These were dreadful times; it was very difficult to eat one’s fill. My mother had to maintain the entire household, and my father, whose gold-plating work had ended long ago, since the technique had gone out of fashion, had no choice but to help knit, even though the work was not particularly easy for him, despite my mother’s good instructions.
[ . . . ]
At Easter 1793, we had to leave the barracks. My mother had rented a very modest apartment at Small Hamburgerstrasse, on the corner of Linienstrasse, for which we obviously had to pay now. There was no news at all from my father. Our lives became more impoverished all the time. In the summertime, I ran around barefoot; I had only linen pants, a shirt, and a vest. Very soon, my mother was reduced to owning no other pieces of clothing than the ones she was wearing. No matter how clean she kept and how often she mended them, eventually she could no longer show up at church on Sundays, and so she finally had to manage without the last enjoyment, the last consolation she had had until then. [ . . . ]
Such a thing is possible in the otherwise so charitable Berlin, when the poor person is ashamed of begging, and my mother could not bring herself to do that even in the most abject poverty. To her, the so-called ‘paupers’ supervisors’ were horrible people, and she would have died of shame if one had as much as touched her. [ . . . ]
Although I was already seven years old by then, I was not able to read yet. My mother obtained for me admission to a charity school; however, I could not attend it regularly, as I had to care for my siblings; moreover, I had little inclination for learning. [ . . . ] In the span of four weeks, I attended school for about 14 days. I did not understand what we went through in class, and the “a, b, ab, b, a, ba” bored me incredibly. [ . . . ]
[In 1793, following his return from war, the author’s father became an “excise comptroller,” i.e. a minor tax official, [ . . . ]. That he began drinking turned into a strain for the whole family. [ . . . ] At the beginning of 1796, the father relocated with his family to the post of “gate collector” (also a minor tax official) in the small town of Friedland in the march of Brandenburg. There Karl Friedrich initially attended the private school of the second preacher, whom people called “chaplain.”]
[ . . . ]
My mother had expected that my father’s transfer to an entirely new sphere of activity, that tearing him from that dangerous environment would have a beneficial effect on him and put a stop to his ill-fated inclination to drinking. To this end, she had tried everything to tie him to the home and make his domestic life as comfortable as possible. However, it was too late. The habit had become a compelling need, and the terrible thing about this problem is that it weakens more and more any strength required to resist the temptation. [ . . . ]
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