Oskar Negt has been fortunate. His life could be told as a success story: Growing up as the youngest of seven children on a small farm without educational resources in East Prussia's Kapkeim, he became a representative of the Frankfurt School, a recognized philosopher honored worldwide, and a professor of sociology. However, Negt's childhood and youth were marked by painful experiences, including fleeing with two teenage sisters to the "City of the Dead," Königsberg, and across the Baltic Sea to Denmark, where he lived for years in internment camps until the family was reunited near East Berlin. They then fled again, this time to the West. It was not until 1955, ten years after leaving East Prussia, that he felt he had arrived. Negt uses his personal history as a basis to raise fundamental questions about autobiographical writing.