All at once, we see department stores bursting with all kinds of wares, snazzy places. I can go in and buy an alligator handbag for Christa, or else a plush doe by Frau Käthe Kruse or the war regalia of a Sioux chief for our little son. I thus woefully redeem my guilty conscience for earning money sumptuously and spending it frivolously, indeed irresponsibly and heedlessly, for not husbanding, and certainly not saving, not gathering, but rather acting as if it were still the worthless old money, the trashy Reichsmark, instead of the sound and weighty Deutschmark with which we must shape our future, with which Germany, Europe, Western Civilization must rebuild from a rubble pile into a new efflorescence, with which we must create a new and this time permanent and definitive economic miracle.

But that’s just it. It’s all too miraculous for me. Too trusting is my belief in the fairy tale of it. Whatever money I earn runs through my fingers like water; for me it’s movie money, dream currency from a dream reality. The very way I earn it is dreamlike and incredible. There’s no fathoming what prompts Stoffel and Associates (my “producer piglets,” as Christa calls them) to grab up every other, often maliciously ironic thought I come up with in order to create a simply great project, which most likely will never be filmed, but which, thanks to some technical bank and tax manipulations I’ve not entirely comprehended, will enable them, as producers, to create a different, even greater and more profitable project, and thus to acquire the capital for newer, bigger studios and even newer, technically ever more perfect cameras (the basis for even bigger projects, in which there’ll be some pickings for me) . . .

I watch this chicanery and I imagine that things will keep on like this for me too, bigger and faster and more and more lavish. I place my naive confidence in a mysterious auto-functioning and parthenogenetic self-replication of prosperity. After all, that’s what’s happening all around me. The grocery stores are bursting with stuff to feed your face with. The hams, the sausages, the pâtés, meat salads, ragouts fins, the cheeses, the primeurs, the fruits are doubling, tripling, decupling overnight. The shoe-store displays are collapsing under a plethora of shoes; never have there been so many shoes since people stopped going on foot—for hardly anyone walks now; people take cars. You can buy them again; they stand, shinily painted in venomously synthetic candy colors, behind mirror-glass panes at the dealers’ showrooms, bigger and bigger, faster and faster, more and more cars . . .

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