My Life and My Efforts Part 3

the story-teller in Asia, Africa, Turkia, Arabia, Persia, and India, including an appendix with interpretation, explanatio & interpretatio, also many a comparison and images by Christia.n.u.s Kretzschmann who was from Germania.

Printed by Wilhelmus Candidus A. D.: M. D. C. V.

This book contained a large amount of meaningful, oriental tales, which were not to be found in any previous collection.

Grandmother knew all of these tales. Usually, she recited them literally, word by word, but in certain instances, whenever it deemed her necessary, she made alterations or added applications, from which became evident that she knew the spirit of the stories she told very well, and made precise use of its effect. Her favourite tale was the fable of Sitara. Later, it also became my favourite, because it dealt with the geography and ethnology of our earth and its inhabitants from a purely ethical point of view.

But let this just be a small indication, here.

The father died as a consequence of a series of hemorrhages.

Taking care of him was so exhausting that the daughter came close to death herself, but she survived it. After the time of mourning had pa.s.sed, May, the faithful lover, came and took her on. Now finally, finally she was truly happy! It was a marriage, according to G.o.d's will. Two children were born, my father and a sister before him; she later suffered a serious fall and was crippled as a consequence of it. So you see, that we always had our share of afflictions, or rather tests of faith. And you can also see that I do not conceal anything. It must not be my intension, to embellish the ugly parts. But shortly after the birth of the second child, that sorrowful event occurred at Christmas time, I already told about. The good young man plunged at night with the bread into the deep, snowy ravine and froze to death. Grandmother and both of her children had nothing to eat during the Christmas holidays, and only found out after a long time of agony that she had lost her beloved husband, and under such dreadful circ.u.mstances. Hereafter came years of mourning and then the hard times of the Napoleonic wars and of famine.

Everything was devastated. No work could be found anywhere.

Inflation grew; hunger raged. A poor, young journeyman came to beg. Grandmother could not give him anything. She did not even have a single piece of bread for herself and her children. He saw that she was silently weeping. This aroused his compa.s.sion. He left and returned after more than one hour. He poured out before her, whatever he had got, pieces of bread, a dozen potatoes, a rutabaga, a small, very ancient cheese, a small bag of flour, an equally small bag of barley, a thin slice of sausage, and a tiny piece of mutton-suet. Then, he swiftly went away to avoid her grat.i.tude. She never saw him again; but there is one who knows him for sure and will not forget him. This one sent even more and better help. The wife of a head forester had died. He lived outside of the town and was known to be as prosperous as he was kind-hearted. His wife had left him with a very large number of children. He wished to employ grandmother as a housekeeper. In this time of need, she would have liked to accept just too well, but declared that she could not possibly part with her own children, even if she found a place to house them. It did not take the good man long to decide. He declared to her, he would not care whether six or eight children ate at his house; they would all be fed. She should just come, not without them, but with them. This saved her from the direst need!

The stay in the quiet, lonely house of the forester was doing the mother and her children a world of good. They grew healthier and stronger from the better nutrition. The head forester saw grandmother doing her best to show her grat.i.tude and to gain his satisfaction. She worked almost more than her strength would allow, but felt good about it. He quietly observed this and rewarded her by granting her children, in every respect, the same things his own children received. Surely, he was an aristocrat and basically proud. He ate alone with his mother-in-law.

Grandmother was just a servant, yet she did not eat in the servant's, but the children's room. But when, after some time, he had gained an insight into the peculiar world of her soul, he cared for her spiritual wellbeing as well. He eased the heavy burden of her work, allowed her to read to him and his mother-in-law from her books in the evenings, and permitted her then to look at his own books as well. How much did she enjoy this! And he had such good, such useful books!

The children had, in reasonable limits, a free life. They chased each other through the forest and got strong limbs and red cheeks.

Little May was the youngest and smallest of them all, but he joined the others with all of his energy. And he payed attention; he learnt and remembered. He wanted to know everything. He asked about every object he did not know yet. Soon, he knew the names of all plants, all caterpillars and worms, all bugs and b.u.t.terflies, which existed in his realm. He sought to familiarise himself with their character, their properties and habits.

