“You see,” he says, leaning down toward her and lowering his voice so that those passing by won’t hear, “one thing you don’t know about me is that I like to serve.”

It is a surprising thing to hear, coming from a man two meters tall and built like a heavyweight. In fact, he is an amateur boxer; or rather was one for many years, until a month ago, when an attack of Schwindel—of vertigo—briefly hospitalized him, turned up a scar in his brain, and put an end to it. And yet, though he claims that he will never step foot in the ring again, and is employed as an editor at a highly respected newspaper, she still privately refers to him, both to her friends and herself, as the German Boxer. It is easier than using his name, which means “little gift from the gods”—because of that, and because calling him the German Boxer highlights their differences, and preserves a sense of ironic distance that keeps her grounded in the new land she’s recently discovered, like some Christopher Columbus of the soul: the land of being unattached and free.

They are walking around Schlachtensee—a long, thin lake at the edge of the Grunewald Forest—discussing whether or not eighty years ago he would have been a Nazi. The German Boxer thinks it is moral grandstanding to claim that he would not have been, as most everyone else in his generation claims, but now he goes beyond the usual argument of how he would have been shaped by historical forces that would have made his participation nearly inevitable, to offer the particular vulnerabilities of his own character.

“I am exactly the kind of person they would have recruited for the Napola,” he says, referring to the elite preparatory schools where they groomed the strong, obedient, and relatively clever German youth into leaders of the SS. “I’ve always overly idolized my mentors, and strove to fulfill every last demand they made of me, because it struck fear in me to imagine failing their expectations. That, along with my size and build, makes me just the sort of person they would have wanted. And, being wanted, I would have felt honored. It’s my weakness for honor and praise, you see, that would have sent me right into the ranks of the SS.”