visit his office, and he could spend most of his days at literary composition. Soon after coming back from the classic land, he published the second of his autobiographical series, Verwandlung einer Jugend (1926). This same year also brought sadness into Carossa's life when on 29 December his dear friend Rilke died. Autobiographical material from Carossa dealing with the period from the mid-twenties to the early thirties is scant; and, since Carossa's own writings are to an excessive degree the only source of information about the man, very little is known about those years. Letters to his wife's family indicate that he was very concerned with his wife's illness, which resulted in her dependency on morphine. During the 1920s he began a relationship with his later second wife, Hedwig Kerber, with a child born in 1930. The lack of literary production may indicate that problems of the German economy, primarily the disastrous inflation, had made it necessary for Carossa to return to practice. He did rework Doktor Bürger and republished it in 1929 as Schicksal Doktor Bürgers, and one year earlier his home city of Munich had honored him with its Dichterpreis. Perhaps these years of relative silence were filled with preparation for the two fine works in the offing, the first of which was to appear in 1931. On 25 May 1931 Thomas Mann's son Klaus Mann first considered emigrating from his native land because of the political situation. Two years later, he, the rest of the Mann family, and many others of Germany's finest minds did go into exile. In 1931 Carossa, outwardly at least, undisturbed by the "gathering storm" published Der Arzt Gion. Although still strongly autobiographical, this work was his first and only major work written in the third person. (The only other one was his short story Ein Tag im Spätsommer 1947.) Der Arzt Gion reflects a maturity and optimism which had been becoming increasingly evident in Carossa's works, but which seems strangely out of place in the depression-scarred, dictator-threatened Europe of 1931. From now on, except for a short period toward the end of World War II, the poet-doctor Carossa gave up medical practice completely. Carossa's last book before the Nazi Regime began was Führung und Geleit (1932), an inner survey rather than a true autobiography of his life from early youth to the 1920. Nazi Germany After the Nazi seizure of power in