•  •  •

Back then I’d known Schwab a fairly short time and only spoke to him about Nagel because I assumed that, if only for professional reasons, he would be just as interested in him (the newly minted author) as I was for the personal reason of our friendship (was friendship my only reason?). And I wasn’t mistaken. Schwab listened very closely to me. His massive face remained impassive. As usual, his sensitive mouth lay like a haughty pasha between the soft cushions of his cheeks, and above it the pale blue carp eyes of a man bespectacled since early childhood (and a regularly relapsing dipsomaniac) stared without expression through his thick lenses. And then all the more unexpected was the malice of his quiet interruptions, questions of perfidious personal provocation, for example, “Was it Nagel the storyteller who disappointed you or Nagel the lover?”

I admit that in those days, my place in the bourgeois order was not easy to determine. I had no profession, wrote occasional treatments for the successors of the late lamented STELLA FILMS (Stoffel has disappeared, Astrid von Bürger grows gracefully older, and the industrious little movie piglets I work for confine themselves to making plans). My free-time activities also left something to be desired. I didn’t play soccer or tennis in a fancy club, to say nothing of golf, not even hockey and not bridge in any case. I was ignorant of soccer pools and didn’t watch TV or play skat at the kitchen table with buddies in shirtsleeves. I didn’t fish, bowl, ride, hunt, row, box, or do gymnastics. I didn’t sing in a men’s chorus, collect donations for the Red Cross—not even for thalidomide cripples or wheelchair polo players—didn’t read a newspaper and wasn’t interested in politics. I couldn’t tell the CDU from NATO, the Monroe Doctrine from the Hallstein Doctrine, state capitalism from the Comintern, and hopelessly confused the EEC, FDP, SPD, and SED. Whenever I said something about current events, Christa blushed liked I’d felt her up. I couldn’t care less about German universities or space travel, didn’t give a shit about the Oder–Neisse line. The Wall of Shame in Berlin was okay with me (it’s only logical that if the Jews have a Wailing Wall, the Germans have a Wall of Shame). I thought being a manager was great: it absolved me of the responsibility no one had asked me to shoulder in the first place. Engagé art, literature, radio, film, and theater left me cold. I had no past to come to terms with except my own, and it was spurious anyway. I left the topic of the kibbutzim to Nagel, compensation for the Arab states to Rönnekamp and his business associates, and the question of rearmament to the chancellor, Pope John XXIII, de Gaulle, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his wife Jackie, Khrushchev, the Lorelei, Willy Brandt, the neo-Nazis, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and Edith Piaf. I hoped to survive the Cold War just as I had the hot one (and this time, my chances were considerably better). Both intra- and extramaritally, I shoved the birth control pill in with my middle finger. There were already enough people preoccupied with the Red Army Faction as well as with the victims of the Twentieth of July plot, even though they had nothing to do with either one. I hadn’t had the pleasure of hearing Pastor Thielicke’s sermons. I’d already read most of the novels Rowohlt started reissuing as cheap paperbacks after the war. I hadn’t seen the DOKUMENTA exhibition. Like so many other things in life, the results of the Ecumenical Council would be made clear simply by the passage of time. Had water polo already been accepted into the Olympic Games, or when and how and by whom would that be decided (and would the teams from the GDR and the Federal Republic—i.e., the anticapitalistic and capitalistic, anti-imperialistic and imperialistic aquatic acrobats—splash around in the pool together or separately)? Whatever the answer, it didn’t move me a hair’s breadth from the conviction that it was utterly unimportant. Philosophically and politically and athletically I wasn’t on the left or the right or the middle (I hadn’t noticed the disappearance of the latter, by the way), not even on the right wing or left wing of the right, to say nothing of being on one or the other extremes—so I lacked any sort of spatial orientation, so to speak.