Prelude to the Past: The Autobiography of a Woman

By Rosie efenberg and Ernest H. Latham Jr.

Prelude to the Past is the remarkable story of a young Jewish girl growing up in Germany during the years leading up to the First World War. She experienced adulthood during the tumultuous years between the two World Wars, becoming one of the most important journalistic figures of the period. This tumultuous era comes to life through the eyes of a powerful, passionate, strong, yet vulnerable Jewish woman who not only recorded the events of the era but also helped to shape them.With an introduction by Dr. Ernest H. Latham, Jr., the foremost scholar on the life and work of Rosie Grefenberg, aka R.G. Waldeck, Prelude to the Past is a must-read for anyone interested in European society in the years preceding Hitler's domination of Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gaudium Publishing
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781592111220

Book preview

Introduction

W

hen I first read Prelude to the Past: The Autobiography of a Woman some thirty years ago, I did so very much in the shade of Athene Palace, the author’s later memoir of eight months spent in Romania on the eve of the Second World War. The earlier book seemed to me then to lack the forceful narrative and immediacy of her later memoir. It appeared to me then to be suspended between two stools. Written when she was in her earlier thirties, it ran too long into her adulthood to be only a story of youth and education, the non-fiction equivalent of what in German literature is known as a Bildungsroman. On the other hand, her early thirties seemed to be too early for the autobiography promised in the book’s subtitle. I was bothered by the title page’s hiding the author’s name behind the initials R. G. when the very next page gives the secret away by stating Copyright – 1934 By Rosie Gräefenberg. I was – and still am – further perplexed by the title of the book: how had Gräefenberg’s life and the events she described been a Prelude to the Past?

In preparation for writing this introduction, I reread the book with much deeper attention. I discovered several layers of interest and importance that I had earlier missed. It is, of course, the autobiography of a remarkable woman. The author traces her upbringing and early education in Mannheim, a brief period at the University of Munich through to her PhD summa cum laude at Heidelberg, the only summa to be given there that semester. As she was still only 21 on July 22, 1920, she was also Heidelberg’s youngest doctor that semester, as she proudly records.

She stayed briefly at Heidelberg as an assistant to her old Doktorvater, Professor Alfred Weber before moving on to Berlin and an apprenticeship in a commercial bank. That was followed by 1,090 Days of Marriage to Dr. Ernst Gräefenberg, a prominent gynecologist. Following the divorce, she moved to Paris and began her career as a journalist, a career that in the next decade would take her on assignment to Morocco, French West Africa, the Soviet Union and China, then back to Berlin where she married Dr. Franz Ullstein, head of a vast publishing empire that included books as well as several important and influential newspapers and many periodicals. The marriage was brief and, on her telling, unhappy. The divorce was the major scandal of the season in Berlin with multiple accusations flying in all directions. Considering its short duration and sordid details, I have long wondered why she devoted some 128 pages, over a third of the book, to her marriage with Ullstein. It had always seemed to me a rather pedestrian, if scandalous, sordid, anti -climax to a memoir with otherwise much intellectual excitement and adventure to it.

It is precisely these adventures, both personal and professional, that came across to me as an important subtext on a second reading. The professional adventures began with Gräefenberg’s moving to Paris for a change of scene and some welcomed solitude following her mutual-consent divorce that terminated the three-year marriage to the Berlin gynecologist. Once the inactivity and solitude had accomplished their purpose, she eased herself into the world of journalism which she would inhabit for the rest of her professional life. In that capacity, she began to write on demand for the provincial German press. This led to her founding her own press agency and provided the impetus for travel to Morocco at the end of the Rif wars. It was inevitable that so talented and spirited a German journalist would come to the attention of the House of Ullstein and its director, Dr. Franz Ullstein, who hired her back in Berlin and packed her off in 1928 to the Soviet Union for four months of in-depth reporting for the Ullstein publications. Her travels eventually also included Switzerland, China, and French West Africa to explore deep into the jungle and report on the French colonies, and especially the French colonialists. By this time, she had well-earned her place on the honor roll of female journalists between the wars who ignored centuries of traditional life, had even left the suffragettes behind and with courage, imagination, and iron will, were feminists before feminism. The names of Claire Hollingworth, Martha Gellhorn, and Margaret Bourke-White immediately come to mind in that connection. When she returned from Africa, Dr. Ullstein, recently a widower, proposed to her, and they married in 1929.

