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Karl Nagel would not have had to encounter the most fatherly of all fathers in order to add the four rays of the Evangelists to the pentagram of politically applied historical materialism. This too was due mainly to the weather. The weather was so grim that a small iron stove, heated fairly well with now superfluous cultural instruments (we had already tackled the wooden paneling in the villa library and the shattered grand piano in the drawing room), was a wellspring of upswelling gratitude, which, in light of the prevailing circumstances, was bound to overpour into the metaphysical.

The point is, public transportation operated poorly in those days, and for mere mortals (surviving tenaciously despite hunger edema), personal means meant one’s own two legs, and some didn’t even have that: at least three of our intellectual companions were left with only one—or one and a half, or one and three-quarters. But anyone who came wandering out all the way to the Elbchaussee on foot (or even on crutches!) had to cross the icily whistling wastelands of the Reeperbahn and Altona, thus offering up a sacrifice of almost mystical grandeur—that noble self-renunciation that gives the formations of primal communities a legendary touch. The at first sporadic but then more regular get-togethers, where we talked ourselves into a fever pitch like Dostoevskian students, took on the character of consecrated hours. Even in its spiritual meagerness there was a certain crèche-like intimacy.

All kinds of things were talked about, and if we sometimes reached one of those moments of collective reflection that occur when someone comes out with a newish truth that is not yet shopworn, then something like a simple poignancy in the mind occurred. “Our crèche piety,” I called it when telling Schwab about it later: “There it lay before us in the straw, naked and helpless, the new itty-bitty truth; the shepherds can’t take their eyes off it; even when three Technicolor kings come out of the bitter-cold, snowy night with an ox and an ass, their eyes remain fixed on it, the itty-bitty little truthlet. May it now grow and become the All-Inspirer. It is already radiating with starry brightness to all eyes that look up to peer at one another . . .”

This was soon to change, when, in Hertzog, we got our first pope.

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Hertzog joined us by chance—but of course Nagel had denied the existence of chance ever since his personal encounter with the Almighty: hence, God sent Hertzog to us. This happened in one of the green-camouflaged months, under the meteorological phenomenon of a violent downpour. We—that is, Nagel and I, the “identical twins,” as Christa called us (without anatomical allusion, surely?)—were tinkering around with the roof shingles on the garden house. We were about to take refuge under the overhang when we collided with a figure obscured by the thick slanted hatching of raindrops, who evidently had the same idea. It was an unusually lanky and, of course, given the period, scrawny man—a gentleman, one might say, despite the socially equalizing and also dripping clothes; so that at first I assumed it was one of Christa’s countless relatives, who were always dropping in. He promptly and cordially apologized for trespassing on the rubble property, but, as he explained, he had no umbrella. Oh, well, there were worse lacks in those days.