For, you see, Aunt Hertha too had relations with superreality. She had heard from over there, an indisputable source, that every self materializing here on earth is merely one half of a spiritual unity whose other half is embodied in a different self, usually of the opposite sex. Every self seeks this other half, and when it has found it, then there is no end to bliss. Such was the case with her. She had found her counterpart in Uncle Helmuth and henceforth lived only for him.

It didn’t bother her that Aunt Selma despised her for it (“Why, you’re in bondage to the man!”) or that Cousin Wolfgang visibly suffered from it. Her mind was fixed on the sublime. A person who has found his counterpart has not automatically arrived in the Nirvana of bliss. On the contrary, he (or she) is chosen for special tasks. For when such a unity is completed, then in its fully restored spiritual capacity it naturally understands the mission it must carry out through its materialization. By means of brotherly love and the proclamation of the True Doctrine, it must build the ever more spiritual, dematerialized City of God on Earth. Superfluous to mention that she, Aunt Hertha, as the female (i.e., more tested, more earthbound, hence doomed to greater suffering in material existence, and thus, of course, more sublime) half of the Helmuth/Hertha duo, believed in Adolf Hitler’s mission of salvation long before Uncle Helmuth did.

Now, Cousin Wolfgang believed the same thing more and more resolutely and was more and more ready for action. In the evening he would disappear without saying where he was going. I alone saw him in our room girding himself up and pulling on shoulder straps. I also found brass knuckles and rubber clubs and once even a pistol on our bookshelf—behind the Spinoza, comically enough, which he must have felt was secure from me. But even though my brother Cousin Wolfgang now daily armed himself to flee the emptiness of the house and submerge himself in the bliss of Nazi comradeship, he could only shrug at his mother’s ravings. He believed that if she had read her Plato, she would know that with her—or rather, Uncle Helmuth’s—silly notion of a counterpart, she was making a gospel out of the joke of a drunken comedy writer—the dumb cow!

Still, Cousin Wolfgang was fair enough (“intellectually honest,” he called it) to admit that the reason his parents’ no doubt basically harmless spiritualism enraged him so much was that he was jealous of his father to the point of occasionally murderous hatred. This realization (especially the insight that his own spiritual ambitions sprang from the desire to expose the knuckleheadedness of this “cross between a mechanic and an Anabaptist” whom to his great disgust he had to acknowledge as his procreator) annoyed him doubly because it required him to recognize a so-called Oedipus complex, thereby corroborating the obscene theories of the Jew Freud. Although, to be sure, Germanic mythology also had . . .