It occurred to me that this too was connected with my constant thoughts about Schwab, with what had appeared to me in our precarious friendship as the quest for defeat: Eros, which had let me pleasurably feel the first conscious humiliation of my life, when I had been cruelly laughed at by classmates for an artfully recited English poem. But this was lay psychology. I was hunting for a different prey. For example: the connection between all this and the something that drove me to write. Or: what was at play behind the chance occurrence when it produces such a grotesque that it opens up a perspective into the paradoxical—that is, into the negative of logic. Seen thus, wasn’t it funny to think that it was really by way of my friend Nagel that I got to meet the piglets and thus came to write at all (not Wohlfahrt & Associates, of course—that rosy little race didn’t exist back then—just their biological ancestors, the primeval pigs of the postwar German movie industry, I would almost be tempted to say—but I would then have to beg forgiveness for this locution from Stoffel & Associates, may they rest in peace; it would by no means be meant pejoratively; its function would be purely evolutionary—those species of Sus scrofa already domesticated in the Stone Age, in the order of mammals of the setiferous artiodactyla, who are at the origin of the noble families of the European domestic swine).

Decent Nagel, in his aboveboard literary (and human) uprightness, has nothing to do with the nimble little race, of course, although every one of his best-selling novels could have been made into a box-office smash for housewives. But the rise of his star along its celestial course took place in the constellation of Stoffel & Associates, the ubiquitously long-forgotten heroes and forebears of the postwar German cinema.

They too, you see, are part of this legendary wintertide of the years 1945–48, which I (perhaps with a few rare members of my age group) must recall with persistent nostalgia, though they have otherwise slipped away from the memory of the German collective as thoroughly as the glacial periods of the Tertiary.

In those days, in the bronze heavens over Hamburg (rusting soon after midday, toward the evening), near the Bronze Age community around Professor Hertzog in Nagel’s (or rather Witte’s) garden house on the Elbchaussee, another star arose, a star that would soon outshine Nagel’s meteorites until its extinction:

the Astra Film Company—boldly wrested from the hesitant occupation authorities, mainly thanks to the vital energy of a man named Horst-Jürgen Stoffel.

Stoffel had succeeded in saving a wood-processing plant (which had quite profitably supplied carbine shafts to the Wehrmacht) and had seen to it that it survived the war’s end with rather large stocks of timber. Seamlessly adjusting to the new historical conditions, he took the enterprise (which had been evacuated to Winsen-on-the-Luhe) in hand and converted it to the production of Christmas toys—

a highly popular item, for instance, was the so-called Eckermann doll: a droll little troll made of branch knots and sporting a flattened back that could be used as a bookend. Scherping was so delighted with it that he planned to throw it in free of charge with his edition of Goethe’s Faust (copyright 1947, all rights reserved), which had been licensed by the military government.