It is not only a need we have to speak constantly, and to complain, and at least keep our attention on whatever is born of our unrest, since only these thoughts and feelings and thought-feelings and vice versa of course have the greater significance. Peace is not life, Roithamer wrote, perfect peace is death, as Pascal said, wrote Roithamer. But such phrases will get me nowhere, I must get away from these phrases, so Roithamer, I shouldn’t waste my time on truisms already demonstrated by history. My awakening in Altensam was the simultaneous decision to get away from Altensam, to get away from everything, to push off from everything that is Altensam, and this process of pushing off is all I have accomplished so far, no matter where I did it, or under what circumstances, and even when on the face of it there seemed to be no connection with Altensam whatsoever. An awakening in my room in Altensam, perhaps, in my turret room, an awakening at the south wall or the east wall, I loved the south wall and the east wall equally, an awakening perhaps under the linden tree or in the kitchen or in the entrance hall where I often sat for hours on end, waiting for my parents, in the icy cold, studying the floor planks in the hall and then, beginning with the floor planks, studying everything, the staircase, the lamps on the staircase, the chapel door, the kitchen door, the objects in the hall, or else an awakening in one of the cellars where I used to hide so often, sometimes in the wine cellar, sometimes in the beer cellar, sometimes in the apple cellar, so many cellars in Altensam, in one of those cellars came that awakening against Altensam, against everything connected with Altensam, or perhaps on that cliff in the woods where I went so often, or in the clearing where they put up the iron-cross memorial for an ancestor who was killed by a falling tree hit by lightning, or in my brothers’ room or in my sister’s room, the music room perhaps, or possibly the farm buildings, wherever the woodcutters, the farmhands, the maids are put up, I don’t know, Roithamer’s words. It might have been during one of those walks I took with my father, those silent walks, always in the same direction, year in, year out, the same way down from Altensam into that vast primeval forest, that forest which my father always referred to as the natural forest, since it hadn’t been planted in accordance with the rules of forestry but had simply grown, without human intervention, a forest that simply blew in by the most natural route, as my father always said, my father loved this forest, Roithamer wrote, his walks took him only into this forest, and I could come along, but I had to keep quiet. Quite possibly it happened on one of those walks that lasted six or seven hours during which the silence must never be broken. Deep down my father had loved only this natural forest, with its seeds blown in from anywhere, its random mixture of trees, Roithamer wrote, and nothing else.
My father’s life was unimaginable without this natural, wind-seeded, mixed forest, Roithamer wrote. On one of those walks my sudden awakening against Altensam and against everything connected with Altensam, Roithamer wrote, “everything connected with Altensam” is underlined. Or else it happened the time I was with my mother in the socalled pine woods, or with my sister in her room which was next to my room, I don’t know. But it was an awakening, a sudden awakening of my opposition against Altensam and against everything connected with Altensam, which determined the entire rest of my life. From that moment on I wanted to get away, to get out, but I had many more years to wait. Light broke with my school years, with the opportunity to get away from Altensam on the way down to school, to make contact by myself with other people on this road, with the kind of people who at least had nothing directly to do with Altensam, a wholly different sort of people. For I’d had no opportunity to make contact with other people, in full critical awareness, before my school days, for I’d always been prevented from making such contacts as I could have had in Altensam, in preparation for later contacts as it were, from making contacts up in Altensam to prepare for making contacts down below. If I visited the woodcutters, I was immediately called back home, the same for our own farmhands, but of course I’d always felt attracted to these people, probably from my earliest days and to a great degree, because such contacts were forbidden. And it was precisely their keeping me away from all others than those born at Altensam which caused me to hate them, later on, to hate all of them and everything connected with them. It was hatred, nothing but hatred, Roithamer wrote. The word “hatred” is underlined. But the people with whom I was denied and forbidden to make and keep contact, I loved, so Roithamer. The word “loved” is underlined. My childhood was nothing but wanting to get away from what I’d been forced into from the beginning, in Altensam, that is, and wanting to get into that other world which I was refused and denied and forbidden, wanting this with a perverse determination, as I now see. They must have sensed that I was different even from my own siblings, who had unquestioningly obeyed all the rules at Altensam, who had never rebelled, in contrast to myself who had rebelled from earliest childhood, three or four years old, as I know, against the regulations and against the brutality of those regulations enforced by my parents or the other socalled authorities in Altensam, they had sensed that from my earliest childhood I had felt absolutely independent, and later on had thought along absolutely independent lines, never willing to submit to their ideas and their orders. It was their misfortune to have brought me into the world, this could not be undone, though they probably often wished they could falsify history to this extent, so Roithamer. Neither my parents nor my siblings nor any of the others who came from Altensam or were connected with Altensam, the whole family in all its distant branches, could ever understand that they were confronted with someone who was always against them and their circumstances and conditions with all his mind and feeling, someone they themselves had brought into the world and who bore their name. And so the fact that my father left Altensam to me, so Roithamer, thinking that his other two sons and his only daughter, my sister, could be satisfied with a financial settlement by me, is nothing but an expression of my father’s intention to destroy Altensam by making such a will, giving a rude shock to all and sundry, a will which incidentally was contested in vain, by my brothers, father meant to destroy Altensam by such a will because he knew and above all consciously felt that he was destroying Altensam by leaving it to me, so Roithamer. No mad caprice on his part, he knew what he was doing, so Roithamer had added. For my father knew (seismographically) that Altensam’s time had come. But he preferred, so Roithamer, to destroy Altensam totally by willing it to me, thereby to destroy it totally in the shortest possible time, because he always fully understood that I hate Altensam, rather than let it gradually sink further into decline as would undoubtedly have been the case had he left Altensam not to me but to my oldest brother or to the younger one, or to both of them together, for there was never any question but that he’d have my sister’s share paid out to her.