ARCHIVE · original four-way version (May 2026) · current experiment →
After Babel, The Machine?

Reading notes (my own writing)

These are my reading notes, kept as I read my own work in full. The aim is not to map or summarize but to steep in the prose — to hear again how I write, what I keep returning to, the register I hold, what my eye lands on. I write the notes as I read, continuously, so that they alone could carry my understanding forward.

Reading order (composition chronology, so I can hear the voice develop):

  1. Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (novel, 1931)
  2. Im Schnellzug nach Haifa (reportage, 1933)
  3. So war's eben (family epic, drafted 1930s–40s)
  4. Der erste Zug nach Berlin (novel, postwar)
  5. Etwas Seltenes überhaupt (memoir, late)

Source: plain text extracted from the PDFs/EPUB in inputs/step1_primary/ (umlauts, »guillemets«, and apostrophes all preserved cleanly). Bare page numbers and page-break marks survive as artifacts in some files; I read past them.

I keep German quotations verbatim, with a light gloss only where it helps me remember why the phrase struck me.

1. Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (1931)

Roman. Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin, 1931. My breakthrough — the Berlin novel. Opening chapter heading: "Nichts ist da, als der Artikel über den Matsch."

Käsebier — ch. 1–8 (the newspaper world)

The book opens not on a person but on a street. "Die Kommandantenstraße zu Berlin, halb schon Konfektions- und halb noch Zeitungsviertel…" — the camera tracks down it, cataloguing shops, and only then settles into the editorial office of the Berliner Rundschau. This is how I begin: place first, rendered as commerce. I see a city through its trades, its shopfronts, its prices.

What I notice in myself here:

Register so far: urbane, ironic, rapid; a feuilletonist's eye; affectionate toward Berlin even while skewering it; attentive above all to money, trades, talk, and the texture of the city.

Käsebier — ch. 4–8 (the machine starts turning)

Käsebier — ch. 5–9 (the manufacture of fame)

This is the satirical engine of the book, and it shows me at my most virtuosic in ventriloquism.

But the satire is not all. Under it I keep real feeling, and it is the women who carry it. Fräulein Dr. Kohler loves the vain, evasive Meyer-Paris; she replays a dream of a shabby hotel room — his ugly underwear, "den untrainierten Rücken" — and loves him anyway; her clear-eyed friend's verdict: "Sie sind bloß instinktlos in der Auswahl Ihrer Objekte." Margot driving, doing the arithmetic of aging and boredom: "Es ist viel leichter auf dem Hintergrund der guten Bürgerlichkeit Abenteurerin zu sein, als auf dem Hintergrund der Bohème." The comedy is the surface; loneliness is the floor under it.

Recurring concern, now central: fame as manufacture — critics, agents, publishers, photographers, radio all converging to inflate value out of nothing, the whole engine driven by money and mutual citation.

Käsebier — ch. 9–10 (under the satire: the social novel)

Here the book turns out to be far more than satire, and I see what I most care about.

A stylistic signature confirmed: the list of balanced opposites — "teils X und teils Y," "teils Wunder und teils Chemie." I weigh grace against logistics, the providential against the organized, in the very grammar.

Käsebier — ch. 10–11 (the society anatomy; the bubble begins)

Note on the milieu: this is the assimilated Jewish Berlin bourgeoisie drawn from inside — Muschler & Sohn the old bank, Kaliski, Hersheimer, Frechheim, Oppenheimer, Meyer-Lewin — their connoisseurship, francophilia, money-talk, marriage-market, all rendered by a native with affection and a scalpel at once. This is my home ground and my great subject.

Käsebier — ch. 12–15 (the mechanics of money; the displacement)

Refrains I keep threading: "Es regnet, immer wenn wir uns treffen" (Meyer to Kohler, tender and empty); the "½ 2 Uhr … Taxi" sentence reused to bind separate scenes. I build rhythm and irony by repetition across characters — the same words returning in new mouths.

Käsebier — ch. 16–19 (Otto Mitte; the catchphrase swallows the city)

Style signatures now firmly confirmed: (1) anaphora as both portraiture and political indictment; (2) the catchphrase/refrain propagating across all characters and classes; (3) ironic juxtaposition of lyrical nature against petty greed; (4) documentary financial precision as the substrate of fate; (5) embedded learned quotation (Schmoller) used to judge a character from outside the scene.

Käsebier — ch. 20–23 (saturation, bureaucracy, the fence)

Added style note: I can turn the commercial soundscape itself into literature — street-cries, ad-slogans, official jargon, all transcribed and repeated until they become a kind of incantatory verse. The vernacular of commerce is my raw poetic material.

Käsebier — ch. 24–28 (the crash; the death of quality)

This is the book's moral-political heart, and the catastrophe it has been building toward.

Käsebier — ch. 29–30 (the summit: a child dies, a city dies)

The moral and emotional climax. Everything converges.

This is the book's true subject revealed: not Käsebier at all, but the death of a humane world — its craft, its city, its intellect, its children — under the rising of money, machine, mass, and the men of no conviction. The satire was the bait; this elegy is the catch.

Käsebier — ch. 31–35 (Miermann dies; the bank fails)

Käsebier — ch. 36–40 (liquidation, auction, the shattered Minerva)

The whole architecture, now visible: a circular structure (Minerva to Minerva), threaded with recurring refrains ("es kommt nicht druff an" / "die Finanzierung ist alles" / "Wir telefonieren einmal" / the doll-chant), in which a manufactured fame becomes a manufactured bubble that bursts into the real 1929–31 — and the satire of celebrity turns out to be an elegy for a humane world: its craft, its city, its merchant honor, its intellect, its children, all going down together as money, machine, mass, and the men of no conviction rise. Written before the worst, and seeing all of it.

Käsebier — ch. 40 "Finale"

The perfect ironic coda. Käsebier, a nobody again, sings in a beer-cabaret in Kottbus; the four Berlin buyers watching him can't even recall his name — "Käsebier, heißt er wohl, aber genau kann ich's Ihnen nicht sagen" — while they talk only of the next failing firms. Risen from nowhere, returned to nowhere. And the last words, Gohlisch's: "Fette Beute gibt's nicht mehr." Fame evaporates; the wheel turns to the next bankruptcy.

Käsebier — voice distilled (what I take from my own breakthrough novel)

Editorial context (Nachwort by Nicole Henneberg — about me, not my prose)

The afterword is the editor's, not mine — I read it for facts and for my own words quoted in it. The genuinely mine (letters, autobiography), worth keeping:

Biographical facts (Henneberg's, to carry forward — NOT to mistake for my voice): assimilated Jewish manufacturer's family; Abitur against my father's will; doctorate in history under Friedrich Meinecke (a "Vernunftrepublikaner," DDP co-founder) — I call myself "Historikerin und Meinecke-Schülerin." First German woman court reporter (Berliner Börsen-Courier 1923 → Berliner Tageblatt / Mosse, 1924–33, the model for the Rundschau). Model: Sling (Paul Schlesinger). Trained at Alice Salomon's Soziale Frauenschule under Gertrud Bäumer. Käsebier = "das zweite Buch des Stammtisches" (the Capri table — Olden, Kiaulehn, Weltbühne, the architect Hegemann). Frächter conceived as Goebbels's "kleiner Bruder"; my theme the German "Anfälligkeit für Irrationales." SA tried to storm my flat 4 March 1933; fled to Prague, then Palestine (1935), then London (1938). Effingers begun right after Käsebier, finished "in dreissig möblierten Zimmern in der Tschechoslowakei, Palästina und London," published 1951 — this is the novel I will translate. Forgotten 25 years; renaissance from 1976; finished the autobiography Etwas Seltenes überhaupt (pub. 1983, after my death in 1982). My faith: "eine liberale Gesellschaft, getragen von aufgeklärten, nicht korrumpierbaren Bürgern."

