“I was kept in a military school until I was ten years old.  The desire came upon me to commit suicide, and I was punished for insubordination.  There was no fascination for me in being prepared for a great carnage.  So my father, though it meant that he had to give up his pet idea, took me away from the school, and I went through the much-discussed humanistic Gymnasium.  My father is a passionate soldier.  I became a physician, but I had scientific interests outside of my profession, and I devoted myself to bacteriology.  Broken shafts and fractured limbs again.  Good-bye to medicine and bacteriology.  It is scarcely likely that I shall ever work in those fields again.  I married.  Beforehand, I had reared, as it were, an artificial structure of the whole matter of marriage—­a house, a little garden, a wife and children, children whom I intended to educate in a freer, better way than most people do.  I practised in a poor country district, being of the opinion that I could do more real good there than in Berlin West.  ‘But, my dear boy,’ everybody said, ’with your ancestral name, your income in Berlin could be thirty or forty times larger.’  And my wife absolutely objected to having children.  From the very moment she knew a child was coming until its birth, there was one desperate scene after the other.  Life became a veritable hell to us.  It was no rare thing for us, instead of sleeping, to argue the whole night through, from ten o’clock in the evening until five the next morning.  I would try mild persuasion and comfort, I would urge every conceivable argument softly and loudly, violently and gently, wildly and tenderly.  My wife’s mother, too, did not understand me.  My wife was disillusioned, her mother was disillusioned.  She saw nothing but craziness in my avoiding a great career.  Then there was this—­I don’t know whether it occurs in all young marriages—­each time before the child was born, we quarrelled over all the minutiae of its education, from infancy to its twentieth year.  We quarrelled over whether the boy should be educated in the house, as I wished, or in the public schools, as my wife wished.  I said, ’The girl shall receive instruction in gymnastics.’  My wife said, ’She shall not receive instruction in gymnastics.’  And the girl was not yet born.  We quarrelled so violently, that we threatened each other with divorce and suicide.  My wife would lock herself into a room and I would beat against the door, because I was frightened and dreaded the worst.  Then there were reconciliations, the consequences of which were only to increase the miserable nervous tension in our home.  One day I had to put my mother-in-law out of the house as a way of securing peace.  Even my wife realised that it was necessary to do it.  We loved each other, and in spite of all that happened, we both had the best intentions.  We have three children, Albrecht, Bernhard and Annemarie.  They came inside of three years, one very soon after the