Schwab, never ever called by a nickname but always by the sternly biblical “Johannes,” was haunted by the joyless atmosphere at home, which in a way was a monument to his deceased father, a monument erected against the shame of impoverishment and meant to put both paternal and maternal relatives in their place. Although much better off, with deep roots in the culture of suburbanized citizen-farmers, all those merchants and bureaucrats descended from the marsh-dwellers who farmed the heath gave way deferentially to the academic but had no intention of being bullied by his poverty-stricken widow. However, they pay their respects to the deceased whose glory reflects on the entire clan. His scholarly publications are mentioned reverentially, the books he edited shelved alongside Schiller, Gustav Freytag, and Treitschke in glass-fronted bookcases. His funeral (his son is sixteen, his lineage betrayed by glasses with a hair-raising diopter number) is not without political embarrassment. One of the speakers, with a Party pin in his lapel and obviously drunk, ventures to say that the best proof of this outstanding intellectual’s National Socialist sentiments was his grasp of the fact that the Röhm purge was not a liquidation of pederastic traitors but the overthrow of good old naive brown-shirted yokels. (They arrest him right there in the cemetery.) The deceased’s son, an ogreish giant a-tremble with neuroses and risible in his faded Hitler Jugend duds, listens with loathing but is preoccupied with dreaming himself out of what is going on, out of his effective reality: his massive body, weak chest and shortness of breath, rachitic knees of a wartime infant, oxycephalic forehead (cf. Cousin Wolfgang)—a few years later all that would be packed into a field-gray uniform. His experiences in the war are terrible. Even today he still wakes up screaming. That is a reality he can’t dream his way out of. His ability to escape the here and now into a field of fantasy has been obliterated. Hence his melancholy.

P.S. His two closest relatives: an “aunt” who by hanging out with bohemian barflies completes the image of a middle-class person with petit bourgeois lifestyle but pretentions to the prestige of the upper classes. And in addition a nymphomaniac niece. Both of them embodiments of his bad conscience. Unavoidably, he’s slept with both and would give his life not to have done so.

• • •

Depict as anecdotes:

The currency reform of 1948. Parallels to March 12, 1938, in Vienna (Nazi invasion). Beginning of a new era. (Cf. Uncle Ferdinand’s theories: a new epoch begins every time God inhales and exhales.)

The effect on Christa: the definitive de-heroizing of her erstwhile (run-down) table ally from the Nuremberg canteen; the deterioration of the oddball in Nagel’s primal community into a complete loser who won’t line up for the opportunities offered by reconstruction.

Schwab meets Nagel.

• • •

My relationship with Nagel (friendship? blood brotherhood? Brothers—yes, the Cains and Abels) is getting more and more difficult. Since chasing the thieves (Hertzog and his cohorts) out of the temple of our little community and thereby destroying the temple as well, he’s recapitulating in the new era the developmental stages of the post–Ice Age. At first the furious chronicler of events in the recent past (his first novel, Craterland, is in its third printing), he was soon carried away by the pull of market forces: radio dramas, a play (which hasn’t yet been produced), and recently film scripts for Stoffel—or rather, for Astrid von Bürger with whom he’s head-over-heels in love. He was careless enough to introduce me to them, so now I’ve met Horst-Jürgen Stoffel, founding father of postwar German cinema, first licensed producer of a movie in the British Zone, and his wife, Astrid von Bürger (Nagel’s not the only one to rave about her), joint proprietors of STELLA FILMS.