2. Im Schnellzug nach Haifa (reportage, 1933 onward)

Travel writing / reportage about Palestine, edited by Nicole Henneberg, with photographs by Abraham Pisarek. Opens "Überfahrt 1933." A different mode from the Berlin novel — first-person witness, the reporter abroad. Reading to hear how my voice works in non-fiction: the eye, the register, what I notice.

Haifa — "Überfahrt 1933" / "Klima" / "Landschaft" / "Wirrnis Jerusalem"

The reportage voice shares the novel's machinery but opens a register the novel mostly kept latent.

Haifa — Mea Schearim / Kino / Rechavia / Postämter / Akko–Haifa / Tel Aviv

Haifa — Purim / beach / Bethlehem–Dead Sea / the settler portraits

Haifa — the Kwuzah / the festivals / the Pessach triptych

Haifa — the identity core (the most important stretch for who I am)

This stretch fixes the self I translate from: the assimilated German-Jewish humanist-intellectual whose true home was German culture and the household Jewish tradition-chain; betrayed by the country she loved and over-served; skeptical of and resistant to Zionism; carrying the cakes, clothes, and songs of the people who threw her out. Fair, ironic, grieving, historical.

Haifa — the exile gallery & my credo

Haifa — the gallery's culmination

Haifa — the closing portraits

(After this the file is Henneberg's editorial Anmerkungen/glossary and afterword — apparatus, not my prose. Glossary terms absorbed: Chaluzim, Kwuzah, Galuth, Misrachi, Sepharden/Aschkenasim, Jecken, Baalaboss, etc.)

Haifa — editorial afterword (Henneberg): my quoted letters + facts

The afterword is Henneberg's, but it quotes me — and these are decisive:

Facts to carry (Henneberg's): SA raid → fled to Spindlermühle (worked happily on Effingers, wrote for the Prague Bohemia) → followed Heinz to Palestine Nov 1933 (he an architect, his brother's invitation; sister-in-law Esther Leibowitz a fervent Zionist — family strife). Jerusalem (Rechavia), then Tel Aviv 1934 (Hayarkon, later Gordon St). Heinz got polio, son Peter whooping cough, I a skin disease (Charara). A 1935 fundamentalist-Zionist rally welcomed Hitler ("Die Lösung der Judenfrage… positiv in unserem Sinne"). Autumn 1937 → Europe, fell in love with England, "das humanistische und liberale Land," my true home; moved there summer 1938; lived in London until my death, 1982.

Effingers (what I will translate): "ein Epos über vier Generationen einer großbürgerlichen jüdischen Familie, in der es viele Mäzene und soziale Wohltäter gab und in deren großen Villen fast täglich Vorträge und Konzerte stattfanden — gerade diese Hochkultur, die sie so liebte, schien ihr jetzt bedroht." The world of the cultured Jewish haute bourgeoisie, its patronage and music — loved and threatened. (A reviewer's phrase worth keeping: "ein weiblicher Alfred Polgar — nur leidenschaftlicher"; and Bisky: I "meide die abgenutzten Formulierungen und emotionalen Routinen" — unsentimental, exact, demanding of the reader.

3. So war's eben (family epic, drafted 1930s–40s, pub. 2021 posthumously)

Roman, ed. Nicole Henneberg. The big one — ~167k words, the family epic. Structured in parts ("ERSTER TEIL — KAISERREICH" etc.). This is the closest relative of Effingers (the novel I will translate): the same genre and material — the German-Jewish bourgeois family across generations, Kaiserreich → Weimar → exile → New York. Reading above all to learn how I handle the family epic: the large cast over time, the generational sweep, the register (warmer, slower, more chronicle-like than the satirical Käsebier?), how I open and move between scenes, the recurring motifs that will matter for Effingers.

Opening: "ERSTER TEIL / KAISERREICH / 1. Kapitel / Damentee in den neunziger Jahren" — Stern bursting in: "Eine runde halbe Million verdient!"

So war's eben — Part I (Kaiserreich), opening chapters

This is the Effingers method in the laboratory. What I learn for the translation:

STYLE — crucial for translating Effingers. This is not a slow Buddenbrooks chronicle. The prose is dense, fast, elliptical, montage-like: very short chapters; enormous social detail packed into quick scenes; free indirect thought slipping between characters mid-paragraph, unsignposted (Markus's factory-and- pearls interior monologue; Hildegard and Franziska silently misreading each other). I build the panorama from many rapid strokes, not slow accumulation — the journalist's compression applied to the family saga. Telegraphic interiority, clipped dialogue, the same money-precision and object-eye as everywhere.

(Extraction note: at page/chapter boundaries the PDF text occasionally scrambles order around inserted image-captions and stray editorial marks like "1 Zeile kürzen" — I read past these. The OCR also drops/garbles letters intermittently — "Troppe," "Idde," "undrchen" — I read through them.)

So war's eben — Part I (ch. 5–8): the prophetic core, the descents

For Effingers, technique confirmed: years pass in a clause; deaths land without drama; the cast is large and held apart by speech and social tag; free indirect slips between many minds; history arrives through dialogue and set-piece; the register is warm, ironic, compassionate, unsentimental. The chronicle is built from many short, dense scenes — montage at epic length.

So war's eben — Part I (ch. 9–11): the second generation, pre-war ferment

(Confirmed: I reuse a single fictional Berlin across books — the Rundschau, Heye, Miehlke, the seasonal feuilletons, the building-corruption, the windbag intellectual all recur. The family epic and the satirical novel are one world seen at different focal lengths.)

So war's eben — Part I (ch. 12–13): the Prussian world & two great set-pieces

Effingers technique, reinforced: the family chronicle is braided with great historical set-pieces (the nationalist meeting, the Richard II evening, the officers' lament), each viewed from inside a different milieu — Jewish bourgeoisie, Prussian aristocracy, the press — all "auf einem Vulkan" before 1914. Pervasive dramatic irony: I know what comes; the characters half-know.

So war's eben — Part I (ch. 13–16): the pre-war atmosphere; the marriages

So war's eben — Part II (KRIEG, ch. 18–19): the war

A magnificent, devastating section. Method and themes for Effingers:

(Form: home-front chronicle braided with the front via letters — the Otto-Jacoby/Klawotzky correspondence; the deaths arriving flat and unannounced; the historical analysis embedded in Heye's nocturnal book. This is exactly how the family epic absorbs the great catastrophe — undramatized, documented, ironic, grieving.)

