If it happens that a movie actually gets made, the backers are steam-rolled by the avalanche of cost overruns. The screenwriter has long since been tossed overboard, but the production company is flourishing. If the project fails before a film is made, the intellectual property rights can be sold to some other production company.

Wohlfahrt: “Keep the rubles rolling, man, that’s the main thing!”

• • •

Because whoever resurrects an event in order to place it in relation to the past and the future—and in the end to eternity as well!—is performing a moral act. I would even say the moral act per se. Doesn’t our conscience operate in the same way, by measuring what we do or fail to do against previous good or bad deeds, with regard to future deeds, and all in relation to the timeless absolute, eternity? Thus a story is the mother of morality, and the telling of stories is morality in practice. And so we will end up on the cross with our practice of morality—all of us who take the stories we tell seriously.

• • •

Dream:

Christa, S., and I are standing on a bridge suspended on steel cables high above a river. I know they are about to snap. I want to test the tension in the midsection of one of these cables. I pluck it and listen to it vibrating at a high pitch, like a violin string. I’ve never played an instrument in my life and I’m enchanted. I discover I can play like a virtuoso; it sounds like a harpsichord concerto. S. is also ecstatic. Even Christa marvels at me. I become aware that under my fingers, the cable is fraying. With every pluck it gets thinner and the tension increases. I know it’s about to snap and the bridge will collapse, but still I keep on playing without warning S. and Christa. Below, Nagel is waiting. He won’t catch any of us.

• • •

Handwritten note:

Select and tailor one’s figures so they become stereotypes—or rather, phenotypes.

But is there any other way?

• • •

Caught myself trying to move as I imagine he moves: lightly, elegantly, gracefully, without affectation. Fell deep into alcohol at the shame of it (and also haunted by dreams: my murder!). Ran into Schelmie and my aunt in the pub. Their intimacy (at my expense) is very suspicious. Was unintentionally quite rude; embarrassed to think how I played the big boss toward Schelmie, the lowly employee. Even more shame. Back home, an auto-da-fé: destroyed everything I’d written in the last week. Lost all idea of what it could be good for.

GISELA

She is a living testament to the truism that a woman is never humiliated by what she does, but only by what happens to her. She never talks about where she comes from but she doesn’t keep it a secret either. She thinks it’s insignificant and not worth mentioning whether she comes from a middle-class, lower-middle-class, or completely unclassifiable family. Her existence begins with the decision to become a whore. She didn’t fall into this profession by accident. She chose it as her best chance to survive—and not just survive, but do so without being exposed to what could have happened to her (at the very least, to be seized, forced to submit to a man or several men: the inescapable fate of a poor, solitary, and very beautiful girl). The times were hard. We are already beginning to forget that back then it was possible to starve to death unnoticed. Only two years: the day that separated the two worlds was only one of them ago.