Once again the boys got back to school just in time to dash through their toilet prior to bed check. That night, listening to the snores and whimpers of his fellow neophytes, Wilhelm remembered her hair and her manner and thought, That’s my real university. That’s where I’ll learn everything I need to know.

Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe had been raised in silence and routine in a cool blue nursery at the beginning of a comfortable era in his family’s fortunes. Who understood him? His mother; his brothers. Then, not even them. His early childhood had been Westphalian, meaning that blank pastureland on which enormous, coarse-boned farmers raised ponderous draft horses, and the Plumpes had lived in a town so quiet that when Wilhelm looked out a window and finally did see a passerby, it was as if a tapestry had moved.

When he was five, they moved to Kassel, which his father saw as a fitting residence for the well-to-do man of independent means. Earlier his father had taken over an uncle’s textile firm, and then sold it at an obvious profit. Wilhelm had been born in the Three Emperor Year of 1888, a few months after the coronation of Wilhelm II. Two years later, the Kaiser had designated Kassel as his summer residence. Wilhelm’s father had immediately settled them in the vicinity of the palace, in the villa colony of Mulang.

There Herr Plumpe searched for his entry into society. The neighboring families were all nouveau-riche. There were mutual invitations to garden parties and Italianate evenings with lights and fireworks. Hosts were expected to provide fresh surprises for each gathering. But established society insulated itself against intrusions from below. This wounded Herr Plumpe profoundly. He withdrew to his study to plan newer and more efficient siege-towers.

In his view, the children’s part of the house was an appendix, necessary during domestic crises that could not be settled without his intervention, but otherwise a desert to be crossed in great strides. Moreover, Wilhelm embodied for him his family’s failure to fit in. His frailest son, useless in rough games, was a boy who, when banished to a field because the day was so glorious, would sit across from romping playmates on a portable folding chair, reading and not allowing himself to be distracted by the shouting.

Both father and son possessed an ocean of words, and in each other’s presence became mute. In his father’s view, words served as a confirmation of things, a sign of possession. To Wilhelm, they were foretastes of excitements barely glimpsed.