At that time I was working at the scientific publishing house of Georg Thieme as a production supervisor. Suddenly an interdepartmental feeling of community reigned, which we had not felt previously and which surely doesn’t exist today. We celebrated; we celebrated day and night. We held together when the pressure from the company management increased. We shared information freely and helped each other with true camaraderie.

It was entirely in the spirit of the times that I asked my friend Helmut Gann, an assistant in company management and the only one of us to have access to the Publishers Weekly of the German Book Trade (Börsenblatt des deutschen Buchhandels), to be on the lookout for any job offerings up north, because I intended to visit some friends in the Ruhr region and while on the road I had in mind to look in on a few places.

This was not really a serious step toward a planned career. In the long run I actually envisaged myself in a publishing management position, but the prevailing wisdom of those days leaned more toward letting go and opening yourself up, and not so much toward targeted career moves.

Unfortunately, very little was available just that week. The Heidesheim Verlagsanstalt, a small southern publishing house in Swabia specializing in horse and rider literature, was looking for a director. And in Frankfurt, the Publishers Association of the German Book Trade wanted to have someone “who could get the job done.” I went to Heidesheim and came back with good chances of getting the job, but once I was back in Stuttgart, I immediately sat down and sent off a refusal. My feeling for life at that time called out for expanding my horizons, for opening them up. The road to Heidesheim would have led me even more deeply into the darkness of provincial Swabia. Stuttgart was bad enough!

But the German Publishers Association? Could the path to emancipation ever lead through an administrative apparatus that had such a bad name among those employed in the book trade as did that of our federation in Frankfurt? That gave me the shivers.

“No, no!” Gann advised. “Look them up! This isn’t the German Publishers Association; these are the people who put on the Fair – they’re really wild! Give it a try, even if it’s only to have a little fun. I also applied there once on a whim.”

At that moment Helmut and I had no idea that with the sentence, “This isn’t the German Publishers Association; these are the people who put on the Fair,” he was foreshadowing a conflict that would keep me engaged for decades.

So I went, not very enthusiastically, but simply because Gann had recommended it to me and maybe because it was on the road going north. Gann was right, “They’re really wild!”

When I called in at the office on Kleiner Hirschgraben Street, I was greeted by Klaus Thiele, who today runs a small publishing house in Mexico and who at that time was the director of the department for foreign exhibitions for the Exposition and Fair Company.

“Do you speak French?” That was Thiele’s first question as soon as I had introduced myself. I had to say no. I hadn’t had any French at school, though I had taken a year afterwards at Berlitz. There could be no question of my “knowing” French.

“Too bad, because you don’t have any chance at all then!” he answered in a distressed tone.

“Our director is a Francophile, and it’s quite likely that he will conduct the interview in French.”

Well, the die was cast, and I didn’t want to spoil a bit of fun for the boss. After a few minutes I was admitted to the director’s office, and as I had been warned, a beaming Sigfred Taubert came around his big desk and said to me, “Bonjour, Monsieur!”

Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.

Then came Bucharest – Contemporary German Literature, a small book exhibit of 400 purely literary titles, which the Germanist Eberhard Lämmert had put together and which had recently been put on without complaint in Belgrade.

Three of us traveled together: Professor Lämmert, Günter Grass and me. Everything was well-prepared. The exhibit was supposed to be set up in the Casa Scriitorilor, the Writers’ Club. Grass was received in a very friendly manner by his German-speaking Romanian writer colleagues. But then delays set in. We could not come to an agreement on the time for the opening. Finally the order came down – the books by Alfred Kantorowicz, Uwe Johnson and Wolf Biermann were to be removed from the exhibit, as was the exchange of letters between Grass and Kohout, Letters over the Border. No reason was given.

This was the first time I had been confronted with such a censorship quandary. The decision to open the exhibit was in this case taken out of my hands. Günter Grass, scheduled as the opening speaker, immediately pulled out. I was very impressed by his attitude. This was the first time that I saw a person acting clearly and unambiguously according to standards which were not imposed from the outside.

