These letters were phrased in a stiff register that worked hard at concealing our mutual embarrassment. Apart from a drunken letter about Franz, where I could hear his old lively voice, not once did he mention what had happened to Charlotte in the camp.

I heard that the people of Weimar were marched five miles north when Buchenwald was liberated. It took days for the residents, dressed in their Sunday best, to file through the camp. It must have been the barmaid from the Swan, the attendants from the Bath-house, the guides from Goethe’s house, the new teachers at the art school with Schlemmer’s painted-over murals, traipsing along the rail track to see what had happened in Goethe’s golden forest. ‘We didn’t know,’ they said, which must have been true and also not true, in the way that horror can be acknowledged but also ignored. (Disavowal; Verleugnung.) Then there is the fact that even what is known we do not admit; that in our minds we disperse the unthinkable. It is possible to know of horror vaguely.

But Irmi’s right: I cannot judge. I was in England from 1934, and later I’d also be ignoring Walter’s letters, because I too didn’t know what to do, and ignoring him was the easiest option. Though I knew he must be suffering, that East Berlin was a prison, I simply didn’t reply.

I too looked away. It was easy.

Weimar

In tone the letters I received from Walter that summer of 1923 were the same as those he sent me after the war: polite, and very formal. I had expected Walter’s normal spleen – Charlotte was a whore, a tease, a seductress – but instead these summer letters were all restraint. He wrote that he’d been seeing lots of them, and having an excellent time; that all three picnicked together in the woods; that a pool had formed in one of the clearings near Goethe’s Oak, where they could take dips to keep themselves cool.

But a liar can sniff out another liar, and my performance of goodwill toward them was mostly a sham. I wondered what was really going on: whether I’d return from Dresden to Jenö and Charlotte bludgeoned in bed (a tabloid picture of Lustmord) or whether (and perhaps it was not unthinkable for a utopia like the Bauhaus) all three of them might have simply hopped into bed together.