He came. Not right away, to be sure. Cunningly, he waited until winter. But then, the green-camouflaged months soon passed. Nevertheless, Nagel was in a bad mood. He evidently expected Professor Hertzog with “tee-zee” to reconstruct his view of the world, which had got considerably out of joint since the encounter with Father GOD.

Until then, it had been solidly founded on Darwin; Marx and Engels were firmly joined on top; and Nagel had even managed to insert the seductive Nietzsche seamlessly and to paste in Freud. But since that encounter with Father GOD, his ideological edifice was stretched thin as though by bomb suction, “puffed through,” as the rubble-dwellers put it in their jargon; and his gruffness in discussions bore witness to the awful draftiness in his spiritual home. Whenever I felt like teasing him (no one could so easily and ludicrously be made to fly off the handle as Nagel), I would advise him in case of intellectual inclemency to appeal to the man who had, it was true, no umbrella, but a need for the religious. Where was he anyway? Karl Nagel would instantly get mad as a hornet. However, when winter came, so did Hertzog. A downright epiphany. Since last we’d met, he had joined the resurrected university as a fully tenured professor and senior registrar of its neuropathological hospital, thus appearing among us whippersnappers with a corresponding authority as a complete human being and scientist. Not only that, but he had succeeded in convincing the military government of the occupation forces that he had heroically resisted the euthanasia of five patients—Party members. And true virtue is rewarded even by victorious armies. Thus, he came as a father: bringing along a bottle of real schnapps and two packs of English cigarettes. Santa Claus in person. In his sack of goodies he even had a “paper” down cold (not written, needless to say, though evil tongues maintained later that he had submitted it as a postdoctoral dissertation at the university). He carried this wealth of ideas in his head. He had only to open his mouth and the ideas, marvelously formulated in a gentle baritone, spilled out like treasure. Every sentence demonstrated how conscientiously he had worked through the subject matter. It had become so air- and watertight that there was little we could do but listen. The topic was obvious. Subsequently, it appeared in countless versions, variations, combinations, in many, many domestic and foreign journals and reviews and just plain magazines, thereby acquiring worldwide fame. Naturally, of these publications, only the popular-science ones are accessible to me, those where the expert across several fields, who communicates with colleagues in a kind of Freemason’s secret code, speaks to the layman as though to a feeble-minded illiterate. And if I remember correctly, these articles are crowned with titles like “Faith and Psyche,” or “Mental Illness and the Bonds of Religion,” or “The Psychiatrist as a Christian Minister,” or even “Savior vs. Sanatorium.” But I may be mistaken. For our little group, at any rate, which he seemed to regard, flatteringly but, alas, wrongly, as the nucleus of the postwar German political elite, the contents of his paper were framed in the title “The Need for God as a Principle for Forming the State.”