A. watches Christa and feels an urge to pay her back for her snide comment. “If my esteemed spouse had the occasional goodness to listen closely, what I was trying to say in my monologue about the restoration of social structures might not have sounded so new to her. Its very specific character, I mean—”

He’s interrupted by the combative art historian. “You aren’t seriously claiming we have a class system in the present Federal Republic?”

No, says A., he wouldn’t want to claim that even as a joke, although paradoxically—as with everything nowadays—it would come dangerously close to being the truth. In any case, more interesting than the appearance itself is what it produces—(again interrupted by a sharp “Namely?”). “Namely,” he says, “the peculiarity that informs the national character like a specific crystallization informs a mineral. Whatever structures the Germans develop (and this is a truism, by the way) have a telltale signature—”

“And what would that be?”

“Philistinism,” says A.

“Philistinism? What about our cathedrals? What about Dürer and Riemenschneider?” exults the art historian contemptuously, looking around for applause, especially from the senator for culture—

“I’m talking about social structures,” says A. (“Isn’t art a social structure?”) “Philistinism doesn’t preclude grandiosity,” A. declares. “It’s quite capable of rising to that level, as it does in Riemenschneider’s case.” (Witte’s sister, outraged: “Well, I never!”. . . She too looks toward the senator in charge of the cultural desk.) “Moreover,” continues A., “we were talking about rebirth—or rather, the reinstitution of anachronistic societal values, which even if they are similarly preserved in other places, seem especially absurd in post-1945 Germany. And not solely because they’re the most idiotic, shortsighted, destructive way of processing the rubble.” (Witte’s sister: “That’s out-and-out Communism!”) “No,” says A., “but you’ve got to try to imagine what’s going on across the Elbe in the head of a citizen of the other, communistically organized half of Germany when he picks up one of our illustrated weeklies and skims the three pages devoted to an article about the wedding of Princess Ilsebill von Hüblingen-Kreutznach-Hinterstetten with Count Wurmfried Wölflingen-Hassenroth. He really can’t take it seriously—I mean, if he’s someone living so close to present-day reality that willy-nilly, he has to see it—and isn’t blinded, like us, by the eyewash in the Americanized media.”

“But blinded by other eyewashers,” Rönnekamp corrects him. “By the way, we mustn’t overlook the fact that the ladies and gentlemen in the Almanach de Gotha have to shill for a brand of sparkling wine.”

“That would make it even more amusing,” A. concedes, “if it didn’t plunge me into despair.”

“Oh well,” says Witte, “it’s the same old figures of fun: the petty prince and the grenadier of the guard. They were already degenerates in the old days.”

“No, no!” A. protests more vehemently than he meant to. “That’s not what makes—or made—them comic models of remoteness from real life. If being a fool and even sheer stupidity were funny, we’d never be able to stop laughing and we wouldn’t need any help from them. It was always the specifically German thing about these lower ranks that made them more ridiculous than amusing—their philistinism. It infects even the highest circles in this country: their inveterate pomposity, bigotry, unworldliness, and absurd self-regard. And all that’s been carried over from the frozen, foggy hell of the Quonset huts into reconstruction and the Economic Miracle as a sort of structural legacy.” He turns to address his adversary directly. “We’re missing an art-historical epoch, my dear Herr Professor. We got tripped up in the rigid forms of the baroque. What we lack is rococo: the graceful form of being able to laugh about things . . .”