and her love for me, the bastard washed up on her shore, her silent admiration of the other, dead sister, the beautiful Maud who strayed onto the path of shiny, golden intoxication—

—and her indifference to Cousin Wolfgang, which hurt him. He too could see that she was not of the same middle-class ilk as his parents—

Sunday evenings they come home from one of their spiritist séances, hand in hand like a pair of siblings (“Hansel and Gretel in astral league,” hisses Cousin Wolfgang), their faces transfigured by supernatural gentleness as they lower them in thanks over their supper of sour pickles and kippers (prepared by Aunt Selma with an especially generous portion of Liptauer cheese for me). They close their eyes for the blessing; they’ve given up trying to persuade the three of us—Aunt Selma, Cousin Wolfgang, and me—to participate. Wolfgang always ostentatiously clears his throat during the “psychologically intrusive ceremony that begins so discreetly.” They don’t talk at table. Their experience is too valuable, their insights into the beyond too ineffable and harrowing, their encounters with those who have already cast off their mortal husk to enter into the pure transcendental element too revelatory to tell us about them. Only in passing do we learn what’s really happening to us—(“Of course sometimes, a soul voluntarily accepts the trial of rebirth although it’s already purified; but it does so to assist a dual who has incurred guilt and is condemned to be reborn—which is the case with Uncle Helmuth and me . . .”).—

—and so he assembles electrical appliances in a big factory for starvation wages, which don’t suffice to spare the other half of the dual soulless drudgery as a bookkeeper for a moth-eaten little music publisher. They too “slave away,” those lofty souls, to support us, feed us poorly and dress us even worse, and provide us boys the worst possible education in the public schools—:

The products cranked out by head teachers: cannon- and office-fodder, effortlessly manipulable by Podunk politicians, pettifoggers, snake-oil salesmen, and charlatans of every stripe—

(“The leader of our séances, a spirit of the highest rank who has voluntarily returned to this cosmic form of existence, reports that a potentialization of our planet is imminent—i.e., that our earthly existence will dematerialize and thereby enter a higher stage of universal order—and that the spirit destined to fulfill this messianic mission, although in the opposite sense, has already been born—” Wolfgang stares at his father, flabbergasted, and can’t believe his ears: “And who’s that supposed to be? Adolf Hitler?!”—“Yes indeed, the same Adolf Hitler you illegally tag along after, one of the many brutal men summoned up by the evil counterprinciple while the pure spirit of National Socialism, as enunciated by Lanz von Liebenfels, is nonviolent, a purely spiritual power . . .”)—

—and in the end, he’s right: the brutal men summoned up by the evil counterprinciple will kill one another and destroy the world along the way, but the spirit of the stigmatized philistines will triumph—