Page 124 - harryDEC12_clean.iba

A lesson in solitude, as one could learn from Christopher McCandless, an American adventurer, who set out in the wilderness hoping to live simply for a time of solitude. He starved to death. It came to me that a conflict was in the making, a conflict from which only one of us could emerge as the winner. Klaus Friedrich was a “Übervater," a narcissistic autocrat who brooked no challenges when it came to his status. My half-brothers Edgar and Ewald were intellectual failures, which was registered by my father with indifference, because he was busy with himself and his quest to satisfy the demands of his extravagant wife. The sons of this marriage had experienced no decent education. Their diplomas were bought at private schools without them learning anything that would give them a degree of ability to find their own way in life, but for Klaus Friedrich that appeared insignificant.
He compensated them with material gifts: travel to the most exclusive resorts, expensive cars and real estate, gifts they took with indiscriminating gratitude and which calmed his conscience, if he had any and if, then it was made of gold dust - a substitute for compassion, as long it lasted.
He had taken any determination from them to pursue their own careers, killed any hunger to succeed: they were the offsprings of Klaus Friedrich Weyrauch that had to suffice. So it was with the women they brought home later. He was the judge, postulated in a figurative sense, the Darwinian "primal horde," in which the „alpha male“ claimed all females for himself and who would expel his sons at will and force them to readjust to what suited him. With me however it was different: my father had lost early contact and influence and this bothered him, as it did bother him in his heart of hearts that I studied, passed all exams with laurels and had written a thesis on maritime law „cum laude“.
Here was his weak point; he felt intellectually inferior to me, which caused envy and resentment in him instead of pride in his son. For this, his ego was too big. I, on the other hand, had always admired my father's success and envied subconsciously his life from which I was excluded from my childhood onwards. My father‘s lifestyle was out of reach, I used to think. But now on the threshold of success, my subconscious reared up and told me: „You can and must surpass your father, if for no other reason than as a revenge for never having been included in the "other life ". To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, I had to kill my father in my thoughts, symbolically spoken, as a ritual act, at the end of which I might find a new relationship with him, a relationship that would be based on distanced respect and appreciation, which would allow me to stand up to him at eye level. That is what my subconscious demanded, but up to then many obstacles would stand in the way, some that I in my credulity could not even imagine. I really did not know him and his devious ways, let alone his character but I would find out later and that would be a surprise.
123