Went there to forestall arguments about it with Scherping. Accuses me of intellectual arrogance when I stay away from such things. Nothing much different in the club since the forlorn gatherings of creative artists in pre-currency-reform days. Nevertheless, more relaxed interaction with the British occupiers. (Recent exchange between two club friends: “Hello, Heinz-Günther!”—“Hallo, Percy!” pronounced “Pörsü.” Percy was clearly a frequent name in Hamburg as well, testimony to Hanseatic relations with the Anglo-Saxons: my cousin Percy Fettkötter.) Duly noted, the rearmament of fashion: the triumphal procession of German textiles begins. Silvery bowties everywhere (symbols of “nothing to hide”). Axel Springer’s natty pseudo-English downtown Hamburg elegance in contrast to Witte’s almost Russian boorishness (his apoplectically red, Falstaffian face with the sea-blue gaze of a “gatekeeper to the world,” haloed by a lion’s mane of white hair—a bourgeois cockade). Equally eager to make visible his reclaimed urbanity (with a tinge of Winsen-on-the-Luhe, however): producer Stoffel, stuffed into a double-breasted pinstriped suit like a gangster in a hit from the Roaring Twenties. Scherping too, Hamburgishly Anglo-Saxonized (somebody’s persuaded him that you don’t have to wear gray flannel pants with a checked jacket; it’s more fashionable to wear pants of the same pattern). Once again, it’s painfully funny to see how hard he tries to downplay his status as the representative of high culture, joking about the book trade, playing the clown—you expect he’ll begin turning somersaults any minute—kidding me, “Well, what should I call you, editor-in-chief? Or maybe just chief? Chief sounds like a dog’s name: Heel, Chief! . . . That is, if you’re not already planning to become my boss! Go ahead! You think I’m illiterate anyway!” He’s looking for his daily dose of abuse and humiliation. I have to control myself to keep from throwing up.

Surveying the physiognomies present I can’t get out of my head the image of the hostages being shot in Crete: Father and son standing together in front of the firing squad. Two gaunt, noble peasant faces, the son with eyes closed, the father looking almost peevishly straight ahead, a second before the crackle of the salvo: the complete, inward collectedness of their composure, nothing demonstrative, no heroics; just a proud coming to terms with an absurd fate—including a cosmically boundless contempt for fate’s violent henchmen . . .