Rönne now turned to me. “In your gatherings in our host’s garden house, dear chap, you and your young friends—especially your fraternal buddy Nagel—used to knock together all sorts of utopian models. And if all that was—if you’ll pardon the expression!—almost touchingly irrelevant, it wasn’t just on account of the hopelessness that followed the terrible disappointment every German—Nazi sympathizer or not—had to feel after 1945 at the collapse of the general expectation of salvation. It emerged from the spirit of the times as well. It wasn’t just the Germans who had been bled dry, it was the entire world, the times. You and everyone around you were too anemic to produce anything new from the German world lying in ruins. You didn’t lack for noble intentions or spirit, just for an impulse from the zeitgeist. It had been the zeitgeist of the still-young century that like a bowstring had launched the arrow of National Socialism, and although its tip was poisoned and flew into the eye of the bowman, the audacity at the heart of the ideology had something infectious. You’re going to say it was a cynically misunderstood Nietzscheism, exaggerated to the tipping point. Agreed. A mortally dangerous field of thought to enter, but watered by arch-Occidental springs, out of a need for order and purity on the highest intellectual level. Already expressed, if you will, by the wishful thinking—widespread at the time—about reviving knightly orders—what Ernst Jünger and Hermann Hesse have in common: the dream of selecting the most highly developed intellects to brew up an alchemical concoction, the essence of all Western thought, out of which would precipitate the philosophers’ stone, a monastic elite of unheard-of intellectual freedom” (Witte’s interjection: “Right! I’m with you one hundred percent!”), “which elite, however,” (with subtle sarcasm, Rönnekamp purses his razor-sharp detective lips while his teeth remain obediently in place) “—and this reveals the cloven hoof of Nazi thought—would forgo any pretention to power. Obviously not the case with the Nazis.” (Witte, subdued: “That’s for sure!”) “But even the blatant thirst for power—i.e., in a conception of power as a necessity in the service of an ethos—was a temptation that was hard to resist. The individual in the onslaught of the masses: that was the idea, to be defended against the dissolution of individuality in the distorting mirror of Leninism. The Nazis wanted to do something audacious: salvage the individual in Socialism.”

Witte’s sister clears her throat as if to suggest that the monologue was depressing the mood of this social gathering.