Read My Prizes: An Accounting for Free Online Page A

honor, I said, to receive a prize that’s connected with the name of Heinrich Heine and also comes from Hamburg, the city I loved most at that time and has always been one of my favorite cities, even today I know of no other through which I can walk with such uninhibited and happy self-confidence. And in which I could actually live for long intervals, even, who knows, maybe even years. I came to Hamburg very early in my life and maybe it has to do with the fact that I spent the year after I was born on a fishing cutter in Rotterdam harbor that Hamburg was for me what is known in the vernacular as love at first sight. I was often, almost yearly, a guest in a brick house in Wellingsbüttel, not far from the source of the Alster, and I love the people of Hamburg into the bargain. The way the news of my participation in the Julius Campe Prize was announced to me was also, I can say, completely appealing. They wrote two or three sentences that they’d selected me for one of three portions of the prize and I could collect the five thousand marks whenever I wanted, they’d be ready for me in the Hoffmann und Campe offices on the Harvesterhuder Weg. There would be no ceremony, no event. So I actually had a good reason to go to Hamburgagain, one day I went to the Westbahnhof and got on a train to Copenhagen and found what seemed the best compartment for me to lean back in and go to sleep. But going to sleep was out of the question because my excitement at being singled out for my work as a writer, for
Frost
, was too great. I got the prize from Hamburg, from Hamburg, from Hamburg, I kept thinking, and I secretly despised the Austrians who had not, until now, extended me even a trace of recognition. The news had come down from the north, from the Binnenalster! Hamburg now was not only the most beautiful of great cities to me but also the pinnacle of clear-sightedness, quite apart from the immense cosmopolitanism that has distinguished Hamburg from time immemorial. In Hamburg the Hoffmann und Campe people had reserved a big room for me in an old villa on the Binnenalster, and I had a taxi take me there. I had hardly reached the room before a newspaper called, wanting to interview me. I leaned back in an armchair and said yes. I unpacked my few things and already the phone rang and the people from the newspaper were there and had pulled out their pencils. It was the first interview I ever gave in my life, it’s possible I gave it to the
Hamburger Abendblatt
, who knows. I was so excited that I couldn’t finish asingle sentence, I immediately had an answer for every question but I wasn’t happy with my skill in phrasing things. I thought: people are noticing you come from Austria, the back of beyond. The next day I saw my picture in the paper and instead of being on top of the world, as I’d expected, I was ashamed of the nonsense I’d talked to the people from the newspaper when I was giving it my best shot and I loathed my photograph, if I really look like I do in this photograph, I thought, it would be better for me to retreat into some dark valley deep in the mountains and never set foot in the world again. I sat there spreading a thick layer of marmalade on my breakfast bread and felt deeply wounded. I didn’t dare even open the curtains and spent several hours sitting in my armchair as if stricken by some indefinable paralysis in my whole body. I felt worse than I’d ever felt before. But suddenly I thought of my share of the prize, the five thousand marks suddenly dominated my mind, and I slipped into my jacket and ran to the offices of Hoffmann und Campe, it was a beautiful walk in the best air and I felt I was seeing the elegant world for the first time in my life. I looked at each of the comfortable villas on the Binnenalster with the greatest interest and the greatest attention. Finally I reached the offices ofHoffmann und Campe. I announced myself and was immediately welcomed by the head of the house in person. The