SURELY every man who finds himself at some period of his life consenting to the labor involved in the writing of his biography is faced with the necessity for finding a pattern by which words may be woven to form truth. No man can tell everything about himself, even if he has the will to do so, nor are many of us capable of judging rightly what has been of significance for the rest of mankind in the welter of happenings in our days. No doubt this accounts for the fact that the majority of published autobiographies, written by men who are known figures in the public eye, follow a set pattern which answers the single question: “How did I come to be the man that I am?”

The fact that the answer of the individual himself to this question reveals far more than he dreams he is saying, makes each new autobiography a mine of interest for the psychologist in every reader. Havelock Ellis narrowed his comments on his own life to a single sharply defined theme, namely, the growth in his consciousness of a realization that men and women are different, and the ultimate expansion of that consciousness into his life’s work. Stefan Zweig gave us the broad panorama of the life of an intellectual Jew in Vienna through the past sixty years, with wide political and social judgments implicit in it. Since he was a man skilled in the use of words, he was able to keep out of that story the personal details of two marriages, as well as the struggles inevitable in mastering his craft. He kept those things unsaid because he had no wish to reveal them, and yet at the core of his half a dozen other patterns, and each would have contained a truth for me, if for no one else. But the sole justification I have been able to find for the labor involved in producing this work is to tell the forthright story of how one fairly normal man happened to be born in such a place and at such a time as to make him a partner in three worlds.

If I have friends who consider me something better, or worse, than merely a normal man, that must be their opinion, not mine. To me, the significance of my life so far as it has developed lies in the fact that I have been forced to make soul-deep adjustments in three different kinds of political units. To make the telling of that series of adjustments of interest and value, something of the personal aspects of my life must also be told.

So I give them to you. It is not an easy task to dig them out of the past. I do so because the pattern of my story may prove to be of some small help in furthering a wider appreciation in the American mind for the kind of men in Europe whom they must think of in future as brothers, whether they choose to do so or not. Today I find myself rather disinterested in the young man that I was, inclined to minimize his enthusiasms and emotions. I would prefer to think of him as more perceptive and certainly more aware of coming disaster than I remember him to be. But his story will be valueless in forming the pattern already set unless it is honest.

As I have already said, I felt no particular constraint as a child by reason of the fact that I was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. People like ourselves had not been persecuted in such a direct way that we were able to understand it. I was indoctrinated with no dreams of revolution and freedom, except the rather generalized ideals of my grandfather, because I had no friends among the young idealists who carried in their minds the image of the fresh, virile Czechoslovakia they later created. When I enlisted in the Imperial Army, I did so from no dramatic motives of hatred, nor even from a sense of duty. I wanted only to escape personal unhappiness by trading it for what I believed would be glamorous adventure. It must not be overlooked that I was also strongly motivated by what Freud has called the “death-wish,” an instinct consistently played upon by the purblind dynasts and militarists of Central Europe.

Eventually I came to cherish the ideals of my country in its new republicanism, to feel myself a true representative of it, but I had first to go through years of ever-broadening experience and a widening education in discovering what the rest of the world was like before I was in a position to appreciate my own. My great adventure turned out to be one of the mind.