I knew I was drunk, but I stubbornly kept talking all the more. I said, “Try to express that in a comprehensible way—in images, I mean. You intend to write about that yourself sometime, right? Okay then, you won’t rise to the bait—I’m not going to either, no matter how hard you try—by the way, did you ever try offering cash? A check signed by your employer Scherping—given the right circumstances that might tempt me to take up my pen. Go ahead! Do as my swinish film bosses do: they get me to write with false promises too . . . But I mean, just for the fun of it: where would you find the images for a gripping novel of the present day? I mean, a present that’s not decoupled from the past. Where would you begin? Probably in the death camps, where guilt and enslaved innocence, terror, fear and deprivation and insanity, the madness inherent in human beings were raised to such a monstrous level that they assumed the character of a dream; where they had metastasized into a surrealistic nightmare; where hundreds of thousands died senseless deaths without the slightest chance for a litmus test to prove their will to live and a consideration of the murderers’ motives had become almost laughable. How does a potential author provide a vivid image of all that? Those who survived don’t like to talk about it, and if they do, then quite inadequately, for language can’t cope with that telling. Especially not with the encounter with GOD. He wasn’t much in evidence there behind the barbed wire. For the great majority of others however—namely, the ones who strung the barbed wire around the camps—the spectacular thunder, lightning, and fire of their experiences at the front and in the nights of air raids in the cities obscured this core reality of the past. The benevolent Veil of Maya, right? Fitfully illuminated by exploding bombs. The terror bombing of German cities, the wild escapes, the loss of the Homeland, the rapes of German women and girls by Asiatic subhumans, etc., such are the novelistic themes that obscure the essence. This incursion of physical ur-reality into metaphysics had a positively cleansing, liberating effect: the horror latent in the epoch was happening at last, quite widely recognized although not yet as directly experienced as inside the barbed wire. But that still was not enough to leave one stone upon another. Not enough to avoid anything of what followed: the reconstruction of the possibility it would happen again. Peace—you’ll protest—a cleansing of conscience, democracy, etc.—those were nothing to sneeze at, were they? Granted. But what about the guilt that continues to grow in the background? The catharsis that never happened! Still charitably veiled by Maya? And you intend to continue to weave that veil and with GOD’s help give a leg up to tomorrow’s reality? So that it doesn’t see? So that the future discovers it’s as blind as ever! Is that what we writers are destined to do? Never to speak the truth! Always weaving the veil of Maya—and all the tighter, the more vividly we depict the terrors of the world of men . . . Many thanks, dear sir, but count me out!”