What am I saying? What nonsense am I banging on about? I wanted to score one against Christa and her clique and once more got carried away, masturbation with my spouse, again and again! Why do I let myself get sucked into jabbering about culture? Please don’t listen, Herr Senator, just follow the course of the contest and my probable defeat. I presume you also regard the situation as a kind of sport: conversation (one of the delights of life, says Goethe) as a duel—Bang! That’ll show the guy who’s boss! Not a game in which one person catches the ball of another and throws it back, with every catch a reward for all the players—probably the only person here one can talk with is that boozer Schwab . . . Why the devil am I letting myself be interrogated like a naughty schoolboy—it’s the teachers who produce the philistines in this country, the inbred dyed-in-the-wool schoolmasters—

A memory from the war: An air raid in Berlin, 1944. One side of the street is on fire. At the first building, air raid wardens have ordered people into a bucket brigade. Full buckets are being passed hand to hand from a hydrant on the corner up to the edge of the conflagration and the empty ones are passed back to be filled again, a pathetic undertaking. The water steams away before it ever hits the fire, but the dazed citizens, ragged figures with raw hands and eyes white in their soot-smeared faces, mustered from their cellars in the neighborhood, continue their irrelevant firefighting efforts undeterred while the air raid wardens bellow senseless orders and brandish their service revolvers. Above the roar of the fire stoked by every puff of wind, a constant murmuring and whispering can be heard: “Here you are, Herr Professor!”—“Thank you very much, Herr Professor!”—“Here you are, Herr Councilor!”—“Thank you very much, Herr Councilor!”—every time a bucket passes from one hand to the next—“Here you are, Herr Doctor!”—“Thank you very much, Herr Doctor!”—A bomb falls nearby with a mighty crash and a woman’s voice screams, “My God, that was more bad than the last one!” A male voice corrects her, “In the first place, it’s ‘worse,’ and in the second place, that’s no reason to interrupt the bucket brigade!”

—and then there’s the opposite type: the buddies from the primal community—yes indeed, we always circle back to the laughable, pitiful, wonderful, primal community in the Nagel-Witte garden house, a pack of repeat survivors, wan from hunger, scruffy in worn-out clothes, eyes bright with childish confidence and cheeks flushed with turnip schnapps and enthusiasm for the good, the true, and the beautiful after the hell they’d been through, inflamed by the sacred will for the new, the better, purer, greedy for everything intellectual . . . and their beautiful utopias: We set up a kolkhoz, get them to allocate us a former parade ground, work together digging unexploded ordnance out of the ground, and plant carrots and cabbages and potatoes in its place. In the evenings we come together with clammy, numbed hands and bent, aching backs for a Hegel colloquium or to listen to Pachelbel and Hindemith on the radio while the womenfolk weave our home-grown flax into diapers for the collective brood, the germ cells of a new, natural society dedicated to culture, a German model won from the bitterest experience of defeat, humiliation, insight into our guilt, and self-recrimination . . . (to be sure, the womenfolk—right, Niemöller old friend?—the womenfolk, who live solely through and for their uterus . . .)