In those years I acted in a lot of plays and my artistic career was on the rise. But what I was paid was nowhere near enough to support a family of five. In 1955 the highest fee for a single play was between 500 and 600 Marks. Little by little real poverty crept into our family life. Friedel was a mistress of improvisation, and she was always able to get credit with the baker and the shopkeeper – we didn't visit the butcher very often. But we couldn't go on like that forever. We needed a regular monthly income that could at least cover the family's basic needs. At the time, you could draw state unemployment support for six months. Then there was only municipal unemployment aid, and for us that was 25 Marks a week.

There's a saying that goes, “When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out through the window.” That's how it was for us. I started to suffer from my inferiority complex again, started stammering, messed up in the radio studio and the offers of work dried up. Friedel started to reproach me with my incompetence and failure. Of course she was right from her point of view. When that happened I always ran out of the house in a rage and into the nearby forest, taking with me a hatchet and a handwagon so I could hack out tree roots (with the friendly permission of the Forest Warden) and chop them up as fuel for the winter.

The Americans stationed near Butzbach were modernizing and extending an old German army shooting range. There was a lot of reinforced concrete in the building rubble, and it was possible to extract the iron from the concrete using a hammer and chisel. You could get a good price for scrap metal in those days – especially for copper and brass. I counted myself lucky when I could find metal in a ditch or in the forest, or, as once happened, a discarded car radiator made of pure copper. When it got dark, I would sometime sneak onto the fields attached to the nearby prison and dig up a basket of potatoes or a cabbage, so I could at least have something to take home with me.