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We received tidings of the rise of the Astra Art Films Company before this star had ascended in full radiance over the horizon. Horst-Jürgen Stoffel’s entrepreneurial dynamics and organizational talent (supported by Astrid’s knowledge of the industry) kept him, of course, from overlooking the fact that in order to build up a proper movie-production company (and also to get the license), he needed a so-called project—that is to say, a subject to grind through the lens—and for that, in turn, he required the work of intellectually creative people.

But this too was no problem. Intellectuals too had washed ashore in Hamburg. The occupation-controlled radio had a nest of them. And these people had gotten through the political filters; you didn’t have to worry that their intellectual products might be marked with stains of the past—

but unfortunately, they were still intellectuals. The ideas they suggested were miles from what Horst-Jürgen Stoffel’s healthy folk sensibility expected to see on the screen, especially at a historic moment when the masses, oppressed by collective feelings of guilt, should be granted messianic promise from that very screen.

(“Well, if it were up to me, the movie would simply have to be called A Silver Lining to the Cloud—laugh all you want, Astrid, but this much even I understand about movies, I know they’re a mass-market article, and so the public alone decides what it does or doesn’t want to see—and believe me, darling, I’m not living in an ivory tower, I have contact with people every day, not old Kurfürstendamm coffeehouse hangers-on but farmers, workers, factory managers, railroad employees, businessmen: these people expect us to give them a guide-post for the future, and a future that they understand, that they can tackle with their own hands, that they can see emerging from the labor of their own hands—believe me, gentlemen, and you too, darling: political philosophy is of no interest to people now, they’ve had it up to here, it’ll come automatically anyway, what they really care about is things that are strictly human, that are close to them: Give us this day our daily bread—right? And for now that’s it—and then maybe: And forgive us our debts . . .”)

Little in this connection could be expected from the intellectuals who were creating “The Cultural Word” at the Northwest German Radio Network.

(“Just listen to just one of those programs—why, it’s nothing but coffeehouse chitchat—and it doesn’t even have the pep the Jews developed way back when at the Romanisches Café.”)

still, that’s where the solution came from. One of the secretaries of the church radio program was friends with Ute Seelsorge, who had told her a great deal about the fascinating discussion evenings at the home of a young writer named Karl Nagel—

in a word: the cinema bigwig Stoffel came and (to put it in the graphic lingo of the executive world, which, thank heaven, has taken over the cultural business) “made a pitch to Nagel.”

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From the first few discussions with Horst-Jürgen Stoffel and Astrid von Bürger, Nagel returned home with the euphoria of a lover freshly struck by his gracious madness—and thus also duly and ardently communicative. I couldn’t help basically agreeing: