(call Wohlfahrt immediately: he’ll flip his lid; he’ll fly to Hitchcock with the idea tomorrow.)

I knew it: this is going to be a creative day. The idea is brilliant. Eventually, it’ll lead to the theodicy, which was so important to Schwab. EVIL in its most sublime, most perfidious variations: love, friendship, brotherhood. The brotherhood of Cain and Abel . . . It would have fascinating dramatic high points: Cousin Wolfgang’s appearance, for example: “Well, what do you have to say now? . . .” Nothing. What should I have said? A man is given the chance to survive at least the first half of a struggle between maddened nations, survive it calmly and well fed in a brown shirt, but his conscience does not permit him; or rather: THE TEMPTER has aroused this conscience in him . . . So, at the very start, for the Polish campaign, he plants himself before the tempter in a poignantly simple military gray, and his eyes ask with defiant anxiety, “Well, what do you say now? . . .” Plants himself with clumsy significance before the tempter, like the lead actor in an expressionist play, his very entrance fulfilling a bit of German destiny, the man in military gray symbolizing Langenmarck, Stalingrad . . . and his eyes, mole blind from reading so much Stefan George, heart-breakingly tragic and defiantly anxious, ask, “Well, what do you have to say now? . . .”

I have nothing to say. Not to you, either, dear Schwab. I lie here and breathe in the creaturely bliss of existence. I’ve got eight days and nights of a Descent into Hell behind me and presumably a few more days and nights ahead of me: I KNOW THAT I AM A MURDERER—like anyone who has a brother.

I know my measure of guilt. Even for certain deaths (including yours) for which I am only very indirectly responsible. Cousin Wolfgang, for example, would not have had to pass away so prematurely but for me (“Well, what do you have to say now? . . .”); likewise Stella; likewise Gaia. But this was, so to speak, the midwife’s role I played for death. Everyone plays it occasionally and also finds his own helper when his hour comes. Nor do I want to mention the corpses that still walk about on two feet in broad daylight: Christa in Hamburg or Dawn in her madhouse. And perhaps also my once so deeply beloved son—a growing corpse, a corpse apprentice, so to speak—who will soon mature to manhood, find a trade, woo a wife, make babies: all this as someone who died prematurely, killed by his father . . . I did it in order to be close to an Other. The way Nadine always wants to be close to someone. Like Christa, when we first met in the hell of Nuremberg—like Dawn: initially her awakening, her happiness, and then the plunge back into solitary confinement with herself—

Why did you die, Schwab? To reach someone else? . . . To show me and Nagel and Carlotta and Hertzog and Scherping and God knows who else that your tormented existence in contemptuous conditions was no fiction, no literary as-if, but a dreadful reality? . . . I imagine that your dead eyes must have contained the same defiantly anxious question as Cousin Wolfgang’s eyes when he stood before me, dressed in military gray for the sacrifice: “Well, what do you have to say now?. . .”