This zest for knowledge, gained him the head forester's special affections, who did not even regard it beneath him, to allow the boy to accompany him. I have to mention this, so that later events become understandable. The following relapse from this sunny, hopeful time of his boyhood into the previous poverty and wretchedness could not possibly have had a positive effect on the boy.

It was at this time that, during lunch, grandmother suddenly fell from her chair and dropped dead to the floor. The whole house became very excited. The physician was called. He diagnosed a heart attack and stated that grandmother was dead and had to be buried within three days. But she was alive. Yet, she could not move a single limb, not even her lips or the not entirely closed eyelids. She saw and heard everything, the weeping, the lamentations for her. She understood every word that was spoken.

She saw and heard the carpenter, who came to take her measurements for the coffin. When it was done, she was placed into it and put into a cold chamber. On the day of the burial, she was laid out in the corridor. The pall bearers came, the minister and the cantor with the students' choir. The family started to bid its farewell to her who appeared to be dead. Just imagine their agony! For three days and three nights, she had made every effort, to show by any kind of movement that she was still alive - - in vain! Now, the last moment had come, when she could still be saved. Once the coffin had been closed, there was no hope left.

Later, she told that in her terrible mortal fear, she had made efforts, quite beyond what is humanly possible, to at least wiggle one finger, when one after another came by to hold her hand for the last time. So also did the head forester's youngest girl, who had always felt particularly close to grandmother. Suddenly, the child startled and screamed: "She has grabbed my hand; she wants to hold on to me!" And really, everyone saw the seemingly deceased, alternatingly opening and closing her hand in a slow motion. The funeral was, of course, called off immediately.

Other physicians were brought in; grandmother was saved. But from then on, the way she led her life was even graver and more uplifted than before. Just rarely, she talked about what she had thought and felt in those unforgettable three days on the threshold between life and death. It must have been horrible.

But this also just served to strengthen her faith in G.o.d and to deepen her confidence in Him. Just as her death had been unreal, from now on she also regarded the so-called actual death as equally unreal, and for many years she sought the right ideas to explain and to prove this. It is thanks to her and her false death that I in general only believe in life, but not in death.

Before she was mentally quite over this experience, grandmother and her two children were hurled back into their previous way of life, on account of the head forester being a.s.signed to another district and getting remarried. She returned to Ernstthal, and again had to earn her living penny by penny. A good man, Vogel by name and also a weaver by trade, proposed to her. Everyone kept urging her, she had to give her children a new father; she owed them that much. She did it, and had no cause to regret it, but unfortunately, she became once more a widow after just a short time. He died and left her everything he owned: poverty and the reputation of a good, hard working man. Hereafter, her life became quiet and even quieter. She got her girl a place with a seamstress, and her boy was sent to a weaver, who kept him working at the reel from dawn to dusk. After all, it was now taken for granted that the boy had to become nothing but a weaver, though he had definitely lost all interest in it during his stay at the forester's house. He had already gained an entirely different image of himself, and it is surely understandable that later, after having been forced into this unloved craft, he got the idea to free himself from it again by means of the pigeon-trade.

Nevertheless, he did his duty, both as a boy and as an adolescent.

He worked hard and became a capable weaver, whose merchandise turned out so clean and accurate that every businessman liked to have him work for him. But, in this leisure-time, he strolled through forests and meadows, to collect plants and to keep all the knowledge he had gained at the head forester's fast in his memory.

Therefore he took great pleasure from the fact that among the previously mentioned inheritance of our mother there were also some old, most interesting books, the contents of which turned out to be of great benefit to him in these leisure-time activities.

Here, I am particularly thinking of a large, thick folio, which had about a thousand pages and bore the following t.i.tle:

Herbal Book Of the most learned and worldwide famous Dr. Petri Andreae Matthioli. Now again with many beautiful new ill.u.s.trations, useful medicine also, and other good pieces, for the third time with particular effort enlarged and printed, by Joachimum Camerarium, Doctor of medicine at the praiseworthy city of Nurnberg.

With three, well ordered, useful registers of herbs' Latin and German names, and then the medicine, with the usage of the same included. Also ample information, on distilling and kilns.

With special privilege of His Roman Imperial Majesty, not to be copied in any format.

