Well, I didn’t want to be outdone, and so I thought up a number of truly lovely films. For instance, a New Guinea movie: A missionary has spent twenty years trying to get a Dajak tribe to give up head-hunting, and just as the solemn renunciation is being celebrated with a great feast, a government commissioner shows up and offers five pounds sterling for every Japanese head; war has broken out, you see, and the Japanese might invade at any moment . . . That this too was another story without peripeteia, because it began with a conflict that from the outset was unsolvable, occurred to no one, because it was impossible back then to film in New Guinea anyway; and the other projects likewise came to nought for some reason or other. I kept writing countless and largely unremunerated scripts for Astra Art Films; some of them were even filmed during the next few years, although in completely revised versions. But for Witte, I was and remained a “part-time artist,” and, I’m afraid, for Christa too.

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I’ve gotten used to it by now, but back then, script conferences with Stoffel, Spouse & Associates weighed on my soul like millstones. They took place in a Hanseatic villa on Harvestehuderweg, which had been saved by Providence from major bombing damage in order to provide Stoffel’s reconstructive will with the appropriate setting. The furniture was old German. The filmmakers, who had been shit out into their Aesir sofas in front of the Valhalla fireplace, turd columns of thick cigars rising from their pursed bud-like mouths, seemed to have been created to fit in with the style. Such scenes aroused the most dreadful notions in my head. This potpourri of a living room—an omnium gatherum of clinker bricks, cast iron, and stained glass—came off as a cabaret parody of a Wagnerian opera, and the gray manager-mugs on the conference-exhausted giants, the fresh-faced heads and uniforms of the rosily well-fed culture-creator occupation officers mixed in among them, fit in nicely in a Götterdämmerung kind of way; and Astrid von Bürger was beautifully typecast in the domestic garment of an Ufa star, a sort of Nibelung dressing gown in royal blue with scarlet lining, which she forgot to button from the mons veneris down, so that each of her calculatedly negligent movements revealed kilograms of German female ham hock. The memory is lodged traumatically in my soul: her arms are flung far apart on the ox-leather bulges of the sofa upholstery; her torso is bent back, her twin howitzer-shell breasts practically bursting through the (here decently buttoned) silk; and over them hovers her—alas—really beautiful Brunhilde head (the head that seduced Nagel at the front, his dream of the “best friend’s sister”). A powerful flood of short dark hair, virtually a banner of Berlin freshness, dangles over her eyebrows, and her big-cat eyes are observing the effect of her erotic presence: a drumbeat into the diaphragm of every man in the room. At the center of the room, her husband, Stoffel, is roaring, with a snifter (black-market cognac) in his left hand and a (black-market) Havana in his right. Primordial Piglet Stoffel, his own totem pole, as it were: six feet six inches of bombastic tremendous stupidity whetted by a certain shrewdness; a double hundredweight of crooked cunning combined with the upright joviality of a suburban bon vivant; a gigantic man-child, still emanating the sweet-and-sour odor of mother’s milk; blond, fat, rosy, moody, ridiculous, and dangerous: the horrifying epitome of German entrepreneurial vitality bulldozing everything in its path . . .