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But I too (in contrast to Christa and, incidentally, Nagel) did not find the combination of Astrid von Bürger and Horst-Jürgen Stoffel to be all that bad. For semantic reasons, to be sure: in my opinion, the two names dovetailed marvelously:

and it was with their names that they first entered my life: through Nagel, who came to me one day and spoke so glowingly of the founding of Astra Films and of the lofty couple.

Apparently, Horst-Jürgen’s temporarily and unilaterally dimmed vision had likewise instantly recognized Astrid as his ideal love object.

Because of the above-indicated mutual readiness, it didn’t take much courtship; besides, Stoffel had only to give a little free play to his talent for procuring things, and any female would melt. Winsenon-the-Luhe was surrounded by farms, in which cows, pigs, and all kinds of domestic fowl were still thriving. A wood-processing plant had something to offer, a fair exchange with mutual profit. A good country ham could get a nice number of bottles of whiskey, the whiskey in turn brought willing ears at the traffic office—i.e., a car permit and a gasoline allocation; with the car one could go in for large-scale butter hoarding; the butter could be exchanged for nylon stockings and plenty of toiletries; for a bottle of Chanel No. 5 any farmer’s wife in the Lüneburg Heath would give up her resistance and hand over any home-cured ham. In short, a smoothly running perpetuum mobile. No sooner were his eyes fixed than Horst-Jürgen read all of his Astrid’s wishes in her eyes—and behold: her wishes coincided with his.

For what, after all, can be the foremost wish of a movie actress who has only just reached the zenith of her career and suddenly cannot make movies because, as a result of world-historical events, there is no such thing as a movie company? Don’t worry about it, darling, we’ll start our own. Here’s a ham, you can get so and so much scotch for it, for scotch there’s Chanel No. 5, for Chanel No. 5 the goodwill of the German secretary (and bedmate) of the military government’s cultural officer, he’ll give you not only a license but also, of course, film, and several automobile permits with the necessary gasoline allocations, which means butter again (and more of it); for butter, cigarettes again; for cigarettes, ham again; after all, we’ve got to crank up the economy in this pigsty, and first and foremost the movie business.

And in the movie business, Astrid knew every man who wasn’t out of the picture—whether because he’d been killed at the hands of the enemy or on account of holding unorthodox political values or from the postwar lack of food—and every man knew her. After all, the episode with Reich Minister Goebbels had been maliciously inflated by envious and competitive witnesses; everyone in the movie business had been invited there sooner or later, anyone who didn’t go was risking his life for nothing—in any case: “Stop carrying on, Karl. When they wanted to stick you in the propaganda company, you opted to take part in Jud Süss—right? Just keep quiet, kid; when they strung up your Lisa it didn’t have anything to do with the resistance, it was because of the Bulgarian she kept running around with, they couldn’t find him then because he’d taken off—right? Don’t imagine you can spin something for yourself out of it . . . So, cheers, friends! To Astra! And to the great future of the reborn German screen!”