“But this is too literary to be probable. Too parodic. Too artistically dramatic for the pulp fiction of life’s reality. Such spectacular devices are used only by the guild of adventure novelists and comic-strip authors. For the most intricate plots, reality has far less demanding dramaturgical devices. Usually, the crudest motivations and stupidest solutions. The suspense gets unbearable.

•

“Yet the defendant Rudolf Hess won’t let the cat out of the bag right away. He stretches the suspense to the limits of patience. He goes into detail about which people at the camp in England had these strangely radiant blue eyes, as clear as water. And he tells of how Dr. Johnson now observed the very same thing, coming to him every day with a newly discovered pair of blue eyes as clear as water. Until—yes, until he, the defendant Rudolf Hess, was forced to perceive that he too, Dr. Johnson himself, had these strangely blue eyes as clear as water . . .

•

“It was still deathly silent in the Nuremberg courtroom. No sound, no motion. Nothing stirred. The dammed-up human pond stood still. But all at once, the suspense was gone. It was gone in a bizarre way. It had not let up. It had not eased up little by little to tear off like a hanging thread. It had, so to speak, run out of this world. It had crossed some mysterious threshold and had run out into a different dimension. The pond was dead. It was no longer dammed up and it did not flow out. It stagnated, it began to decompose.

“And it remained so as LORD JUSTICE Lawrence, after clearing his throat with literary thoroughness, so to speak Dickensianly rapped his pencil on the tabletop and spoke in a paternally strict voice to tell the defendant Rudolf Hess that he should finally get to the point, he had already been speaking for twenty minutes, and he must bear in mind that twenty more defendants were waiting to make their concluding statements. And when the defendant Rudolf Hess responded by shrugging his shoulders and sullenly saying that if they didn’t want to hear what he had to say, he would simply stop; and he very ponderously rolled back into his wheelchair-invalid blanket and sat down to stare with empty periscope shafts into the void.

•

“Nothing had happened, and what had happened was meaningless, both for the defendant Rudolf Hess and the Nuremberg Court of Law, and for us who were permitted to witness this historic moment. And it was meaningless for the world outside, beyond the guarded walls. And certainly for the new youth of Germany who were growing up out there in the rubble dumps. All of us had long since passed into a different state, into a dimension that had not been human for a long time.

•

“Nothing more was happening to us. There were no murderers anymore and no victims, because there was no more human reason able to distinguish between good and evil. Madness was growing hybridly, welling and swelling and forming metastases like everything else around us. There was no more guilt and hence certainly no more atonement, hence no destiny and thus nothing more to narrate. We should have known this, my brother Schwab. We shouldn’t have pushed one another to write. Why? For whom? To what end? Peace could have been with us long ago, my brother Cain.”