Hamburg, 1950: Ran into Herr von Rönnekamp on the Jungfernstieg. Cordial reunion: his detective’s face (Arsène Lupin, avenger of the dispossessed) steamrollers you with amiability. In his rich Baltic accent with the swallowed umlauts that earned him the nickname “the Bütch” he declares, “Hoven’t zeen you in a dock’s edge!” Invites me to a “little chat” in the pastry café of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. On the way he tells me about the tragic fate of another member of his brotherhood: Unhappily in love with a young man he picked up on the street and hired as his servant only to be swindled and robbed in every possible way, his despairing friend had decided to kill himself. At the moment he’s raising the pistol to his temple, his servant-lover enters the room. Caught in the act, the startled suicide shoves the pistol into his pants pocket. It goes off and shoots off “bows nuts, chust sink off it, shoots off bows testikels.” Tableau. (From his narrow mouth “testicle” sounds like the name of a Baltic landed estate: “For seven hundred years, the Rönnekamps have been the lords of Testikel.”) What moves me is not the tragedy of the man who shot off “bows nuts” or rather “bows testikels,” but the love story behind it. So that sort of thing still exists—although probably only among queers. Rönnekamp too won me over with his capacity for love. Unforget-table times in his gingerbread cottage in Pöseldorf: him in the midst of his lover-boys—of the teenager or ordinary seaman variety—muscular young lads with fist-sized boils on the backs of their necks beneath their yellow Lorelei-manes; him boasting in his Baltic aristocrat’s manner that tenderness is unmanly and laughable, and an immediate, rising chorus of young male voices: “You? How can you say that? You! Just a little kiss and you’re right down on your knees!”

(Handwritten note: Attention! cf. Abel)

I see him standing at the window, in his hand a book he’s going to recommend to his favorite, Dieterkins (a mechanic’s apprentice). (What heterosexual still falls in love with a girl from the “people”? Romanticism flourishes only in tennis clubs these days. With predictable consequences.) Rönne’s anguished attempt to explain the beauties of Joseph Conrad to the dull-witted boy. Loving instruction. Wanting to give the best one has. His knife-edge profile bent in Pre-Raphaelite humility.