The Romanian leadership, whoever they were, never came into view. Someone was standing in the background behind the Board of Directors of the writers union, and that individual must have been pulling the strings. Romanian writer colleagues averted their gazes and appeared to be quite embarrassed, but they kept trying to move us to a compromise.

It was decided to continue the discussions during a trip to the Romanian provinces. We left Bucharest in four black Volga limousines. The trip was interrupted again and again by stops at inns with heavy Romanian cooking (Grass had a sheep’s eye peeking out from under his bushy walrus mustache), ending with lots of Romanian țuică [plum brandy].

In the evening we were supposed to arrive for an overnight stay in Sibiu (Hermannstadt). As we got out of the cars in front of the hotel, in the midst of the confusion that occurs upon arrival, a little boy came up to Grass and asked:

“Are you the German poet Günter Grass?”

When Grass said yes, the little one took his hand and pulled him around the street corner. Grass, whom I had traveled with during the last leg of the journey in the same car, called to me:

“Weidhaas, come along. I don’t know what this little one wants.”

I joined the two of them. The boy pulled the poet around another street corner, into a building that we went through before emerging on the back side, around another street corner, again into a building, down some stairs to a basement, along the corridor, until we finally came to a door painted white. The boy opened the door. We entered a large vaulted room, in which about 100 people were sitting, looking at us expectantly. An older, white-haired man got up and with slow footsteps came to the three of us…

Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.

It was only then that I learned that Eduardo Galeano, publisher of the Buenos Aires left-wing cultural magazine Crisis, had been detained by the Argentine military dictatorship and was in great danger.

Through my good contact at the German Embassy in Buenos Aires, the cultural attaché Dr. Gottfried Arens, I was able to have Galeano, together with his wife, receive an official invitation and tickets to Frankfurt for the Book Fair, something that put him in a good position to leave the country.

Galeano and his wife soon were numbered among the good friends in my Latin American family, in that during the Book Fair they also got involved in our practical problems, such as babysitting!

With his book, Open Veins of Latin America, [published in 1973] Eduardo Galeano had created a penetrating historical survey of his continent from its discovery down to the present. Our introduction of Galeano at the Fair made his book a sensation in Germany, and since then its stature and popularity have only grown. In 2009, the book was once again catapulted onto the bestseller list when Hugo Chávez of Venezuela presented a copy of Galeano’s famous work to the new American President, Barack Obama.

Read more in See You in Frankfurt!

In May 2009, Eduardo Galeano sat for an hour-long interview with the news program Democracy Now:

Peter Weidhaas and Mario Vargas Llosa (1976).

(Read Part I)

Ruppert Schmidt, a clever fellow, always ready for a joke, was a book dealer from the Rhine city of Offenburg, quite close to France, and the owner and director of the Offenburger Dokumente Verlag. Schmidt had joined the French Resistance during the war, and since that time had maintained good contacts with French intellectuals, contacts which he had used since 1946 to promote the introduction of literature from Germany into France. Through him, I had established contact with the great Argentine author Julio Cortázar in Paris, and after a short period of hesitation he expressed willingness to take over the role that I had originally intended for Gabriel García Márquez. As it soon turned out, Cortázar’s name was a big drawing card on account of his literary works being known by practically every other living Latin American author, but also because of his exemplary political stands. Cortázar, an Argentine living in Parisian emigration, had spoken out decisively against the Argentine military, which in April 1976 had taken power in Buenos Aires and was on the verge of removing from its past anything that appeared leftist or critical of the new junta regime. Cortázar was also physically a larger than life figure, with his calm face under a frizzy beard.

We were successful in gathering behind Julio Cortázar almost all the important names in Latin American literature, such as Juan Rulfo (Mexico), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), who agreed to speak at the opening of the Book Fair, Jorge Amado, Osman Lins, Thiago de Mello (Brazil), Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay), Manuel Puig (Argentina), Manuel Scorza (Peru), José Donoso and Antonio Skármeta (Chile), Adalberto Ortiz (Ecuador) and others.

