Because I ought not forget to mention that the publishing industry was already beginning to stir. Just as all manner of life was still teeming in the ruins. The red-light alleys at Gänsemarkt and on the Reeperbahn had also remained intact (like the Davidswache and the City Hall).

•

Horst-Jürgen Stoffel was not a man whose enterprising spirit could be restricted to the manufacture of cultural goods. After the Eckermann doll, he started producing wooden soles for ersatz shoes (which soles, to be sure, could be purchased only with rationing stamps). However, his lumber supplies were now categorized as “controlled goods” and subject to a quota.

And it came to pass that from one of the allocations, 870 more pairs of soles were carved than could normally be carved by the most efficient utilization of raw material. Horst-Jürgen Stoffel thus found himself in a ticklish dilemma: as an upstanding entrepreneur, he was obliged to register the increased output; but if he reported the overproduction, then inevitably the assholes at the Industry Office would cut the allocations by enough raw material for 870 pairs of soles (or else expect the same overproduction for the same allocation from that day forward), and, moreover, they would demand an accounting for the missing 870 pairs of soles from all previous allocations. Stoffel got out of this predicament by simply “remaindering” the extra 870 soles on the black market.

I don’t remember what price was fetched by a pair of black-market wooden soles in 1947—Stoffel, at any rate, got 150 marks a pair from the middleman, a paltry sum when one recalls that fifteen Wild Woodbine cigarettes cost the same at that time. Still and all, Stoffel had 130,500 marks in his hands. To be sure, that was worth no more than 13,050 cigarettes, roughly what an average smoker puffs into the atmosphere, after a brief incorporation into his pleural cavity, over the course of, say, fifteen months—

what could be more obvious than taking the money, which could so easily dissolve into thin air, and investing it in an industry that creates ephemeral shadow plays? Horst-Jürgen Stoffel applied to the military government for a license to produce movies.

Of course, there were other reasons, linked to the times. Hamburg, as we know, is called the Gateway to the World, and during those winter days it was worthy of the name. Never before or since has it been the scene of such animate transience as in the first phases of the mass migrations (not yet arranged by travel agencies but triggered by the advancing Russians), when the natives of Brandenburg (pushed by the Upper and Lower Silesians, who passed through Lausitz and the Magdeburg plains into the Hanover region, and from there northward to Schleswig-Holstein, only to be shoved toward Hesse by the Pomeranians and East Prussians, who were driving the Mecklenburgers before them) advanced into Bavarian territory in order to avoid the Thuringians, who had likewise started moving, while the Rheinlanders, who had been evacuated into the Warthegau, tried to trade positions with the Poles who had been hauled to the mines in the Ruhr; however, the Rheinlanders were severely hindered by the Sudeten Germans, who had been thrown westward and whose flanks were being attacked by Transylvanian Saxons and Bukovinan Germans (Gaia used to say: What do you need to make a good salad? A spendthrift for the oil, a miser for the vinegar—and a madman to keep tossing it and tossing it).