ABSTRACT
having failed to find the american girl of my dreams in my two high school years in Chicago, I was looking forward to discovering her among the many attractive coeds that I expected to encounter at the university. I did meet lots of girls there in the four years between my arrival in Champaign in 1942 and my return to Berlin in 1946, but I never developed the kind of spiritual closeness to any of them that had quickly sprung up between Hildegard and me, not even to the one girl with whom I fell in love and who jilted me after our brief engagement. Hildegard didn ’t need to ask, “What are you thinking about?” because she could read my mind—even if I couldn ’t read hers. In fact, she got to know me better than I knew myself.
