In the presence of an epistemological stopgap with such lofty moral prestige, we soon stopped laughing (our earlier laughter had been grim, but frequent). Now, I do not mean to claim that our conversations (or rather now: debates) therefore became duller. The chief pleasure had always been the thinking itself—however informal, even innocent (childlike, you see): a kind of intellectual game of tag for letting off steam until you got tired; there was no meaning, much less purpose, to it. But now it became a sport, indeed a club sport under rigid leadership, a competitive sport. Sports too are pleasurable—a competitive sport, however, is a strenuous pleasure, which sometimes comes at the cost of a good mood. And, in contrast to a lively game of tag, a bit abstract.

Hence (and also because the son of God had so dominatingly turned into a gymnastics trainer), a few of our buddies left the group—regrettably, not the worst ones. But those who stayed made it their ambition to show that the missing ones were missing something quite extraordinary.

And indeed: experiencing Hertzog in these discussions was something quite extraordinary. He came with better and better schnapps and more and more English cigarettes, and at first he acted very loose, equal among equals, a primus inter pares by sheer chance, yet incredibly cheerful, spiritually rubbing his hands together, as it were, at the joyous prospect of a good, juicy conversation, a real roast goose of a debate, nicely stuffed with apples and chestnuts and cloves. He warmed the small community up (which, for its part, was keen on the intellectual skeleton of the goose) with parish priest–like jokes. (Some of them were quite daring. For instance, I remember one about a patient who is in the habit of running around with his forefinger up his ass because he imagines he’s got a bee inside that might fly out at some embarrassing moment; he’s promised he’ll be cured; he’s anesthetized; a huge cloth bee from a toy store is placed on his bed, and when he awakes, he’s told that the bee has been removed from his body and he doesn’t have to worry anymore about its slipping out at the opera or at his father-in-law’s funeral; the patient thanks the staff exuberantly, but then he promptly rams his finger back up his ass because he’s scared the bee will fly in again, haha-haha!)

at this point, however, Herr Professor Hertzog switched over from humor to popular-scientific seriousness; he explained that the anecdote had at its heart something worthy of study: you see, the little deception of the alleged surgery on the crazy patient (for supposedly removing the bee from his asshole) was an ancient and utterly wise medical custom, a tried-and-tested therapeutic method of shamans: a casting out of the devil, a feigned exorcism; psychosomatic medicine has established the mental and spiritual origin of many organic illnesses; we still have to clarify whether and to what extent such disturbances cannot sometimes be traced to a genuine state of possession—that is to say, whether the actual psychological nidus did not form solely from a self-created malfunction of the mental and spiritual mechanism (which until now has been pictured rather too mechanistically), or whether something from outside—let us quite undauntedly use the popular term for it, a demonic power—takes control of a man’s mind and soul. As far as many neuroses and psychoses were concerned, he, Hertzog with “tee-zee,” on the basis of his rich practice and with a likelihood verging on certainty, believed he could maintain that, with a surprising number of cases, which provided ample food for thought, such an assumption could not be brushed aside.