Barth the Failure?

You guys will have to forgive me. I recently moved and my first volume of Church Dogmatics is still packed away somewhere, so as you can imagine, I'm going to be a bit behind. But I thought I'd offer this, a quote from Vol. 1 of Barth's The Gottingen Dogmatics, that I recently purchased. It's actually quoted from a letter that he wrote to his friend Eduard Thurneysen as Barth was about to quit his pastoral duties and recorded in Migliore's introduction:

"When Barth left his pastorate in Safenwil, Switzerland, in 1921 to take up his new academic post in Gottingen, Germany, he was not optimistic about his chances of success. He wrote to his friend Eduard Thurneysen: 'I dare not even think about having to lecture three or six or eight hours each week.' 'I just can't imagine myself in the situation and cannot think that I will be anything but a great failure.'"

I find that to be an utterly amazing confession.