In his desperation, Nagel had brought me along to a script conference to help him defend his artistic ideas. The discussion takes place in the Stoffels’ new house on the bank of the Alster. Interior decoration: dark wood paneling with miniature Hanseatic merchantmen as chandeliers. Besides Astrid, Stoffel, Nagel, and me, in attendance were the STELLA FILMS dramaturge, a pimply young man who would have fit right into Nagel’s primal community if he hadn’t immigrated too late from the Eastern Zone; the investment bank’s film consultant and attorney; and two stereotypical gray-faced employees waiting like cats at a mouse hole to pounce on the bizarre notions of artistic types. Nagel had presented a marvelous idea. The treatment read like the ideal metaphor for Germans’ coming to terms with the past, poetically shifted far enough into the realm of symbolism and humanity in general so as not to seem uncomfortably allegorical. But with plenty of dramatic tension:

A native tribe in Central America (it was a saga Nagel brought home from his globe-trotting years) believes that every thirty-five years, the world is destroyed and renewed overnight. The fateful day is preceded by a time of scarcity. The tribe is threatened with starvation, and whoever steals from their meager food supplies is condemned to death. A woman steals a few ears of corn from the village storehouse to feed her starving children. The tribe has its own court that can issue death sentences, but may not carry them out itself. Now they are waiting for the executioner to arrive from the capital city. He arrives the night of the expected end of the world. The tribe is preparing for the end of the old and the birth of the new. They extinguish all their fires and destroy their old possessions. They await the morning on which a new world era will begin. The executioner must decide whether it is his duty to execute a prisoner condemned in the old world on the first morning of the new one.

In his treatment, Nagel has already described some scenes (extinguishing the fires, the tribe’s mood in the face of the destruction of the world) vividly enough to provide the men from the bank a picture even they can imagine. However, the first thing they do is start picking apart the content in minute detail—apparently feeling it their duty to the employers who put food on their table to make the movie so foolproof that even a department head couldn’t have anything against financing it. The arguments are correspondingly predictable: Will it be possible to convince moviegoers there are people who really believe that every few decades or so the world is destroyed and then raised from the dead the next morning? (I venture to interject that the miracle of the currency reform must have convinced most Germans of such a possibility, but I’m met partly with blank incomprehension—“Whaddaya mean?”—and partly with barely contained indignation, as if I’d called into question the inviolability of the monetary system and thus of the banks.)