I may as well come right out with it: I was one of those clairaudient infants whose mental development is completed at birth and after that merely needs a certain amount of filling in. The moment I was born I took a very critical attitude toward the first utterances to slip from my parents beneath the light bulbs. My ears were keenly alert. It seems pretty well established that they were small, bent over, gummed up, and in any case cute, yet they caught the words that were my first impressions and as such have preserved their importance for me. And what my ear took in my tiny brain evaluated. After meditating at some length on what I had heard, I decided to do certain things and on no account to do certain others.

“ It’s a boy,” said Mr. Matzerath, who presumed himself to be my father. “He will take over the store when he grows up. At last we know why we’ve been working our fingers to the bone.” Mama thought less about the store than about outfitting her son: “ Oh, well, I knew it would be a boy even if I did say once in a while that it was going to be a girl.”

Thus at an early age I made the acquaintance of feminine logic. The next words were: “When little Oskar is three, he will have a toy drum.”

Carefully weighing and comparing these promises, maternal and paternal, I observed and listened to a moth that had flown into the room. Medium-sized and hairy, it darted between the two sixty-watt bulbs, casting shadows out of all proportion to its wing spread, which filled the room and everything in it with quivering motion. What impressed me most, however, was not the play of light and shade but the sound produced by the dialogue between moth and bulb: the moth chattered away as if in haste to unburden itself of its knowledge, as though it had no time for future colloquies with sources of light, as though this dialogue were its last confession; and as though, after the kind of absolution that light bulbs confer, there would be no further occasion for sin or folly.

Today Oskar says simply: The moth drummed. I have heard rabbits, foxes and dormice drumming. Frogs can drum up a storm. Woodpeckers are said to drum worms out of their hiding places. And men beat on basins, tin pans, bass drums, and kettledrums. We speak of drumfire, drumhead courts; we drum up, drum out, drum into. There are drummer boys and drum majors. There are composers who write concerti for strings and percussion. I might even mention Oskar’s own efforts on the drum; but all this is nothing beside the orgy of drumming carried on by that moth in the hour of my birth, with no other instrument than two ordinary sixty-watt bulbs. Perhaps there are Negroes in darkest Africa and others in America who have not yet forgotten Africa who, with their well-known gift of rhythm, might succeed, in imitation of African moths—which are known to be larger and more beautiful than those of Eastern Europe—in drumming with such disciplined passion; I can only go by my Eastern European standards and praise that medium-sized powdery-brown moth of the hour of my birth; that moth was Oskar’s master.

It was in the first days of September. The sun was in the sign of Virgo. A late-summer storm was approaching through the night, moving crates and furniture about in the distance. Mercury made me critical, Uranus ingenious, Venus made me believe in comfort and Mars in my ambition. Libra, rising up in the house of the ascendant, made me sensitive and given to exaggeration. Neptune moved into the tenth house, the house of middle life, establishing me in an attitude between faith in miracles and disillusionment. It was Saturn which, coming into opposition to Jupiter in the third house, cast doubt on my origins. But who sent the moth and allowed it, in the midst of a late-summer thunderstorm roaring like a high school principal, to make me fall in love with the drum my mother had promised me and develop my aptitude for it?

Outwardly wailing and impersonating a meat-colored baby, I made up my mind to reject my father’s projects, in short everything connected with the grocery store, out of hand, but to give my mother’s plan favorable consideration when the time came, to wit, on my third birthday.

Aside from all this speculation about my future, I quickly realized that Mama and this Mr. Matzerath were not equipped to understand or respect my decisions whether positive or negative. Lonely and misunderstood, Oskar lay beneath the light bulbs, and figuring that things would go on like this for some sixty or seventy years, until a final short circuit should cut off all sources of light, he lost his enthusiasm even before this life beneath the light bulbs had begun. It was only the prospect of the drum that prevented me then from expressing more forcefully my desire to return to the womb.

Besides, the midwife had already cut my umbilical cord. There was nothing more to be done.

The Photograph Album

I am guarding a treasure. Through all the bad years consisting only of calendar days, I have guarded it, hiding it when I wasn’t looking at it; during the trip in the freight car I clutched it to my breast, and when I slept, Oskar slept on his treasure, his photograph album.

What should I do without this family cemetery which makes everything so perfectly clear and evident? It has a hundred and twenty pages. On each page, four or six or sometimes only two photographs are carefully mounted, sometimes symmetrically, sometimes less so, but always in an arrangement governed by the right angle. It is bound in leather and the older it grows the stronger it smells of leather. At times my album has been exposed to the wind and weather. The pictures came loose and seemed so helpless that I hastened to paste them back in their accustomed places.

What novel—or what else in the world—can have the epic scope of a photograph album? May our Father in Heaven, the untiring amateur who each Sunday snaps us from above, at an unfortunate angle that makes for hideous foreshortening, and pastes our pictures, properly exposed or not, in his album, guide me safely through this album of mine; may he deter me from dwelling too long on my favorites and discourage Oskar’s penchant for the tortuous and labyrinthine; for I am only too eager to get on from the photographs to the originals.

So much for that. Shall we take a look? Uniforms of all sorts, the styles and the haircuts change. Mama gets fatter and Jan gets flabbier, some of these people I don’t even know, but I can guess who they are. I wonder who took this one, the art was on the downgrade. Yes, gradually the art photo of 1900 degenerates into the utilitarian photo of our day. Take this monument of my grandfather Koljaiczek and this passport photo of my friend Klepp. One need only hold them side by side, the sepia print of my grandfather and this glossy passport photo that seems to cry out for a rubber stamp, to see what progress has brought us to in photography. And all the paraphernalia this quick photography takes. Actually I should find fault with myself even more than with Klepp, for I am the owner of the album and should have maintained certain standards. If there is a hell in wait for us, I know what one of the more fiendish torments will be: they will shut up the naked soul in a room with the framed photographs of his day: Quick, turn on the pathos: O man amid snapshots, passport photos. O man beneath the glare of flash bulbs, O man standing erect by the leaning tower of Pisa, O photomaton man who must expose his right ear if he is to be worthy of a passport! And—off with the pathos. Maybe this hell will be tolerable because the worst pictures of all are not taken but only dreamed or, if they are taken, never developed.

Klepp and I had these pictures taken and developed during our early days in Jülicher-Strasse, when we ate spaghetti together and made friends. In those days I harbored plans for travel. That is, I was so gloomy that I resolved to take a trip and, to that end, apply for a passport. But since I hadn’t money enough to finance a real trip, including Rome, Naples, or at least Paris, I was glad of the lack of cash, for what could have been more dismal than to set out on a trip in a state of depression? But since we had enough money to go to the movies, Klepp and I in those days attended motion picture theaters where, in keeping with Klepp’s taste, wild West films were shown, and, in response to my needs, pictures where Maria Schell was the tearful nurse and Borsche, as the surgeon, played Beethoven sonatas by the open window after a difficult operation, and displayed a lofty sense of responsibility. We were greatly dissatisfied that the performances should take only two hours. We should have been glad to see some of the programs twice. Often we arose at the end, determined to buy tickets for the next showing. But once we had left the hall and saw the line waiting outside the box office, our courage seeped away. Not only the thought of a second encounter with the ticket-seller but also the insolent stares with which total strangers mustered our physiognomies shamed us out of lengthening the line.