Juan Rulfo was the author of only two books, The Burning Plain and Pedro Páramo, both written before the war but which appeared in German only in 1953 and 1955. These books were considered classics of the new Latin American literature, since the author employed an experimental style of storytelling in a masterly way, something that was becoming common in the literature of the continent only in the 1970s. I was soon bound to him by a hearty friendship. Rulfo, even then a convinced proponent of moving slowly, appeared as early as one week before the Book Fair in Frankfurt, and stayed on afterwards for another two weeks, which he spent principally with us, at our home, and with other friends.

Jorge Amado, the father of countless novels about his town Salvador da Bahia, was the creator of the most widely read novel of Brazilian literature, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon. Amado, whom I had missed very much in Bahia for my book exhibit in 1971, had the peculiarity of never getting on an airplane. He crossed the ocean by ship.

José Donoso’s novel The Obscene Bird of Night had fascinated me long before the Book Fair. In a park, Don Jerónimo founds a society of cripples and human monsters. Don Jerónimo himself finally gets into the park, but as a non-cripple he is considered by the inhabitants of the park to be too ugly. He is therefore killed. In this world of dread, which Donoso lays out, this is the symbol of the subjection of the helpless individual, violated by outside forces—a book that leaves a deep impression.

The Chilean Antonio Skármeta made a name for himself as a young author in Germany, primarily by his homage to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda: the novel (and film) Ardiente Paciencia (which became the basis for Michael Radford’s Il Postino). Skármeta became a friend of our house. Later, when he had returned to Chile, I often met with him when I spent time in Santiago. Many years later he returned to Germany as the Ambassador of Chile.

With Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano had created a penetrating historical survey of his continent from its discovery down to the present. Our introduction of Galeano at the Fair made his book a sensation in Germany, and since then its stature and popularity have only grown. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has called Open Veins “a monument of Latin American history.” In 2009, the book was once again catapulted onto the bestseller list when Chávez presented a copy of Galeono’s famous work to the new American President, Barack Obama.

Back then at Frankfurt, Galeano and his wife soon were numbered among the good friends in my Latin American family, in that during the Book Fair they also got involved in our practical problems, such as babysitting.

(to be continued…)

Max Frisch said, “An accident is something that is long overdue that finally hits you.” For many years I moved about in the literary world of Franz Kafka. I dug into all his stories, his diaries and letters, until I had finally had enough of the obsequiousness and assimilatory tendencies of the main character K, and was on the lookout for a new, completely different world. And so I hit upon Latin America, this tragic culture, something that grew out of conquest and destruction of the cultural identity of its Indian peoples, the Aztecs, the Maya and the Inca, by the European conquistadors from Spain and Portugal. These were just the thing for finding an identity for someone like me, who, like Kafka’s hero K, felt guilty but did not know why. The two cultural streams of the oppressed and the conquerors are still locked in a battle over values and influence in Latin American Mestizo society. They are still far from creating a homogeneous view of the world for the peoples who live there.

How could this not fascinate me? I was looking for something that had left me, that would fill in the deficits in my identity, and I had uncovered in their wake an attractive, controversial mode of life and culture. The Broken, the Unfinished, the Struggle for the meaning of reality, in which much that is human but also much that is magical stirs, fascinated me both in Latin American literature and in the Latin American people whom I met at my expositions in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Córdoba and Santiago de Chile, as well in later trips to Mexico, Central America, the northern reaches of South America and Brazil.

There are two different ways to grasp a foreign country, a foreign culture, a foreign society, a foreign language. One way goes through literature; the other, through love.

When I first set foot on this continent, I was quite susceptible to both forms of adaptation. Boundlessly curious and open to everything that I ran into there, I was soon consumed by a powerful passion for a woman from Córdoba, in Argentina, someone marked by strong Indian features, and who on the basis of her powerful and exotic personality quickly drew my interest and then aroused my love. After only a few days I had decided to take her and her one and a half year old daughter to Germany, to my ponderous fatherland, to live with me.