Gräefenberg’s account of her professional life is braided together with an account of her personal life, which was, if possible, even more breathless and adventurous. She tells in some detail of her amorous activities, discreetly, without the full names of her lovers, in terms that are frequently erotic but never pornographic.

She records that her first venture into the sexual side of life occurred when she was eight years old. Her school friend Lizzie wondered how babies are made. Rosie, who had been informed on this matter in broad outlines earlier, with the help of an encyclopedia, had puzzled out for herself the specific details of the male and female roles. Lizzie insisted on knowing; but when a description failed to be clear, Rosie drew pictures of the relevant actions in a letter which was found. Lizzie’s mother immediately transferred her to another school, and Rosie was nearly expelled.

At twelve, Rosie met the man she calls Michael, her math tutor. She refers to him as her first and longest love. They met secretly three times a week. The relationship was virtually platonic with nothing more physical than sitting beside each other on a couch and kissing. Michael was more than twice her age, thus establishing a pattern of relationships with men much older than herself. Eventually, their relationship was discovered, and Michael had to leave Mannheim. When they met some time later, he proposed an eventual marriage, but her feelings had changed, and they parted for good. In 1917, she enrolled briefly in the University of Munich. There she fell in love with Wolfgang W., but she was also preoccupied with the left-wing politics of the time, which in her case veered into frantic revolutionary enthusiasms. He offered her mere political comradeship and not the real intimacy she demanded. At the end of her third semester in March 1919 she transferred to Heidelberg. There she was determined to get her doctorate before she was twenty-two. That resolve left no time for intimate relationships, and she received her degree on July 22, 1920, two days before the target date.

She moved to Berlin in 1921, apprenticed to a bank and immediately took her first lover whom she shortly married, the noted gynecologist, Dr. Ernst Gräefenberg, who was 40 years old and, true to tradition, some seventeen years her senior. A brief, adulterous affair with her employer, Lobkowitz, followed. She describes the affair as loveless, frankly sensuous and soulless. In a few months, it was over. Her marriage had begun and ended during Germany’s Great Inflation, and she went to Paris to recover. Rene was a 35-year-old whom she met at a dinner in the home of the Secretaire General de la Prefecture de la Seine in 1924. They traveled around France, and he accompanied her initially to Morocco. There she had a vague, possibly platonic relationship with a French colonel about fifty, since to me, fidelity was at that time a matter of geography. Once back in Berlin, I loved an Italian nobleman for a while, Antonio, age 35, an early Fascist.

One of her first assignments with the House of Ullstein took her to Geneva and the League of Nations. There she met Kobra, who was to become the great love of my life. The relationship started as a one-night-stand, so spontaneous a burst of animal magnetism that she had to ask him his name the next morning. She describes in detail the passionate relationship that followed. Her relationship with Dr. Ullstein seems to have been developing along parallel lines, and they were married in November, 1929, apparently with the understanding that the relationship with Kobra could continue unabated. The difference in her and Dr. Ullstein’s ages was vast, even by her standards, she being 31 and he some 63. Her mother, twelve years younger than her new son-in-law, observed, He’d be too old for me.

From the beginning, Ullstein’s four brothers and their families, not to mention Ullstein’s children by his previous marriage, regarded his new wife as an interloper and a gold digger. This opinion of her was not ameliorated when he returned from the honeymoon in Paris with his face half paralyzed, seemingly from a stroke. Things spiraled quickly down from there. The on-going affair with Kobra came into public view as the scandal of the season. All sorts of rumors of espionage flew around wildly; she was accused of being a spy for Germany, for France, for the Soviet Union, or even of being a double or triple agent in some bewildering combination. In the end, the predestined, nasty, bitter, and complicated divorce was granted by the court in Moabit-Berlin in 1930. It obviously meant a considerable financial settlement in Mrs. Ullstein’s favor. As her lawyer observed, Now you will be secure for the rest of your life. It also meant the end of her affair with Kobra, who, having stuck by her throughout the turmoil, now exhausted by the publicity and stress of it all, that evening ended their relationship. Thus, at this moment of her triumph, she lost the great love of my life. On this bitter-sweet note she concludes her memoir.

There is still a third layer of meaning in this book which is doubtless the most interesting for readers today, certainly greater than the life of an intelligent, successful career woman or the litany of amorous adventures of what could be seen as a lusty, independent, trendy feminist. This layer I had not fully appreciated in the earlier reading, the layer of history and politics experienced by an extraordinarily observant, perspicacious German intellectual.

