I got a room in a tiny boutique hotel as bright as a small spring sun. From my window, I could see the university in its lush, magical setting. Manicured lawns, hundred-year-old trees, hedges clipped and sculpted with lasers, fountains with, I imagine, fat fish fed by an invisible hand with the best of intentions or at least with impeccable attention to punctuality, scale and quantity. In the middle of the campus, on a grassy hill, the majestic Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität sits enthroned. It is a magnificent building, stately, opulent, in delectable warm shades of stone. I thought back to my university, the École Centrale in Nantes, a poor relation by comparison. This, clearly, is a temple to science. The hordes of regimented students, walking in groups or single file already had the austere, preoccupied look of veteran scientists while also being tousled, smiling, pleasantly scruffy like all students their age. The professors, old-fashioned, shambling, essentially innocuous, carrying baskets or old canvas bags, looked as though they had just arrived from the country and gone to the wrong place. Germany, I remembered, was in the throes of an environmental crisis, something that dovetailed neatly with is formidable industrial infrastructure. Leather and faux-leather satchels were clearly the fashion in Frankfurt this year. When I was a student in Nantes, it was nylon rucksacks, and I remember Monsieur Candela, self-obsessed soixante-huitard that he was, telling me that in his day, you turned up for lectures with nothing and left with a girl on your arm. Things change.

Until now, I had been able to allow my future father some extenuating circumstances, to see in him the conscientious schoolboy, the fun-loving student, the decent, happy-go-lucky soldier. He is young, he doesn’t know, the Final Solution is a state secret, a confidential matter known only to the Führer perched in his Eagle’s Nest, the impregnable Berghof, and to the starving prisoner in some far-flung part of eastern Europe, in a death camp cut off by snowstorms from the rest of the world. People suspected, they spoke in euphemisms, they had noticed that there were fewer and fewer Jews and other Minderwertige Leute on the streets, that many shops were closed and derelict, that the Judenhaus and the synagogues had been repurposed, but a war is a war, it must first be fought, only afterwards can you calculate the dead and the disappeared, only then do state secrets, like corpses, float to the surface.