Such an insight (I had discussed it with Christa often enough!) should have brought us together all the more humbly. It should have made us love and protect each other in this state of exposure, aid and assist each other as much as we could. At those times, people truly met at point zero, as the term goes; thus they could have easily laid down arms, formed an alliance, jointly confronted an existence under spiteful conditions. But precisely because we were—albeit only legally—joined in matrimony, the knowledge remained one-sided and hence ineffective. Right after the passage from bridehood into matrimony, that is, right after the legalized transformation of favors into actionable duties, Christa saw me no longer as a fellow traveller through the earthly vale of tears but simply as the archenemy of women, a failure on all fronts, a man who with others of his kind had started a war and shamefully lost it; and now, in this devastation, instead of putting a decent roof over our heads, he was nattering on about a beautiful future—and, to make matters worse, had gotten her pregnant, thereby adding one more extortionate, helpless mouth to the existing hungry ones.

Nevertheless, I loved her very much. Only I saw, alas, that I could not count on her as I could count on, say, Nagel. I could not count on the same understanding, at least. It should be said that not only was she of that order of women who on principle try to tie us down to accursed earthliness, she was of a different race entirely: despite her good background, she was one of the poor in blood, the gray-faced, rummaging through the rubble fields, looking for the remnants of their property, instead of being delighted to be rid of it and able to begin a new, unencumbered existence. I had no sympathy with these people, though day in day out they were a vivid reminder of the condition humaine. They did not rebel against it. To use a literary expression that does not come from Nagel, they ate the flour even after they themselves were put through the mill. Rather than react with sovereign scorn towards the tremendous injustice of life, they strained and made the harness all the tighter; they moaned under the lashes of real and imaginary ordeals, but put their heads in the yoke.

They were our natural enemies, Nagel’s and mine, as it struck me at the time, and they hated us as profoundly as we hated them. It was a time of promise, in which (as Nagel was later to write) “we readied ourselves for the adventure of renewal,” and they turned it into a workaday grayness, which ultimately nipped our confidence in the bud. We lived in the frivolity of the saints, like the lilies of the field—for “whatever one may say about the ludicrous weakness of the human spirit when confronted with the relentless conditions of nature, that weakness does give us the strength to transcend our plight, even if only temporarily and with fictions” (Nagel) . . .