In short, it ended with Professor Hertzog’s unshakable assertion that man has an innate and irrepressible need for religion, no doubt about it, one can demonstrate it scientifically, certain mental disturbances can even be diagnosed indisputably as deficiency syndromes in this respect, mental scurvy, as it were, where faith has an effect like lemon juice, I’m speaking to laymen here of course, professionally I would put it differently, oh please don’t go out of your way, these are issues we’re all very interested in, by the way, if you’d like another, we brew it ourselves, you know, yes, thank you very much, it’s damn strong, but the effect is all the more Dionysian . . . you see how even you quite unconsciously keep bringing up supernatural things; as I’ve said, psychological needs can no more be suppressed with impunity than physical ones, there’s a wide-open field here, especially for social psychology. But this is a nice coincidence. You see, we’ve been discussing this for several weeks now with a couple of friends, more in political terms, why that goes without saying, it is a highly political problem, indeed, just look: your class-stratified state is conceivable only on the basis of the patriarchal principle, without the notion of God as the most fatherly father there can be no bourgeois social structure, naturally not, but that proves precisely what I’m saying: the need for religion is natural and innate in man, just like, say, the sexual drive, and Freud showed us what happens if you suppress it, well, and rationalism is simply the other repression, just tell our friends that, why it’s obvious, we saw it in the Russians with our own eyes, despite a quarter century of Communism those people keep swarming into the churches, well, the war machine functioned there for completely different reasons, you can’t do without psychology even here, which is what rigid materialism would like you to do, isn’t it, incidentally Stalin is also a father, and what a father at that, and you can’t say the Russians have a truly classless society, on the contrary, the Kremlin elite has distinctly aristocratic features, granted, not on the outside, no, there’s absolutely no way you can claim that, hahaha, but Moscow’s betraying Communism in many ways, and the point is: how does a classless society establish its own notion of God, yes, the process must be reversed, first alter the notion of God, then establish the appropriate state, perhaps matriarchal, why not, I tell you, it’s the theologians who are at fault here, so listen, just drop by in the evening, then we can thrash this out with our friends, I’d love to, why not, it would interest me no end, you seldom come into contact with open minds, especially in young people, well, we’re not all that young, alas, but that makes no difference, you’re as young as you feel, so do come by anyway if you have nothing better to do, I couldn’t imagine anything better, certainly not nowadays, well really. . .