By the way, on the subject of new German fashions: my kind, artists and intellectuals, still cling loyally to our old duds: baggy corduroys, anoraks, and berets. (In the days of Rinaldo Rinaldini, highwaymen too wore distinctive and easily recognized clothing.) But even the lads from the radio already betray a tendency to rebourgeoisify into manager types. Gone is their buccaneering candor. The currency miracle’s caused shockwaves. The stroke that separated today from a swashbuckling yesterday in the bombed-out landscape cuts through one’s character. The innocuousness of those who had nothing left to lose in the poorhouse generosity of the hunger years spent in cellar holes and Quonset huts belongs to another race of men. I wonder if the trip through purgatory was a process of purification? It’s a long road to travel from former Party member to nihilistic existentialist to arch-democrat and citizen. Can’t get rid of the impression that it happened almost without any—or at least with mostly unconscious—involvement on our part, over our heads, so to speak. Collective fate. The times are pregnant with it. (I’m afraid to encounter myself in the mirror: yesterday, gaunt as a Belgrade hackney nag, but with bright eyes [bright with horror!]; today, drunkard’s eyes like old oysters behind thick lenses, pillowed in the fat of the all too abrupt dietary shift of the miraculous reconstruction. Specifically German in bearing and gesture: a routinized display of droning uprightness: “True blue and always honest!” as a program for worldwide profit. By the way: the post-currency-reform spirit is dropsical: the edema of yesterday’s famine shines through; the pressure mark of a finger takes several minutes to fade.)

In response to all that, the occupying Brits in their dysentery-yellow field blouses maintain a stiff upper lip. No longer the masters in their former officers’ club, they mingle in uneasy nonchalance with the horde of German cultural managers busy devouring rolls while balancing champagne glasses as if they had no memory of the raggedy cigarette-butt collectors of yesterday (“Exskyooze me Zurr, I vant to ax you for a purrmeet to go to Buxtehude to fetch my zister. She iss a ferry pritti gorl”). Done and gone their colonial grandeur, when the Ice Age Germans were the coolies of the British Labor-Sahibs. A people’s prestige is measured by the hardness of their currency.

For a while I stand by a group talking about the recent past and what a disgrace it was that many of our countrymen acted after the defeat and under the Allied occupation: denunciations, self-abasement before the victors, begging for cigarettes and chocolate, turning tricks for nylons, and so on. An occupying officer turned cultural advisor stands there listening. He is young and the very model of an Englishman: clay-colored field blouse; tangerine-colored hair; banana-colored mustache; innocent, steel-blue eyes framed by egg-yolk-yellow lashes; rabbit teeth; and a long, pointed chin like King Thrushbeard. Someone turns to him.