“Be undaunted then! Walk on with your senses alert, wander with your senses open through this beautiful bright underworld that is Paris, or rather this overworld . . . You know, the thing that has always made photography (the invention most expressive of the zeitgeist) dear to me is the dialectics of the positive and negative image—don’t you agree?—whereby the latter is surprisingly more informative. For instance, I heard a little story here that articulates the terror of a certain German past in the negative, so to speak. The story was told to me by a tiny homosexual Jew who managed to escape from Berlin in 1939 just before the war broke out. He was sixteen years old at the time. Well, just before he fled, he went into a pissoir in Charlottenburg with a big Jewish star on his jacket, which he tried to conceal, as best he could, beneath his lapel. A moment of twofold relief—gratefully enjoyed—but then a tremendous shadow suddenly falls on him. He looks up: next to him, a gigantic SS man in uniform was unbuttoning his fly. The SS man looks down at him and said: ‘You’re a Jew, huh?’ Our little homosexual can only nod. The SS man: ‘Well, then, c’mon, gimme a kiss!’. . . But I forget why I wanted to tell you the story—ah yes, of course: because you presumably wish to write about Paris; you have to make literary use of your Paris experience. Could you do so, fairly and honestly, knowing about such events and realities, as if the things you saw around you here were still real? . . .”

5

I am going into such detail about these not exactly edifying incidents because, as I have said, I am in possession of some notes about them. These notes were penned by S., whom you encounter in these pages as Schwab. This is not the place to explain how I obtained them, nor do I wish to go into the matter of which varying or even contradictory descriptions of particulars are closer to the truth. Likewise, I need not expatiate on my intentions in contrasting the two notes.

Paris, October 1964. Thanks to alcohol and H.’s new pills, rather blurry impressions. We walk past the Madeleine. We’re no longer speaking. A day of agonizing tensions. I arrived by plane from Hamburg this morning. He didn’t pick me up (even though Schelmie wired the arrival time). Supposedly the telegram reached his hotel too late. I’d like to believe him (but I don’t). Trying to explain my embitterment to myself. Childish reason: I’d been looking forward to riding in his new car. Also, I lost my baggage. Tiresome, humiliating language difficulties (yet his fluent assistance would have embittered me even more).