In the fall I went to Dresden to boarding school. The first months were unbearable; I suffered one humiliation after another. I was used to being called an “idiot” by my parents, but I considered it an expression of personal hostility and did not take it to heart or give it another thought.
Here, however, people of my own age would say the same thing to me, even if the words were different. Here for the first time I heard the fine expression “gojischer Kopf.”* The words were unknown to me, but the intonation and the scornful laughter left no doubt about their significance.
The boarding school was divided into two cliques. One was composed of typical well brought up middle-class girls. It sickened and bored me.
The other was made up of “intellectuals.” It consisted of only three girls, a Berliner, a Finn and a Jewish girl from Bohemia. Naturally I wanted to belong to this clique. The Finn, who was well disposed toward me on account of my socialist views, and the Bohemian, who was a good sort, would have been glad to include me, but it all came to nothing because of the Berliner’s resistance. For some reason or other this Käthe Bernhard could not stand me. She was about two years older than me, and most strangely formed, with a short fat body, on which was placed a beautiful head with wonderful eyes and a high intelligent forehead. When we took walks together the “clever” girls walked in a separate group, and I was obliged to trail along behind with the “stupid” ones. On top of everything, Käthe, true Prussian that she was, despised all Austrians. She is the only person who ever succeeded in awakening a certain counteractive patriotism in me. Then too the antipathy of the “intellectuals” was understandable, for I was the only aristocrat in the entire school, and when parents came to look the school over the fat old proprietress would call me and announce, with pride: “This is our little… Her cousin is the wife of the heir to the throne,
Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand.” Whereupon, upset and embarrassed, I would make a stupid face and courtsey.
Dutzi, whose room was next to mine, was very beautiful and newly baptized. She reproached me bitterly for sleeping late on a Sunday morning, instead of going to mass. Dutzi was a spoiled little creature who related to anyone who would listen how her mother and the late Crown Prince Rudolf* had well, . . . One evening as I lay in bed reading she knocked on the connecting door and called: “Come into my room.”
I obeyed. There stood Dutzi stark naked and beautiful as God had created her.
“Am I not beautiful?” she asked.
I was accustomed to nude pictures and statues and examined her wih the eyes of an expert. “Yes, you are very beautiful, but don’t put on any more weight.” And I turned to go back.
Dutzi glanced at me crossly. “Aren’t you going to stay in here with me?”
“I have an interesting book I want to read.”
And I left. I never could understand why from that time on Dutzi was angry with me.
The “clever ones” still excluded me from their group, even though I studied like mad and – thanks to the culture I had picked up painlessly at home – often came out ahead of them in school work. Finally, however, I managed to gain admittance to the intellectual clique in a very “goyish”
way. Once, when Käthe, with her insufferable superior smile, remarked yet again: “But that’s something you can’t understand!” my feelings of anger got the better of me and I gave her a good box on the ears.
This obviously made a deep impression on the Berlin girl. From then on we were good friends, and I was one of the “clever ones.”
We didn’t mind enjoying our own cleverness a little, got up an hour earlier than the others and read books that “improve the mind.” My old arrogance returned. I preached socialism and made the others read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty* and, as a “socialistic” book, Stirner’s The Ego and His Own.* Perhaps the girls who did not have a “goyish” head understood more of this than I did.
Käthe was still vexed; she dragged out Schopenhauer in the little Reklam paperbacks and we all had to read The World as Will and Representation at six o’clock in the morning on empty stomachs.
Annie, the Finnish girl, was not so heartless. She brought us Tolstoi’s Resurrection, the conclusion of which I even then found unsatisfactory, as
well as the novels of Turgeniev. As a matter of fact, as far as I personally am concerned, everything is her fault. I read Fathers and Sons and fell in love with Bazarov and Russia. Subsequently I discovered that Turgeniev was at bottom a counter-revolutionary; but in those days he excited all my rebellious feelings, and I had but one wish: to go to Russia and join these heroic beings in bringing about the revolution.
I also owe some less agreeable hours to the Finnish girl. She gave me Ibsen’s works to read. With one of them – entitled Nora in German – I was already familiar. When I was with my parents in Lisbon there was a little cupboard next to the toilet where father stored away books he had already read. Even at that time I seem to have been true to my principle:
never waste a moment. At the age of eight, the sub-title of Nora – A Doll’s House – tempted me and I pulled this book out from the pile. It was a bitter disappointment, because I did not understand a word of it. Now Annie gave me Ghosts to read, explaining with worldly wisdom: “All men have syphilis.”
The play caused me days and nights of utter misery. It seemed to me that I could never be clean again. I washed myself at every opportunity and my body filled me with disgust.
And then: “All men have syphilis.” All men – then my father too had had this disease, and I would end up like Oswald, crying for the sun.
Käthe eased my mind finally with one word: “Rubbish!” and as she was the cleverest of us all, I believed her.
On Sunday mornings when the kneeling and rising faithful went to church we “clever ones” gave talks to each other. Annie lectured on tyranny and revolution, Käthe discoursed on the meaning of drama – she wanted to be an actress – and I, naturally, held forth, with the infinite confidence of the ignorant, on social issues.
Meanwhile, my position with the “clever ones” had become more firmly established. I could do something none of them was able to bring off: I could write. I wrote gruesome plays about the injustice of the world and about women’s rights, which we performed on Sundays. I always got the best part, because I was so good at “dying.”
In the spring a new girl came to the school, who could not get admitted to either clique – a little Jewish girl from Vienna. She proclaimed to all that there was only one poet in the world, Hofmannsthal, and gave us his works to read. I found them boring, but held my tongue, because Mimi was such a nice girl. There were violent literary debates, but Mimi would
not let herself be beaten down – until one day there was a sudden change in her. She received a letter from home, and ran around the whole day with tear-filled eyes. That evening she said: “There are other poets besides Hofmannsthal.”
It was not till several days later that we discovered the answer to this puzzle. Mimi’s poet had become engaged to Mimi’s sister instead of waiting for her.
*
When the holidays came I went with grandmother, who was suffering from a heart ailment, to Nauheim.*
In August she died, in Switzerland. My youth, and everything that stood for security and freedom from care, was gone. A hostile world lay before me, a world of ill-intentioned strangers. I had no home any more. At sixteen, I had to cope alone with myself and with the world.