He profited most from Reinhardt’s method of keeping a Director’s Book. Reinhardt worked on it for weeks before a production began, its purpose to give physical form to the text. Scenery, props, notes on character, changes of light, the volume and duration of the music—it was all there, in Reinhardt’s crowded handwriting. And in just under eight months, twenty-year-old Wilhelm from Westphalia progressed from merely watching to being allowed his own entries.

Wilhelm saved, and framed, the program notes for The Miracle, in which he had his largest role, as The Knight. The program notes consisted of the title, the credits, and then eight sentences, boxed: In our age we can communicate across the ocean. But the path to ourselves and our neighbor remains infinite. The actor walks this path. He transforms himself, his hands, eyes, and mouth full of miracles, and is at once artist and work of art. He lives at the border of reality. He carries in him the potential for all passions, for all fates, for all forms of inner life. He shows us that nothing human is foreign to us. If it were not so, we could not understand other men.

He saw even less of Hans after they had an ugly argument over Wilhelm’s handling of a letter from his mother. She had written that his father was doing badly, continually oppressed, furiously complaining that Wilhelm now belonged to that other hostile part of the world; that he couldn’t count on his children to carry on his name.

What about his brothers? Wilhelm had wanted to know. Couldn’t they deal with this? But Hans had been moved by the letter, and urged Wilhelm to visit. Wilhelm refused, though he finally wrote to Bernhard, his eldest brother, informing him of his decision to cut himself off. He told Hans a day later, elaborating with a little pride on his letter’s language. Hans responded that the necessity of an event did not establish its virtue.

Then Lasker-Schüler brought them back together by staging a surprise party for Hans’s birthday. Wilhelm was too absorbed in a new production to take part in the preparations. The party was small, composed of the group that had missed Hans’s first reading: her husband, Herwarth Walden (originally Levin), and the painters Zech, Meidner, and Franz Marc.

The theme was Red. Zech dressed as the Devil. Marc wore a red horse’s head. Wilhelm had had Reinhardt’s costume shop cover him with arm-sized streamers of red satin, and had come as Blood. Paul had come as the Red Knight, his armor painted cardboard. Lasker-Schüler was all in blue.