So war's eben — Part II (ch. 19–20): deeper into the war

So war's eben — end of Part II → Part III (WEIMAR): the genesis of Nazism

This is the novel's central political achievement — the line traced from Wilhelmine militarism through 1918 to the Freikorps and the proto-Nazi underground, dramatized from inside.

(For Effingers: this is how I carry the Weimar catastrophe — the inflation, the Fememorde, the Jewish-patriotism tragedy, the fascist underground — braided through the Rumke and Jewish-bourgeois families, with the rise of the Right rendered from inside its own intoxicated voice.)

So war's eben — Part III (ch. 23–25): the Weimar chaos

So war's eben — Part III (Weimar), ch. 26–27 (lines ~7020–7800)

So war's eben — Part III (Weimar), ch. 27–28: the newsroom & film world (lines ~7800–8580)

So war's eben — Part III, ch. 29–31: the rise of catastrophe (lines ~8580–9360)

So war's eben — Part III, ch. 32–33: the rallies, the persecution, the left's suicide (lines ~9360–10140)

So war's eben — Part III, ch. 34–35: 1932 and the 30th of January 1933 (lines ~10140–10920)

So war's eben — ch. 35 conclusion & Part IV ch. 36: Hitler, the torchlight, the fire (lines ~10920–11700)

So war's eben — Part IV, ch. 36–39: justice perverted, the SA raids, Prague exile (lines ~11700–12480)

So war's eben — Part IV, ch. 40–43: Freia's refusal, Karlsbad, the Röhm purge, Moscow (lines ~12480–13260)

So war's eben — Part IV, ch. 43–46: the two terrors, the Gulag, Paris & London exile (lines ~13260–14040)

So war's eben — Part IV, ch. 46–48: Kristallnacht, the camp deaths, the war (lines ~14040–14820)

So war's eben — Part IV, ch. 48–49: Birnbaum's suicide, the Blitz, the deportations (lines ~14820–15595)

So war's eben — Part IV, ch. 49–50: Theresienstadt, Rudolf's death, the long exile (lines ~15595–16375)

So war's eben — Part V (Nachkrieg), ch. 51–52: return to Berlin, the Gulag testimony, Otto's death (lines ~16375–17155)

So war's eben — Part V, ch. 52: the New York émigré panorama (lines ~17155–17935)

So war's eben — Part V, ch. 53: "Die alten Bekannten" — the New York survivors (lines ~17935–18711)

So war's eben — Part V, ch. 54–55: the ending (lines ~18711–19417)

So war's eben — editorial afterword (Nicole Henneberg, "Die Vertriebenen") — CONTEXT, not by me

(This is commentary about my work; I record it only for orientation toward Effingers.) The afterword establishes that So war's eben is the close companion of Effingers — written later, in the late 1950s, when "noch einmal einen großen Roman schreiben" was my greatest wish; published here for the first time, posthumously. Effingers (1951) "hatte kaum jemand Notiz genommen" in a Germany that "vom jüdischen Schicksal wollten die Meisten nichts wissen, auch von deutscher Schuld nicht." The Thomas-Mann dispute about émigrés who watched "von den Logen- und Parterreplätzen des Auslands." My postwar journalism (Tagesspiegel "Briefe aus London," the Veit-Harlan trial 1949, "Kalte Umschläge aus Deutschland"). The afterword names my method exactly: So war's eben "verknüpft alle ihre bisherigen Themen und Schreibweisen: die schnellen, pointierten Dialoge… wie in Käsebier… die Schilderungen einzelner Typen, wie in ihren Gerichtsberichten… und die fesselnden, atmosphärischen Darstellungen von Interieurs aus den Effingers." Its central subject: the growth of antisemitism after WWI and its roots already in 1900–1914; the Berliner Rundschau as the mirror of the Berliner Tageblatt; the three contrasted groups (bürgerliche Juden Ost, reiche Juden West, deutsche Oberschicht); and the question that drove me lifelong — "Wie konnte es zu Hitler kommen?" (my unfinished essay "Warum, wieso, weshalb Hitler?"). Like Effingers it opens in the Kaiserreich with a luxurious "Damentee" — but here critically observed (Adelina Markus's overdecorated Unterrock, the hybris of the newly-rich "Juden West," their "gedankenlose Verschwendungs- und Prunksucht" against the visible Elend of industrial Berlin). 74 named characters. All of this confirms: Effingers is the same world, the same method, the same governing question — the destruction of the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie — and So war's eben is its later, posthumous twin. My reading of it has prepared me directly for the chapter I will translate.

Further from the afterword (lines ~19490–19782) — the indispensable orientation:

BOOK 3 of 5 COMPLETE: So war's eben — read in full (all 19,782 lines).

This is the closest living relative of Effingers — the same Berlin-Jewish bourgeois world, the same century-span, the same governing question, written later and reaching further (into the Shoah, the Gulag, exile, the postwar). Having read it whole, I now carry: the voice (fast elliptical montage-dialogue; the flat undramatized death-sentence — "Aber das erfuhr niemand"; the recurring refrains across characters; the ventriloquized registers from Berlinisch to fascist-mystical to communist-cant; the money-and-manners precision; the catalogues; the "unverändert, unverändert"); the structure (the family-feast / housewarming as hinge; the chapter-end historical threading); and the moral vision (the even-handed horror at both totalitarianisms; character not party as the measure; the women's and the decent conservatives' clear sight against the men's denial; the tragic faith of the assimilated patriot; peace makes beauty, persecution makes ugliness; "Unser ganzes Wesen ist die Sprache"). Two books remain: Der erste Zug nach Berlin and the memoir Etwas Seltenes überhaupt.

BOOK 4: Der erste Zug nach Berlin — reading notes

ch. 1–4 (lines 1–760): the genre, the narrator, the satire

ch. 4–8 (lines 760–1519): the unrepentant Germans, the "I am a Jew" set-piece

ch. 8–11 (lines 1519–2278): the Neumann monologue, the Kultur-seduction

ch. 12–16 (lines 2278–3037): the Stegen affair, the Blut-und-Boden creed, the Soviet debates

ch. 16–18 (lines 3037–3796): the moral climax — Dolgelly's "Mob!", Reinhold, Merton's keening

ch. 19–21 (lines 3796–4144): the ending — the Elbe, the Job-parable, the defeated conversion

Editorial afterword (Nicole Henneberg) — CONTEXT, not by me

(Commentary about my work; recorded for orientation.) Confirms and deepens:

BOOK 4 of 5 COMPLETE: Der erste Zug nach Berlin — read in full (novel + afterword).

