Now, here, I could talk to him “fairly”—as we said—about John and Stella: with more thorough knowledge and greater insight into the ways and dynamics of their world. I could explain to him why it made no difference at all whether they were the exploiters and oppressors that Uncle Helmuth made them out to be (and that he, Wolfgang, agreeing with his father for once, saw them as): John, the second son of the second son of some high-ranking peer, who went through the typical education process at Eton and Cambridge, who, casually and peripherally, as it were, became a linguist, highly esteemed in that field for his knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient Persian and for his translations and editions of rare manuscripts from the early Sufi period, but who one day chucked his bookworm life and entered the British diplomatic service, where his duties were of a very special sort; and Stella, the daughter of a Bucharest department-store millionaire, a woman for whom squandering money was an inner compulsion, a redemption of her socialist conscience from the guilt of being a capitalist’s child. Stella, who, in Berlin—the legendary Berlin of the late twenties!—had been friends with Paul Flechtheim, Gottfried Benn, Max Reinhardt, George Grosz; who had studied sociology in Heidelberg, psychology at the Sorbonne, art history in Florence and Freiburg, and was as well known in Prague as in Madrid. Stella, who had her winter chalet at Saint Moritz, her summer villas in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and Biarritz, and regularly won the prize for being the most elegant “Lady in Her Car” at the autumn races in Baden-Baden as well as first prize in the golf tournament. Stella, the indefatigable nightclub denizen, the chain-smoker whose collection of lovers was as significant as her collection of Futurist art. Stella, who had read her Marx as passionately as The Divine Comedy, who knew her Einstein as thoroughly as the writings of Lilly Braun . . . Whether it was correct to call these two people plutocrats, cynically knowing participants in and promoters of an inhumane system, even its parasites—this made no difference whatsoever;

it wasn’t the issue, any more than to what extent and in what manner they would have been able to open new horizons for Cousin Wolfgang too, to have done for him what they did for me: expand the world by adding a different world, freer, roomier, airier than the petit bourgeois confinement in which we spitefully crammed our Plutarch and Hölderlin in order to be something better than the uneducated in the back courtyards. They could have opened up to him a world that was cheerier, brighter, more humane than our sweaty, anxiety-damp probity made insipid by hopes that were never fulfilled, the philistine probity about which we boasted because it cost so many sacrifices, though it brought us nothing that did not feed our arrogance; in any case, a world in which the bathroom pipes weren’t rusty from the wet laundry always hanging from them.

He hated all these things as much as I did, my brother Cousin Wolfgang. He suffered as much as I did from the stench of cabbage and watery soup in the stairwell of No. 14 in a long line of tenements built in the same ugly way, dilapidated in the same grease-smeared, gray, filthy decay. He felt as much as I did how our vitality was suffocated under all sorts of lamentable restrictions and shameful renunciations. He felt as much as I did—like a lead band around the mind—the eternal anxiety about that cherished bit of breathing space beyond sheer existence, threatened daily by higher rents, potato prices, job dismissals, forced evictions . . .