Life Before Letters, Chapter 7: Detours

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.