Chapter 35Hiddensee and the ChildrenHIDDENSEE UND DIE KINDER

draft

Machine translation, not yet checked. This chapter is a raw AI-assisted draft made from the public-domain German. Expect mistakes of fact and of tone; it is here to make the work readable in English, not to be quoted.

📖 This chapter with the German alongside →

Johanna was now with me again. In the summer I meant to go with her to Hiddensee. There I meant to receive the children's visit, so laboriously begged for (and obstructed by a thousand evasions). I had pictured it to myself so beautifully, reading the beloved ones' every wish from their eyes. But it turned out very cheerless. The children were as if transformed, cool and reserved. Put their heads together the whole day. With me they spoke not a word. The only thing that won any interest from them was the amber hunt. (Daily there came letters from the new mother, after each of which their behaviour grew more distant still than before.) How right Helene von Monbart had been — into the house of my mortal enemies I had given them. I suffered the torments of hell.

And after I had longed for this visit for a whole year, I breathed again when it was over. Ah, I thought with bitter pains of those verses that had once streamed from my soul at little Helga's first attempts at walking:

Children's Feet

Not yet can the little feet go walking1, Even with both my hands I cannot guide My child, who out into the wide world Strives from my arms towards the earth, Lifts up its little hands, begging and longing: Do let me slip down from your lap, I want to walk proudly at your side ... Ah, my beloved, everything lived through, Everything, the pressing little soul! You learn to go, to wander, to walk. You run past us — how soon, into the wide world, You wander the long, the endless way, Over childhood's spring-budding footbridge, Through the thorn-hedge of a life, You wander in raptures, you wander in pains, Farther and farther from my heart.

Notes

Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.

↑Not yet can the little feet go walking — In Via passionis (1895) as "Kinderfüsse" — written, as she says, at little Helga's first steps, so late in 1894 or early in 1895, a year or so after her birth in November 1893 — and once more not quite as printed. The fourth confirmed memory-variant, and the first from her earliest collection: the 1895 print has "Wandelst den langen, den endlosen Weg" where the memoir writes "Wanderst"; "zu Seiten schreiten" becomes "zur Seite schreiten"; the memoir adds a dash ("Läufst uns vorüber — wie bald") and an exclamation mark after the "pressing little soul," and drops the closing ellipsis. Chapters 26, 32 and 33 established the habit with Kreuz des Südens; this extends it back to Via passionis. Why she reaches for this poem here needs no note: the verses written at the first steps already knew where the walking would end — farther and farther from her heart.