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.”