races back along the endless road. The custodian was just going off to eat — and was horrified himself. — So then we have the right jar: Conrado Telmann, figlio di Ottone. This time the flowers and the crape will wreathe the right man. An hour and a half late, we hurried back to the pyramid of Cestius.
And now the ceremony went off with dignity, and movingly. Sudermann spoke: “His whole life was work and love. But his end came at the noon of his life.”
And these honours would very nearly have fallen to Emilio Pardi, and Konrad Telmann's ashes would have stood forgotten in a corner of San Lorenzo. — How madly life and death, farce and tragedy are shaken up together. — But — Mors Imperator!16
It was the beginning of June. The Protestant pastor Weymann, who had heard of my fate, wanted to console me. But he also wanted to convert me from my free-thinking. So he came often, and there arose between us what I believe was a genuine friendship. But the world found it odd, and being a herd animal he bowed to the world's verdict and stopped his visits. I had nothing but a bitter smile for that. I had given notice on the apartment and handed my furniture to the carrier, and stayed the last few days with my friends the Bülows.
Before that, on the way, at Lake Garda, I had had a meeting with A. Getting to know him in person, I recognised that all his ideal veneration and admiration was in the end after nothing but “adventure.” — Life gave me hard lessons.
Then I travelled back to Germany, to a cold-water nature-cure establishment, Eckerberg near Stettin, which improved my throat trouble considerably.
I saw the dear old Herr von Bülow only once more before his death. Now he lies near Konrad at the Testaccio. I saw him for the last time at Maria's wedding in Berlin.
She had become engaged and married to Professor von Scala of Innsbruck17 and was overjoyed. How often, from Berlin, I put up at “Haus Scala” afterwards and shared joy and sorrow with my friends.
The old lady finally sent little Inge back to me, who was by now beginning to walk. I went with her to Bärenfels in the Erzgebirge for the after-cure. Everything was overcrowded. At last, after a long search, I got a room. When the child began to cry in the night, people hammered on the wall from both sides, snorting with rage. It was not a refreshing stay, however lovely the dark fir-woods would have been, enjoyed alone. There had been a great flood at Kipsdorf18, hence the overcrowding here. The bellowing of the Saxon philistines and their children at the height of the holiday season destroyed every mood.
Now I wanted to settle in Berlin, and spent days searching the suburbs with that in view. At last, in Grunewald, in the Wißmannstraße, in the very grand house “Schloß Königssee,” I found what I wanted. A glorious studio with a skylight and, underneath it (one went down by a little gilt rococo staircase), a few tiny rooms, though very artistically fitted out. I engaged a maid. Helga and Inge came back to me. They have a sad memory of it.19 They were much alone with the donna, for I had so much to do and to see to in the new surroundings.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Konrad in the armchair by the window — No verb, because this is not a sentence — it is a stage direction. From here to the mirror, the most important scene in her life is written as a play. The German makes it unmistakable a few lines further down, where she writes »Konrad ab«: ab is the word printed in a German playscript for an exit. She gives the speeches with their speaker's name and a colon, brings the servant on with a parenthetical direction, and sets the properties out first — armchair, window, one child at his feet, one on his knee. Four hundred pages of continuous prose, and for these two minutes she stops narrating and stages it. It is the only place in the memoir where she does this, and the effect is that she is not remembering the scene so much as watching it from the stalls, unable to reach it.
- ↑do not deserve a kiss — His last words to her, and she prints them: a small joke, and a refusal. She could have left this out. Nothing in the chapter would have suffered, and a good deal of what follows — the year of chasing a spark of his soul through heaven and hell — would read more simply. Instead the scene is built to end on it. Read the exchange again from the top and it is a woman asking three times to be got up for, or kissed, and being told no each time, by a man with about an hour to live.
- ↑for twenty years — Which dates the writing. Twenty years from January 1897 is 1917 — so she was composing this in the last full year of the war, and of her life. It is the clearest statement in the book so far of when the book was made. The memoir was published posthumously in 1926, seven years after she died in December 1918, and it has been hard to say how much of it was drafted when. Here she measures the distance from her own text: twenty years, out loud, in the middle of a sentence she cannot finish the way she began it. Watch the verb too — »abgerückt«, moved away, as of furniture pushed back from a wall. Not healed, not reconciled. Moved off a little.
- ↑The old Herr von Bülow was envoy to the Papal See — This sentence corrects an identification made in the previous chapter. Her friend Maria von Bülow is not the ambassador's wife: she is the daughter of Otto von Bülow, the Prussian envoy to the Holy See — a different Bülow, a different legation, a different house. There were two German missions in Rome, and this chapter needs both of them within four paragraphs. Bernhard von Bülow, at the Palazzo Caffarelli, was ambassador to the Kingdom of Italy, and it is his rout that Telmann is dressing for when he dies. Otto von Bülow was Prussia's envoy to the Vatican, an older man, and it is his household — his daughter Maria, Preuschen's “Grussel,” and his son — that she sends her children to at midnight. Marie Pauline Viktoria von Bülow married the ancient historian Rudolf von Scala of Innsbruck the following year, which is how the identification can be pinned; she appears at the end of this chapter as the bride. Note the detail that is easy to walk past: the daughter and son were out at a party that evening. Very probably the same one.