In the years that followed, in trips both abroad and here at home, my dedication to the study of the Latin American continent never flagged. I felt myself guided by Latin American literature, which was published only sporadically on the German book market and was barely noticed, and which for the time being I could only read in German. The German reader could find very few aids in getting into a literature which seemed at first to be strange, magical, mythical, quite surrealistic, and often even baroque-sounding. In the 1960s various editions existed of the works of the great stimulator of the new Hispano-American literature, Jorge Luis Borges; of the two Nobel prize winners, the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias and the Chilean Pablo Neruda; and various titles by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, the two Mexicans Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo, and the Argentine Ernesto Sábato. On my first visit to Argentina, Sábato had introduced me to the fascinating life of Buenos Aires through his book On Heroes and Tombs.

As part of the wave of politicization related to the student protests and the youth revolution of the end of the 1960s, the revolutionary situation in the states of the southern continent hit you right between the eyes. We took account of the political drive of the Latin Americans, and raised the charismatic prophets of the new age to the rank of idols, from Camilo Torres to Che Guevara and Ernesto Cardenal. However, it soon became clear that the interest in Latin America had a mere surrogate character. The interest was fanciful, and whenever it appeared it was superficial and on the surface only. The surest indicator of this was that very little attention was paid to the most reliable sources about the change of consciousness in Latin America, the self-discovery of the Latin American authors visible in the common traits of a literature that they themselves were devising.

In this regard, it is worthwhile to trace the story of the reception in Germany of the Latin American author, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, who like no other embodied the magical realism of Latin American literature in his stupendous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Immediately after publication, his books became global bestsellers, and were blessed with sales of several hundred thousand copies. In Germany, García Márquez first appeared in 1966 in a small novel in German translation, known in English as In Evil Hour (La mala hora), published by the East Berlin Aufbau Publishing House. The book was immediately taken under license for West Germany by the Sigbert Mohn Verlag in Gütersloh.

Still, this book was a flop in both parts of Germany, since, as Sigbert Mohn wrote to the head of Aufbau, Fritz-Georg Voigt, “… its completely unsatisfactory sales do not even cover the cost of storage, let alone promise any profit….” The book was sold at clearance. The East German publisher tried another book, No Letter for the Colonel (Coronel No Tiene Quién le Escriba). Since this too was unsuccessful, the Aufbau Verlag gave up.

In the meantime, the West German Kiepenheuer und Witsch got interested in the author, and in 1970 published García Márquez’s masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude. This time the West German–East German exchange went the other way. In 1975 the Aufbau Publishing House took a license to publish this book.

As the author once noted, he writes as his grandmother told stories, and does not analyze events. Nonetheless, or perhaps precisely because of that approach, like no other book the novel contributed to a “spiritual identity” of the splintered continent. Both in the Spanish motherland and in the United States, especially because of its success in Latin America, the book was a sensation. In France, the Académie Franċaise in 1969 named it the best foreign novel. Otherwise the reception outside of Latin America was restrained. In Germany, García Márquez did not make the bestseller list until the time when the Frankfurt Book Fair chose Latin America as its special topic in 1976. In the six years up until this marketing event, the Cologne publishing house sold only a few thousand copies, and the resonance among the general public was muted.

My strongest attempt to bring Latin American literature closer to the reading public occurred when the Book Fair and the German book trade in general got wind that they had a serious image problem, due principally to the over-commercialization of literature. In planning the first topical program of “Latin America” at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I had prescribed for myself a grand outing to Latin America, beginning in the middle of November 1975. By the end of December I wanted to visit nine Latin American countries, and convince them to bring their publishing houses and authors to the Book Fair in Frankfurt in the fall of the following year, with the aim of making their art and literature known the world over. I was armed with a film about the Frankfurt Book Fair and a Spanish language stump speech that I could revise as occasion demanded, all intended to convince publishers to participate. I planned on going to Colombia (Bogotá), Venezuela (Caracas), Cuba (Havana), Mexico (Mexico City), Peru (Lima), Bolivia (La Paz), Uruguay (Montevideo), Brazil (Sȧo Paulo) and Argentina (Buenos Aires).