A dystopian political satire (written ~1951–53, set summer 1949), the formal opposite of my elegiac chronicles but the same moral universe seen through a frivolous American "camera." What it adds to my self-understanding for the translation: (1) my satirical-ventriloquist range — sustained dramatic irony in a single naive voice, the empty narrator as moral instrument; (2) the deliberate macaronic English/German as Verfremdung — I am willing to break the surface of language for meaning, and I have a real ear for English; (3) the recurring figures and motifs travel between books (Stegen→Friedrich Wilhelm; the embezzlement and elevator-girl anecdotes; the Job-parable; the suicide-water; the "Wahrheit über eine Ecke des Lebens"; the leidende-Kreatur wise-woman; "es riecht" as the mark of poverty; Parzival's "fragen"); (4) the bedrock convictions, stated openly here: individual guilt not collective punishment; "love his kind" not "his country"; the one security is "die Übereinkunft der Menschen, was gut und böse ist"; the unestablishability of truth once lying is normalized; the seductiveness of the cultured fascist; the even-handed horror at both totalitarianisms. One book remains: the memoir Etwas Seltenes überhaupt.

BOOK 5: Etwas Seltenes überhaupt. Erinnerungen — reading notes (the autobiographical bedrock)

The title is Rudolf Olden's review-phrase about me: "Etwas Seltenes ist die Tergit überhaupt." This is the memoir — the ground from which So war's eben, Käsebier, Der erste Zug all grew. Reading it confirms, again and again, that Grete (in So war's eben) is me, and that nearly every recurring figure and anecdote across my fiction is drawn from this life.

Vorworte & "Berufssuche und Berliner Tageblatt" / "Die Oldens" / "Kunstprozeß" (lines 1–720)

"Kunstprozeß" / "Stammtisch Capri & Das Wunderbare" / "Reise nach Griechenland 1927" (lines 720–1439)

"Rückkehr zu den deutschen Belangen" / "Der Anfang des Endes" (lines 1439–2158) — the documentary source of my fiction

"Der Anfang des Endes" / "September 1930" / "Roman" (lines 2158–2877)

"Roman" (concl.) / "Das Jahr 1932" / "Unser Sohn" (lines 2877–3596)

"Unser Sohn" (concl.) / "Die letzten Monate 1933" (lines 3596–4315)

"Die letzten Monate 1933" (concl.) / "Besuch des Sturm 33" / "Besuch bei Theodor Wolff" (lines 4315–5034)

Memoir, lines 5034–5773 — "Besuch bei Theodor Wolff" / "Wir finden Karl wieder" / start of "Erste Reise nach Berlin Mai 1948"

The visit to Theodor Wolff at Nice. Two days at a café by the sea on the Riviera with the man who was the Berliner Tageblatt. Wolff: "Ich schreibe nicht für die Emigrantenpresse, sondern nur Historisches. Kein Wort gegen Deutschland." Here is the great fault-line of the emigration laid bare in one sentence, and I argue the other side of it. Walter Jens's name for the thing — the "Jahrtausend-Katastrophe." War Deutschland mit Nazitum identisch? I did not write against the Nazis myself, because my father had gone to prison in 1933 (acquitted) and was still in Germany, his works taken from him because "wehrwichtige Betriebe" could not lie in Jewish hands. So I held my pen — and note that I add at once: "Daß es sich als wirkungslos erwies, steht auf einem andern Blatt." The futility is a separate page. I do not let myself off.

The antisemitism as the through-theme of a life — "der wahnsinnige Komplex." I call it that and say it was, for wide circles, especially women, "das wesentliche Thema ihres Lebens." Then the small unbearable instances, which are my method — I prove the climate by its smallest grains, not its statutes: schoolmates' hair brushed wet because wavy hair was Jewish; the four Backfische of the reading-circle renaming themselves out of their Jewishness (Helene→Hella, Grete→Maja, I→Gabriele — and Heinz's delight at finding I was "Lieschen" in the family: "Natürlich ein Lieschen, Quatsch Gabriele"); the cousins' skit at Hella's 1915 wedding ("unser Lenchen, das von ihren Juden zu einer Hella gemacht worden war ... nun, da sie einen deutschen Offizier heiratet, werden wir ja unser Lenchen zurückbekommen") — at the wedding of a man going back into a decisive war they found no other theme than Jews; the Baroness in the clinic rejecting a blond baby laid on her bed — "das ist ein Judenkind. Nehmen Sie es sofort weg" — who yet entrusts her life to a Jewish doctor; and, dated 1977, the old man in a crowded Berlin restaurant: "In das Café kannst du nicht gehen, das ist völlig verjudet. Das war Deutschland." The flat closing verdict, set down without heat — my signature cadence.

The historical scaffolding behind the grains, which I give as cold catalogue: emancipation came twice "auf den Bajonetten der Feinde" — 1806 and 1918 (so to be a patriot was to undo it); exclusion from corps, Burschenschaften, the Handlungsgehilfenverband; Jewish chemists confined to Jewish firms, barred from full professorships; the Alldeutscher Verband (one-third of its board teachers) demanding Jews be neither publisher nor owner nor contributor of newspapers and pay double tax. — Against this, two men's self-deceptions placed side by side: Ernst Feder, 1961: "Wo ich bin, ist Deutschland." (My dry: "Na, so einfach war es eben nicht.")

My own departure, the dated hinge of the whole life: "Ich war am 4. März 1933 von Deutschland weggegangen, sofort. Ich roch, daß ein so gewaltiger Haß, wenn freigegeben, zu Mord führen mußte." — I smelled that a hatred so vast, once let off the leash, must end in murder. This is the nose, not the argument; it is why I left at once and Wolff and my father did not.

The anti-Zionist passage — central to who I am. Heinz built a house in Jerusalem for the father-in-law of his brother, a co-founder of the Hebrew University; the Zionists held 1933 to be "eine Klärung, eine Rückgabe der Würde, des Stolzes." I ask: can it be that, if it lets a Revisionist cry in a vast hall "Die Lösung der Judenfrage in Deutschland ist positiv in unserem Sinne erfolgt"? "Konnte man zweitausend Jahre ausstreichen — denn schließlich waren die Juden mit den Römern nach Deutschland gekommen — und ihnen das Recht auf Heimweh absprechen." The right to homesickness. Two thousand years not to be struck out. This is the Effinger humanism exactly: we belong where we have lived and built, the catastrophe does not retroactively un-belong us. Wolff, kindly, will not take up this huge theme with me; he speaks instead of Herzl and Nordau, whom he knew in Paris at the Dreyfus trial — "Nordau, übrigens der viel Bedeutendere, wäre nichts für Sie gewesen. Sie waren albern."

"Wie töricht alle Verallgemeinerungen sind." The Lachmann case as my standing proof against the easy line. Lachmann developed the Mosse inheritance-grounds, lost a hundred million in the crisis (not one flat rentable) — and this was job-creation on the grandest scale, exactly Rockefeller Center — yet the cant demanded "Olden und Tergit weniger Gehalt," and no one ever named Lachmann's achievement; he left Germany a poor man. Wolff: "Ich brauchte drei Arme, einen gegen die Nazis, einen gegen die Kommunisten und einen gegen Lachmann-Mosses Sparpolitik." Three fronts at once — my own sense of the squeeze.

