50
PARTISAN REVIEW
us, because it prophesied the revolution, the future when all would
be changed.
In the summer of
1920
it seemed that the proletarian revolution
would come by way of Warsaw to Berlin, and then-who could
say? - might perhaps reach Paris. But by the middle of August the
picture changed. We tried to forget our disappointment, for events
followed each other with breathtaking swiftness, all seeming to point
to upheavals on which we were impatiently counting- we who were
still conjugating almost entirely in the future tense. The defeats in
Bavaria, Hungary, Poland, and the Baltic-all this meant, we
thought, that the new world would supplant the old only after the
most painful birthpangs. He who keeps his eyes fixed on the peaks
can easily overlook the valleys and the deep chasms. And had I not,
since my earliest childhood, been accustomed to discover the hills
beyond the other hills?
* * •
Even now it is easy for me to compile a relatively detailed list of
all my enthusiasms.... Like all young people I liked to be carried
away, and felt deep gratitude toward anyone who gave me occasion
for it. Doubts did not dampen these ardors, though they set limits to
my credulity.
The infatuation would end, the enthusiasm would be snuffed
out as wind will blowout a lighted candle. Or else it would gradually
dissipate, unnoticed. When a friendship ends, one looks for a
psychological explanation, some sad comfort. And in al,l such cases
one tends to give way to the temptation to poison the spring from
which one drank so greedily and to convince oneself and others that
it was poisoned from the first. My memory is perhaps still true to my
experience because I was able to resist almost effortlessly this
tendency toward retroactive depreciation....
I have been speaking of my youthful enthusiasms in an effort to
understand why I did not immediately recognize, in the years
1921-22,
the significance Alfred Adler had for me. During those first
two years he impressed me, as he did so many of his audience, but
he did not fill me with enthusiasm. Why not? One reason, one out of
many, comes to the fore, which perhaps is not salient but is
nonetheless noteworthy. It was a question of his language, its excess
of everyday words from which he formed his sentences, glibly and
colorlessly, so that I, like so many of his detractors, especially the
