There, however, he didn’t spend much time provoking the Schuschnigg regime, which was decaying anyway (his opinion of Austrians was never high; he found fault with me too, certain features that he ascribed to my formative years in Vienna: inadequate solidity of character, for instance, hence also careless squandering of a certain talent for linguistic artistry). He gave up political agitation among the cisleithan assholes and (a forerunner, a pioneer, of hitchhike tourism) thumbed his way across Switzerland to Italy. There (more dynamic than Goethe), he forged ahead through Terracina, all the way to Palermo, crossed over to Libya, traipsed along the North African coast to Ceuta (a florilegium of small adventures—nowhere near as vividly narrated as on those frost-crackling winter evenings under the horse blanket—has just been put out by Scherping). Next, he crossed the Fretum Herculeum, navigating his own sailboat, and, by way of Spain and France (five fantastic days in Paris: brothel visit and so on!), he came back to Germany. While crossing the border, he was intercepted. He had neglected to obey his draft notice, had not promptly answered the call of duty, and was therefore considered a deserter. The outcome could have been unpleasant, but his father (fortunately a World War I veteran, Iron Cross First Class, gold Party pin) ironed the matter out. Of course, his offspring was promptly inducted into the Wehrmacht.

Uniformed, shorn, given hell, thrown in the guardhouse, put on latrine-cleaning detail (“I’m gonna make you slave like Augeas, you fucker!”). Then, as a reward for the work accomplished, he was allowed to belly through the Lüneburg Heath in full battle dress and kit. In revenge, young Nagel (familiarized, incidentally, with the teachings of Sigmund Freud during his travels abroad) drew the necessary conclusions from the twofold Oedipus situation with his father the beer-brewer and with Father State and became a Communist. However, an active cultivation of this anything but popular ideological direction was obstructed by the war.

But in those days, when the ice wind tattered the angels’ frozen feathers, something glowed over the crooked garden house of the villa on the Elbchaussee: the star under which our allegedly rationalist yet ardently myth-believing century has ever sought the start of a new Golden Age.

Nagel had ignited the star. He had, of course, enriched it with evangelical rays (he had met God in the war—a story that has been served up to his readers in several versions), but the model was still recognizable.

From among those who had returned and those who had stayed at home, refugees, stragglers, and drifters, a small circle of like-minded and simply conversation-minded people had formed around him, and this circle now drank our home-brewed turnip schnapps, rolled cigarettes out of the tobacco Christa raised on the manure pile (she, meanwhile, lay in bed and pouted), and overcame the unovercomable past (which back then was the present of yesterday). People discussed Karl Marx, Ortega y Gasset, and Hemingway, the Bible, Hermann Broch, Camus and Sartre, Max Weber, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and, promiscuously and chaotically, just about everything we got wind of. Anyone who came emptied out of his pocket not only crumbs of sugar, ersatz coffee, herring paste, or cigarettes but also the tiny hoarding bag of his knowledge, emaciated by twelve years of Nazi rule. He would bring along a book he had smuggled through the Thousand Year Reich—a volume of Karl Kraus, James Joyce, Musil, Kafka—or simply a foreign newspaper, or a report on a radio program he had recently listened to, probably still with the subliminal fear of being caught. Intellectually too, it was a slum; “but,” as Nagel later wrote, “in intellectual matters, hunger is a virtue that yields miracles. Though the loaves be as meager as at the feeding of the five thousand, not only does one eat one’s fill, but one also gathers twelve baskets from the crumbs that are left over.”