Waldeck (to now call her by the name she used after the 1930s and the name under which she published most of her books) was born into an upper middle class, thoroughly assimilated German-Jewish family. She describes the security, gentility, and comforts of a childhood in Wilhelminian Germany. It was a life in sharp contrast to the uncertainties of Germany at war from 1914 to 1918, with its growing deprivations, the strictly enforced rationing and the adolescent terrors of enduring the repeated bombings while in her family’s basement, to say nothing of the tragic deaths at the front; at 18 she, had more friends in the Somme and Vosges cemeteries than among the living. Enrolled in 1917 in the University of Munich, she immediately fell in with the revolutionary students and founded a short-lived socialist journal, Aufbruch, much to the embarrassment of her banker father. Most of the male students were wounded veterans, and she shared their disappointment at the unexpected defeat, their anger at the lack of appreciation of the stay-at-home civilians, the post-war blockade, and the onerous reparations extracted at Versailles. She quickly tired of Munich and left the university and her Barricade-Woman persona behind. She transferred to Heidelberg set on getting her doctorate in the shortest possible time, a resolve that left no time for love affairs or politics. She did remember a limping student with a fanatical face whose attempts at poetry Prof. Friedrich Gundolf sharply criticized. It was, of course, Josef Goebbels, and the reader is left to ponder how much European history would have been different if Gundolf had been more encouraging and generous in his criticism, and the Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna hadn’t failed Adolph Hitler in the drawing section of their entrance exam.

Only with the move to Berlin does Waldeck resume a social life and begin a critical commentary on Germany’s social democracy and its failure to stem the tide of National Socialism. She describes in some detail the effects of the run-away inflation in the early 20s. It is only following the move to Paris that she begins to deal with international affairs and become deeply involved in the evolving reconciliation between Germany and France that held out such promise and proved to be a forlorn, tragic and violent disappointment. Once she joined the House of Ullstein, she undertook considerable foreign travel and her observations broadened out to such subjects as world peace, communism, and colonialism.

The last 128 pages, over one third of the book, narrows down its subject matter to simply the brief marriage with and the tumultuous divorce from Ullstein. There are none of the major subjects or the prominent European intellectuals and statesmen whose names are so liberally peppered elsewhere in the book. Why this sudden, sharp departure from the subject matter of most of the book? One must bear in mind that she started writing this book before its publication date of 1934, the year after Hitler and the Nazi party came to power in Germany. There was considerable concern and interest in the United States about the new Germany, with its strange rituals in Nuremberg, the book burnings, the Reichstag Fire, the dramatic violence of the Night of the Long Knives, and the Nuremberg Laws on the horizon with their radical anti-Semitism. Most readers would expect a German journalist to address these prominent topics as she could easily have done. Why didn’t she? I think there is the same answer to both of these questions. She makes plain to the reader that her humanistic values and liberal, democratic opinions, not to mention her Jewish ethnicity, were in direct conflict with Nazi ideology, but she still had strong ties of intellect and blood to Germany. The Nazis were notoriously thin-skinned at foreign criticism, and they had robust ways of expressing their anger. Had she written an account of the Nazi rise to power as critically as she believed it to deserve, the Nazis would never have let her back in the country, and we know of at least one trip that she made back to Nazi Germany after the book was published. In addition, there was also the need to protect her mother, sister, and friends still there from Nazi revenge.

Seen in this light it now becomes clear that Waldeck is using the divorce with its mutual accusations, its self-serving lies and deceits, its charges of espionage and traitorous behavior as an allegory for the suicidal path to self-destruction upon which Germany had embarked. At the very end, when the divorce is granted, Kobra breaks off their relationship. She closes the book with a German proverb that might be translated, One must have won once in order to realize when everything has been lost. It is apparently written about the loss of her lover, Kobra, but it is clearly about the loss of her country and her culture as well.

The understanding of the book that I have advanced above did not occur to contemporary reviewers. Prelude to the Past was generally received as the frank and sophisticated story that the author in part intended. E.H. Britten, reviewing it for Books, noted Waldeck’s qualities hardness and self-sufficiency which only love seems to unsettle. F.S.A. in the Boston Transcript saw the product of a strong, clear, cultivated mind. Some indication of the impact of the book can be seen in the fact that Malcolm Cowley gave it a major review in the New Republic. Not surprising for Malcolm Cowley, and even less for the New Republic in 1934, at that point a major intellectual voice of the American left, the reviewer did not find either the author or her society particularly attractive: the former because she got all the money she could out of Dr. Franz Ullstein without ever paying him for the value received, and because the best one can say for her that her morals were those of the crazy world in which she lived; the latter because it was a society wholly without standards. At the end of some 1900 words, Cowley angrily concludes: After reading this book of hers, you don’t like Hitler any better, but you can understand why so many people regarded him as a savior. There are ages so utterly sunk beneath the level of human dignity that they make even a false and vicious messiah seem, for the moment, better than none at all.

