to become Eine Kindheit, kept a record of his war experiences later published as Rumänisches Tagebuch, and also made notes which served as the basis for a large section of his Lebensgedankenbuch titled Führung und Geleit. Carossa served as battalion medical officer on both fronts: first a short period in France, then an extended stay in the southeastern theater (Rumänisches Tagebuch), where his unit was involved in the Second Battle of Oituz. In 1918 Carossa's unit was transferred back to northern France where he suffered a shoulder wound which ended his military career. Weimar Republic The gay Munich, which Carossa had remembered from before the war, greeted the convalescent veteran with somber, black-veiled women, limping men, and empty store windows. This was no time for poets of limited ability, as Carossa considered himself. At the time he felt earnestly: In den Jahren der Prüfung und Erniedrigung, wenn das Volk trauernd zur Erde schaut, wird ihm der Dichter stets am allernächsten sein. But his own destiny was to be primarily that of a doctor. Ich werde wieder an Krankenbetten sitzen, über fremde Leiden Buch führen, Diagnosen und Prognosen stellen, Heilmittel verordnen, Zeugnisse verfassen, öfters Nachts gerufen werden, und von Zeit zu Zeit eine Urlaubsreise antreten und hie und da einmal ein paar Verse oder eine Seite Prosa schreiben ... Dem ärztlichen Wesen wollte ich verbunden bleiben und falls ich etwas schriebe, mit der Sprache kaum anders umgehen als mit den Heilgiften, auf deren genaue Dosierung ich eingeübt war. He considered it a good omen that while purchasing new medical instruments during his convalescence in Munich, he met Rilke who then turned out to be the first patient of his renewed practice. Upon his own recovery he returned to his Passau office. With renewed dedication, he read medical journals and went to lectures at the clinic to improve his abilities. The Passau practice grew and kept him quite busy. Nevertheless, in a later addition to his autobiographies, published posthumously, he concedes that when he moved to Munich, not long after reestablishing his Passau practice he fully intended to give up medicine for the life of a 'freier Schriftsteller': a wish which could not then become reality. Doctor Carossa did however, find a little time for the "Heilgifte" of literature. In 1922, the author of Doktor Bürger, which had been so glaringly modelled on Goethe's Werther, published the first volume of his autobiography,