Worlds In-Between: Multiple Realities in My Life and Psychoanalytic Thinking

Although I have not lived in a German-speaking area since I was thirteen years old—the age I was sent to boarding school in France—I think it is appropriate to describe the following reflections with a German word: “Selbstdarstellung,” or self-representation. Geographically, Linz, Austria, remained my home, and Austria remained where I spent practically all my school vacations, until the country was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. Psychologically, the German language played and still plays a singular role in my inner life, a role that is, at the outset, important to highlight—more important than explaining, for instance, that my father and his brother inherited from their grandfather a business that went by the name of LUSKA (LUdwig und Sigmund KAfka), K. & K. (Purveyor to the Imperial and Royal Court), and that the company specialized in brandies, canned foods, vinegar, mustard, and pickles. But it is also true to say that the German language did not develop in me. It got stuck. As a result, I do not quite take for granted the meaning of German words, and I must attune my listening carefully. Such microscopic dissection of words occurs far less frequently to those who speak, and have always spoken, German as a matter of routine. A Selbstdarstellung—which differs from the story of a life, or from an autobiography proper—describes this peculiar situation: the author occupies a place away from one's self,