He also announced himself to be a democratizing influence. Concerning the arts, he pretended to be bored to tears by all pretension: the ballet should be forbidden by the Reichstag; for entertainment there were boxing matches and bicycle races; if anyone needed more, they should stay at home and look in the mirror. He represented, he told them, all that was best in the modern consciousness. He kept a pair of opera glasses in his room, through which he looked at a nudist in an apartment across the street. The man was fat and would go about his business in the evenings with the curtains open, reading and handling himself. About sex it became evident that he had the matter-of-factness of someone sitting down to dinner.

Wilhelm and Hans agreed to remain polite but not welcoming. One night, two months after they’d climbed the railway trestle, Spiess stopped by Wilhelm’s room, when Hans was at the library, to ask if he wished to go for a walk. Wilhelm declined but was intrigued. And Hans was late. An hour went by. Restless and annoyed, Wilhelm decided to go to the library. He left his room thinking of Spiess, then turned a corner and ran into him.

Their impulse was to draw back, but they went up to each other. As if by agreement, they walked around the school grounds and the athletic fields.

They talked about their backgrounds. Spiess complimented him on his height. Wilhelm mentioned in turn that he’d liked the sultan’s tent. He was titillated by the decadence of the flirtation, yet berated himself. Wasn’t he devoted to someone else? Didn’t he have any rules? Would the few he tried to impose upon himself constantly give way? Suppose Hans returned? Where would he say he’d been? He walked along, hands in pockets, absorbed with the complications. The idea of causing Hans pain appalled and fascinated him. He was a small boy considering the effects of shaking the ant-farm. What a pig I am, he finally thought, glorying in his wickedness.

Berlin, 1910

BERLIN, 1910

It was characteristic of Hans that the first afternoon they spoke, he asked Wilhelm his goals in life. Wilhelm surprised himself by answering “The theater,” and from thereafter philology receded rapidly. A year later they quit Charlottenburg together to study art history and literature in Heidelberg. When Spiess wrote, offering to visit, they never responded.

In Heidelberg as students they performed Schiller in the presence of the Grand Duke of Baden. Max Reinhardt was in the audience. Backstage he sought out Hans and Wilhelm, still in costume, and offered the nineteen-year-old Wilhelm a place in his newly founded theater school in Berlin. If he agreed to stay for six years, it would cost nothing. Wilhelm was nonplussed. Hans said, “He accepts your offer right here, on the spot.” For years afterwards Reinhardt referred to Hans as Wilhelm’s “agent.”