This was a very strenuous trip, with lectures, TV appearances, press interviews, lots of official banquets, lots of alcohol, all with temperatures I was not accustomed to of around 104° Fahrenheit, and with elevations ranging from sea level to 12,000 feet above sea level (La Paz). The most strenuous thing for me was my internal tension. I was in Latin America, and—how can I say it?—I wanted to be a Latin American. I wanted to take hold of Latin America from the inside; my enthusiasm for being there was unrestrained. René Pacheco, Director of the Historical Commission of the Cuban government, invited me with my companion Manfred G. to Fidel Castro’s box seats in the theater for classical ballet (Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; we were later treated to Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba and Strauss’s Salome). When the prima ballerina Alicia Alonso enraptured the public into storms of applause, the kind that we have only at soccer matches, tears came to my eyes about this successful mix of the European cultural patrimony with the Latin American temperament.

On the other hand, my shock was great when, in a Bolivian café, the Jew Peter Levi spelled out that the friendly gentleman at the table next to me was the old Nazi and one-time SS officer Klaus Barbie, alias Altmann. Barbie had been sentenced to death several times, most recently in 1954 in Lyon, for a massacre in St. Genis-Laval and for many executions in the Montluc Prison in Lyon. Here was the “Butcher of Lyon,” sitting as an innocuous passerby, an arm’s length away from me, enjoying himself with his bodyguard in unabashed contentment. Since 1964 he had been active as a consultant for the Bolivian military government. Beate Klarsfeld, the representative of the International League Against Anti-Semitism and Racism, had dug up this fugitive in La Paz and had publicized his stay and his activity worldwide, something that did not seem to disturb him at all as he sat there and savored his coffee and laughed.

So it popped up again, this burdensome question of identity that I was seeking to escape from in Latin America. Wasn’t I one of them; wasn’t he one of us?

to be continued…

At the 20th Frankfurt Book Fair, my first Book Fair as part of the organizational team, I participated only as an observer. As a new colleague in the exhibition department, I was not directly involved in the work of the Fair, though here and there I did my part with smaller tasks and errands. I could therefore look at the events on the fairgrounds with a certain cool composure.

It was quite the opposite for Sigfred Taubert, who despite all declarations to the contrary was deeply affected in his self-understanding as director of the Fair, something which in my opinion a few years later factored into his decision to take an early retirement.

I was cool and collected, but I was certainly far from being able to get a general picture of things. In my memory, I see myself drawn again and again into excited and wildly gesticulating discussion groups. Due to the crowded corridors in the Fair, it was not possible to be at all moments at the center of the action, and so most of the time I tried to find out in the offices of the Fair management when and where something had actually happened. However, hundreds of disgruntled exhibitors and Fair visitors were on the same mission. The result was that here as well as outside in the halls the chaos unfolded like a giant battle royale, in which otherwise well-mannered and respectable people suddenly lost their composure and advanced on the supervisors with wild screams in order to register their complaints, their problems and their demands.

Once I grabbed a well-known author by the arm as he insisted with choleric hiccups on seeing the fair director on the spot, followed by an old publisher who was foaming at the mouth. Then I started in with the words “whoever is screaming is wrong” in a counterattack on an excited contemporary (the author of The Revolution Releases its Children), whom the bookkeeper Ingrid Lenz was holding onto tightly. Snarling with rage, he then turned on me and would not let go of my jacket collar for a good ten minutes. An unholy bedlam reigned over the entire Fair, and hardly anybody could get on with business. What was the point?

Only at the end of each day of the Fair could we employees pry from a visibly exhausted Fair director just what had happened that day. On the following morning we received the accounts in the press that were played out with relish, but which seriously differed from the internal reports.

The Book Fair began on a Thursday, and went relatively smoothly with regard to the practical matters of the Fair. The supervisory board of the Exposition and Fair Company and the management of the German Publishers Association basically had the building on lock-down after the previous year’s spontaneous demonstrations against the right-wing publisher Axel-Springer and the occupation of the Greek national stall. The security arrangements were very intrusive. Every visitor was affected and had to undergo heightened security checks when entering the fairgrounds. Placards and signs were confiscated at the entrance.

The Fair management and the supervisory board had decided on another classic measure. They had hundreds of policemen stationed on the fairgrounds with all their standard equipment of police cars, paddy wagons, water cannon and riot shields.