Karl Vetter — the well-meaning fool, my anatomy of a German type. "das gesuchte gepriesene Kind aus dem Volk, der Proletarier," who by the going philosophy would govern better than the aristocracy that had done it a thousand years. But — and this is the distinction I insist on — no scoundrel: "wie bei Millionen Deutschen waren Fleiß und Tüchtigkeit Moralersatz. Betrieb um des Betriebes willen, Reklame, egal für was." Marxists call it profit-seeking; it is not; it is diligence standing in for morality. His 1933 article: "Einzel­ tragödien unvermeidlich," the people gripped by "das Gruseln" — "das schadet nichts" — the gods and idols toppled, "ich weine ihnen keine Träne nach," while in the same breath asking Hitler to reach the defeated his hand "wie Bismarck." Then the grotesque sequel: summer 1933 at the Hotel Dolder, Vetter and the new SA-chief (who had taken 50,000 marks from the Tageblatt till) calling on the exiled Wolff with a briefcase of files — "Sie werden doch Ihr Werk nicht zugrunde gehen lassen wollen." The competence-machine grinding on, blind to what it has become. — This is the genealogy of every Vetter/Stegen/Rumke figure in my fiction: not evil, dumm, with diligence where conscience should be.

The "Dienst" defence again (= the Eisbecher/order-vs-morality theme, central to my whole vision): the KZ torturer meeting his victim on a Berlin omnibus, courteously making room — "Sie haben mich doch am schlimmsten geschlagen, und jetzt machen Sie mir Platz?" — "Das war im Dienst." That was in the line of duty. A Berlin proletarian. The conscience subcontracted to the office.

Mood over numbers — my political epistemology, stated to a master politician. Wolff: "Frankreich ... Die Wahlziffern sind überwiegend demokratisch." I dare: "Es kommt nicht auf Wahlziffern an ... Hitler hatte nie eine Majorität. Es kommt auf die Stimmung an und die aktiven Elemente." The temper and the active minority decide, not the count. And the woman back from Germany: "was für ein herrliches Land Deutschland geworden ist. Alle sind selbstbewußt und alle fühlen sich als Glieder einer Gemeinschaft. Wunderbar." — there is my "Wunderbar, nicht?" turned to its most chilling use: the seduction of belonging.

Wolff's end, given plainly: the 1942 letter to Feder (the lapsed American visas, "Verbiete du dem Seidenwurm zu spinnen!"); dragged through the camps; dead Nov. 1943 in the Berlin Jewish Hospital — "fünf jüdischen Ärzten und zweiundzwanzig jüdischen Krankenschwestern," only for the "privilegierten Mischehen." "Er ist in meinen Armen gestorben." Six years still lay between the café and that.

Heinz, the great love-detail. At Victoria Station a "völlig verelendet" Heinz — not ill, he had simply not eaten enough, had saved until I came back. The two pork chops he could not bring himself to eat alone until they stank and he threw them out: "das ist eine größere Liebeserklärung als der Brillantschmuck, den die Herren ihren Bräuten geben." My cooking-passion; my son to his English fiancée: "hier wirst du stündlich gefüttert."

"WIR FINDEN KARL WIEDER" (Part Two). From 1946 I wrote for the Tagesspiegel "um alte Freunde wiederzufinden" — and it worked: "Land ohne Fahnen" brought Karl back. That essay is pure me: August 1914 and summer 1940 Berlin drowned in flags — "die tollste Festdekoration" — set against England, which through the whole war, alone and bombed nightly, never thought to fly a flag: "man flaggt ja auch nicht bei einem Bergwerkunglück." "Die Engländer ... berauschen sich nicht an diesem Kampf, auch nicht, wenn sie siegen." (And Kaiser Friedrich had called even 1870 "ein nationales Unglück.") The English sobriety against the German flag-rapture — exactly the contrast Der erste Zug and So war's eben draw.

Karl's letters then run for pages, and I print them nearly whole — the documentary method again, the real voice left rough. They are a small masterpiece of the Galgenhumor of the rubble years: conscripted as "billiges Volksopfer" to the Volkssturm, Russian captivity, back July '45; breaking up the family's lovely furniture for firewood; the children playing "Genickschiesserles" ("Mensch, du hast een Genickschuss, da mußte doch umfallen!"); 3½ houses left standing for kilometres; eating only with a spoon "wie wir es bei dem Eintopfminister bereits geübt haben"; "Mit Hunger ist jedoch nicht zu spaßen, es ist kein Zustand, sondern eine schwere Krankheit"; the math-problems set to my genius son; the grandchild run over by a tram and saved by the Fangkorb — "Es gibt doch noch Dinge in Deutschland, die funktionieren." And the unbearable reversal of the food parcels: she who had to flee now feeding them — "richtiger wäre es doch, wenn wir Ihnen etwas schicken könnten." I let Karl's own wit carry the pathos; I do not editorialize. This is the warmest sustained stretch in the book, and it is built entirely of another man's letters — a lesson in my own deepest trust: the real voice, transcribed, outdoes invention.

THE VIKTORIASTRASSE HOUSE — direct key to my translation of Effingers. Karl's question about my property rights opens it: Heinz's grandparents' house, built 1858 by Persius, bought in the sixties "für 300 000 Mark Gold auf den Tisch, ohne Papier dazwischen" — the giant plane planted at Queen Victoria's visit to her daughter the Empress Friedrich. Grandmama dead 1932, the house unsellable. The men who came to rent it as a clubhouse, overlooking Heinz, speaking of "der jüdischen Kiste," of "Insektenpulver streuen gegen die jüdischen Läuse," meaning to fly a swastika; the uncles of one mind: "Solange das Haus uns gehört, wird keine Hakenkreuzfahne gehißt." And then, flatly: "Mein Roman Effingers kreist um dieses Haus." — The book I am to translate turns on this very house (the same "300 000 Goldmark" mansion as in So war's eben). Bombed; the land sold to Berlin for 15,000 marks in the early fifties, split eighteen ways; "Heute steht die Philharmonie auf dem Grundstück." When I render Chapter 25 I must hold this in the hand: the house is not a setting, it is the whole lost world, mourned as one mourns a person.

The "Seiflappen" essay — synecdoche, my favourite figure. A friend asks for a washcloth, believing the post-Hitler world is a shop one need only enter. The Seiflappen, I find, has perished "zusammen mit dem Respekt vor dem Alter, dem Eigentum, dem Leben, der Ehe, dem guten Namen unseres Nächsten — Ideen, die fünftausend Jahre die Welt zusammengehalten hatten — Hitler zum Opfer gefallen waren." The whole moral order read off a single missing small thing — and the five-thousand-years refrain again (the agreements of mankind about good and evil). Beside it the émigré arithmetic — "ein Viertel, ein Achtel, neunund­ achtzig Neunzigstel ... der Deutschen Anhänger Hitlers" — argued so long the pot on the gas burns through. Tragedy weighed against a ruined saucepan: my exact proportion.

