“Tell me, John, don’t you think it was a disgrace? If we’d invaded England, for example—you’ve got to admit, we almost did, with that mess in Dunkirk—so, if we’d occupied your island, could you imagine anything like what happened with us here in Germany?”

King Thrushbeard blushes and bats his yolk-yellow lashes. His chin gets even longer and sharper. After overcoming his obviously genetic Anglo-Saxon bashfulness, he comes out with, “I can imagine that in that case, just about everything you’ve mentioned could happen to us just as it did to you—except for one thing: this conversation.”

No one seems visibly affected by the screening of the embarrassingly bad cinematic work of art. Except for Nagel, of course, who’s seething about how the brain trust of director, star, and her producer husband as well as the distributor and the investment bank’s film consultant made a hash of his original screenplay. He claims he can’t even recognize his own work. But even Nagel has no ear for the disgrace of this concoction’s warped attempt to overcome the past, especially since the only thing it’s meant to overcome is the exceedingly banal past career of the former Nazi film star and present leading lady, Astrid von Bürger. Good old Nagel is too much in love to see how her biography is glossed over in the cinematic legend he’s been force-fed: her rise—amid the death throes of Universum Film Inc.—from an athletic starlet to the popular image of young German womanhood, thanks to the patronage of the Reich Propaganda Minister Dr. Josef Goebbels, while shielded from that mighty man’s more intimate attentions by a feigned friendship—at first only a hypocritical simulation but soon becoming a real bond—with his wife, Frau Goebbels, whom she, Astrid (in the film she’s called Helge), does not betray even in the critical hours before the suicide of the entire family, and for that is retrospectively accused of collaboration in the crimes of the Third Reich.

(If only it had been like that! But what irony in the double entendre of the title “A Woman Plays Foul”! Irony masking as profundity. Nagel is genuinely proud of it. I’m having trouble persuading him not to make a novel out of the story. Moreover, some very unpleasant arguments about it with Scherping, who’s all fired up about the project and willing to underwrite it if only to contradict me.)

Insufferable remarks by Stoffel, producer and husband of the leading lady (“. . . I’m especially proud of you, my dear Astrid, making such an important contribution to correcting the image of collective guilt . . .”). Abashed faces on all sides.