Memory and recollection are mysterious powers, and recollection is the more mysterious and puzzling of the two. For the memory has only to do with our heads. How much is seven times fifteen? And little Paul shouts promptly, ‘A hundred and five!’ He has learned it and his head has retained it. Or it has forgotten it, in which case little Paul cries, ‘A hundred and fifteen!’ Whether we know this or that correctly or incorrectly, or whether we have forgotten it and must reckon up anew, good memory and bad memory reside in our heads. The pigeon-holes for all the things we have ever learned are there. I imagine they are like the drawers in a cupboard or a chest of drawers. They often stick when you try to pull them out. Sometimes there’s nothing in them, and sometimes there’s the wrong thing. And sometimes they won’t pull out at all. Then they and we are ‘as if nailed down’, as the saying goes. Our memories are either large or small chests of drawers. In my own head, for instance, the chest of drawers is rather small. The drawers are only half full, but they’re fairly tidy. When I was a little boy my chest of drawers looked quite different. In those days my little top storey was a real lumber room.
Our recollections, on the other hand, do not lie in drawers, nor in cupboards, nor in our heads at all. They live right inside us. They are generally dormant, but they are alive and breathing, and sometimes they open their eyes. They live, breathe and sleep everywhere – in the palms of our hands, in the soles of our feet, in our nostrils, in our hearts and in the seats of our trousers. What we have once experienced suddenly comes back after years and years, and stares us in the face. And we feel that it had never gone away at all, it was only asleep. And when one recollection wakes up and rubs the sleep from its eyes, it often arouses others, and they in turn yet others, like sleepers in a dormitory.
There is something very peculiar about one’s earliest recollections. How is it that I remember some things from my third year but nothing at all of the fourth and fifth years of my life? How is it, for instance, that I still remember Dr Haenel and the busy nurses, and the little garden of the private clinic? I had cut my leg. The bandaged wound burned like fire; and though I was already able to walk then, my mother carried me in her arms. I cried and she comforted me. And I still remember how heavy I was and how tired her arms became. Pain and fear have a good memory.
And how is it that I can still remember Herr Patitz and his Studio of Artistic Portrait-Photography in Bautzen Strasse? I was wearing a little sailor frock with a white piqué collar, black stockings which made my legs itch, and laced boots. (Nowadays little girls wear trousers; in those days little boys wore frocks!) I stood at a low table with ornamental legs, and there was a brightly coloured sailing-ship on the table. Herr Patitz stood behind the box camera on its high tripod, stuck his artistic head under a black cloth, and ordered me to smile. When the order remained unheeded he took a jumping-jack out of his pocket and dangled it in the air, crying with desperate jollity: ‘Hi! Hi! Look! Look!’ I thought Herr Patitz frightfully silly but I did what he asked all the same, and to please Mamma, who was standing near me, I managed to muster up a shy smile. The photographer now pressed a rubber ball, counted slowly to himself, then shut up the slide and noted the order, ‘Twelve copies, postcard size.’
I still have one of those twelve copies with the words: ‘My Erich aged three’ in faded ink on the back. My mother wrote that in 1902. And when I look at the small boy in the little frock with his round, shyly smiling baby face, neat fringe and grubby little hand held awkwardly up to his belt, the hollows behind my knees begin to itch again. They are remembering the woollen stockings I was wearing then. Why is that? How is it that they have not forgotten them? Was the visit to the artistic portrait-photographer Albert Patitz really so important? Was it such a sensational event in the life of the three-year-old? I do not think so, but I do not really know. And our recollections themselves? They live and die, and neither we nor they know the reason why.
We often wonder and puzzle about this. We try to raise the curtain a little and get a glimpse at the reasons behind it. All of us, educated or otherwise, try it one time or another, but seldom get beyond puzzling and guessing and conjecturing. My mother and I tried it once too. It was about a boy the same age as myself named Richard Naumann, who lived near us. He was a head taller than I was and quite a nice boy, but he could never stand me. I didn’t mind this so much in itself, but I simply couldn’t understand why it was, and that was what worried me.
Our mothers used to sit side by side on the green seats in the garden of the Japanese Palace down by the Elbe when we two were in our prams. Later he and I squatted together in the playground making sandcastles. We went together to the Gymnastics Club in Alaun Strasse, and to the higher elementary school. And he never lost a chance of being nasty to me.
He threw stones at me. He tripped me up. He pushed me backwards until I fell over. He ambushed me from doorways as I passed unsuspectingly, gave me a clout and ran away screeching with joy. I ran after him and whenever I was able to catch him up I made him laugh on the other side of his face. I was not afraid of him, but I couldn’t understand him. Why was he always attacking me? Why would he never leave me in peace? I had never done him any harm. I liked him quite well. Why, then, was he always going for me?
One day when I was telling my mother about it, she said, ‘Even when the two of you were in your prams he used to scratch your face.’ ‘But why did he do that?’ I asked, baffled. She pondered for a moment, then said: ‘Perhaps it was because everyone thought you such a pretty baby. All the old women and park keepers and nursemaids who passed by our seat used to look into your prams, and they always seemed to think you a lot more attractive than he was. They simply raved about you.’ ‘And you mean to say that he understood that then ‒ when he was a baby?’ ‘Not the words, of course, but the sense, and the way they said it.’ ‘And does he still remember that even though he didn’t understand it?’ ‘Perhaps he does,’ said my mother, ‘and now go and do your homework.’ ‘I’ve finished it long ago,’ I answered. ‘I’m going out to play.’
And as I ran out of the front door downstairs, I stumbled over Richard Naumann’s leg. I raced after him, caught him up and gave him one behind the ear. Perhaps he did hate me since our pram days. Perhaps he remembered them and was not really attacking me, as I thought he was, but only defending himself. All the same I was not going to put up with being tripped by him for that reason – you bet I wasn’t!
Extract from When I Was a Little Boy, Chapter 5, ‘The Königsbrücker Strasse and I’ © The Estate of Erich Kästner, 1957
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