There he stands, on solid seafarer legs, inspired by the model of the Hanseatic cog on the windowsill, bucking the weather, towering in the pea soup of cigar smoke and Hennessy vapors, swaying in the waves of emotional logorrhea that have been pouring out of him for hours; with arm stumps and flapping elbows, snifter and cigar in his sausage fingers, he beats time to his rhetoric, and, with hypnotic gazes from his small, light-colored pig eyes and a spooky play of his features, he tries to make his spouse, Astrid (who pretends not to notice), aware that the skirt of her slit Blessed Virgin frock has slipped off her lap so that over the silver-slimy snail paths of her nylon stockings (from the American PX) two succulent, quartz-lamp-browned thighs are visible all the way up to the groin . . .

It is heartrending to see how greatly this irritates him, even though he wouldn’t dare say a word about it or walk over and shift a corner of the old-fashioned dressing gown to cover the splendidly conjugal boundaries that his spouse so hospitably presents. His face twitches like the face of a sleeping man when the legs of a fly stroll across it, his eyes blink, his breathing is audibly heavy, his intonation more and more menacing: “. . . and so, gentlemen, and dear Astrid, once again, I can sum up the results of this conference as quite positive in the following terms: for me personally, the project seems to have made great strides thanks to the night’s discussion and especially thanks to the objections—approved by all of us—the objections raised by our friend from the bank, Herr Jansen. Certain details in the treatment aroused in each of us—and I am expressing myself with some amount of restraint—an impression of superfluous, highfalutin intellectuality. But now, thank goodness, all those aspects have been omitted, and the author will be so kind as to replace them with new and—hopefully!—better things. However, beyond that, we are all—and I believe I am speaking on behalf of everyone here—we are all as convinced as ever about the project—one hundred percent. And if this isn’t a film that can bring us back to the peak of the good, old—I mean: the pre-Nazi Ufa—yes indeed, dear Astrid, we all know and appreciate your contributions, but you can’t possibly claim that the German cinema during your Doktor Goebbels’s days could be compared to what it used to be—huh? Well, then! If we can work our way back up to the top with this project—incidentally, I think you’ve lost a few buttons, darling—What? No, it doesn’t bother me, I’m only pointing it out for the sake of order—anyway, as I was saying: if postwar German cinema doesn’t show a desire to regain its supreme position, then my name’s not Stoffel, and to you, my friend”—meaning me—“I will never speak another word!”

•

When my experiences ran along those lines, when they made me realize the net I was caught in and that I was getting ever more irredeemably tangled in it because I was chasing the chimera of money, which in the movie business is tossed out left and right—inveigling the needy into leaping at it the way fools leap at confetti during the Mardi Gras in Nice—