Rönnekamp’s pale, sharp private-eye profile (Arsène Lupin, avenger of the disinherited—the main reading material of my formative years in Vienna) and the fanatically cold vanity in his tropically lashed eyes when he snapped in his hard Baltic accent: “This, gentlemen, is simply the very antithesis of art!”

Happy days of my youthful callowness, when the sketches for my book were still briskly drawn from human life (and who would ever have dreamed back then that it would not be granted me to present it to Schwab in a finished manuscript and relish my first triumph in his beautiful envy)!

At any rate, and be that as it may: now the notes were lost. In the past few days, I had meticulously, yes downright hungrily combed the folder marked Hamburg—Miscellaneous, and had not come across the note. Nor had I missed it when going through the folder, even though an obviously related list of idiotic questions about the philosophy of art had come into my hands:

Does the supposed distortion of a Romanesque lion have an artistic aim? Or did the Romanesque simply “see things that way”?

Is art a by-product? That is: Did Giotto paint his frescoes as an artist or as a pious Christian?

To what extent would the literary value of Samuel Pepys’s Diary be greater had it been fiction?

(and so on)—

These things could truly have been uttered in Rönnekamp’s salon or even in Witte’s refined home: as at a round table of Kultur-bearers, among whom Christa appeared like a regrettably mute unicorn, quite properly manipulating a knife and fork (what exquisite things she would have yielded had she been granted the power of speech!). Grouped around her: the director of the School of Arts and Crafts with his wife (a former ballet mistress); the publisher of the Financial Gazette with his wife (a doctor of philosophy); a cybernetics teacher with his wife (intimidated petite bourgeoise; incidentally, the only one who got Christa to speak, three brief sentences about a pudding recipe). And at the high point of the discussion, somewhere the question “Boots, you feel, are a Freudian symbol?”

Which is patriarchally rebuffed by Witte: “Please, not at the table!”

Again, and yet again: happy days! For just imagine if I could have had that dance of death published back then, that macabre postwar German round: Christa, Rönnekamp, Witte, and Carlotta: the victims of the resistance movement and the sodomy law, the economic-reconstruction miracle, the Financial Gazette, arts and crafts and cybernetics, Doktor Oetker’s pudding powder and Professor Doktor Jaspers’s philosophy hand in hand, and: reach for the violin, Dame Past! Kultur starts playing in an Isadora Duncan dress. A bit moth-eaten, of course: the ivy is growing out of Kultur’s eye sockets. But these are true values, salvaged from the rubble, dusted off and freshly polished:

but, no doubt about it, that list was part of another (fragmentary) note that I had found floating loosely in the folder labeled Magma and transferred to the new folder labeled Schwab (although I can no longer recall my intention—certainly not as a model for a conversation with him? Impossible!):