My thoughts returned to a meeting I had had the previous Tuesday with Frau Kalau vom Hofe at the Goering Institute.

‘I brought your books back,’ I explained. ‘The one by Professor Berg was particularly interesting.’

‘I’m glad you thought so,’ she said. ‘How about the Baudelaire?’

‘That too, although it seemed much more applicable to Germany now. Especially the poems called “Spleen”.’

‘Maybe now you’re ready for Nietzsche,’ she said, leaning back in her chair.

It was a pleasantly furnished, bright office with a view of the Zoo opposite. You could just about hear the monkeys screaming in the distance.

Her smile persisted. She was better looking than I remembered. I picked up the solitary photograph that sat on her desk and stared at a handsome man and two little boys.

‘Your family?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must be very happy.’ I returned the picture to its position. ‘Nietzsche,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘I don’t know about that. I’m not really much of a reader, you see. I don’t seem to be able to find the time. But I did look up those pages in Mein Kampf — the ones about venereal disease. Mind you, it meant that for a while I had to use a brick to wedge the bathroom window open.’ She laughed. ‘Anyway, I think you must be right.’ She started to speak but I raised my hand. ‘I know, I know, you didn’t say anything. You were just telling me what is written in the Führer’s marvellous book. Not offering a psychotherapeutic analysis of him through his writing.’

‘That’s right.’

I sat down and faced her across the desk.

‘But that sort of thing is possible?’

‘Oh, yes indeed.’

I handed her the page from Der Stürmer.

‘Even with something like this?’

She looked at me levelly, and then opened her cigarette box. I helped myself to one, and then lit us both.

‘Are you asking me officially?’ she said.

‘No, of course not.’

‘Then I should say that it would be possible. In fact I should say that Der Stürmer is the work of not one but several psychotic personalities. The so-called editorials, these illustrations by Fino — God only knows what effect this sort of filth is having on people.’

‘Can you speculate a little? The effect, I mean.’

She pursed her beautiful lips. ‘Hard to evaluate,’ she said after a pause. ‘Certainly for weaker personalities, this sort of thing, regularly absorbed, could be corrupting.’

‘Corrupting enough to make a man a murderer?’