“Father kept on his desk,” Martin Freud relates, “a kind of unbound diary in the form of large sheets of white paper upon which he recorded in a most laconic way those events of each day that seemed to him important.” At the top of the first of the sheets on which he made his recordings in his usual Gothic script, Freud wrote: Kürtzeste Chronik (Shortest Chronicle). Why shortest? Perhaps because the recordings were begun in 1929, when he was seventy-three and felt he had not much longer to live. Or perhaps the word is a reference to the brevity of the recordings, which might consist