ABSTRACT
At the age of seventeen, as I later discovered with a confused sense of fear and guilt, one possesses an almost unlimited capacity for overlooking unpleasant facts. Until early 1938 the years had passed without major shocks and great excitement. I went to school, read many books, met friends, engaged in a variety of sports. Right into summer of 1938 I must have been so immersed in my own affairs that I only noticed the events around me out of the corner of my eye. It was a year of waiting, of unsuccessful attempts to train for a career, a year of cycling tours in the Taunus and the Sudeten; I fell in love at least twice, saw dozens of films, did a great deal of swimming. But then, suddenly, during the second half of the year, the pulse of history began to quicken, and I discovered that there was great trouble ahead, with me in the wrong place—that, in brief, I had waited too long. With all the reading of foreign newspapers and listening to radio broadcasts from abroad, I had somehow failed to draw the obvious conclusion—that Nazi Germany had more or less finished rearmament, that expansion was about to begin, and that war was therefore imminent.
