RONALD HAYMAN
43
wea ther, coming up da il y with bo undl ess brilliance and assurance.
T he wo rld will be inverted fo r the next few years: since the o ld god has
abdi ca ted, I sha ll be ruling the wo rld."
On 3 J anuary 1889, he collapsed in the Piazza Carl o Alberta aft er
embracing a horse that a cabdriver was beating. H e was carri ed back to
his lodgings, where he wro te several letters, and during the next few
days he went on writing letters, which have been published, but after
being interned in the Basel asylum o n 10 J anuary, he wrote no thin g
whi ch has been considered publishable, though he survived until 1900.
He was transferred to the asylum a t J ena a week later, and released in
March 1890. H e lived with his mo ther until she died in 1897, and then
with his sister, Elisabeth. The four pages of childlike scrawl I found in
the archive at Weima r probabl y da te fr om the first ha lf of 1892. One of
the man y strange features about the cryptic, di scontinuous sentences is
that when he used the first person he was not referring
to
himself, but
performing a harshly criti cal ventriloquism, with either hi s mo ther or
his sister as obj ect. "Only where did the illness in the famil y come
from? For littl e Mari e was indeed a very strong girl and the Herr Pas tor
even mo re so. I go t to know him a t the wedding. T hey used to say it
always fell on the fo urth child." "Ma ri e" must refer to hi s mo ther, and
he seems to have been harbo uring a morbid suspicion that she had had
an inces tuous affair with her brother Edmund, pastor at Gorenzen .
Edmund
heartily
loved both your good children and loved the BI
wife so much he was now another guardian of our Fritz and more
Indeed he was declared incurable at the Court by Professor Binz–
wanger and from that moment on I had no peace in being able at
least to look after him myself Well when he applied for the lodgings I
had my fun with him finding out whether he was engaged all the
ones that came to me were either engaged or got engaged and then he
said I' ve had my fingers burned so
I
prefer not to move in Do they
have children? Do you remember when I said uninvitec! guests have
to
stand in the corner
It
was too much grief for a mother's heart was
it not she has another three children? of her own He is so similar to
him in character too so gentl y di gnifi ed they could both control
themselves so well
At the same time he was capa bl e of a much more sympatheti c
identificati on with the old lady, even if he was aware tha t on one level
of consciousness she had welcomed the circumstances tha t had made it
possible for her to repossess him, to become as indispensabl e to him as
when he was an infant. "Otherwise he feels abandoned But the love for
me has also remained Already he has become too accustomed to me
