In some complicated way, am I supposed to help him take out his anger on the Americans? It’s so obvious he hates them that I’m often embarrassed to be seen with him. They’re in charge here in Nuremberg, and I get the jitters when he starts in in my presence about how one nation founded on genocide—the extermination of the redskins who owned the land where the stars and stripes now wave—shouldn’t presume to sit in judgment on another, much older, incomparably more civilized, nation that did nothing but undertake the elimination of a foreign body from its own organism. The people he says this to can’t believe their ears: their shocked gazes slide involuntarily in my direction. What’s my connection to such a madman? In intimate contact with the most prominent figures of this “show trial,” as he calls it, he can afford to act like that. Although nobody knows exactly what role he’s playing here, the more obscure it is, the more important it seems to be. I, on the other hand, the stray nobody at his side, an “individual of doubtful nationality,” still half-starving but accoutered (if only in hand-me-downs) by Turnbull & Asser and Huntsman, supposedly a witness in the trial—called by whom? testifying for or against what?—I am an extremely suspicious figure. They let me know it wherever I appear. They give me the cold shoulder. So I stay in the background as much as possible and wander the labyrinthian corridors of the gigantic courthouse in Fürth. I don’t eat in the Allies’ canteen, but with the untouchables: the Germans and stateless, displaced persons like myself. The food is the same as in the Allies’ canteen, but for the likes of us, it’s dumped out like slop for pigs. Whether they’re a certified defense attorney for the accused, a worn-out general who avoided indictment and hanging by a hair’s breadth thanks to the Twentieth of July, or a newly appointed party chairman and future chancellor, they’re all under the thumb of an officer of the court whose job is to keep order in this swarming nest of termites and who, as a praetorian guard, has nothing but contempt for them. The other thumb they’re under belongs to a highly suspicious individual by the name of Gaston Oulman, his ancestry as indefinable as mine, who styles himself the beadle of the German press corps, runs around in a homemade uniform of highly martial cut, and is treated with corresponding respect. Everyone fears him. Everyone dances to his tune except me, and he knows exactly whose protection I’m under and avoids crossing paths with me but doesn’t exactly contribute to my feeling at home here—“at home,” yes, that’s exactly the term for it. The historic significance of this trial, the polarity of good and evil, of glorious victors and bloodstained vanquished, the back and forth and up and down, the tension between right and wrong, moral outrage and hypocrisy, heart-stopping horror at inconceivable crimes and forensic hairsplitting, shock and indifference, the daily emotional roller coaster under the downpour of newly discovered, monstrous evil and the excruciating doggedness and bureaucratic pigheadedness of procedural process, the banality of evil and habituation to dealing with monsters—all that squeezed into the beehive of Fürth and its queen-bee cell, the smallish courtroom at its center, all heavily guarded, sealed off, a fortress bristling with checkpoints, encircled by tanks and ordnance in a landscape pockmarked by bombs—all that, I say, constitutes a biotope, a cramped little world whose spell no one can escape.