I love you, little man, and I don’t like to think about the immediate future, where humiliations unavoidably await you given your unfortunate choice of a father: creditors pounding on the door (the rent is overdue); the bailiff’s sympathy with your mother’s troubles, which doesn’t stop him from doing his duty; the neighbors’ malicious gossip (“—’cause these have-nots from out of town think they’re better than us—”). The false myths that circulate about your father (“Artists and writers are always part of the bohemian scene”) will make him seem—and this will particularly disgust you—sleazy and Romantic. Rumors will circulate branding him an irresistible seducer of young ladies from the best families and recently married wives of German men with steady incomes and benefits, and at the same time a shameless whoremonger. He’s often spotted in the bordellos on the Reeperbahn. He appears in public with a prostitute named Gisela who’s known all over town. One can’t help wondering if he’s her pimp, because he can’t afford her price, so he probably is. You’ll look at your mother and admire her good breeding, her slim figure, the girlish blond of her hair, the magical enchantment of her blue eyes, and her haughty little mouth, and your love for her will tie up your heart, along with your hatred for the man who’s inflicted such abuse on her in the name of his inflated myth as artist and high priest of one of our lesser gods.

I don’t like to think how bitter it will be for you, since for a while in your childhood, before you begin to see through me, you will love me too. Your little hand will take hold of my big one with fervent trust. You’ll listen with bated breath to the fairy tales I tell you—and they certainly won’t be the ones I tell everyone else to their incredulous astonishment—no, they’ll be fairy tales from the forests of the country I was born in: legends of kings’ sons, of herdsmen and hajduks and beautiful women, not of the millionaire whoremongers of the Côte d’Azur, from whose number you can select you own progenitor. I’m going to hide from you the box with the dubious photographic evidence. You’ll do very well without it. You’re going to be plagued with enough ominous suspicions as it is: you’re my son, whether you like it or not. You’ll recognize yourself in me by our common blood, our common penchant for play, anger, and laughter, sharply mocking observations, our contemptuous shrug for everything petty, our brooding, indolence, innate sadness—in a word, by all the characteristics you will later strive manfully to overcome in order to correspond to your genetic material from the distaff side by being upright, unambiguous, reliable, trustworthy, and in compliance with the general rules of etiquette. You’ll still love me as I am because you’ll sense that a part of you is exactly the same. But that won’t last long. You are your mother’s son too. You’ll grow up to be a German man, my little man. And you’ll succumb to another dubious myth: what is a man?