So I simply go out to the yard; it is not that I am expected, but rather that it is utterly inconceivable that I could stay away. The wheeled table already offers what she calls “a little something to munch on”: a small basket of black bread (“Just try it, it’s whole-grain bread”) rye bread caraway-seed bread graham bread aniseed bread crispbread salt sticks cheese sticks, a little board with ham on it (“Just dive right in, that’s homemade cottage-cured ham”), her familiarity is quite neutral, impersonal, noncommittal, the act of taking possession occurs by way of the exceptionally rich offering of first-class consumer goods: smoked goose breast (“It’s a home recipe, from refugees from Pomerania”), fat liverwurst (“You’ll never get that in a normal store, it comes from Holstein, straight from the farm”), a small crock of butter (“genyuwine country butter”), a stone jug of Steinhäger beer (“Drink some right away, it’s nicely chilled”), a bottle of Bommerlunder, half a bottle of kümmel, a remnant of cognac, reams of paper napkins, a small dish of salted almonds, another of sweets, a cup containing cigarettes (Copenhagen brand: gull motif), an ashtray (Rosenthal porcelain decorated by Bele Bachem’s artistic hand with a cat-faced debauchee in a corset and laced boots plus a Montgolfier floating high in the air), the weekly magazine pile (“Knowledge Is Power”)—all she’d have to do is have my slippers ready (“Why don’t you take off your tie, it’s a lot comfier”). I promptly stretch out in the chaise longue, hack off thick slices of whole-grain and rye bread, goose breast and home-cured ham, heartily heap up liverwurst on playing-card crispbread, poke the salt sticks in the butter, the cheese sticks in the mayonnaise. I need something to hold on to, something solid in this boneless situation, in this strangely abstract world; the life-giving food has to produce the reality of life I lose when I walk into the hallway here and certainly under the sunshade with stitched-on toadstools in this sunless wasteland. I try to find the reality of life in the illustrated magazines, I peruse Der Spiegel, Stern, Good Housekeeping, Better Living, Modern Woman, Radio and TV Guide; while doing so I slip more and more deeply, more and more hopelessly into abstractness, also losing my (already diluted) identity.

I am most intimately, most personally spoken to (as among gallows birds and pastors’ daughters), initiated, involved, drawn into complicity. Editors honor me with letters, fraternally presenting me with their ethical motives (not neglecting to add their passport photos), sibyls whisper their queenly wisdom to me in a uterine tone (with a profound gaze, a Mona Lisa smile around the vulva that appeals directly to my gonads). This is flattering, but it’s not meant for me; what is meant and addressed is something in me that is no longer my SELF but probably one of the countless sub- and co-selves of my experiencing self. I don’t want to be pedantic—that would promote total dissolution. But anyway it’s something embarrassingly general into which the substance of my self (perhaps slashed open by the categorical imperative) runs out—whether the ID of the psychologists (according to Sigmund Freud, the pleasure principle rules unrestrictedly there) or the ONE of the existentialists (according to Jean-Paul Sartre, the world of the salauds) makes no difference to me, it’s not my SELF—yet it is, but not really. . . There is evidently a collective self in me, into which any other self (together with its idiotic demands) can be projected, a communal multiplicity in which everyone can identify with everyone else, everyone with all the others, all with everyone. Otherwise, I couldn’t be expected to let myself be drawn into matters that are not at all my matters, utterly remote from the things that really affect me and certainly remote from the things that I can affect with my actions.