(Quote from a 1942 speech by Hitler, speaking about the times of struggle at the beginning of the movement: “. . . and, my comrades in the Party, whenever you were almost convinced by the arguments of our opponents and felt yourselves starting to waver, it was the German Woman who sprang up and simply shouted them down . . .”)

The womenfolk, right Willy? They wanted to get down to brass tacks! (Christa: “You’d do better to find me some bacon grease instead of guzzling schnapps with your crazy friends!”)—soon, ah so soon we had to thank them, the womenfolk, for the insight that the chance for the kind of unblemished new beginning we were imagining was lost, untenable from the get-go, the childish, sweet, foolish plan of our naiveté, the battle against the termite power of the philistines lost a priori, the perseverance of the myrmidons in their eat-in kitchens and allotment gardens, our visions laughably anemic compared to the tenacious vitality and swaggering pretension of the petit bourgeois and the petit bourgeois narrow-mindedness of the upper and middle classes, compared to the burgeoning life in the pelvises of their womenfolk—

Although they’re all tattered and underprivileged, they’re equipped with the invincible energy of eternal strivers, constantly clambering over one another, eagerly struggling up the chicken coop ramp of traditional hierarchies—If you would be so kind, Herr Head Official, many thanks, Frau Head Official, if you would be so kind, Herr Assessor, many thanks, Frau Assessor, if you would be so kind, Dr. So-and-so, Many thanks, Frau Doctor, if you would be so kind, Herr Professor, your devoted servant, Herr von Krautjunker. Frau von Hinterstossen, Küss die Hand, Frau Baroness, an honor to meet you, Count Soand-so, Countess So-and-so, if I may be allowed, Your Serene Highness. . .

all of it the precipitate of the spirit of schoolmasters, the essence of their promulgations, slicing with ice-crystal hardness into our visionary Ice Age, our naive Christmas at the crèche of the promised future, the spirit of schoolmasters a gift from the Byzantine East, conveyed by Professor Hertzog (“Hertzog with tee-zee, if you please!”), first of all to make us aware how un-seemly our behavior was: disheveled hicks just barely liberated from the army and the prison camps, roughnecks tramping—so to speak—with bare feet (although some, like our dear amputee Wilhelm Niemöller, with only one) into the salon of higher education—yes indeed!—in order to clap the titans of Western thought on the shoulder with rough-hewn familiarity, feed ravenously from their golden plates and drink from their crystal glassware and mingle our cowherds’ voices in their grandiose monologues and dialogues—

shouldn’t our women be ashamed of themselves right down to their fallopian tubes? Especially Christa . . .

Willi Niemöller, yes, the very one. Naturally, he drew the conclusions and simply took off. Of course, he had nothing constructive to suggest for the problem of the “new” societal order we were seeking, but he represents at any rate a lovely example of individualistic independence. He did put down on paper his insight into the genealogy of the schoolmasters, if not in the form of a novel like Nagel. Years later, around 1950, a postcard from Vienna arrived with a picture of the restored St. Stephen’s Cathedral. On the other side, it read—