lead him towards understanding himself and the errors of his ways, but it can also offend and harden him. One of my fellow prisoners, an intelligent banker, had, for three quarters of a year, received nothing but old issues of a magazine called "Fraundorfer Blätter" to read, dry instructions in gardening, which neither interested him, nor could benefit him in any way. He put up with it, being increasingly embittered, until I got in charge of the library and gave him something more fitting to his needs. An actor, who was a hothead, was thus enraged by the tales of Jeremias Gotthelf, that he had almost been punished for improper behaviour. The last one he had to read bore the title "How Five Girls Miserably Perish with Brandy" [a]. When I gave him a volume by Edmund Höfer [b], he was as happy as if I had given him a fortune. A social democratic plumber had been victimised my a long series of devotional books. He angrily swore to me that just for these books there could not be any God. He had only gone bankrupt due to his bitter poverty; but the authors and publishers of these scriptures were bankrupt due to self-righteousness and arrogance and deserved at least the same prison sentence as he. [a] "Wie fünf Mädchen im Branntwein jämmerlich umkommen" was published in 1838. Jeremias Gotthelf is a pseudonym for the Swiss author Albert Bitzius (1797-1854). [b] Edmund Franz Andreas Hoefer (1819-1882). From these examples you can see how well I first had to get to know my library and then also the needs of its readers. This involved some serious and difficult psychological considerations and led to the sad final conclusion that, basically, of the kind of books we needed there were only a very few. They were not just missing from our prison library, they were also missing from literature in general. I thought of my boyhood, of the little tracts I had read then and of the trash which had poisoned me; I thought further, and I compared. Then, a realization dawn on me. Are only the inmates of the penitentiaries in confinement? Is not every human being basically a prisoner? Are not millions of people confined by walls, which might not be visible to the eyes, but the existence of which can nonetheless be felt just too well? Does it only apply to the inmates of a penitentiary that the body has to be constricted, so that the higher part of our being, the part which came from above, shall reveal itself? Does it not apply to all mortals, and thus to all of mankind, that everything which is low has to be put in bondage, so that the soul, having gained liberty by such means, could uplift itself up to the highest ideal to be found on earth, to the nobility of the spirit? And are not religion, art, and literature those things which are supposed to guide us from these depths into those heights? The very literature, I, the prisoner confined to my narrow cell, am also a part of!