Printed in Frankfurt am Main, M. D. C.

It was the most natural thing in the world for father to immediately take this book and to study it eagerly. It contained even more than the t.i.tle promised. For instance, the names of the plants were often also given in French, English, Russian, Bohemian, Italian, and even in Arabic, which later helped me in particular to a quite extraordinary degree. Father also turned from one page of this delightful book to another, from one plant to another. He added much, much more to the knowledge, he already had; not just about the flaura itself, but also about its nutritious and technical properties and its healing effects. The ancestors had tested these effects and had added very many marginal notes to the volume, telling about the results of these tests. Later, this book became a source of the purest and most natural pleasure for me, and I may well say that father excellently supported me in this.

Another one of these books was a collection of biblical woodcuts, probably from the earliest time of the xylographic art. I own it, just like the Herbal Book, up to this day. It contains very many, quite excellent pictures; some are unfortunately missing. The first one is Moses and the last one the beast from the eleventh chapter of the Revelation of John. The t.i.tle page has been lost.

Therefore, I do not know who the author is or in what year this volume was printed. Grandmother used this book as an aid when telling us the biblical stories. We immensely enjoyed every one of these tales, and this brings me to most outstanding quality, grandmother possessed for us children, this was her incomparable gift for story-telling.

Actually, what grandmother did was not that much story-telling as it was creating, drawing, painting, shaping. Even the toughest subject-matter gained shape and colour, being told by her lips.

And when twenty persons listened to her, every single one of these twenty had the impression that she told what she told quite exclusively for him alone. And it stuck, it lasted. Whether she related a pa.s.sage from the Bible or from the vast realm of her fairy-tales, it always culminated to some profound insight in the relations.h.i.+p between heaven and earth, the victory of good over evil, and the warning that everything on earth was just a parable, because the source of truth was not to be found in this low form of life, but only in a higher existence. I am convinced that she did not do this consciously and with the full intension; she was not sufficiently educated for this, but it was a inborn gift, a genius, and such a beneficial spirit will, as is well known, do its work most surely, when it is neither discovered nor observed.

Grandmother was a poor, uneducated woman, but nevertheless a poet with a G.o.d-given talent, and therefore a stroy-teller, who created characters from the wealth of her stories, which not just existed in those stories, but truly came alive.

Thinking back at my earliest memory, I do not come across the fable of Sitara first, but rather the fable "of the lost and forgotten human soul". I felt such endless pity for this soul. I have wept for it with my blind, unseeing eyes of a child. To me, this tale contained nothing but truth. But only years later, after I had experienced how life could treat a person and after I had extensively delved into the the heart of mankind, I realized that the knowledge of the human soul had indeed been lost and forgotten and that all of our psychology had not not yet been able to return this knowledge to us. In my childhood, I have spent hours sitting quietly and motionlessly, staring into the darkness of my sick eyes, to contemplate where this lost and forgotten soul might have ended up. I really, really wanted to find it. Then, grandmother took me on her lap, kissed me on the forehead and said: "Be quiet, my boy! Don't be sad for it! I have found it.

It is here!" "Where?", I asked. "Here with me", she answered.

"You are this soul, you!" "But I am not lost", I objected. "Of course, you are lost. You have been cast down into the poorest, dirtiest Ardistan. But you will be found; because even when everybody and all have forgotten about you, G.o.d has not forgotten about you." - I did not comprehend this, then; I only understood it later, much, much later. Actually, in this time of my early childhood, every living being was just a soul to me, nothing but a soul. I saw nothing. To me, there were neither appearances nor shapes, nor colours, neither locations nor movement from one location to another. I was very well able to feel, hear, and smell the persons and objects, but this was not enough to picture them truly and vividly. I could only imagine them. I did not know how a person, a dog, a table would look like; I could only picture it in my soul, and this picture reflected its soul.

Whenever somebody spoke, I did not hear his body, but his soul.

