When it came to me, it struck me so hard that I almost fell from my airy perch on the wall. They were the same contours, drawn with a hard pencil and sophomorically accurate, the same faded watercolors as the studies that Private First Class Adolf Hitler (at the time, more artistically than politically engaged) had doodled into his sketchbook in France during World War I: shot-up farms in September light . . . But this cannot be talked about here. Not even with the pretty survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. This is not the time or place for cultivated salon chitchat. Important things are happening here. History has caught up with itself and is now taking place in the present, is even taking a step into the future. Here, a milestone is being placed in world history, casting a warning shadow into times to come.

Everybody says this to himself three times a day (at lunch in the cafeteria, at cocktails in the bar of the Grand Hotel Excelsior, at the slow waltz shortly after the floor show in the Excelsior souterrain). Here too we live elevated by the magic of cant. We live in the nimbus of exceptionality. We are witnessing a historic expansion of international law. The Hague Convention of 1926 managed only to condemn war as a crime; it offered no legal sanctions against the perpetrators (much less defined the crime of conspiracy). Here they are now, the conspirators responsible for the last war, sitting as defendants in two fenced-in rows of benches, and we already know how this will end. The milestone in world history will once again be a gallows . . .

They seem to know this themselves. They act stoic, sharply watched as they are by helmeted GIs, who, as a token of the solemnity of this historic moment, are wearing white cotton gloves on their dangling butcher paws. And across from them, raised up on a platform, enthroned at a long table, as in da Vinci’s Last Supper, sit their judges:

in the middle looms OUR LORD JUSTICE Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, visible from the elbows to the head, an isosceles triangle (the acme pointing to God). Christian England, the bulwark of Western Civilization, invented by Dickens in his finest hour: graying in the dust of files to abstract, patriarchal justice; learnedly sucking a pencil, discreet harrumphs purging the throat, mind, and conscience; and in the sea-blue eyes under the periwig (here set aside) the eternal boyishness of Britain . . .

and to his right and left, the apostles. (Not a zodiac describing twelve but one more than half, namely seven, the number of perfection and the completed action; the judges are arranged not dramatically in four trios, as seasonal constellations, but in the four-times-two-makes-eight of eternity.) At the left of OUR LORD’s British colleague, two Frenchmen (their artistic tailor is Daumier) in bat cloaks, vain neck-bands, puffy lawyer-caps: the black brethren of the white cook and the red Communard, gazing with astute Cartesian eyes from behind their thriftily iron-framed glasses, and paper-flower bouquets of éloquence proliferating from their narrow lips. . .