--I have been working on figuring out myself. It is not easy. It has been many many years since my Embrace. Yes, "Embrace", a term I picked up in England in the 1920's. It means accepted (or thrust) into the vampiric community by means of being drained of one's blood and given a portion of a vampires. Thus turning you into a creature of the night. I was born in Germany in 1845, Embraced in Berlin 1891... just in time for a new war.

--The last hundred-plus years have yielded me quite a bit of information about my condition. I learned in the late Nineteenth Century that I am a Malkavian. I learned in the early Twentieth Century that being a Malkavian makes one mad. I learned that far too late to stop myself from acting upon an impulse which led to my participation in a series of horrid acts during World War I under the name of Karl Donz. I told myself it was a lack of judgement... not madness.

--I learned of the Camarilla and its opponents in the early Thirties. I served in the German Army during World War II out of love for my country under a false name (can't have their records reveal I was nearly sixty). I never participated in any acts of racism toward our Jewish population, but I witnessed many. I punished none.

--I took up bartending and blood-preparations skills in the Fifties and Sixties in England, serving Toreador parties and ceremonies as an Austrian butler named Finchen. I've made many friends within the ranks of the Toreador. They enjoy fine things... my skills were appreciated. Those were the best of days.

--The Seventies brought me a wave of new blood concoctions laced with mind-altering drugs. I yearned for it. I found myself craving, at times, the effects of LSD through human blood. I became a monster and adopted a fitting personae to help it.

--The Eighties found me serving as bartender for Ventrue gatherings and royal ceremonies in and around New England in America under a new name. This was a good time. I had long gotten over my tendancy toward psychotropic effects. I had something much better. I had my madness to keep my mind flowing. Oh, didn't I say? I'm mad. Always have been.

--I only came to terms with madness in the Eighties as Franz Christan -- Ex-german Fighter Pilot, before then I was denying to myself and everyone else that I could indeed be a little crazy. My obsession? Servitude? Being someone else? Creative blood concoctions? I don't know. But all of these things have yielded to me secrets in the past. I look forward to learning more from them in the future.

These are not the Chronicles of my life. Not all of them. These are mostly lies. Rules # 1, my young Malkavian friends. If you must learn something by reading the text, you'd best be learned enough in the ways of Malkav to see all of the lies, truths, and motives in the very first word. Don't rely on the physical world to yield you knowledge. If you do, you are no better than the Nosferatu whose archives of memory don't speak from the Essential Truths and were not bestowed upon them by the Universal Patterns.