His father understood him to be like those boys who developed passions for trifles in order to persuade themselves that they were living poetically. His father’s hope was to attend decisively to his still-unformed character. For stretches he could forgive his son. A member of the oldest family in town might single the boy out in public with an award for recitation, and Herr Plumpe’s pride would allow him a respite. But then, when the expected invitation to that home failed to materialize, he again would be oppressed by the realization that his plans were precarious or collapsing, and once more the fury would be upon him. They were never Prussian enough. His wife finally found the courage to point out to him that the reason why was no mystery, since they weren’t Prussian at all.

But Wilhelm was the least Prussian of them. On that, at least, everyone could agree.

So the angular and gawky Wilhelm ran errands as a pretext for getting out of the house. Sometimes he pretended to have forgotten something so he could go out again. In the tradition of boys in this position, he devoured adventure stories, particularly those set in the tropics. No illustration was too crudely colored, no story too absurd for his guilty appetite. When he ran out of books, he visited the galleries in town, assembled over the previous century by the Hessian Dukes. He haunted the Court Theater, absorbing its classical repertoire. He wandered the house mangling snippets of Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Lessing, and Grillparzer. On weekends he was allowed to attend performances that ended near midnight. (A boy in attendance alone was no cause for concern, since the theater’s explicit purpose was moral uplift.)

What a privilege theatergoing seemed to be! To be left alone in the dark, no one asking him questions, the king of his seat, content to let everything pass before him. There he felt the return of that part of himself that had to slink away each day so that another part could remain behind to enjoy his family.

At the dinner table his father might fulminate every so often at yet another day his son had wasted. While he did so, his wife gazed on the passing storm in her usual meditative and not unpleasant trance. But Wilhelm’s privileges, as his brothers bitterly noted, remained unrevoked. The Would-be Artist, they complained, expected and received from all others, but especially from their mother, preferential treatment because of his Temperament. Nerves, his brother Bernhard sourly called it. So that even before Wilhelm separated himself from that world—even before he rid himself of what he felt to be the oafishness of “Plumpe” and thus made a visible, official break with that past—he had begun to draw back from it, and it had continued its process of drawing away from him.