32 Part I: OriginsContact with the non-self... becomes for the early maturer an
urgent need. The narcissistic direction of his impulses, indicated
by the preponderance of imagination in his experience, positively
delays his maturing.... He is struck down by passion; lulled too
long in the security of his autarky, he reels helplessly where he
had once built his airy bridges. The infantile traits in the hand-
writing of the precocious are not an empty warning.^26School experiences of a precocious youthAt grammar school Theodor did not have good handwriting, but it must
have been passable. For he received good marks in all subjects and top
marks in most subjects, except for mathematics, physics and hand-
writing (in those days pupils were still given marks for the neatness of
their handwriting). He was exempted from gym lessons and religious
instruction. In his leaving certificate, on 2 March 1921, he was even
given high marks for ‘behaviour’ and ‘diligence’. His dealings with the
teachers were almost entirely unproblematic, as was his grasp of the
demands of the curriculum. Nevertheless, as a boy who played music
and wrote poetry he had mixed feelings about school as an institution.
This had nothing to do with the teachers and their approach to teaching
a humanist syllabus. What he found difficult was the school’s insistence
on discipline and the emphasis on classification and standardization in
the teaching process, as well as the conformism that was bound up with
the idea of loyalty to the class and the school.
He wrote about this in an essay for the Frankfurter Schülerzeitung
(Frankfurt School Magazine), whose first issue appeared in October
- This essay discussed the ‘teacher–pupil relationship’ in an unmis-
takably precocious tone. Nevertheless, it reflected the experiences of
a youth of seventeen, which it summed up in the words, ‘From the
outset, there is a disharmony of the soul between teacher and pupil.’^27
Although this was a youthful piece of writing, and in fact his first pub-
lished text, its linguistic form and mode of argument tell us something
about the author’s mental attitude and way of thinking. He began by
discussing the topicality and relevance of his subject against the back-
ground of current trends and ideas, and went on to look at fundamental
problems of education and teaching. He thought it encouraging that
at such a turbulent time – it was the end of the First World War – ‘the
profoundest questions of our lives were the subject of debate, instead
of being ignored in a cowardly and complacent apathy’, and that new
approaches were being entertained. The youthful author attempted
to give a precise account of the teacher–pupil relationship in schools
without following the fashion of blaming one side or the other. The
frequently lamented deformation of the personality of the teacher
that was so often depicted in contemporary literature, the tendency to