I was granted this winter experience in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe (frozen over) in 1945–46, 1946–47, and 1947–48.

Needless to say, various mild months occurred in between. At times, the rubble landscape even donned a camouflage-green-splotched frock. Perhaps, people even sweated there occasionally, healthfully sweated out the excessive water content of cabbage, potatoes, and fodder beets—ultraviolet sun rays might have eased hunger edema—but all in all, the winter withdrew only temporarily and soon returned with an even icier grip on the ruins of the city.

All this is known. Most of my German contemporaries went through it themselves (meanwhile, cinematic artworks have come to us from America envisioning the day after the annihilation of the world by hydrogen bombs: the mood is pretty much the same), so I can spare myself the trouble of describing it in detail. The only interesting thing is that this grim wintertide stayed with me rather traumatically—but only by virtue of its loss.

What people don’t know (or at least don’t generally remember) is that it was heartrendingly human. It was certainly no radiant humanity (like, for instance, that of the late Herr Doktor Albert Schweitzer, who was being held up to everyone as an example) but, rather, the dismal, gray-faced humanity of slums—and, despite all the anguishing nuances, the story is ultimately of biblical simplicity: the evil are bad, the good good; the lukewarm lukewarm, the fiery fiery; the wise wise, the fools foolish; the smart people smart, the stupid ones stupid.

That’s how simple the world was (until the day when the weather changed again as though by magic, marked in my notes as the “day of the currency cut”): almost a picture-book world.

People dealt plainly with one another (almost everyone wore rags). If you had nothing to say, then you held your tongue (although the man who held his tongue was not necessarily the one who had nothing to say); but if someone talked, you listened. If he talked nonsense, you promptly told him so: people weren’t shy in those days (they had already learned the meaning of fear). If you asked someone for something and he turned you down, you accepted that as his privilege and didn’t hold a grudge. If someone gave you something, you were grateful. If someone stole something from you, you let him go (you would probably have done the same in his place). If you had no bed to sleep in, you pushed a couple of sleeping people closer together and lay down next to them—and if they drove you away, they had bad dreams afterward. Anyone who didn’t want to share his piece of bread ate it alone and was ashamed (or else wasn’t: that was his privilege). Any man who coveted his neighbor’s wife was a wonderboy: just where did he get the calories?!

Most likely, a very few did live in joy, in the lap of luxury, on the gravy train. But they were marked. Marked not to be condemned but to be marveled at: extraordinarily vital (or miserable) existences. To put it tersely and topically: the middle-class categories were canceled. Values were drawn not from ideologies but from living reality—in nouns, not adjectives: my friend the black-marketeer. That asshole of a food official. Unsophisticated, plain, and simple.