On Friday the author, Minister of Finance and controversial politician Franz-Josef Strauss, insisted on giving an interview to German television at the stand of the Seewald Verlag. An apprehensive Sigfred Taubert accompanied the Minister through a below-ground entrance to the site of his appearance. Then, without any seeming provocation, he ordered the police to remove the waiting German and foreign journalists. Apparently in the group he had seen the two Socialist German Student Union leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Hans-Jürgen Krahl and a half-dozen others who appeared to be protesters.

In his memoirs here is the way it reads:

I took the megaphone… and looked at the crowd, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Hans-Jürgen Krahl were setting the tone. I suffered under no illusion that I could achieve anything with my words. I was powerless against the crowd. In vain I demanded that the corridor in which the publishing booth was located should be kept clear.

While this confrontation was limited to the immediate area of the Seewald Verlag in the large Hall 5 (today Hall 8), on the following day, a Saturday, the situation got much worse in Hall 6, where German belles-lettres was located.

The Socialist German Student Union (the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbundd or SDS) had called for a teach-in on Saturday, September 21, 1968, at 4 PM, in Hall 6, stall 1148 of the Diedrich Verlag, a company which had published the works of that year’s recipient of the peace prize Léopold Senghor. The teach-in was to discuss his important role in his own country and the Afro-American revolution in general.

Taubert:

If we assumed the passive attitude of a well-intentioned Fair management, I could not count on the literary publishing houses set up in Hall 6 being able to withstand an hours-long SDS program. I also doubted how they might greet such a passive attitude from management. I finally settled on the tactic of direct intervention.

And so at 2 PM, the time at which the general public had access to the Fair, he had Hall 6 closed by the police. Whoever was already inside had to remain inside, and whoever was outside could not get in. Only exhibitors and journalists were exempted from this regulation. Only one person, who was neither the one nor the other, got into Hall 6 without being bothered by the police and soon left again – the chairman of the neo-Nazi NPD party Adold von Thadden, who had apparently gotten in with a press pass. It was obvious that this sideshow had great symbolic power, and it was played up by the press and by protesters with great fanfare.

Indescribable scenes played out at the entrances to the Hall. Whoever is familiar with the highly sensitive public intellectuals of our Fair can imagine the reaction elicited by such sudden restrictions on their freedom of movement.

When Sigfred Taubert finally understood that the teach-in under the given circumstances affected only small parts of Hall 6, he had the police withdrawn and the Hall reopened.

[Read the whole story at SeeYouInFrankfurt.com]

Finally in the fall of 1966 the “Deutscher” was officially accepted into the family, and the engagement was celebrated. A palace was rented, a small one to be sure, but a palace nevertheless. Family members came from the whole country and from Norway and Sweden. For the first time in my life I wore a cutaway, a rented one, but a cutaway for real!

And then came the time in which my in-laws offered me a partnership in the company, but here I refused. My unsteady, forward-striving nature demanded that I determine my own fate. I wanted to go my own way, to seek out a career as a publisher and not to enter the harbor of security at the tender age of 27. My education at the Graphics Art Institute was soon to be finished, and I wanted to apply to a publishing house as a book production editor in order to provide for myself and my future wife.

One after another I applied to the Danish publishing houses of Munksgaard, Gad, Gyldendal, and Samlerens Forlag, but the salary that they offered me as a book production novice came nowhere near the sum that my in-laws had provided for my work in the bookbinding company. With a heavy heart I now looked south to my home country, to a threatening existence. Birgitte, my fiancée, was not enthusiastic – “For holidays perhaps, but forever?”

For me there was no going back. I placed an ad in the German Publishers Weekly in Frankfurt, and in the fall of 1966 with my secondhand VW Beetle I set off for the first time to the Mecca of all book people, to Frankfurt and the Frankfurt Book Fair.

There I was successful right away. I found a position as a production editor in the specialized medical publishing house of Georg Thieme in Stuttgart, with a reasonable salary that would make me independent and would put me in a position to support the family that I was about to start.

