So, we lived like the lilies of the field, Nagel and I, and they, the flatfooted race, heaped shit over our loveliest blossoms. For us they were what they had been for Uncle Helmuth: the wicked OTHERS. They spoiled the dreams of the dreamers, the fictive happiness of the enraptured. Even before, when they had been so well housed and sated that the fat on the backs of their necks burst their rubber collars, they had lived shabby, workaday lives, and they would go on like that once they were sated and well housed again. Even now, with their world shattered, they did not face what had happened as a challenge. They took everything as a stroke of fate, which for better or worse had to be weathered with heads bowed. Whatever was to come—even if it wasn’t worse but, unexpectedly, better—theirs would be the same maggot’s existence in the same roll of neck fat. They could not picture, hence could not bring about, anything better. Unlike us, they lived without the Easter promise, lived instead with the tenacity of termites, which was far superior to our childlike-fantasy ways. For them, the future was not a sublime vision, its rays transfiguring even the gray present, but something they trudged toward; it could bring them at best a more sated, more corpulent, more stably housed, although equally dismal present—and yet still they were certain it was theirs, no matter whether the terrors lurking in it were the same old terrors or even worse.

Incidentally, I do not know where we overexcited windbags, we visionaries around Nagel—or rather around the homemade turnip schnapps in Nagel’s garden flat—got the idea that we’d been given a mission. We truly believed we were meant to find the solution to any conflict, plight, evil, stroke of fate in human existence (we called them “problems”). We played ourselves up as if we and no one else had to find the key to the future of Germany and thereby, per Major General Baron von Neunteuffel, to the destiny of the entire world. We searched for the “spiritual foundations of a new humanity,” even before Professor Hertzog supplied us with this rousing formulation. Meanwhile, the other race, Christa and her ilk, concerned themselves with the rationing stamps for a special allocation of barley. They did not think beyond the next day, but, petty, sullen, and tenacious, they spared no effort to ensure that the next day would at least be no worse than today. We dreamers and windbags viewed this narrow-minded scorn of the spirit as a danger for the day after tomorrow. But while we were talking about how to stave off that danger, they kept puttering and pottering on in their obligatory dreariness, creating the foundations for their world—and the day after tomorrow was then as empty of hope as today and tomorrow.