None of us, the Director included, thought the Citizens’ Survey would bring us down altogether. Looking back, I might even be tempted to say the Survey was a brilliant move, because in the end, Weimar didn’t serve just the foreigners with their exit papers, but all of us. Though the Director had persuaded them not to print the names of the Jews and the French and the Americans and the Czechoslovaks, the numbers had been printed – and the numbers had done enough.

Shortly after the article, and in a stroke of good luck for the city, the new mark was brought in, and the Republik revised how much money – in suddenly sober terms – these Jews, foreigners and Communists were costing the country. There had been a wildness to the inflation that had let the Bauhaus flourish: if nothing had value then anything was possible. But when the new money came in, Reichswehr officers raided the school, looking, ostensibly, for Communist activity. When they didn’t find any Communists, well: the school was shut down anyway.

The day after they cancelled the old money there were people everywhere wheeling their rubbish to the dump. Up at Walter’s apartment there were trillion-mark notes snowing onto the pavement below, and Walter himself was seated on his lodging’s window as on a horse: a leg over the sill and another in the apartment, as he watched the wind carry off the cash. His silk gown revealed his stomach and the bulge of his genitals against the sill. There was a foul heaviness in the air from the florist, and the day was cool and muggy. I was surprised I’d found him. As Kaspar had said, he’d been something of a ghost since the semester began.

‘Walter! What are you doing? Stop!’

The light hitting his taped-up spectacles meant I couldn’t quite see his eyes. ‘Why?’

‘At least keep it for kindling.’

‘Ah, Pauli, ever the pragmatist.’

His landlady let me in, and the doorway to his flat was open when I’d made it up the stairs. Inside, there was mess everywhere. ‘It’s all garbage,’ he said, looking around the room. Overnight, he’d become a pauper. In his gown he looked like a figure from the Hochadel: an aristocrat’s ruination to him. ‘I can at least make you a coffee. I have,’ he said, ‘tons of the stuff.’ He came in with two small cups. ‘No milk. Sorry.’

We hadn’t really spoken since I’d seen him in the woods. I’d finished my coffee by the time I could think of something to say. ‘I haven’t seen you for a while.’

‘I’ve been busy,’ he said, packing up the stuff. ‘Baby Jesus. The Magi, et cetera.’