Meanwhile, indulge me: That was not yet a time like today when people can draw ready-to-use intellectual material from paperbacks and cultural radio and television programs. We were troglodytes. Those who—like myself, like Nagel and our buddies around the bottle of turnip schnapps in Nagel’s garden flat (later, the nuclear group around Professor Hertzog; I shall give a detailed account of this elsewhere)—those, I say, like us, from the juiciest generation of cannon fodder for WWII, whose best years of learning and education were suddenly interrupted by that historic event and who were left behind with the always insatiable hunger of the half-educated and the autodidactic—such people, in their poignant attempts to analyze the spiritual bases for yesterday’s catastrophe in order to destroy the seed of evil and perhaps eliminate it from the spiritual foundation of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, felt like pioneers and rubble-rummagers and refuse-recyclers. We continued to feel the naive need to explain everything ex ovo—even age-old commonplaces and platitudes—to ourselves as well as everyone else. For not only had the commonplaces and platitudes become extremely questionable but also we could no longer count on understanding them without an ex ovo explanation—or on being understood when we did explain them. We were troglodytes and lived among troglodytes—not like the spoiled youth of today, in an environment that obtains its well-founded knowledge and reliable intellectual depth in oversize paperbacks and educational TV channels with all the paraphernalia of prefaces, fore-words, and introductions, notes, addenda, and bibliographical data (home delivery free of charge). Far off still lay the present day, in which the satisfied highway rest stop person might, figuratively speaking, transpose the elegant atmosphere of the champagne advertisement into cerebral experience and—in fashionable comfort, aristocratically leaning back in his plastic-bolster sofa, clutching a beer can, listening to the cultivated voice of a moderator—mentally follow the most exciting philosophical paper chase (forgive the shallow metaphor; it forces itself on me!) with a cheerful Husserl, behind the pack of yapping Jasperses, cross-country over Heidegger and Wittgenstein; for him, the sovereign self-servicer in all other situations of life except for the unacknowledged intellectual situation, our lederhosen-boy-scout ponderings in the prehistorical year of 1947 must seem like a quaint folksong.

But, as I have said, time only appeared to be stagnating in those days. What lay ahead moved one hour closer to us with every revolution of the clock’s hand. Of course, the star of Bethlehem was in the winter sky of 1946–47—thanks to a need, intensified by the lack of real bread, for the “bread one doth not eat.” But as the winter of 1947–48 drew to a close, one could tell that this bread had no hope of keeping up in the race with the bread one doth eat, as soon as this last appeared in sufficient quantities and thickly stacked with cold cuts. Soon the black market was running smoothly, new democratic parties were a reality, the press and the publishing world were flourishing, and instead of the star of Bethlehem the star of Astra Films had risen over Hamburg. The interregnum of the Quonset-hut intellectuals ended without anyone’s noticing.