In the pastry café (coffee and cake for him; cognac for me in the absence of whiskey), talk turns to the days of the primal community in Nagel’s garden house, where we met. (General Freiherr von Neunteuffel, in whose company he had turned up, is in Bonn by now, busily engaged in the project of rearmament.) What Rönne articulates with fetching impersonality is an excellent analysis of events since 1945: at first, paralysis after the shock of total defeat (Nagel’s “Craterland”), then the primal communities born out of it, gatherings of fanaticized starvelings too inept for black market business. Escape into the intellectual sphere, the cultural and political spheres. The latter especially—a playground for the utopians; equally fertile ground for sharp-eyed strivers. Everyone who barely managed to survive—scruffy, tattered idealists with their heads in the clouds, disabled sleepwalkers, eternal students missing a limb or two, dyspeptic intellectuals, exploiters of ruined ideologies—they all devote themselves to intellectual reconstruction. Including the cobweb-shrouded Weimar Republicans rounded up by the western Allies from liberated concentration camps, state prisons, agricultural forced-labor camps, and other hiding places as pitiful proof of originally humanitarian war aims, in order to give them a quick dusting off and introduce them into the mother liquor of apathetic turnip eaters as catalysts for the hoped-for crystallization of a new German democracy. Although officially appointed, they too operated at first in an airless environment outside the bounds of general awareness—until, in fact, a sort of crystalline precipitate formed (similar to the famous Karlsbad salt) with a crust of professional politicians surrounding it. This new race is now determining the new German reality. Its first coup was the currency reform of 1948.

However, Rönne says, this process would not have been possible without the distracting maneuver that every magician uses to divert attention from his actual manipulations. It was produced by the inter-regnum of the intellectuals. The radio dominates reality. An enormous backdrop of chatter is erected. The most obvious evidence: Professor Hertzog and his intervention in the intellectual magma of the primal community, his distracting game of supposedly bringing order to the chaos. The radio broadcasts journalistic imitations of it in the evening while actual politics (e.g., Bonn’s appointment of General Neunteuffel) takes place behind a curtain of threadbare news reports.

When Rönnekamp talks, his incisors drop down from behind his upper lip and appear very large. Does he have not very well seated false teeth? Very disconcerting. I have to force myself to pay attention to what he’s saying and not to the epiphany of his front teeth.