In his treatment, Nagel has already described some scenes (extinguishing the fires, the tribe’s mood in the face of the destruction of the world) vividly enough to provide the men from the bank a picture even they can imagine. However, the first thing they do is start picking apart the content in minute detail—apparently feeling it their duty to the employers who put food on their table to make the movie so foolproof that even a department head couldn’t have anything against financing it. The arguments are correspondingly predictable: Will it be possible to convince moviegoers there are people who really believe that every few decades or so the world is destroyed and then raised from the dead the next morning? (I venture to interject that the miracle of the currency reform must have convinced most Germans of such a possibility, but I’m met partly with blank incomprehension—“Whaddaya mean?”—and partly with barely contained indignation, as if I’d called into question the inviolability of the monetary system and thus of the banks.)

Another objection: Why does the executioner have to come from so far away? (“Can’t these people string up their own criminals?”) Nagel patiently explains that after all, the tribe is subject to the laws of the country even if the government makes allowances for ethnic traditions and permits them to try their own cases. Carrying out the sentences, however, is reserved for the organs of the central government. Although she’s only Stoffel’s representative, Astrid von Bürger has taken charge of the discussion with a good deal of personal authority and asks somewhat mockingly (glancing at me for complicity) how they are going to inform the moviegoer of this complicated judicial situation—with a screen of written explanation, perhaps, listing the applicable precedents? (She’s already secured the complicity of the bankers; as chair of the meeting she has to support everyone equally.) Nagel squirms like he’s suffered a psychological shot in the belly. No, he says in a somewhat hoarse voice, the executioner himself could explain it in a few brief words—the treatment already has the movie beginning with an encounter between two strangers, the executioner and a world traveler who narrates the events. They meet at a campsite, both on their way to the natives. “Narrates?” Stoffel interjects in a booming voice. “I hate films that need voice-over narration. Film is a visual art, as proven by the decline in quality when the talkies were introduced . . .” Nagel interrupts him peevishly. “First of all that’s nonsense, and secondly, there’s no voice-over to what’s happening on-screen. Nobody explains what’s going on. The foreign traveler witnesses it all and we see what happens through his eyes.”