While I was thinking about my work and my personal problems, the plane had landed and was now taxiing along the runway towards the terminal of Hamburg Airport. I’ve been through this airport so often that I hardly notice it. It’s just another glass and steel box with flickering fluorescent lights. In the crowd, no one notices me, I’m just another passenger, just another German. If they do notice me it’s only because, like all Frenchmen abroad, I draw attention to myself. That’s how we are, we complain whenever things don’t go our way in foreign countries. Today, however, I felt tense, I felt scared, I shuffled forward in a daze. People jostled me, gave me strange looks, talked behind my back in German, in English, in Japanese. Some of them frankly sneering, which should give you some idea of the state I was in. Until now, I’ve only ever travelled for work – where everything is pre-planned, every minute timetabled, I am met at every airport – or with Ophélie, who anticipates every problem before it happens. I am lost, searching for myself, I am travelling back through time, peering through shadows, exploring the greatest atrocity the world has ever known and trying to work out why I am carrying the weight of it on my shoulders. In fact, it is because I already know that what I am doing is so painful. It would be impossible for me to grasp the enormity of this tragedy and emerge unscathed. I am terribly afraid I will come face to face with my father in some place where no man can stand and still be a man. My very humanity is at stake.

Hamburg, it has to be said, is in rude health. A very Teutonic health. Behind the beautiful façades there is something substantial, there are pleasing depths. Compared to Germany, our beloved Frankreich looks like a badly-run campsite. In France, we see healthiness as a sin, with all its connotation of money, monopolies, class struggle, and the exasperating exuberance of nouveau-riche nonentities. If we spend so much time and money on our bodies it’s probably to purge our bourgeois sins. We have become overweight, chubby-faced, bright-eyed dyed-in-the-wool revolutionaries. With my haunted look, my deathly pallor, my face unshaven, I looked obviously French, something that clashed with my glaringly robust Nordic physique. I tried to make up for it, but I couldn’t: I’d forgotten how to be exhausted and hide it, how to get annoyed without losing my temper, how to be completely lost but walk as though I knew exactly where I was going. I rented a car and set out. All I wanted was to be alone. More alone than anyone in the world.