Start of "Erste Reise nach Berlin Mai 1948." Unlike colleagues placed with the BBC or the Information Ministry, "war mir nichts geglückt." Klub 43 (Monty Jacobs, Hermann Friedmann); Döblin's Das Goldene Tor; the comedy of the Neue Zeitung returning my galleys "wie man ihn eben an Verrückte schreibt" once I confessed they were reprints. And the line that names my burden: "Außerdem hatte ich das Hauptwerk meines Lebens, Effingers, einen 700-Seiten-Roman daliegen." The chief work of my life — sitting unpublishable, parcels not going through. (Continues.)

Memoir, lines 5773–6512 — "Erste Reise nach Berlin Mai 1948" (the return; the ruined-city elegy; the Effingers manuscript saga)

This is the longest sustained set-piece of the book and, for my purposes, the most important — because the novel I am to translate is the elegy for the world this chapter watches die. I should read Chapter 25 of Effingers in the light of this walk through the ruins.

Getting the book out — and the rule-follower vs. the character, again. Parcels still did not go; but I could send Effingers to a French official — Döblin — who divided the manuscript and posted it to Rowohlt. (Döblin turned Catholic, as did Heinz Goldberg of the Dreyfus film — both revering the Jesuits for making them, out of magnificent fighting-cocks, gentle and helpful men "ganz auf den Nebenmenschen eingestellt.") At the London office for the flight permit: "You are trading with the enemy," the officer says — of articles I write for no fee that they would otherwise pay from taxes. "We will stop you." "Das können Sie nicht in der französischen Zone." A Battle-of-Britain hero got me every permit. On the plane, the Prussian former Referendar who had literally opened the courtroom door to my career turns cool at my story: "Aber das ist die Vorschrift." — and I ask the question that is the moral spine of all my work: "Waren Karl und Heinz die einzigen Rebellen, die einzigen Charaktere in dieser Welt?" The character is the one who breaks the rule for a person; everyone else pleads the regulation. (Heinz, on giving our last money for the flight without a moment's hesitation: "Bildung und Vorwärtskommen, dafür gab man seit fünf Generationen Geld aus." My son's gruff humour: "da werden wir sie auf gute Weise los." Heinz on me: "sie fällt auf alles rein.")

England as renunciation, Berlin as ruin. Cripps's England — socialism plus the puritanism most English love — "eine Welt der Entsagung"; so everything in Berlin first looked elegant by contrast. Heide Sachs, Heinz's gifted cousin, who wrote Berlinisch couplets for Claire Waldoff almost unpaid — "Viel echter als Tucholskys gräßlich sentimentales 'Mutter mit deine Hände'" (my aesthetic creed: the authentic Berlin voice over the sentimental). Thrown from the church she was confirmed in, Feb. 1933, for a Jewish father; and the Lützow pastor who swore on oath he had seen the "Pulverdampf" until it proved to be a smoky pub door opening — the perjury that founds the lie.

THE RUINED-CITY WALK — the elegiac manner I will need for Effingers. My own footstep the only sound. Every house bombed, windows "viereckige Sonnenflecken," holes in the façades. The old West — the classicist quarter of the Kaiserzeit haute bourgeoisie — annihilated 23 Nov. 1943 in a firestorm "von der Gedächtnis­ kirche bis zum Potsdamer Platz": "eine grün bewachsene Wüste." I read street signs to find streets where I could once have named every shop; the streets survive only as pavement and "die unterirdische Welt" — water, gas, telephone, electric. The Molnár comedy at the Nürnbergerstraße theatre (Pallenberg's Swiss-German telephone scene, the sold-out house "in schallendes glückliches Gelächter"). My parents' house on the Landwehrkanal where I was child, Backfisch, through war and inflation 1908–28: the two bay-windowed sides standing, the staircase fallen in the middle "wie ein versteinerter Wasserfall." The courtship topography, the most personal stroke: from the former Königin-Augusta-Straße (now "unaussprechlich Admiral von Woyrsch-Straße") Heinz rang every evening for a year — "Ich gehe jetzt weg" — and we walked toward each other, meeting "bei der Von der Heydt-Villa." The Shell-Haus, "nicht gebaut, sondern geknetet." The colossal rubble-heap whose oversized members become, in my eye, the baths of Caracalla, Diocletian's palace at Split, the Segovia aqueduct (Heinz in Rome: "Da hast du Rom, das ist der römische Maßstab") — "In solchem Trümmerhaufen ... mußte der Cäsarenwahn des böhmischen Gefreiten und Speers Wiedereinführung der Sklaverei enden." The Tiergarten quarter as Pompeii — "Tradition seit Rom, nie ganz zerstört. Kontinuität ... Altes Europa." Lilac and laburnum still in flower; Grete/Maja's fragment of a capital in a glass case, "ein Stück Antike, nur Gips, nicht Marmor."

Barbarism = uneducation + Prussianism, not ideology. The 18th-century Berlin in the Russian sector still stood — Gendarmenmarkt, Schinkel, the Friedrichsforum, the 1848 memorial show in the Schloss ("Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit," Humboldt, Harnack, Goethe, Leibniz) — "Und dieses Schloß hat Ulbricht abreißen lassen. Er hätte genausogut ein Dutzend Rembrandts zerschneiden ... können." Why? "Er brauchte n'Aufmarschgelände." My verdict, the even-handed core: "Diese ungeheuerliche Barbarei hat nichts mit Kommunismus zu tun ... sondern es ist eine Mischung aus völliger Unbildung und Preußentum." Hitler too destroyed "ein Menschheitserbe ... für ein Paradefeld." (Goebbels, who could "nichts Jüdisches ertragen," moving at once into the Villa Goldschmidt, built and lived in by a Jew; Mussolini's megalomaniac legation "noch nicht fertig, schon zerbombt.") What survived I catalogue tenderly — Brandenburg Gate, Poelzig's broadcasting house, Bruno Taut's coloured houses under the pines, "eine der nie erwähnten ganz großen Leistungen," Max Taut's Eichkamp — against the verdict on the people: "Aber die Menschen hatten ihre Zirkusse mehr geliebt als ihre schönen Siedlungen." Bread and circuses. And the moral impossibility I cannot let pass: the Columbia-Haus torture cellars now housing "eine sogenannte Gaststätte ... auch das ging nicht."

The false scale of values. Three times ladies tell me I have lime on my jacket — "It does not matter a hoot," I finally snap, "wütend über diese falsche Wertskala." The waitress on the tiled toilet amid the rubble: "Na, wenn mans schon macht, macht mans doch richtig" — "ein Wort, das einen Teil der deutschen Nachkriegserfolge erklärt" (and the same thoroughness that smashes 15 crates to report "Punkt 12 Uhr Befehl ausgeführt"). The marble Hohenzollern in the Tiergarten and the courtly starving man — "Darf ich Sie fragen, ob Sie etwas zu essen bei sich haben?" ... "Ich danke verbindlichst." The petrified beautiful deaf-paralyzed young man on the Kurfürstendamm "der die Hölle gesehen" (recurs as emblem). The hunger I read by sex, as in WWI: women and children blooming, the men — finer senses, "können nicht hungern" — pitiable; "die Natur scheint das Überleben der Frauen für wichtiger zu halten."

