ABSTRACT
The Lutheran Protestantism of my childhood was so "liberal" that it consisted of little more than a tree at Christmas and Bach cantatas at Easter. And the Pastor—attendance at whose religion class, two hours a week, was still mandatory in the Austrian Gymnasium of my childhood—hardly aimed much higher. Thus, I was totally unprepared when, barely nineteen—a bored trainee at an export house in Hamburg, employed mainly in copying invoices for shipments of padlocks to India or to East Africa—I encountered Kierkegaard's masterpiece Fear and Trembling—accidentally, but, of course, providentially. It was many years before I understood what had happened. But I knew immediately that something had happened. I knew immediately that I had found a new, a crucial, an existential dimension. I even then probably knew that my own work would be totally in society—though by then I also did suspect that it was not going to be in business and that I was, indeed, most unlikely to become a "commercial success." And even though I later did teach religion for a few years (though only on the side) my work has indeed been totally in society. But I knew at once, in those far-back days of 1928, that my life would not and could not be totally in society, that it would have to have an existential dimension which transcends society.
