Even his bad conscience is ambivalent. On the one hand, he welcomes his relationship with Gisela as a liberation from the erotic obligation that binds him to the standoffish Christa, leaving him unhappy; on the other hand, he is sorry to see what he’s destroying. He’s also stung by the fact that he has to pay Gisela for every copulation. He tells himself he’s encroaching on Christa, taking it from her already meager housekeeping account, so to speak. But then again, the idea of taking some sort of revenge is a satisfying feeling. His relationship with Gisela punishes Christa for the coldness with which she responded to his passionate courtship. With pure schadenfreude, he now sees that Christa has gotten wind of his infidelity; the fact that it’s with a girl from Whores’ Alley on the Reeperbahn is beyond anything she could imagine, not to mention that his relationship to that kind of rival could have become so intimate that he goes clothes shopping with her. All that flatters his sense of irony, but smacks unpleasantly of bourgeois complications: he cannot help calling it—with Stella and John—“the fucking problems of the bloody middle class.” In his heart of hearts he tells himself that the Hamburg milieu is beginning to rub off on him. From a nonbourgeois perspective, his marriage to Christa is a banal misunderstanding on which any emotion is wasted, while his deep-frozen but intellectually fiery relationship with Gisela is a pleasurable adventure. (Two different aesthetics. Muddied when morality puts in a word).

Perhaps superfluous. Hard to connect it with more important questions. Interesting, of course, from a psychological point of view. Gives A’s figure more profile. But—you need to know things like that, but you don’t need to say them.

• • •

“The activities of the mind arise solely from adequate ideas; the passive states of the mind depend solely on inadequate ideas.”

—SPINOZA

NOVEMBER 1949

Cultural event: Debut of the film star Astrid von Bürger (gloriously denazified but still deeply controversial) in A Woman Plays Foul, her first postwar role (screenplay by Nagel). Producer: Horst-Jürgen Stoffel, her spouse (production company: STELLA FILMS). Location: the Anglo-German Club on the Alster (following the screening in the Holsten Theater).

Went there to forestall arguments about it with Scherping. Accuses me of intellectual arrogance when I stay away from such things. Nothing much different in the club since the forlorn gatherings of creative artists in pre-currency-reform days. Nevertheless, more relaxed interaction with the British occupiers. (Recent exchange between two club friends: “Hello, Heinz-Günther!”—“Hallo, Percy!” pronounced “Pörsü.” Percy was clearly a frequent name in Hamburg as well, testimony to Hanseatic relations with the Anglo-Saxons: my cousin Percy Fettkötter.) Duly noted, the rearmament of fashion: the triumphal procession of German textiles begins. Silvery bowties everywhere (symbols of “nothing to hide”). Axel Springer’s natty pseudo-English downtown Hamburg elegance in contrast to Witte’s almost Russian boorishness (his apoplectically red, Falstaffian face with the sea-blue gaze of a “gatekeeper to the world,” haloed by a lion’s mane of white hair—a bourgeois cockade). Equally eager to make visible his reclaimed urbanity (with a tinge of Winsen-on-the-Luhe, however): producer Stoffel, stuffed into a double-breasted pinstriped suit like a gangster in a hit from the Roaring Twenties. Scherping too, Hamburgishly Anglo-Saxonized (somebody’s persuaded him that you don’t have to wear gray flannel pants with a checked jacket; it’s more fashionable to wear pants of the same pattern). Once again, it’s painfully funny to see how hard he tries to downplay his status as the representative of high culture, joking about the book trade, playing the clown—you expect he’ll begin turning somersaults any minute—kidding me, “Well, what should I call you, editor-in-chief? Or maybe just chief? Chief sounds like a dog’s name: Heel, Chief! . . . That is, if you’re not already planning to become my boss! Go ahead! You think I’m illiterate anyway!” He’s looking for his daily dose of abuse and humiliation. I have to control myself to keep from throwing up.