Not his external, but his internal appearance approached me. To me, there were only souls, nothing but souls. And so it has continued to be, even after I had learnt to see, from my boyhood on, up to this day. This is the difference between myself and others. This is the key to my books. This is the explanation for everything which has been praised or condemned in me. Only he who had been blind and became seeing again, and only he who possessed such a deeply rooted and powerful world within himself that it, even after he became seeing, dominated the world outside for his entire life, only he will be able to put himself in my place and understand everything what I was planning, what I did, and what I wrote, and only he will have the ability to criticise me, _n.o.body_ _else!_

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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 a.s.sociations 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 thras.h.i.+ng 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 circ.u.mstances. This offended and annoyed him. For himself, he had settled with these circ.u.mstances. 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.s 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.

The lie that I was a millionaire, that my income had amounted to 180.000 marks, was invented by a tricky and very intelligently calculating opponent, who possesses a keen knowledge of human nature, and would not hesitate for a moment to use this knowledge, even if his own conscience should urge him otherwise, to obtain profit and advantages. He knew very well what he did, when placing his lie into the newspapers. By this, he stirred up the very lowest and ultimately worst enemy against me: envy. The previous attacks against me hardly matter any more, now; but since I am believed to be in the possession of millions, I am a.s.saulted quite mercilessly and pitilessly. Even in the articles of otherwise rather respectable and humane critics, this financial vindictiveness plays a part. It causes a boundless feeling of embarra.s.sment to see people, who have proven themselves as courteous knights of literature in every other case, riding around on this vulgar horse! I own a house, not enc.u.mbered with debts, I live in, as well as a small amount of money I keep saved for my travels, nothing else. I am left with nothing of my income. It is just barely enough for my modest household and for the hard sacrifices I have to make for the lawsuits I have been forced into. In the past, I could follow my heart and be giving to the poor, especially to poor readers of my books. This has stopped now. Nonetheless, I am now, more than ever, pestered by letters demanding money from me, on account of this cunning lie of being a millionaire, but unfortunately I cannot help any more, and almost everyone I have to turn away, feels disappointed and becomes my enemy. I conclude that this unscrupulous act of depicting me as a filthy rich man, has harmed me more, much more than all adverse criticism and other hostilities put together.

After this digression, which I deemed necessary, I will now turn back to the "boyhood" of this alleged "millionaire", who seeks such a very different kind of treasure than all those who aim to exploit him.

It had been a dreadful time, especially for the poor inhabitants of that area were I was at home. Living in the present times of prosperity, it is almost impossible to imagine how miserably people starved through their days in the end of the 1840s.

Unemployment, deformity, inflation, and revolution, these four words explain it all. We lacked almost everything that is required for the body's sustenance and relief. At lunchtime, we asked our neighbour, the innkeeper of the inn called "Zur Stadt Glauchau" , for the potato peelings, to use the few sc.r.a.ps that might still be attached to them for a hunger-soup. We went to the "Red Mill", where we got a handful of dust from the empty bags and the spelt that had been thrown out for free, to turn it into something resembling food. We plucked atriplex [a] from the rubble dumps, otterzungen [b] from the ridges of the fields, and wild lettuce from the fences, to cook it and to fill our stomachs with it. The leaves of the atriplex felt greasy. This resulted in two or three little drops of fat floating on the surface of the water, when they were cooked. How nutritious and how delicious did this seem to us! Luckily, there were also a few stocking-weavers among the many unemployed weavers of our town, whose business had not stopped entirely. They wove gloves, these extremely cheap, white gloves, corpses are dressed up with, before they are buried. Mother succeeded in getting the job of sewing such burial-gloves together. There we sat, all of us except father, from early in the morning until late at night, st.i.tching away. Mother sewed the thumbs, for this was difficult, grandmother sewed the sides with little finger, and I, together with my sisters, sewed the middle fingers. When we had all worked very hard, we had all together earned eleven or even twelve new-groschen by the end of the week. What a financial stock! For this, we got beetroot-syrup for five pfennig, spread on five tiny rolls of bread; these were very conscientiously divided into pieces and pa.s.sed around. It was just as much a reward for the past week as it was an incentive for the next.

[a] Melde = atriplex: some kind of a weed from the goosefoot family (chenopodiaceae), also known as orach or orache in English.

[b] Otterzungen: Germany's most respected dictionary, the "Duden", defines this as a "petrified fish-tooth". This seems a bit strange to me. I would rather guess that it must be some kind of a plant. Literally it would mean "adders'

tongues".