Ladies and Gentlemen, as I stand here before you, a seventy-year-old, and however improbably, for several months an American citizen, speaking English, or at least attempting to, as a guest, no, as an official member of an American State institute which has invited you to hear me, – as I stand here, I have the feeling that life is such stuff as dreams are made on. All is so strange, so little credible, so unexpected. In the first instance I never thought that I would reach the patriarchal age [of three score years and ten], although in theory I have long thought this to be desirable. I thought and said that once one was in the world it would be good and honourable to stay the course, to lead a full and regular life [kanonisches Leben] and, as an artist, to be characteristically productive at all stages of my life. But I had little confidence in my own biological competence and efficiency, and the stamina which I have nonetheless shown, seems to me less as proof of my own vital patience, than of the patience which the genius of life has had with me, as an addition, as grace. But grace is always astonishing and unexpected. Whoever experiences it thinks he is dreaming.

It seems to me dreamlike that I am and where I am. I do not need to be a poet for this to strike me as self-evident. One only needs a little fantasy to find life fantastic. How did I get here? Which dream-wave [Traumwelle] cast me from the furthest corner of Germany, where I was born, and where in the last analysis I belong, into this hall, onto this podium, that I stand here as an American, speaking to Americans? Not that it seems wrong to me. On the contrary, it has my complete approval. As everything stands today, my kind of Germanness is preserved most fittingly in a hospitable cosmopolitan environment, the multiracial and multinational universe that is America. Before I became an American, I was allowed to be a Czech; that was highly commendable and I was grateful, but it had no rhyme or reason. All the same, I only have to imagine that I had by chance become a Frenchman, an Englishman or an Italian, to realise with satisfaction how much more fitting it is that I became an American.