Chapter 30The AdoptionDIE ADOPTION
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The old lady and her constant burning wish to have the children about her grew more and more into a conflict between refusing and granting. Every summer she begged so heartbreakingly to be allowed Helga and Inge at Höckendorf just this one last time before she died. — Helga eventually went to school in Danzig, where my brother-in-law H. had become director of the shipyard1. He wanted to adopt the two children as his own, and I could not bring myself to give them up. For seven years the negotiations went back and forth, until at last, at last, worn down by life and by the advice of my friends Sudermann and others, I no longer stood in the way of the children's “happiness.”
Henning H. said that he had served seven years for Helga and Inge, as Jacob served for Rachel2. How I suffered in this conflict of love and reason — through seven years — words cannot say it. It made me ever more restless. — No happiness, no peace, no love, no children. Loneliness, the terrible kind, oppressed me more and more. Sometimes, with all of this, I was close to madness. But even then I still hoped that in the end I would after all force the world to my feet. Was I not happy in spite of everything, since I still believed in myself and in my star? — — —
Helene von Monbart tore open all the wounds of my soul again, when I had almost resolved to leave the children to H. for adoption. — “Do you not know that you are giving your own flesh and blood into the house of your mortal enemies? That they will be estranged from you from the very start?”
Ah, what was I to do? What was I to do?
In the end the children themselves gave the decision. They begged so pitifully to be “given up” after all. They were so happy there. The same children who later reproached me with having “sold” them!3 — And I did sell them, truly, for the mess of pottage of their carefree future4. For at the adoption, once it had finally been wrung out, my brother-in-law made them his heirs. He promised me in writing to send both of them to me for at least six weeks every year, and after their confirmation for a year each — and further, not merely not to estrange them from their mother, but to bring them up in her spirit and in love for her!
Why did I not have these promises made binding at law? How could I still believe in a human being, after everything I had already experienced of human worth! Still, in touching innocence, I believed that the new “father” would keep his word with his promises.
The adoption was now an accomplished fact.
After a seven years' struggle! — Yes, I had truly “sold” my children for the mess of pottage of their future free of care. For I myself was without any fortune of my own; the few savings Konrad and I had would be swallowed up by their education. And who was to tell me how it would go with the sale of my pictures in the future? Then they would stand penniless, perhaps facing the spectre of want. It was surely the best thing for my beloved ones, to look out from a safe harbour on the wildly breaking sea of life.
If ever a decision was hard for me, it was this one. And how a thousandfold I was to regret it later.
Bitter to me too was my brother-in-law's demand that the children should bear his name. They are now called Helga and Inge von H. And Konrad Telmann, who was so proud of his newly won name! It makes me melancholy as well to think of this.
My mother-in-law had made good on her dying. In spite of everything I mourned her death honestly.
But year after year I was to walk a bitter road of suffering, to get the children sent to me on a visit, with a thousand entreaties and humiliations, at first for a fortnight annually and then for a shorter time each year. In those years loneliness showed me its most terrible face, and I believed I must force life to make me a present of one soul — one single soul.
The Monbart was to be proved right — I had given my own flesh and blood into the house of my mortal enemies. Why they hated me there I have never really grasped, I never did the whole clan any harm. Unless at most it is the story of the frog and the glow-worm. — “Why do you spit?” asks the glow-worm. “Why do you shine?” answers the frog.5
The shining, too, has left me in the course of the years.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑my brother-in-law H. had become director of the shipyard — Henning von Holtzendorff (1853–1919) — married to Telmann's sister Margarethe, later Chief of the Admiralty Staff and Grand Admiral. He directed the Imperial Shipyard at Danzig from October 1901 to September 1903, which puts a hard date on this sentence. Their marriage of 1887 was childless, and in 1906 the couple adopted Helga and Ingeborg Zitelmann, the daughters of Konrad Zitelmann — Telmann — who were raised to the Prussian nobility as von Holtzendorff in 1907. That is the outcome this chapter negotiates. The Danzig dates matter for reading the memoir as a whole: chapter 29 has Helga at school in Kiel “where H. had been posted,” this chapter has her “eventually” in Danzig, and Danzig is 1901–03 — so the children's story here is being told across years and does not run in step with the travel chapters around it. The book is arranged by theme, not by date, and this is one of the clearest demonstrations of it. (Henning von Holtzendorff)
- ↑as Jacob served for Rachel — Genesis 29: Jacob serves Laban seven years for Rachel, and the years “seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her.” The uncle by marriage casts himself as the patient lover and the children as the bride — leaving the mother in the place of Laban, the one who withholds. It is worth pausing on how much work that sentence does for him. Seven years of legal pressure become an act of devotion; the man doing the taking becomes the one who is kept waiting; and the woman refusing to give up her daughters becomes the hard bargainer of the story, which is the only role Genesis leaves her. She reports the comparison without comment, immediately after the words “I could not bring myself to give them up,” and then gives her own seven years in the same breath: “words cannot say it.” Two accounts of one period, one of them scriptural and flattering, the other unable to be put into language at all.
- ↑The same children who later reproached me with having “sold” them! — The sentence the whole chapter is built to hold, and it is the only place the daughters' side of the story is heard. The order of events is deliberate and cruel to herself. First the children ask to go — they are happy at Höckendorf, where the summers were, and where there is money. Then, years afterwards, they accuse her of having sold them. And she does not defend herself: she takes the word, agrees with it, and spends the rest of the chapter explaining the price. Bear in mind who is reading this. The memoir was published in 1926, seven years after her death, with a foreword by Helga — one of the two children in this paragraph. Whatever passed between them later, this page went into the book with the daughter's consent.
- ↑for the mess of pottage of their carefree future — Esau in Genesis 25, who sold his birthright for a dish of lentils. She uses it twice within a page — and the birthright being sold in her version is hers. The exchange she describes is precise: the girls become the heirs of a childless admiral, and in return they cease to be hers. What makes the biblical figure exact rather than merely bitter is that Esau sells because he is famished and cannot see past the hunger of the hour, and she gives the same reason without excusing herself — she had no fortune, the savings she and Konrad had put by would be eaten up by the girls' education, and nobody could tell her whether her pictures would go on selling. Then the promises, all of them in writing and none of them in court: six weeks a year, a year each after confirmation, and an upbringing in love for their mother. The next paragraph asks the question a lawyer would ask.
- ↑“Why do you spit?” asks the glow-worm. “Why do you shine?” answers the frog. — The fable in two lines: the frog needs no motive for its spite beyond the other creature's light. She has not been traced to a source and may be quoting from memory. A trap for the reader of the German: speist here is not from speisen, to dine, but the old contracted form of speiest, from speien, to spit — so the glow-worm is asking why the frog spits, not why it dines. The exchange circulates in German as an old fable without a settled author; it is not in Lessing's, and no source has been found for the wording she gives. What matters is what she does with it. Asked why a family hated her, she offers no grievance, no property, no quarrel — only that she gave light and that this was reason enough. It is self-flattering and probably true at the same time, which is the register of the whole memoir.