When had he become that? During the Ice Age. The lost mythical past. Had that period ever really existed? Wasn’t it a pipe dream of mine? Did the people sitting here know anything about it? Had they experienced those years as I had? Had I really experienced them as I imagined? Now, in this reality of 1965, in a world cemented to the sky and inundated with numberless kinds of plastic toys—was it possible to believe in the crèche Christmas of 1947? Could I give a high-rise horlà any notion of the neo-Gothic clinker-brick villa looming like a citadel from the surrounding landscape of ruins in 1948—the villa in which the British had installed Horst-Jürgen Stoffel as the first postwar German film producer? A nocturnal script conference there:

with the company scenario editor (former gofer of the last System-zeit intellectuals to find refuge at the Nazi Ufa movie studio), the head of production (former chief of lighting at Ufa), the head of distribution (former textile dealer, then war-economy adviser), the cinema consultant of the foolhardy daredevil bank that intended to finance the “project” (a man with a hitherto immaculate past as a teller), the film officer of the occupation authorities (child of Auschwitz victims; he had emigrated in time), a representative of Hamburg’s cultural senate, which had risen from the ashes of buildings like a phoenix. All these emaciated executive faces, colorlessly inserted into lamentable civilian clothes and marked with the indelible traces of various winter campaigns, were now notched by something almost more terrible: an urge to overcome the past (by way of the movie business) and to find personal fulfillment in artistic activity (“Creativity, ya know—that’s where all these guys in our business get so obsessed!”) . . .

they squat there, half-asleep, as though they had been shit into the titanic club chairs provided by the megalomania of Hanseatic founding fathers: they are exhausted, exasperated after seven hours of grating against one another’s narrow minds, ignorance, resentment (“I tell you, gentlemen, if we’re to form this brain trust of ours to make our project foolproof, then we’ve got to make sure that the image of the German woman in wartime is done properly!”)—yes indeed! But how can this idea be carried out with the actress slated to play the lead in the “project,” Primordial Piglet Stoffel’s wife Astrid von Bürger, the darling of the public during the last years of the war and now emerging purged from the final collapse, rape-spree tested, a blend of noblewoman and tease . . .

poor Nagel! How he loved her! . . . And how he hated me because of her! And yet he should have known that my betrayal was only a parody. . . How often had I wanted to explain it to him: “Damn it! Can’t you understand that I was trying to make a joke! Granted: it was a bad joke. Blame it on my Viennese upbringing! Your hatred for the Ostmark is justified.” It wouldn’t have mattered. He was a serious man, our friend Nagel. There was no teaching him that it could be considered funny that a man who has just returned from the war minus an arm, arriving in a shattered Fatherland where everything has to be rebuilt, at last, at last discovers what he was fated for, and writes, damn it, writes, arduously and sedulously with his awkward left hand, penning short stories and the beginning of a play and the outline of a novel and another and another . . .