Still wet behind the ears, only just out of leading strings, the provincial youth that I was forced himself to appear a grown man—I joined a fraternity, sought to give my intrinsically rather shy nature a touch of boldness, jauntiness, heartiness; I had not been in the place a week before I was playing the part of cosmopolitan man about town, and I learned, with remarkable speed, to lounge and loll at my ease in coffee-houses, a true miles gloriosus. This chapter of manhood of course included women—or rather ‘girls’, as we called them in our student arrogance—and it was much to my advantage that I was a strikingly good-looking young man. Tall, slim, the bronzed hue of the sea coast still fresh on my cheeks, my every movement athletically supple, I had a clear advantage over the pasty-faced shop-boys, dried like herrings by the indoor air, who like us students went out every Sunday in search of prey in the dance-floor cafés of Halensee and Hundekehle (then still well outside the city). I would take back to my lodgings now a flaxen-haired, milky-skinned servant girl from Mecklenburg, heated by the dancing, before she went home from her day off, now a timid, nervous little Jewish girl from Posen who sold stockings in Tietz’s—most of them easy pickings, to be had for the taking and passed on quickly to my friends. The anxious schoolboy I had been only yesterday, however, found the unsuspected ease of his conquests a heady surprise—my successes, so cheaply won, increased my daring, and gradually I came to regard the street merely as the hunting ground for these entirely undiscriminating exploits, which were a kind of sport to me. Once, as I was stalking a pretty girl along Unter den Linden and—by pure coincidence—I came to the university, I could not help smiling to think how long it was since I had crossed that august threshold. Out of sheer high spirits I and a like-minded friend went in; we just opened the door a crack, saw (and an incredibly ridiculous sight it seemed) a hundred and fifty backs bent over their desks and scribbling, as if joining in the litany recited by a white-bearded psalmodist. Then I closed the door again, let the stream of that dull eloquence continue to flow over the shoulders of the industrious listeners, and strode jauntily out with my friend into the sunny avenue. It sometimes seems to me that a young man never wasted his time more stupidly than I did in those months. I never read a book, I am sure I never spoke a sensible word or entertained a thought worth the name—instinctively I avoided all cultivated society, merely in order to let my recently aroused body savour all the better the piquancy of the new and hitherto forbidden. This self-intoxication, this waste of time in wreaking havoc on oneself, may come naturally to every strong young man suddenly let off the leash—yet my peculiar sense of being possessed by it made this kind of dissolute conduct dangerous, and nothing was more likely than that I would have frittered away my life entirely, or at least have fallen victim to a dullness of feeling, had not chance suddenly halted my precipitous mental decline.

That chance—and today I gratefully call it a lucky one—consisted in my father’s being unexpectedly summoned to the Ministry in Berlin for the day, for a headmasters’ conference. As a professional educationalist, he seized his chance to get a random sample of my conduct without previous notice, taking me unawares and by surprise. His tactics succeeded perfectly. As usual in the evening, I was entertaining a girl in my cheap student lodgings in the north of the city—access was through my landlady’s kitchen, divided off from my room by a curtain—and entertaining her very intimately too when I heard a knock on the door, loud and clear. Supposing it was another student, I growled crossly: “Sorry, not at home.” After a short pause, however, the knocking came again, once, twice, and then, with obvious impatience, a third time. Angrily, I got into my trousers to send the importunate visitor packing, and so, shirt half-open, braces dangling, barefoot, I flung the door open, and immediately, as if I had been struck in the face by a fist, I recognized my father’s shape in the darkness outside. I could make out little more of his face in the shadows than the lenses of his glasses, shining in the reflected light. However, that shadowy outline was enough for the bold words I had already prepared to stick in my throat, like a sharp fishbone choking me; for a minute or so I stood there, stunned. Then—and a terrible moment it was!—I had to ask him humbly to wait in the kitchen for a few minutes while I tidied my room. As I have said, I didn’t see his face, but I sensed that he knew what was going on. I sensed it from his silence, from the restrained manner in which, without giving me his hand, he stepped behind the curtain in the kitchen with a gesture of distaste. And there, in front of an iron stove smelling of warmed-up coffee and turnips, the old man had to stand waiting for ten minutes, ten minutes equally humiliating to both of us, while I bundled the girl out of bed and into her clothes, past my father, who was listening against his will, and so out of the house. He could not help noticing her footsteps, and the way the folds of the curtain swung in the draught of air as she hurried off, and still I could not bring the old man in from his demeaning place of concealment: first I had to remedy the disorder of the bed, which was all too obvious. Only then—and I had never in my life felt more ashamed—only then did I face him.

My father retained his composure in this difficult situation, and I still privately thank him for it. Whenever I wish to remember him—and he died long ago—I refuse to see him from the viewpoint of the schoolboy who liked to despise him as no more than a correcting machine, constantly carping, a schoolmaster bent on precision; instead, I always conjure up his picture at this most human of moments, when deeply repelled, yet restraining himself, the old man followed me without a word into the oppressive atmosphere of my room. He was carrying his hat and gloves and was about to put them down automatically, but then made a gesture of revulsion, as if reluctant to let any part of himself touch such filth. I offered him an armchair; he did not reply, merely warded off all contact with the objects in this room with a movement of rejection.

After standing there, turned away from me, for a few icy moments, he finally took off his glasses and cleaned them with deliberation, a habit of his which, I knew, was a sign of embarrassment; nor did it escape me that when he put them on again the old man passed the back of his hand over his eyes. He felt ashamed in my presence, and I felt ashamed in his; neither of us could think of anything to say. Secretly I feared that he would launch into a sermon, an eloquent address delivered in that guttural tone I had hated and derided ever since my schooldays. But—and I still thank him for it today—the old man remained silent and avoided looking at me.