In front of the flower-laden coffin, their heads were thick and dense as cobblestones. God-fearingly bared or else bonneted with reasonably priced millinery creations, their hair curled mildly, maternally, in permanent waves, or charily parted, thinning, or bald—and from the shoulders down, they were welded into a block. If, overhead, the pipe organ sounds had not been clambering through and over one another like puppies in a basket, I would have expected a thundering hymn, as if from one mouth, from the many mouths of these many heads:

a mighty fortress was their God.

And they acted as if this were true for my friend Schwab as well.

•

My dead friend’s irony allowed the survivors elbow room for their life-lie:

It sovereignly let them falsify his sloughed-off life to bear witness to the upright character of their own, and to declare as humus and topsoil what actually had merely given birth to his hatred and nurtured his questionable majesty:

the ridiculous potentate gesture of the intellectual, who, imperious as Tamberlaine, subjugates the endless terrains of intellect and rules, unrestrained, in the realm of possibility: out of hatred for a reality in which he never succeeds in tearing himself from the tangle of narrow-minded middle-class interests in which his existence is inextricably interwoven with thousands of fibers

Now he had succeeded in doing so (albeit in a different manner). Hence, he could afford to be magnanimous.

He left the field to those whom he had once so deeply despised. He lay there, so well concealed under his hill of flowers that one couldn’t even tell whether it was really he whom all the snowy wealth of blossoms had buried there, and whether he wasn’t actually viewing the spectacle, mildly amused, from some spherical corner of the crematorium’s pavilion vault or even from outside (blissfully enraptured, at any rate): the solemn laying of the cornerstone for the model building of his edifyingly falsified history.

A highly gifted son (and hence afflicted by that to which the extraordinary are susceptible) of the most solid bourgeoisie, rooted in the strongest national soil and shaped by the landscape; and his sense of duty toward the collective had ordered him modestly to exert a broad effect as an editor in a publishing house instead of focusing his uncommon strengths on creating an outstanding work of his own.

Thus he hung on the finally drawn noose of his life story like a home-cured ham from which each of the worshipfully gathered could slice off a piece (washed down with the schnapps of sentimental self-absorption). They were delivering unto the purging fire a lucid, educated intellect that had frequently hinted at genius. A man who had raised his brow over the short-lived squalls of the culture business and held it aloft in the grand wind of the true act of creation. And who, although never personally soaring to creativity, had stalked creativity and recognized it and cleared the way for it, and frequently and happily fecundated it, thus attaining an undisputed rank in the cultural reconstruction of postwar Germany.