No less noteworthy was a slightly shorter review by Dorothy Thompson in the prestigious pages of the Saturday Review of Literature. Thompson saw the book as an important record: a social document of first rate importance; some day historians, recording the collapse of bourgeois civilization in the Europe of the twentieth century, will be looking for the first-hand sources. And then, I hope, this book will still be in existence. Rather than condemning Waldeck, Thompson sees her as a symbol of the era and the place; Rosie is not average, she is in a profound sense representative, a sort of apotheosis of the decaying bourgeoisie, deserving praise for absence of exhibitionism when she lays her life upon the dissecting table as a man with an obscure disease might will his body to a scientific laboratory. In the course of the review, Thompson gives the distinct impression of knowing Waldeck personally, describing her as a very vital young woman in excellent health, who sought to earn a living (which she does not need) by founding an independent European news service.

Although the narrative in Prelude to the Past stops in the early 1930s, it is interesting to follow the lives of some of its major figures. Dr. Ernst Gräefenberg (1881-1957), the gynecologist and Waldeck’s first husband, lost his teaching position because he was Jewish. He stayed on in Germany in the mistaken belief that he would be protected because of his distinguished record in World War I and the fact that among his patients were the wives of some high-ranking Nazis. In 1937, he was charged with attempting to smuggle some valuable stamps out of the country. He was sentenced to three years in prison and fined 199,000 marks. A much-published scientist with an international reputation, he attracted the attention of Margaret Sanger, the founder of the Planned Parenthood in America, who led a campaign to raise the necessary funds to get him out of Germany, across the Soviet Union, through China and Japan, to the United States. He passed his American medical boards in 1941 at age 60. He settled in New York where he was affiliated with the Mount Sinai Medical Center and had a large private practice which he had to give up in 1950, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. He then worked with the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau and the famous sexologist Alfred Kinsey until he died of the disease seven years later.

Dr. Franz Ullstein (1868-1945) survived all the scandal of the Ullstein Affair and eventually recaptured his former position as the leader of the firm, but not for long. When the Nazis came to power, one of their first targets was the House of Ullstein because of the liberal, democratic orientation of its newspapers, periodicals, and publishing program in general. For example, it had published Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, whose anti-war, pacifist message was an anathema to the Nazis bent on revenge and rearmament. As the Ullstein family was Jewish, the Aryanization process was soon put into effect, and Dr. Ullstein emigrated to the United States in 1938. He died, struck by a bus as he crossed a street in Manhattan in 1945. His body was returned to Berlin and buried at the family plot in the Heerstrasse Friedhof, ironically under a gravestone statue by Josef Thorak, who contends with Arno Brecker for the dubious honor of being the most prominent Nazi sculptor.

Kobra, in contrast to Waldeck’s two ex-husbands, made a considerable success of Nazi Germany. He has been identified as the German diplomat Karl Ritter (1883-1968). He was educated as a lawyer. He served in World War I, before and after which he held a position in the civil service. In 1922, he joined the Foreign Service and began a career with an emphasis on economic relations, in which capacity he was at the League of Nations conference in Geneva when he met Waldeck and their affair began. His career advanced rapidly once Hitler came to power. In 1936, he was briefly in charge of the commercial section of the foreign ministry. In 1937, he was posted overseas as ambassador in Rio de Janeiro. This too was a brief assignment as the following year the Brazilian authorities made it clear his continued stay in their country was not desired. He had apparently too aggressively pressured the Brazilians to ban anti-Nazi propaganda. It was during this period he later indicated that he had joined the Nazi party.

Back in Berlin, he resumed his economic portfolio, first working on the economic implications of the newly incorporated Sudetenland territory and then the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. When the war broke out he was appointed liaison officer with the OKW (high command of the armed forces). Following the war, he was arrested and interned until 1947, when he was arraigned on five counts and eventually found guilty of two of the counts: count 3, crimes against humanity for being complicit in the deportation of Danish, French and Hungarian Jews to the death camps; and count 2, war crimes for not taking steps to inform the armed forces of the international conventions protecting prisoners of war when they are once recaptured, and making misleading reports to the Swiss Embassy which was representing British interests in Germany. He was sentenced in 1949 to four years imprisonment which, with time-served, allowed for his release on May 15, 1949, at age 65.