Even-handedness about the occupiers — character, not nation, again. The 12,000 Berliners Hitler drowned by flooding the refugee-filled U-Bahn, the Nazis saving themselves "und die Bevölkerung ihrem Schicksal überlassen." Yet of the Russians I refuse the single colour: Bersarin's handsome Siberians (death for looting) giving way after his death to the Mongol troops and "ein Zusammenbruch jeder Disziplin" — and then a whole rosary of human anecdotes (the cheese smeared on by hand; Freia's "Sei gut, denk an deine Mutter, sei ein Mensch"; "Du gut zu mir, ich gut zu dir"; the jasmine "für gute Frau"; "Haut wie Samt"; the rings given back). The father who gave his sixteen-year-old daughter a cyanide injection rather than a Russian brothel — "Ein Mörder," sagte ich — against the woman's deformed logic, "Wir werden das den Amerikanern nie vergessen, daß sie an der Elbe haltmachten." The apparatus that survives every ideology: "Auch bei Hitler waren ausgezeichnete deutsche Beamte. Wieviele Geheimpolizisten von Nikolaus II. waren noch bei Stalin?" — the Ochrana = GPU. Mr. Hobbing: "Es gibt nur die Wahl zwischen Protektion und Freiheit. Zusammen geht das nicht." And the unprovable-guilt fear, my recurring nightmare, in Tjulpanow's recruit: "Aber wer garantiert mir, daß ich nicht einer von diesen Fällen bin?"

"Die Mörder sind unter uns" — the banality of evil, my own doctrine on film. Hearing Berlinisch again after a decade; and the Nazi murderer who, to London critics' astonishment, is not the jackbooted gorilla but "ein fetter kleiner Herr, ein Familienmensch, ein zärtlicher Vater, ein guter Arbeitgeber, der, während er den Weihnachtsbaum schmückte, den Befehl gab, ein Dorf auszurotten: 'Und gebense mir nochn bißchen Lametta.'" — "die tiefste Studie eines schuldigen Deutschen." Exactly my conviction that the cultured/ordinary perpetrator is more terrible than the brute. Heinz lighting a cigarette mid-Oxford-Street, wordless: "Uns machte der elfjährige Berliner stumm."

THE EFFINGERS MANUSCRIPT SAGA — provenance of the book I translate. "Ur­ sprünglich warens sechs." Two shipped to New York to escape the bombs — "Sie kamen nie an. Sie waren wohl torpediert worden." A third to Heinz's cousin (the League of Nations chief interpreter, Bretton Woods, the first UN session, saviour of hundreds) — lost because she never answered letters. A fourth to Kiaulehn for Desch in Munich — Desch never received it. Two left: one already at Rowohlt via Döblin; "Da war also das Manuskript in meiner Hand das letzte." I dared not give that last copy even to the aged Suhrkamp ("Wir haben keine Manuskripte. Peter Suhrkamp kein Material!"). Rowohlt's telegram; Springer's dropped book-press; Blanvalet's "Bücher müssen von Verlegern herausgebracht werden"; my loyalty to Rowohlt and my youth deciding it. The altered proofs ("neudeutschen Unfug ... ob die Kunsthändler in Deutschland auch die Bilder malen") fixed by one phone call. Rowohlt's promise of a paperback — undone because "ein neuer Pharao, der wußte nichts von Joseph." — Effingers nearly did not survive; I carried its last copy in a suitcase of food into the ruins of the city it mourns. That is the weight the translation must honour.

(Also: Müller-Jabusch — left the BT before '33, press-chief of the Deutsche Bank, grew a beard and became a small-station master to stay with his Jewish wife; away two days, they took her to Ravensbrück, stood her three times in the frost till her limbs froze — "aber immer war sie es, die noch die andern getröstet hat" — then she died. The son at the Dutch central card-index could read which letters were "dran" for deportation and warn people. The new literature Rowohlt sent — Boldt's Letzte Tage der Reichskanzlei ["was sie zuerst taten, als Hitler tot war? Sie zündeten sich eine Zigarette an"], Meichsner's Versuchts nochmal mit uns! on the Hitler-faith and "Das Wunderbare" — all of it "ohne historische Zusammenhänge ... der Name Hitler kam nicht vor.")

Memoir, lines 6512–7251 — Müller-Jabusch's curiosities; the Botenmeister; the taxi-driver; Moabit; "X"; theatre 1948; first visit to Karl

"Ein Fanatiker der Tatsache, also der Wahrheit, nicht des Gequatsches 'über.'" Müller-Jabusch's thousands of clipping-folders and his Christmas brochures (Erlebtes, Erzähltes, Erlesenes ... "auf der Insel Berlin") give me a sentence that is almost my own ars poetica: a fanatic of the fact, that is of truth, not of chatter about. His specimens delight me — and note which delight me: the apparatus that survives every regime. The Tägliche Rundschau of 1948 running "Amerika als Kulturbringer" copied wholesale from a 1942 Nazi Eher-Verlag book — "Die braune Farbe brauchte nur ein bißchen rot übertüncht werden" (the brown needed only a little red painted over it) — and the copyist the communist F. K. Kaul, who stayed all-powerful DDR state-prosecutor. Brown to red with a coat of paint: my whole conviction that the two totalitarianisms are one machine, made into a single image of a man whitewashing a clipping.

THE BOTENMEISTER — the supreme documentary specimen of the "unpolitical" German. A full page of transcribed Berlin proletarian speech, left utterly unsmoothed, and it is one of the most important pages in the book for my method. Thirty years with the papers, never a day missed; followed "Herr Martin" to the BT on a point of honour; salary cut in 1930 ("wenn man sich noch nich mal n Glas Bier leisten kann, denn is ja alles aus"). Then: "Ich habe mich nie an der Politik beteiligt. Ich bin n ganz unpolitischer Mensch ... das bringt einen bloß in Ungelegenheiten." And so, flatly, without a seam: "Volk ohne Raum," Versailles, "da haben se doch eines Tages unsern Herrn Wolff rausgeschmissen, das war'n Mann von Seide" — thrown out by Kakuschke the lift-man, the Zellenobmann — and then "Ich kann nicht klagen, es waren nette Leute ... schöne ruhige Jahre für uns." The war as "Neid auf den deutschen Fleiß ... wie schon 1914." And of the Nazi editor Schwarzer whom the Allies later interned: "n Mensch wie Seide is das gewesen ... gute Bezahlung und Urlaub, und meine Frau und ich sind in Italien gewesen mit Kraft durch Freude." — Here is the whole German catastrophe in one decent, kindly, blind little man, who measures every regime by whether the pay was good and the holidays nice, and can connect nothing. I set his monologue down whole and add not one word of comment; the flatness is the indictment. This is the documentary root of every "unpolitical" figure in my fiction — and proof that my method is to transcribe, not to judge in my own voice. When I translate dialogue in Effingers, this is the warrant: keep the real voice rough; do not improve it; the abruptness carries the meaning.

