Hans was first. Her introduction ran as follows: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Spirits and Slaves, Sons of Moloch, I give you one of Heaven’s Elect. I give you a Windstorm. I give you Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele.”

The audience applauded as though they’d wait and see about that Windstorm.

But Hans read with the confidence and fluency of someone in the middle of a storied career. Standing up there alone with his few sheets of paper, he had more presence than Wilhelm had achieved in his years of shambling about onstage.

He read a series of lyrics in an order the two friends had debated. Three city poems first: “Rhapsody,” “Not Yet Day! The Hideous Night—,” and “Rejoicing Zion, Murderous Baal.” Then a poem for Lasker-Schüler, followed by one for Wilhelm—“And There Will Be Days Like Silk”—and finally, an elegy entitled “My Friend, Who Went to the Shadows,” which he refused to discuss.

The applause afterwards was sincere. That night they toasted the beginning of his public career as a poet. He soon was published in small magazines and the Sunday newspaper supplements, and made plans for a chapbook. He became known to other poets. “And There Will Be Days Like Silk” appeared in Free Spirit, with the dedication “For Ulrich the Helmet”—a nickname coined by Lasker-Schüler.

Even so, Wilhelm wondered about that mysterious Friend now in the Shadows. Had Hans meant him, or a rival?

He had little opportunity to find out. Reinhardt demanded more and more of his attention. But, as he wrote his mother, to be twenty years old and onstage with the sort of actors and actresses that had begun to crowd those productions …! There would be time for talk later. And Hans had his own life. In the meantime, at any given night, in any production: Wegener, Basserman, Loos, Veidt, Krauss, or Jannings.

Of course all the other theater companies began pillaging from them. All over Berlin, all over Germany, somewhere in Act I, young men emerged from the gloom like wraiths, while diagonals of light fell from high windows into vast and empty atriums. Every production began to look like theirs. And why not? Wilhelm himself was copying all he could, and in the process learning discernment, dedication, focus, and confidence. Reinhardt’s confidence, as sets collapsed and experiments backfired and audiences mutinied, reminded Wilhelm of a remark attributed to Haydn while the French were besieging Vienna: Don’t worry. When Haydn’s around, nothing can go wrong.

He was learning Romanticism: in Reinhardt productions Expressionist screaming might be restaged as tender kisses. He was learning subtlety: Reinhardt taught him how to use the quieter characters onstage like those half-shaded figures behind the heroes who could so transform a painting.