I had returned to Berlin from this first longer trip refreshed and enriched. This is the real benefit of maturity, that it makes people free from the narrowly-drawn boundaries within which one's life moves, and that which he sees and experiences in foreign parts, leads within him to ever-renewing fruits.

If only I could persuade everyone to practice for such a journey by drawing. Drawing means learning to see. Thousands, nay, millions learn to make music -and how few of these bring home fruit from this for their life! If only one could explain to everyone, and to their teachers, that the practice of music is unavailing to those who do not have an understanding and pleasure in music as well. In contrast simply everyone should learn to draw, so that his eyes will be opened and bright for all beauty and meaning which the world offers in visual forms. It really is entirely irrelevant whether someone achieves excellence or even only competence, but rather that he should have looked keenly and with love, because for him his vision has truly become his own, and cannot be lost for all time. From my trip I brought home not a few drawings, some of personalities, some of landscapes. They have all gone missing. But now, after so many years, I could produce series of view from Thuringia and Tyrol, and they would correspond to the forms they had at that date.

In Berlin I was free for the creativity that I had carried in my soul since the years of my youth, of which I had so often dreamed and spoken, and had always been repressed due to the adversity of my situation.

Now I had won my way through, and could begin. I already held in my hand the text that my comrade in art had put together for me.

As I read through it, and read it again, I felt like I had been struck by lightning. This, is this then Mose\ About which you have dreamed so long and so innocently? and who knows whom you have talked to about it? And now you are facing it, cold, without feeling? With no pulse beating for it? No dawn of intuition?