Hamburg, 1950: Ran into Herr von Rönnekamp on the Jungfernstieg. Cordial reunion: his detective’s face (Arsène Lupin, avenger of the dispossessed) steamrollers you with amiability. In his rich Baltic accent with the swallowed umlauts that earned him the nickname “the Bütch” he declares, “Hoven’t zeen you in a dock’s edge!” Invites me to a “little chat” in the pastry café of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. On the way he tells me about the tragic fate of another member of his brotherhood: Unhappily in love with a young man he picked up on the street and hired as his servant only to be swindled and robbed in every possible way, his despairing friend had decided to kill himself. At the moment he’s raising the pistol to his temple, his servant-lover enters the room. Caught in the act, the startled suicide shoves the pistol into his pants pocket. It goes off and shoots off “bows nuts, chust sink off it, shoots off bows testikels.” Tableau. (From his narrow mouth “testicle” sounds like the name of a Baltic landed estate: “For seven hundred years, the Rönnekamps have been the lords of Testikel.”) What moves me is not the tragedy of the man who shot off “bows nuts” or rather “bows testikels,” but the love story behind it. So that sort of thing still exists—although probably only among queers. Rönnekamp too won me over with his capacity for love. Unforget-table times in his gingerbread cottage in Pöseldorf: him in the midst of his lover-boys—of the teenager or ordinary seaman variety—muscular young lads with fist-sized boils on the backs of their necks beneath their yellow Lorelei-manes; him boasting in his Baltic aristocrat’s manner that tenderness is unmanly and laughable, and an immediate, rising chorus of young male voices: “You? How can you say that? You! Just a little kiss and you’re right down on your knees!”

(Handwritten note: Attention! cf. Abel)

I see him standing at the window, in his hand a book he’s going to recommend to his favorite, Dieterkins (a mechanic’s apprentice). (What heterosexual still falls in love with a girl from the “people”? Romanticism flourishes only in tennis clubs these days. With predictable consequences.) Rönne’s anguished attempt to explain the beauties of Joseph Conrad to the dull-witted boy. Loving instruction. Wanting to give the best one has. His knife-edge profile bent in Pre-Raphaelite humility.

In the pastry café (coffee and cake for him; cognac for me in the absence of whiskey), talk turns to the days of the primal community in Nagel’s garden house, where we met. (General Freiherr von Neunteuffel, in whose company he had turned up, is in Bonn by now, busily engaged in the project of rearmament.) What Rönne articulates with fetching impersonality is an excellent analysis of events since 1945: at first, paralysis after the shock of total defeat (Nagel’s “Craterland”), then the primal communities born out of it, gatherings of fanaticized starvelings too inept for black market business. Escape into the intellectual sphere, the cultural and political spheres. The latter especially—a playground for the utopians; equally fertile ground for sharp-eyed strivers. Everyone who barely managed to survive—scruffy, tattered idealists with their heads in the clouds, disabled sleepwalkers, eternal students missing a limb or two, dyspeptic intellectuals, exploiters of ruined ideologies—they all devote themselves to intellectual reconstruction. Including the cobweb-shrouded Weimar Republicans rounded up by the western Allies from liberated concentration camps, state prisons, agricultural forced-labor camps, and other hiding places as pitiful proof of originally humanitarian war aims, in order to give them a quick dusting off and introduce them into the mother liquor of apathetic turnip eaters as catalysts for the hoped-for crystallization of a new German democracy. Although officially appointed, they too operated at first in an airless environment outside the bounds of general awareness—until, in fact, a sort of crystalline precipitate formed (similar to the famous Karlsbad salt) with a crust of professional politicians surrounding it. This new race is now determining the new German reality. Its first coup was the currency reform of 1948.