One must not overestimate the effect of Hertzog’s speeches and writings on subsequent German intellectual life. And even less on political life. He merely served as an alibi. Every conjurer knows the term “misdirection”: a diversionary tactic that, at the decisive moment, shifts the audience’s attention from the fingers about to perform the actual sleight-of-hand. Postwar German development used Professor Hertzog in this way and got along without any actual reference to his ideas. And he was not alone in this respect: the generous occupation-supported interregnum of intellectuals in Germany from 1945 to 1948 (Kultur, Kultur über Alles) was a happy but politically disastrous period.

Nevertheless, Hertzog is pretty much the only one of the then princes of the mind whose head (or mental balls) was not sliced off by the currency cut. His academic career remains unflaggingly at its zenith. Likewise he has a steady influx of patients. He is a shining light at all kinds of national and international congresses—that clever fellow who effortlessly manages to reconcile humanism and technology, Plato and Lenin, Freud and Saint Paul (plus Picasso and Michelangelo, Proust, Joyce, the Bauhaus, Apollinaire, Salvador Dalí, Rilke, Alban Berg, Dada, Nijinski, Herbert von Karajan, and, over and over again, Karl Nagel—for, needless to say, he’s also keenly interested in the arts). No doubt about it, this is a bravura performance, and indeed one of high symbolic content, if one understands that only a shrink could succeed in pulling it off.

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But I digress, and indeed far beyond that wintertide that left so much melancholy yearning in my mind. What I wanted to talk about is the weather: the bitter-cold winter weather during that period, and the hallowed hours in Nagel’s garden house. With Hertzog, they openly acquired the character of a church service.

To be sure, we first had to go through a brief and occasionally stormy process of fermentation.

This was due not just to the topic of the “discussion evenings,” as our once disorderly, turnip schnapps–fired palavers were now suddenly known. The chief cause was that we now had a topic. Earlier, you see, we had jumped erratically from one subject to another—with the rough directness that set the tone in those days. The word “shit,” now vivaciously circulating again, was in great favor before the currency reform. But the rough exterior concealed a heart of gold: an almost childlike openness of minds and feelings. We talked about anything “that came up”—and so many things came up, because everything was new as in childhood. From the flat Ptolemaic world, the world had emerged band-box fresh. “The phoenix,” said Nagel, who was already tending toward complex metaphors, “naturally knows, like any magician, the most dazzling way to perform his feat: on a tabula rasa.” If only he had known then how right he would be at the currency cut!

Anyway, we talked about whatever crossed our minds, and, in greatest detail, of course, about the things that were truly new in our lives. Christa, for instance, harped incessantly on the food shortage, Nagel on God, the rest of us on the preparation of turnip schnapps and the American short story, nuclear fission and its possible consequences, existential philosophy, the Anglo-Saxons, Russians, and French and their behavior during and after the war, radio programs (“The Cultural Word”), diverse treatments for the clap, the possibility of attaining higher caloric value by inserting rabbits into the consumption process for cabbage. And over and over again, needless to say, Germany’s present and future. With Hertzog, however, this higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge was sieved for so-called central questions. And these, in turn, had to be systematically analyzed. The key factor derived from the gap that our unslaked need for religion had sucked out of the world of experience. In terms of a working hypothesis, it was initially most suitable to fill that gap with Jesus Christ.