In response to all that, the occupying Brits in their dysentery-yellow field blouses maintain a stiff upper lip. No longer the masters in their former officers’ club, they mingle in uneasy nonchalance with the horde of German cultural managers busy devouring rolls while balancing champagne glasses as if they had no memory of the raggedy cigarette-butt collectors of yesterday (“Exskyooze me Zurr, I vant to ax you for a purrmeet to go to Buxtehude to fetch my zister. She iss a ferry pritti gorl”). Done and gone their colonial grandeur, when the Ice Age Germans were the coolies of the British Labor-Sahibs. A people’s prestige is measured by the hardness of their currency.

For a while I stand by a group talking about the recent past and what a disgrace it was that many of our countrymen acted after the defeat and under the Allied occupation: denunciations, self-abasement before the victors, begging for cigarettes and chocolate, turning tricks for nylons, and so on. An occupying officer turned cultural advisor stands there listening. He is young and the very model of an Englishman: clay-colored field blouse; tangerine-colored hair; banana-colored mustache; innocent, steel-blue eyes framed by egg-yolk-yellow lashes; rabbit teeth; and a long, pointed chin like King Thrushbeard. Someone turns to him.

“Tell me, John, don’t you think it was a disgrace? If we’d invaded England, for example—you’ve got to admit, we almost did, with that mess in Dunkirk—so, if we’d occupied your island, could you imagine anything like what happened with us here in Germany?”

King Thrushbeard blushes and bats his yolk-yellow lashes. His chin gets even longer and sharper. After overcoming his obviously genetic Anglo-Saxon bashfulness, he comes out with, “I can imagine that in that case, just about everything you’ve mentioned could happen to us just as it did to you—except for one thing: this conversation.”

No one seems visibly affected by the screening of the embarrassingly bad cinematic work of art. Except for Nagel, of course, who’s seething about how the brain trust of director, star, and her producer husband as well as the distributor and the investment bank’s film consultant made a hash of his original screenplay. He claims he can’t even recognize his own work. But even Nagel has no ear for the disgrace of this concoction’s warped attempt to overcome the past, especially since the only thing it’s meant to overcome is the exceedingly banal past career of the former Nazi film star and present leading lady, Astrid von Bürger. Good old Nagel is too much in love to see how her biography is glossed over in the cinematic legend he’s been force-fed: her rise—amid the death throes of Universum Film Inc.—from an athletic starlet to the popular image of young German womanhood, thanks to the patronage of the Reich Propaganda Minister Dr. Josef Goebbels, while shielded from that mighty man’s more intimate attentions by a feigned friendship—at first only a hypocritical simulation but soon becoming a real bond—with his wife, Frau Goebbels, whom she, Astrid (in the film she’s called Helge), does not betray even in the critical hours before the suicide of the entire family, and for that is retrospectively accused of collaboration in the crimes of the Third Reich.