Stuttgart, on a sunny autumn Sunday in 1966 – I am lying on my Danish leather sofa in my apartment, brightly decorated with beautiful Danish furniture on Immenhoferstrasse, the middle of the Weinberg, and I feel awful. I have been feeling bad the entire morning and have no desire to see anything. I’m just hanging around, depressed; I don’t know why.

There’s the doorbell! I get up and open the door – nobody there. I press the buzzer for the house door down below, but no one is trying to get in. Finally I shuffle back and plop down on the sofa. I feel miserable.

There goes the doorbell again. Well, I think, somebody is pulling my leg. Once again there’s nobody at the door.

The same thing happens once more. And nobody who could have rung.

An inner tension, close to being torn apart. Nonetheless, this ringing doorbell arouses my curiosity. Am I hallucinating? I get up on a chair and unscrew the cover of the doorbell; I lie down on the sofa once again, but in a way so that I can see the doorbell.

I feel so depressed that I am nauseous. Once again the doorbell rings. I can clearly see the ringer beating against the vibrating bell.

Am I going crazy? I feel even more nauseous. I grab a candle, light it, climb back up on the chair, and put some soot on the body of the doorbell where the hammer strikes. I need to know – is this occurring in my head, or is somebody playing tricks on me? I also put a little soot on the doorbell button at the entrance to my apartment and on the one down below on the building door. Now I will know!

Once again I lie down on the sofa. I am sick as a dog. Then the ringer moves and it rings. I climb up – clear signs of the hammer on the sooty bell. I run down to the door – the two doorbells are untouched.

I am going to be sick.

I lean against the door of the apartment. It keeps ringing, the rings closer and closer together. I cover my ears.

Suddenly I know what is going on. I tear open the door of the apartment, and barge in on my neighbor, who is very alarmed when she sees the dismay in my face:

“May use your telephone to make a call?”

Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.

Chapter 6: Going Home Again

They say that life moves forward in seven-year segments.

My childhood, the period from birth to age 7, 1938 to 1945, I can call nothing other than “happy.” The war seemed to be an adventure. Thanks to my parents’ care, I didn’t suffer any need. The bomb attacks on Berlin up until 1942 were exciting events for a young boy, who several times stood alongside the shelter supervisor at the door of the air-raid shelter to get a good look at the lights from the so-called “Christmas trees,” artificial illumination that was dropped to light up the bombing targets.

Later, when my father had set up the family in a little house in Austria near the city of Braunau, I grew up in sun, garden and fresh air. Those years allowed the growth of a natural and healthy strength that I retain to the present day.

Those days held many wonders for me – the shots fired in our direction by the Americans during the last days of the war from the opposite bank of the Inn River, the nightly roaring of the American tanks, the goat that sailed through the air when a hand grenade exploded nearby, the low-flying fighter jets strafing children on their way home from school, the half-starved Russian prisoners of war who were driven in the thousands past our house into the woods nearby – as a child, I was amazed at all this, but did not take in its historical significance or human tragedy.

A friend of the family, a construction engineer and officer in the German army, visited my father often. The six-year-old boy, unconsciously infected by his parents’ conversations about the war and by the non-stop propaganda on the radio, stopped the “Uncle” dressed in civilian clothes at the garden gate with the cry, “Halt, who goes there? Password!”, all the while aiming at him with a wooden weapon, a simple club with a string attached. The “uncle” pushed the “rifle” aside, patted the boy on the head and warned him:

“Petie, never point a weapon at a person.”

With the cunning of an innocent child, I answered:

“But uncle, it’s only a piece of wood!”

“You never know,” he responded. “You never know whether such a weapon can shoot.”

He then asked me to put an empty bottle on the apple tree and rest a board behind it. I eagerly did what he requested with the clear knowledge that this experiment would be a catastrophic flop for the “uncle.” He took up a position about ten paces from the apple tree, slowly brought up my wooden rifle, and for a long time aimed at the bottle. Suddenly an ear-piercing bang broke the quiet, and the bottle exploded into a thousand pieces. Sorrowfully, he gave me my wooden rifle back. Later, after I had pulled a bullet out of the board behind the bottle, I took my rifle apart trying to discover the secret behind the shot.

Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.