Except for visiting Winifred Wagner in Bayreuth, little is known of his years in retirement. There is no record of his ever being married, but he had, however, fathered an illegitimate son, Karl Heinz Gerster (1912-2005). He followed his father into diplomacy. He was posted in 1940 to the German Embassy in Paris where, in keeping with his leftist and anti-Nazi proclivities, he was able to aid the French Resistance and to help Jews avoid deportation. After the war, he settled in the German Democratic Republic where he joined the Communist Party (SED) and had a successful career as a journalist and a prominent television personality. It was subsequently revealed that he had an equally successful parallel career as a paid informer of the secret police (Stasi).

After arriving in the United States for the first time in 1931, Waldeck obviously spent considerable time writing Prelude to the Past, which was published in 1934. Thereafter, she clearly led a busy life. For a period, she may have been a private secretary to the prominent female journalist Dorothy Thompson. She made at least one trip back to Europe and Germany, returning to America in May of 1936 on the maiden voyage of the zeppelin Hindenburg from Loewental, near Friedrichshafen in Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey. Not surprisingly, Waldeck attracted the attention of the FBI as no German Jew in his or her right mind, once out voluntarily, went back to Nazi Germany. Furthermore, there were several high-ranking Nazis on the flight: Joseph Berchtold, the second Reichsfuehrer-SS and Himmler’s predecessor, Friedrich Krebs, the violently anti-Semitic mayor of Frankfurt and Wilhelm Traupel, a SS Sturmfuehrer involved with the T-4 program that exterminated the mentally ill. It was certainly strange company for a German Jew to be keeping. Also among the fifty-one passengers was the German diplomat Karl Ritter, making it clear that Waldeck’s association with Kobra did not come to the definite end that she described in this book. At some point in the mid-1930s she married the Hungarian nobleman Count Waldeck. This gave her the title Countess Waldeck, but even more important a Hungarian passport. The Nuremberg Laws had stripped her of her German nationality, and she was not naturalized as an American citizen until April, 1939. During this period, she published political articles in Foreign Affairs, Living Age, and the American Mercury among others. She was able to get her mother and sister out of Nazi Germany and settle them in the United States. Her sister, Ella, was first employed as a ski instructor in Aspen, Colorado, and later married and became a professional photographer in Seattle. Her mother made a less successful adjustment to life in the United States and committed suicide in Seattle in 1940.

In June 1940, Waldeck went to Romania as a stringer for Newsweek. She filed several stories for the magazine before she left Bucharest the following winter. Arriving back in New York, she immediately went on a lecture tour and prepared her next book, Athene Palace, first published in the United States and Great Britain in 1942. Coming as it did, shortly after America entered the war, it gave a detailed look at life and events in one part of Nazi-dominated Europe. It was something of a wartime bestseller, went into several printings, and was picked up as a selection of the Travel Book Club. Her next book, in 1943, was a speculation as to a future, post-Nazi government in Germany, titled in America Meet Mr. Blank: The Leader of Tomorrow’s Germans (in England Excellenz X was substituted for Mr. Blank in the title). At this point, she turned her attention to fiction and wrote two novels set in the Napoleonic period: in 1945, Lustre in the Sky, concerned with Talleyrand and his mistress at the Congress of Vienna, and, in 1948, The Emperor’s Duchess, the story of Laure Permon Junot, wife of the Duke d’Abrantes. Both were translated into French and German and enjoyed greater success in Europe than in America.

In 1948, she returned to Europe for two years. Her articles on post-war conditions were collected and published in 1951, in her last book, Europe between the Acts. Most notable was the chapter Report on Rommel. It is an iconoclastic treatment of the famous German field marshal who commanded the Africa Corps.

In this period, she converted to Roman Catholicism, possibly under the influence of the charismatic Bishop J. Fulton Sheen and Claire Booth Luce, a friend and famous convert herself. She lived on, largely forgotten, in genteel poverty, in a rent-controlled apartment at 155 East 38th Street in Manhattan. She was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in New York on July 9, 1982, and died there of old age on August 8th. She is buried in the Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York City.

