Although I’d opened my wallet, I passed through the checkout counter without buying anything and outside found that the city had turned into a black-and-white picture. The ocher of the outside walls of the buildings and the emerald green of the cars were now wavering between black and white, having lost their colors and been absorbed into a spectrum of gray.

With this black-and-white scene before me, I no longer knew what era I was living in. I was surrounded by a group of children. They were all holding out bowls, begging with their eyes for food. Certain that if they looked away for even a second they wouldn’t get their share, they never took their eyes off me. The bowls were white as bone inside. Their roundness perfectly matched the round faces of the children. The children disappeared the moment I realized that this was a picture: the famous poster Kathe Kollwitz created during the 1920s to tell the world about starving children. There’s not one unnecessary line, so her message comes straight at you. But perhaps the image of hungry children didn’t have such a clear message for the world back then. The word “hunger” probably didn’t even occur to passersby who saw them shuffling along, their shoulders drawn in, or sitting by the road, their thin arms hugging their knees. Individual characteristics erased from their faces, these children were arranged for the greatest effect, each one given the same bowl. Their names were replaced by a single category: “German children.” Artists are also artistic directors, with a hint of the liar about them, and their lies worry me so much that I can never bring myself to take action, and so become quite useless.

Sometimes when you walk by a window you get a glimpse of what’s going on inside the house. A man stands by the door, hanging his head. His wife and children look at him, their eyes full of hope, but maybe he lost his job today. He stands there, staring down at the floor. The situation in the house next door seems just as bleak. The father must have been killed in the war, for the photograph of him in his uniform is draped with a black ribbon. The mother, her eyes half-closed in anguish, presses her head into the pillow. Until the day before yesterday she’d managed, by helping clear away the rubble, to earn just enough money to keep her children fed somehow, but now she has a high fever and can’t get out of bed. Her little children stand by her bedside. They don’t know what to do.

I quickened my pace, heading for the park.

As it was already dark, no children were playing anymore, but I saw an old woman sitting on a bench, her right hand across her forehead as she stared out at the city. Snow had fallen on her head, turning her hair white. The shawl over her shoulders, too, was pure white. She wasn’t wearing a coat. The skirt wrapped around her lower body was thick as carpet, and she had big boots on. Assuming she was a homeless woman sitting there on the bench, people walked by without speaking to her. But I couldn’t help noticing how extraordinary her face was—the strong ridge of her eyebrows, and the determination in the eyes beneath, looking straight ahead.