First published in 1968, a year after the Adrienne von Speyr’s death, this Autobiographical Fragment (as the original subtitle has it) contains her account of her own childhood and youth. As Hans Urs von Balthasar, the book’s editor, writes in his foreword, “the author’s primary focus was on her inner development, the significance that certain experiences, some pleasant and some difficult, would have for her later decisions. . . . Two themes weave their way like a scarlet thread through the labyrinth of her earliest years: an unshakable determination to become a physician and an equally unshakable determination to belong to God alone, to place her entire existence unreservedly at God’s disposal. Only as a negative aspect of this second theme can one grasp her otherwise almost incomprehensible antipathy toward the conventionally bourgeois, relatively superficial yet firmly anti-Catholic Protestantism of her surroundings.”
Editor’s Foreword by Hans Urs von Balthasar
We, the Children
Les Tilleuls
Willy
Primary School
Meeting Saint Ignatius
The Year 1911
Bellevue
Sunday School
My Father
The Waldau
The Last Two Years of Primary School
The Operation at Basel
The Progymnasium
A Walking Tour in the Alps
The Beginning of the War
The Second Year of the Progymnasium
Madeleine
The Fourth Year of Gymnasium (Spring 1917)
The Vision of Mary
The Death of My Father
Tuberculosis (Spring 1918)
Leysin (October 1918-July 1920)
Interlude on the Plains
Back in Leysin
Saint-Loup (September-December 1920)
The Waldau (December 1920-August 1921)
The Basel Girls’ Secondary School (August 1921-April 1923)
The Railway Bridge
Acquaintances, Graduation
The Beginning of Medical School (Easter-October 1923)
The Dissection Lab (Winter Semester 1923/1924)
The Bicycle Tour (Summer Semester 1924)
The Broken Leg (Winter Semester 1924/1925)
The Second Preparatory Year Nears (Summer Semester 1925)
The Neergard Affair (Winter Semester 1925/1926)
The Death of Professor Hotz (Summer Semester 1926)
The First of August
Editor’s Epilogue
Appendix: Grandmother’s House