She has pointed out that her father obviously wrote this biography to convey his memories to future generations of the family. It was certainly not written with any idea of it ever being seen except by his family.
We must remember that this is a son's recollection of his father, not necessarily an unbiased or completely accurate account if such a thing exists! Nevertheless, Wilhelm Spiegelberg and his son were academics and scholars, and as the intended use of this memoir is for research and scholarly purposes, they would have understood that there may be a wider interest in its dissemination and would not have seen this as in any way a breach of confidence.
While I remember him as relatively remote from me during my childhood, I was much closer to him as I grew up. But during my adolescence I felt at times somewhat rebellious towards him for reasons not always connected with his occasional authoritarianism.
Physically, he was to the end quite healthy, walking usually with the then customary cane. But his heart, since an attack he had suffered while climbing the Dent du Midi in the Swiss Alps had weakened to the extent that he was unfit for service in the German Army. So during World War I he served only as a civilian in an army library service for which he received a minor decoration, which he had also received for tutoring one of the Hohenzollern princes on his way to Egypt.
His final illness, discovered only on the occasion of what seemed to be a minor bladder disturbance while he was teaching, proved to be an incipient cancer. He died very suddenly during an otherwise smooth recovery from his operation in his hospital bed of an embolus, perhaps because his heart was not strong enough to pull him through. I remember little, if any, change in his outward appearance, with his black moustache and a fringe of hair around his practically bald head, which made him always wear a hat.
