. . . couldn’t even broach the subject with him. He always cleverly changed the subject to the immediate postwar years, which he called the “Ice Age.” He stubbornly kept returning to his pet topic: the “rubble killer” who was never found or punished for his crimes. Corpses of women had been found in the rubble of the ruined city, all stripped naked and killed in the same manner. They could not be identified; it was a time when all sorts of people were moving through the city, God knows from where, nobody had papers, countless numbers were missing, disappeared. Unless there had been a notice of a missing person with precise information that matched one of the murdered women, there was almost no chance the victims would ever be identified; and none of the existing notices matched them. It wasn’t just the anonymity of murderer and murdered that fascinated him. It was primarily the instrument with which they had been killed: a wire loop with a toggle that could throttle them in the blink of an eye. He never tired of praising the “admirably ingenious” simplicity of this murderous tool (“loop it around her neck and twist the toggle—couldn’t be quicker, cleaner, quieter . . .”). And he carried it to absurd lengths, claimed this lethal loop had already been in use in the Egypt of the pharaohs, he’d seen with his own eyes a wall painting in which a dignitary was holding one in his hand like a hieroglyph—“no, I’m sure I didn’t dream it, I do sometimes dream about a murder—quite often in fact—but never with the garrote, I wish I could kill so elegantly, my murders are gruesome, base acts of violence, that’s what makes them so distressing . . .” If his listeners showed signs of getting bored, he served up the story of the girl from Buxtehude who’d been given a ticket to the Holstentor Theater and had come to Hamburg for the performance. The sight of the rubble around the train station was enough to give her the creeps already. She didn’t have a return ticket to Buxtehude. After the play, she would have to walk in the dark to Rothenbaum Avenue where a relative of hers lived. She hadn’t even had time to let this relative know she was coming and of course, she’d heard about the rubble killer lurking in the ruins—in a word, she was very restless during the first act and was thinking she should maybe forgo the second act and set off right after the curtain came down on the first. She got so fidgety that the man sitting next to her asked if there was anything wrong: did she have fleas or need to go to the ladies’? He was a nice middle-aged gentleman and seemed trustworthy enough to tell him what was worrying her. “You can stay here and relax,” he said. “I live near Rothenbaum Avenue. When the play’s over, I’ll walk you there.” So she sat back happily and enjoyed Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Helmut Käutner was directing and was riding his hobbyhorse: there was a tango interlude in which a Spaniard in a bolero jacket whipped his partner into obedient lockstep. And sure enough, when that magnificent spectacle was over, the helpful gentleman was prepared to accompany the girl to her relative’s place through a landscape pocked with craters and piled with rubble.