To smooth away.

A German mother’s plain good sense

Is not without permissiveness

If only for the race’s sake—

And if the future’s what’s at stake,

And it happens to be dawning

’Tween the legs of her sweet darling,

Then a mother’s sure to foster

Whatever prevents a stricture—

She herself in proud grief might

Regret that fate should deem it right

To curse her with unwanted leisure

When she’d rather have the pleasure

Of herself comporting

With the boys—it’s only sporting.

If you manage to get cover

For your plans from your dear mother

You can finally be at ease—

Put your feet up, feel the breeze,

Close your eyes, relax, dear child,

Let the rose-hued fingers mild

Of sunlight play upon your face

How nice, to laze here by the lake

SA commander Roehm

Doesn’t have it half as good.

Nor do others have it better

Lying beside other waters

With their noses in the mud

Eels swimming around through their heads

Two-foot holes shot through their guts

Mushrooms sticking out their butts

So the Führer’s will to victory

Could be fulfilled economically

If Lebensraum is our desire

It’ll cost us fertilizer

Where blood mixes in with soil

Germination knows renewal.

Strength through joy: render it service

For it passes through your cervix

In Adolf ’s plans for living space

The path from forebears of the race

To proudly liberated grandsons

Leads through the thighs of German virgins

Happy then she who can say

I’ve done my duty.

Bear the hard times then with patience

Cheered by German confidence

Wait in silence, free of scorn,

Necessity will break through iron

If the iron won’t break, howe’er,

We know of things that shall endure:

Zille’s cast of characters

On the Spree.

Let that fire fill your lungs

And you won’t have to hold your tongue

Unless it suits you, then act meek

But sometimes show a little cheek

To let them know, time and again:

You’re from Berlin!

Admittedly, the poem wasn’t in the best taste. But it depicted the cultural background, the foil against which Astrid von Bürger had to be seen in order to be fully understood and appreciated. And that background could not be depicted in anything but our so-called stave rhyme, following the literary recipes of the greatest German: for a prose description, Goethe would have said, the subject was not important enough.

As for Nagel, it was not only his lack of necessary familiarity with the milieu that kept him from a sociological understanding of the beautiful Astrid. He was in love. Had he known the obvious, he would no longer have believed in the survival of the formal energy of that milieu; he would have regarded the memory evoked thereof as arbitrarily and improperly quoted, and he would have labeled it a rather shabby ad hominem argument. But because he was in love, he took my poem without further ado as sheer perfidy on my part. There was a rupture in our friendship, and it could never again be glued together.