I spent the entire day not with my parents, but with grandmother. She meant everything to me. She was my father, my mother, my teacher, my light, my sunshine which my eyes lacked. Everything that became a part of me, physically and mentally, I got from her. Thus, I most naturally came to resemble her. Whatever she told me, I told back to her, adding what my youthful imagination partially guessed, partially grasped. I told it to my sisters and to others who came to me, because I could not come to them. I told it in grandmother's tone of voice, with her confidence that left no room for any doubt. This sounded precociously and convincingly. It gave me the nimbus of a child well beyond his age in intelligence. Thus, adults came as well, to listen to me, and I might have degenerated into an oracle or miracle child, if grandmother had not been so very modest, truthful, and intelligent, to intervene wherever any kind of danger arose to me. A blind child is given little work. He has more time to think and ponder, than other children. So, he might easily appear more intelligent than he is. Unfortunately, father did not possess grandmother's intelligent modesty, nor mother's silent thoughtfulness. He enjoyed talking very much and exaggerated, as we already know, in everything he did and said. So it happened that this fate, which I escaped here, later, nevertheless, was to come over me, that awful fate, to be praised to death.
When I learnt to see, my inner self was already developed and fixed in its later major features to such an extent that even the world of light, opening now before my eyes, did not possess the power to draw the centre of my inner being outside towards it. I remained a child for all times, just turning into an older child, the older I grew; I remained a child in which the soul dominated and still dominates today, so that no consideration for the world outside and the physical life could ever keep me from doing something, what I have found to be right for the soul. And in all of my life, I have incessantly made the experience that with entire peoples it is in no way different than with me. They preferably act not due to external causes, but on account of themselves, their souls. The greatest and most beautiful deeds of a nation were born out of its inner self. And no matter how strong and how inventive a poet's mind might be, he would still never succeed in forcing the plot of a great, national drama upon the history of a people, if it was not already in the people's soul. And even if we would found hundreds of associations and commissions of authors of books for young people and thousands of libraries for children, students, and the general public, we will arrive at the opposite of what we intent, if we choose books which only satisfy the needs of our pedantry and our methodics, but not the needs of those souls, upon which we force them. I have come to know these souls, have studied them since the time of my youth. I have been such a soul myself, and am it even still today. Therefore I know that the general public and the younger generation must not be given books full of paragons of virtue, simply because there is no person who is a paragon of virtue. The reader wants truth, wants real life. He hates the virtuous dummies, which always stay where they were once placed, possess neither flesh nor blood, and are only clothed in whatever that dress-maker called "textbook morality" has dressed them up with, and nothing more. The task of an author writing for a young audience does not consist of the creation of characters who act so exceedingly delightfully impeccable in every situation that the reader necessarily has to get bored by them, but such an author's art is rather to allow his characters to commit all those errors and stupidities, he wants to save his youthful readers from. It is a thousand times better he would let his fictional characters perish, than to have the disgruntled boy transfer the evil, which did not occur, though it should have occurred in all truthfulness, from the book into the real life. This is the axis around which our literature for the youth and the general public has to revolve. Exemplary boys and men are bad role-models; they repel. Show the negative, but true to life and thrilling, thus you will achieve the positive.
After we had moved into a rented place, we lived at the market, with the church in its centre. This square was the children's favourite playground. In the evenings, the older school-boys gathered at the church gate to tell stories. This was a most exclusive club. Not everyone was allowed to go there. When someone came, they did not like, they made no fuss; he was sent away with a thrashing and surely would not return. I, on the other hand, did not come, nor did I ask, but rather I was invited in, though I was only five years old, while the others were thirteen and fourteen. What an honour! Such a thing had never happened before! I had grandmother and her tales to thank for this! At first, I kept quiet and just listened, until I knew all of the tales which were going around here. They did not hold it against me, because I had learnt to see only a short time ago, kept my eyes still half bandaged, and was treated with some consideration by everyone. But once this was over, I had to take my turn. Every day another fairy-tale, another story, another narration. This was asking much, very much, but I delivered, and with pleasure. Grandmother worked with me. What I was to tell at dusk, we worked out in the early mornings, even before we ate our morning soup. Then, I was well prepared when I reached the church gate. Our beautiful book, "The Hakawati", supplied our stories for a long time. On top of it, this stock of stories increased quite extraordinarily over time, of course not in the book, but in me. This was the very simple and natural consequence of me having to translate, after I had become seeing, the world of my soul, generated by the Hakawati in me, into the visible world of colours, shapes, bodies, and surfaces. By this, innumerable variations and multiplications were created, which I could only put into a fixed shape and form by telling them.
By this time, father had managed to get me the permission to attend school. Normally this permission was only granted after the age of six; but my mother was, in her capacity as a midwife, in frequent contact with the minister, who enjoyed granting her this wish, since he also served as the local school inspector, and father met the elementary school teacher Schulze twice a week to play skat or schafkopf [a], and therefore it did not turn out to be difficult to obtain his permission as well. I learnt to read and write very quickly, because father and grandmother helped with it, and then, once I could do this, father thought the time had come to start carrying out the plans he had for me. He wanted to fulfil in me what was not fulfilled in him. At the forester's house, he had been granted a glimpse at better and more humane conditions. And he was always haunted by the idea that there had been important men among out ancestors, about whom we, their descendants, had to say that we were not worthy of them. He wanted to live up to their example, but was violently pushed down by the circumstances. This offended and annoyed him. For himself, he had settled with these circumstances. He had to remain what he was: a poor, uneducated craftsman. But now, he transfered all of his wishes, hopes, and everything else onto me. And he was resolved to do everything possible and not to miss any opportunity to turn me into the man he had been denied to become. This can surely only be regarded as a commendable act of his. But the important thing was what path and manner he gave to my education. He wanted whatever was good and beneficent to me. He could only achieve this with good and beneficent means. But unfortunately, I have to say, without telling too much about future events, that my "childhood" came to an end now, at the age of five. It died in the very moment when I opened my eyes to see. What those poor eyes got to see from then on up to today, was nothing but work and work again, worry and worry again, suffering and suffering again, up to my present agony, like being tied to a stake and being incessantly tortured without any end being in sight. -- -- --
[a] Skat, Schafkopf: Two popular games of cards. The word "Skat" is derived from the Italian "scarto" (discarding cards), and "Schafkopf" means literally "sheep's head".
III. No Boyhood
Oh dear, beautiful, golden time of youth! How often have I seen you, how often have I found joy in you! With others, always just with others! You have never been with me. You steered clear of me, keeping in a far, far distance. I was not envious, truly not, because there is no room in me for envy at all, but it hurt nonetheless, when I saw the sunshine warming other people's lives, while I stood in the most remote, cold corner of the shadows. Yet, I also had a heart, I also yearned for light and warmth. But even the poorest of all lives requires love, and if this most poor one is sufficiently determined, he can become richer than the rich. He just has to search within himself. There, he will find what fate has denied him, and can pass it out to all, all of those who give him nothing. For truly, truly, it is better to be poor and nevertheless giving, than to be rich and nevertheless do always nothing but receiving!
I guess, this is the right place to clarify a misconception about me from the very start. This is that I am regarded as very rich, a millionaire even; but I am no such thing. Until now, I had just enough "to get along comfortably", nothing more. Even this is most likely to come to an end soon, since the relentless attacks against me will eventually bring about, what was to be brought about by them all along. I am getting used to the idea that I will die just as I was born, as a poor man without any possessions. But this does not matter. This is just externally. This cannot change any part of my inner self and its future.