ABSTRACT

His early years were marked by profound, almost timeless stability and security. Being the only child in the period of the ‘child king’ (Ariès 1975), and in a Jewish bourgeois environment which was famous for the huge amount of loving attention paid to children, he had a childhood which was particularly rich and rewarding emotionally.1 The sense of stability also extended to the surrounding world, where he felt completely safe, and where ‘[o]ne could not imagine that the world would ever be different’ (RL: 13). In the autobiographical interview, he immediately connected this sense of stability to his later ability of persisting with his work for decades, despite the almost complete lack of recognition (RL: 14).