- ↑Did not Titian too paint his dead daughter? — The story she is reaching for is told of Tintoretto, not Titian: it was Tintoretto who was said to have painted his daughter Marietta on her deathbed. She wants a precedent and takes the nearest great Venetian. What the sentence is really doing is granting herself permission. Her husband has been dead about twelve hours, she is sitting at an easel in front of his body at first light, and she asks the room a rhetorical question about an old master. Then she paints all day and refuses food. The picture she made that morning — a deathbed portrait of Konrad Telmann, worked up later from the study — is one more of her canvases with no known whereabouts.
- ↑The cremation is there — In Catholic Rome in 1897 this was a statement of position, not a convenience. The Church had forbidden cremation outright in 1886, and the crematorium at the Campo Verano by San Lorenzo was used almost exclusively by freethinkers, freemasons and anticlericals. It explains the shape of the rest of the chapter. Telmann is burned rather than buried, the ashes go into an urn, the urn goes into the Protestant cemetery among the foreign unbelievers, and five months later a Protestant pastor turns up at her door hoping to convert her from her »Freigeisterei« — her free-thinking. The word is hers, and she uses it as a description, not a confession. Two paragraphs after the furnace she is at the Bülows' table pushing away a dish: “How can I eat while he is burning!”
- ↑the pig brings luck! — »Schwein haben« — to have pig — is the German for having a stroke of luck, and the pig is the standard German luck-charm. The joke is savage and entirely private. The pig studies are the ones she made at Höckendorf in the previous chapter, following the village swineherd into the beech wood for weeks with her painting things, for a picture of Circe — the goddess who turns men into swine. Those studies are still standing round the walls of the room. Her husband's coffin has just been carried out through the door between them, and the last verb, »wühlten«, is what pigs do: root, dig, turn the ground over. The first thing she made after his death was a six-line pun.
- ↑“Noch einmal Mors Imperator, Requiem für Konrad Telmann” — Her book of poems for him — “Once more Mors Imperator” — which takes the title of the picture that had wrecked her career ten years earlier and turns it on her own husband. It was out in the year of his death, not the next: the Allgemeine Zeitung reviewed it on 30 December 1897. The second book named here is one we did not know she had made: “Von jenseits des Grabes,” From Beyond the Grave — Telmann's last poems, with a selection of his earlier ones, edited by her. A posthumous volume of a nineteenth-century German novelist, assembled by his widow, ought to be findable in the German library catalogues; it is the only piece of editorial work by Preuschen we have heard of. The sentence after it is the whole grief of the rest of her life in one clause: they never became known. (the requiem)
- ↑the black courser — Her own private figure, two of them, never explained anywhere in the book: one that hunts her and one she must hunt. She simply assumes we know. The sentence that follows is the hinge of everything after 1897. “Through heavens and hells I had to search for it. And I searched for half a lifetime — never, never to find it.” What she means by searching is not a figure of speech: the second half of her life goes into spiritualism, séances and the occult, and this paragraph is where it starts, three days after a cremation, out of a stated need to find one spark of a particular dead man's soul. The half-lifetime is accurate — she was writing twenty-one years later and still had not found it.
- ↑I was to go to Helwan — Helwan, south of Cairo, with its sulphur springs — the winter cure that European doctors sent chest and throat patients to. The chapter puts the journey in the spring after his death; the press puts her Egyptian winter a year later. The Egyptian season ran from about November to April, and Nile steamers stopped when the heat came. Fit that to the rest of the chapter — she recovers from erysipelas in February or so, goes out, takes the boat to Aswan “at the end,” comes back by way of Taormina, and is in Rome for the interment at the beginning of June — and the whole thing sits inside 1897. That matters, because the reference works put her Egyptian winter in 1897/98, and the press bears them out: by 8 January 1898 she had left for Cairo “on account of a chest complaint,” to stay half a year, and on 31 October the same paper reported her moved from Rome to Berlin “after spending a winter in Egypt” (Saale-Zeitung, 8 January and 31 October 1898). The bronze relief for the grave is dated 1897, but that dates the interment, not the journey. Either she went twice, or the chapter has brought the Egyptian winter forward a year.
- ↑he renounced the Zitelmann family — Her account of the pen name: Telmann was not a nom de plume he signed books with but a legal change of name, registered with the police — and his family treated it as a repudiation and never forgave it. It rests on her word: the couple's own wedding announcement of June 1891 is signed “Konrad Zitelmann (Telmann)” (Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 27 June 1891), and we have found no record of the change. It also explains the hostility the previous chapter kept glancing at. His relations were outraged when a divorced woman painter entered “their correct family”; they hate her still, she wrote, thirty years on. Here is the same clan refusing a plaque on the birthplace of their own son because he had changed his surname — and the sentence they use to do it, quoted in full, is one of the small masterpieces of self-portraiture in the book. “Even if he had become a Goethe.”
