Five Weeks at Humanitas. Manfred Jurgensen

      Published by Hybrid Publishers

      Melbourne Victoria Australia

      © Manfred Jurgensen

      This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers,

      PO Box 52, Ormond 3204.

      First published 2010

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

      Jurgensen, Manfred, 1940-

      Five weeks at Humanitas / Manfred Jurgensen.

      9781921665028 (hbk.)

      Jurgensen, Manfred, 1940- Humanitas (Sanatorium) Hitler Youth.

      Mentally ill—Rehabilitation. World War, 1939-1945—

      Germany-Flensburg.

      A823.3

      Digital Distribution: Ebook Alchemy

      ISBN: 9781742980515 (Epub)

      Cover design by the Modern Art Production Group

      Contents

       I am a Book

      Dear Reader

       Eggshells

      One

      Two

      Three

      Four

       Lions and Nightingales

      Five

       Fireworks

      Six

       A Singular Kind of Love

      Seven

       ‘Hitler’s Children’

      Eight

      Nine

       Surviving the Snake Pit

      Ten

       The Age of Travelling

      Eleven

       Buzzing Drones or The Colour of Speech

      Twelve

       Appendix

      Thirteen

       Acknowledgments

      In memoriam Max Frisch (1911-91)

       Everything can be told,

       but not the true story of one’s life.

       Max Frisch

       Artists sometimes sense they must

       revise their work where they love

       Rainer Maria Rilke

       Our doubt is our passion and

       our passion is our task.

       The rest is the madness of art.

       Henry James

       Why do we tell stories

       so brazenly about ourselves?

       …

       I am preparing

       myself for some arcanum

       in my own story.

       Vincent Buckley

       I am a Book

       I am not the one who’s crazy!

      Philip Roth, My Life as a Man

       A Harvard professor kept badgering

       Dylan Thomas about the meaning of symbols.

       ‘Mr Thomas, on line three you say …’

       Thomas finally exploded:

       ‘Don’t you appreciate that to me

       it’s not a symbol, it’s real?’

      Dear Reader

       The following autobiography is not written by a so-called celebrity, nor is it the record of a person remarkable in any other way. Its narrative is not so much about the individual as an attempt to recapture the events of a curious and comic, remarkable and extraordinary life. Both story and protagonist of this book, then, is life, being, existence. Strictly speaking, the text should not therefore be called an autobiography. Perhaps the term could be replaced with something like ‘auto-fiction’ or ‘bio-novel’. However, unfortunately we habitually perceive fiction as the opposite of reality. What is real cannot be fictional, least of all fictitious. My aim is not to fictionalise the author’s biography but to reveal the fiction of life itself.

      Many distinguished writers have made pertinent statements about the nature of biographies, none more perceptive, I think, than Jose Ortega y Gasset when he says: ‘Biography is a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified’. Yet I would go one step further and claim that life creates its own ‘biographical’ fiction. At its most spectacular we’ve adopted the habit of calling it ‘coincidence’. The coexistence of events is not necessarily accidental. It may well be shaped by life forces the way artists are driven to formal