With this new edition of Prelude to the Past, Dorothy Thompson’s prediction comes true, and historians and readers of a later century will have available to them an important source document of twentieth century history. Many people deserve thanks for this opportunity and must be named: the European Division at the Library of Congress and in particular it chief, Grant Harris, have been ceaselessly helpful and encouraging since I began my research into Rosie Waldeck over twenty years ago. Dr. Kurt Brackob, director of Histria Books, had the wisdom and foresight to see the need for a new edition of Prelude to the Past and to guide it through the press. And, of course, my wife, Ioana, always my sharpest critic and closest helpmate here as elsewhere, now as always deserves again my most sincere thanks.

Ernest H. Latham, Jr., Ph.D.

PART ONE

Childhood, Love and War

1

EVEN AS A CHILD

T

RADITION will have it that childhood is carefree and happy. I did not find it so. Too many mysteries surrounded me which I could not name nor confide to the grown-ups. For instance, those terrors at night, when the friendly, familiar things in the nursery looked eerie, and suddenly there seemed to be rooms that opened in and out of, and behind one another, where people one knew went gliding about in a shadowy sort of way that was horrible and frightening. And there were terrors by day as well, as when mother stayed out longer than usual, and I pictured her run over by a trolley, bathed in blood, perhaps dying, and being brought home by strange men. When my parents went away on a journey, as they frequently did for long periods at a time, I would bid them good-by composedly enough, shedding no tears, but convinced that it was forever.

It seemed to me that every irregularity, every break in the wonted rhythm of life, held latent in it something terrible and surprising, and that death lurked everywhere for those I loved. But as the grown-ups evidently expected me to be happy, I behaved as if I were. Out of sheer politeness. In reality I was far too apprehensive to be happy.

It was only by degrees, when I found that though mother was perpetually late, she was always quite well when she did arrive, and that my parents always came home in high spirits from their journeys to distant parts of the world, that I began to believe that life was not necessarily catastrophic. As it grew more and more obvious to my childish understanding that the probabilities were in favor of this comparative security I acquired an increasing confidence in life’s dealings with us mortals. Gradually the terrors took flight. But I was never truly confident and happy until long, long afterwards, when no one expected me to be either.

When I was six years old, and beginning to feel at home in life, the figure which occupied the foreground in my landscape of the world, looming larger than parents, grandparents, or anyone else whatever, was Lizzie. Lizzie was my best friend. In the mornings we learned to read, write, and do our sums, in the same class at the girls’ school, and in the afternoons, we went walking, headed by our Fräuleins, in the city park or on the promenade beside the Rhine. Lizzie was no good at her lessons, but she had wonderful ringlets, which had been curled upon a wooden pin, and were tied with an immense ribbon-bow. She was a graceful, long-limbed child, and wore little lace frocks and Leghorn hats. I felt utterly inferior to her. True, I was the best pupil in our class, but my smooth black hair would go into nothing but two thin rattails, from which the ribbon was forever slipping off. And besides, it was clear that I would never be tall and graceful like Lizzie. I was shorter than she was, and shorter than any other girl in the class.

Nevertheless, I felt that I might not have looked quite so bad if I had not had to wear the damnable sailor-dresses, which came regularly for me from London. In winter they were navy blue, and in summer white with a navy-blue collar. The navy-blue jackets that went with them had brass buttons with crests or anchors on them, and the flat caps had a ribbon on which S.S. Georgia, or the name of some other ship, was printed in letter of gold. I hated these sailor-dresses, and envied Lizzie, and every other little girl who was allowed to wear red, yellow or green, with all sorts of trimmings.

Strenuous measures were taken to make me grow taller and slimmer, though at the beginning of the century no great interest was as yet felt in Germany for physical culture. Besides the gym-lessons in school, conducted by Herr Leutz on the principles of Jahn, the veteran pioneer in that art, a Fräulein Gossmann came twice a week to our own house. She had been trained in Sweden, and was an energetic person. She used to massage me on a table in our so-called gym, and then we did exercises. Besides all this, I was daily stretched at full length on a board, with my head strapped into a kind of muzzle, so tightly that I felt a dragging pain in every single articulation of the spine. This was supposed to result in a beautiful straight back. I looked with a skeptical eye on these stringent attempts to improve my outward appearance. At that time, I once heard my father say to my mother: No, the poor child is certainly not pretty. We must make her interesting instead. The word interesting filled me with the profoundest misgivings. I feared that one would have to learn a terrible amount before one could be interesting, and time showed that that was just what my father intended.

But I forgot about my looks, and everyone and everything else, the moment a wonderful new world disclosed itself to me—the world of books. That happened as soon as I was able to read from the printed page.

My friendship with Lizzie came to a sudden and tragic end. Though I was only about eight years old at the time, I can