- ↑the gifted sculptor Seeböck — Ferdinand Seeboeck (1864–1952), an Austrian sculptor settled in Rome from 1889 — and the bronze portrait relief of Telmann he made from her death mask survives, signed “F. Seeboeck Rome 1897.” The signature settles the chronology of the whole chapter: the relief was made in 1897, so the interment described here is June 1897, five months after the death, not a year later. Two other things follow from it. The object she is describing still exists, on the grave in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome — she is one of very few people in this book whose monuments can still be gone and looked at. And Seeboeck's patrons in Rome were the Mond family: Ludwig Mond, the collector she names in the previous chapter as a man with good pictures in the Palazzo Zuccari, is the same man who kept this sculptor. The Roman circle was small.
- ↑Hermione von Preuschen ... — She had her own name cut into the stone in 1897, at forty-two, with the dates left open, and prints the ellipsis here. It was not a gesture. She is buried in that grave: the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome records her at tomb 1130, beside Konrad Telmann, twenty-one years after she chose the spot. The next sentence in the memoir — “It was my wish that my urn should one day stand beside his” — is written as a wish and had already been arranged in bronze and yellow marble.
- ↑and I shall unlock your grave for you — Two promises in six lines, and she keeps one of them. The first is that she will come and be let in — which she was, in 1919. The second is the harvest: that she will make his work known, and his songs will go through the world like birds. She had said a page earlier, writing twenty years on, that they never became well enough known and that it was a constant pain to her. So the poem is being quoted here by a woman who already knows how the wager came out, and she quotes it anyway, without comment.
- ↑“Death is but a seechange — into something wild and strange!” — Misquoted, and the slip is the interesting part. Shelley's stone in that cemetery carries Ariel's song from The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” Three things have happened to it. Shakespeare's sea-change is a transformation, not a death; she has turned the line into a definition of dying. Rich has become wild. And the whole thing has been compressed into an epigram of the kind she liked. Whether the error is hers or belonged to the whole German colony — “the words always gave us something to think about” — cannot be told from here, but she is quoting from memory a stone she stood in front of many times. August von Goethe, the poet's son, is buried a few yards away, and Keats is in the same ground. She got Telmann into a cemetery that was already full.
- ↑But — Mors Imperator! — She ends the funeral on the title of her own painting: the picture that was thrown out of the Berlin exhibition in 1887, made her notorious, and which she called the curse of her life. Ten years later it is the last word over her husband's grave, and it is being used as a shrug. Read the two sentences before it again. A woman drives an urn across Rome with her closest friend, arrives at the wrong hour with the wrong ashes, races back past a custodian going to his lunch, and then writes: how madly life and death, farce and tragedy are shaken up together. The German »Aber — Mors Imperator!« has the force of but there he is, or but that is who is in charge. Death the Emperor, the skeleton in ermine that cost her her career, has the last line in her husband's chapter as a kind of house joke between her and the reader. (the painting)
- ↑Professor von Scala of Innsbruck — Rudolf von Scala (1860–1919), the ancient historian, who married Marie Pauline Viktoria von Bülow in 1898 — which fixes both the identity of Preuschen's closest friend and the date of the wedding that closes this chapter. It also redirects the most promising search in the whole project. If letters from Preuschen survive in quantity anywhere, the likeliest holding is not the Chancellor's papers but this household: “Haus Scala” in Innsbruck, where she says she put up again and again from Berlin and shared everything with them, and where a professor's papers would ordinarily end up in a university archive. Maria von Bülow is the one friendship of her life she says lasted to the grave.
- ↑There had been a great flood at Kipsdorf — The Erzgebirge flood of 29–31 July 1897, which destroyed 320 houses and 130 bridges, killed nineteen people and washed away the railway to Kipsdorf. It dates this paragraph to August 1897, but not the move to Berlin that ends the chapter, which came a year later, in August 1898 (Hallesche Zeitung, 24 August 1898). It is a good example of how the memoir can be pinned by the things she mentions only in passing. She is complaining about the noise; the reason the hotel is full is that the resort down the valley has just been wrecked and its visitors have nowhere else to go. Everything checks: Inge, born in May 1896, is “beginning to walk,” which is right for fourteen months; the interment was in June; the cure at Eckerberg came between. The one thing to hold lightly is this chapter's placing of her Egyptian winter a season before the reference works do: the press supports their 1897/98 (Saale-Zeitung, 8 January 1898).
- ↑They have a sad memory of it. — Six words, in the present tense, and then the chapter ends. She is reporting her daughters' verdict on her in their own words, from a conversation she does not give us, and letting it stand. The present tense matters: they were alive as she wrote, grown women, and they had told her. It is the only place in the book so far where somebody else's judgement of her is allowed onto the page without an answer — she does not defend herself beyond the half-clause about having a great deal to do. Helga was four, Inge two, they had lost their father in January 1897 and been shipped to Pomerania, and in the late summer of 1898 — a year later than the chapter's order suggests — their mother has moved them into a studio flat in Grunewald and left them with the servant. Thirty years later Helga wrote the dedication that opens this book. (the dedication)