THE TAXI-DRIVER — the unrepentant inversion. Its twin. He complains of the new dishonesty; drove a staff car in the East; "ich habe doch gesehen, was das für anständige Menschen waren ... Es ist alles anständige deutsche Kriegsführung gewesen ... So was Teuflisches wäre uns Deutschen nicht eingefallen." The outrage that "Franktireurs" took the officers' uniforms 200 km behind the front; my flat correction — "die Menschen sind doch ohne Kriegserklärung überfallen worden" — and his deflection, the deflection of a whole nation: "Wer war denn schuld an diesem Krieg?" Again I let the man hang himself in his own words.

Moabit — "En gros erlaubt, Detail verboten?" Back in the criminal court (the Wachtmeister knows me at once — as the Botenmeister did; the little people remember, the journalists are "unfreundlich, verbittert"). A theft trial over a gold ring with a semi-precious stone — "dafür dieser Aufwand?" — while millions in looted pictures, jewels, furniture went unjudged, "von Soldaten aller Armeen, von den lieben Nachbarn geraubt. Beute!" The new Nazi BT editor who took 50,000 marks "mit dem Recht des Parteimitglieds"; the SA clearing out a friend's felt hats — "Die Bestohlenen konnten gar nichts machen. Sie waren bloß ruiniert." The unbearable arithmetic: wholesale robbery (states, armies) permitted, the retail ring prosecuted. And the East three stations away — quoting an Egyptian paper on "arabischer Sozialismus" (50,000 political prisoners, 15,000 owners expropriated, "versteckter Straßenraub") — "Das war der von Millionen im Westen ersehnte Osten." My even-handed horror, exact.

"X" — the house of the dead, and collective liability. The most chilling private scene. Found again through "Land ohne Fahnen"; now in the Eastern administration, "wie Herr Sisyphus und die Danaiden in einer Person." The punch bowl, the silver, the Rhine wine, the walled-up gold cups bought year by year since the inflation — and the wife's parting obscenity as she shows me the couch: "Sie wissen, daß mein Mann Syphilis hat." I say nothing; at first light I flee "das Totenhaus ... durch den Keller auf die Straße." "Kaum ein Jahr später war er durch eine manipulierte Gasleitung in seinem Bett getötet worden." And the old grievance recalled: at Mahagonny (1931) X reproaching me for Weill's tactlessness as though "Gesamthaftung Israels" — the collective liability of all Jews for one Jew's act. Thirty years on, Mahagonny in East Berlin is "ein völlig anderes Stück," the offensive name gone: "Die Revolution, die alle Revolutionen auf ewig beendete, hatte hier stattgefunden. Jede Änderung, jeder Zweifel an der Heiligen Schrift, war mit Tanks zu beenden. Die DDR ist eine Mischung aus den Zuständen vor der französischen Revolution ... und 1890." (And Beatrice Zweig dyeing all her clothes black because the help reported she "trägt noch nicht einmal Trauer" — conformity enforced even in grief.)

Theatre 1948 — and "der Übergang in eine andre Sprache." Directly to my point: Wohlbrück magnificent in German, a "steifer Bock" as Walbrook in English — "Nur für ganz wenige war der Übergang in eine andre Sprache nicht tödlich" (Bergner, Dietrich; Valk's broken-English Othello "am besten"; Maria Fein's career ended by the failed leap). The passage into another language is deadly for all but a few — a sober warning I carry into my own crossing of Effingers into English: the danger is real, the survivors rare, and sometimes the broken version keeps more life than the smooth. Achard's Zeit des Glücks (the golden wedding running backward fifty years; "das bürgerlich elegante Milieu ... so gespenstisch wie ... die goldenen Becher von X") moved me more than Priestley's Linden Tree, which triumphed in London and flopped in Berlin: "Der Sprache, treffend für Alter und gesellschaftliche Position, beraubt, erhoben sie sich nicht ins allgemeine Menschliche ... sondern wurden Puppen." — i.e. a play (and a translation) lives or dies by whether the register, exact to age and class, survives; strip that and the figures become puppets. A direct instruction to myself.

The regime-proof servant; the surviving Nazi inside the occupation. The English lady admiring her coffee-cook who served "beim Kaiser ... bei Präsident Ebert und Präsident Hindenburg und bei Hitler, jetzt ... für uns" (the apparatus again, now domestic); the real Nazi at Lancaster House — "Das ist wahrscheinlich ne Jüdin," the English policeman's sad nod, "Jeschlossen" barked at the young man with the victim-of-fascism badge: "Das war seine erste Begegnung mit der englischen Demokratie." And the psychology of the persecuted, given to a Tel Aviv waiter who found English officers easier to serve than Jewish lawyers: the Jews "gegen die immer Haß gepredigt wurde ... die also tief unsicher sind, aber wenn es sich um wirklich ernste Dinge handelt, finden Sie niemanden wärmer ... als Juden. Brauchen bloß an jüdische Ärzte zu denken."

Besuch bei Karl, and a biography note. The Stadtbahn through the ruins; the young man on the welcomed destruction — "ohne das wären wir ja die Bande nie losgeworden" — "in all dem Elend eine gute, hoffnungsvolle Stimmung." Karl's shared-villa lodging "von der Primitivität so vieler Emigrantenbleiben" (my own first Jerusalem room, everything stolen; a wardrobe "jahrelang als Höhepunkt des Luxus"). And the plain biographical line: "Dreizehn Jahre nach der Auswanderung wohnten wir in einer eigenen Wohnung im eigenen Haus" — bought to be near Peter's school, requisitioned for the bombed-out, and by 1946 Peter already at Cambridge; Heinz with no work permit, barred by the architects' guild. The long deprivation, stated without self-pity.

Memoir, lines 7251–7990 — Hamsun; Grete; Pension B.; Hamburg 1948 (Rowohlt & the Effingers reception); 2nd trip 1949; THE HARLAN TRIAL

Hamsun, and the question the Harlan trial will answer. Karl burned all his Hamsun when Hamsun went over to the Norwegian invaders "mit fliegenden Fahnen" and "das bis heute noch nicht bereut." At the 1941 PEN dinner the Norwegian journalist: "Hamsun ist eine deutsche Erfindung." I defend the art ("Victoria ist eine der schönsten Liebesgeschichten der Welt") and end with the wry self-puncture that is so my voice: "Mir, der so viel Bücher gestohlen wurden, sind alle Hamsuns geblieben. Spricht allerdings gegen Hamsun." The great artist who embraces the tyrant — held here at arm's length, to be confronted head-on in the Harlan pages below.

Grete; and the mixed-marriage rescue, a real recurring type. My intimate friend of 15–20, "sehr deutsch schön, obzwar eine Jüdin." Klupp divorced her so he could keep working under Hitler, then his whole life became the daily walk to the Hamburger Straße ("dem Vorhof von Auschwitz") to court and bribe the SS until he had saved both her and her mother; the Nov. 1943 bombing burned the files and the danger passed; they remarried in 1945. The same survival-pattern as Müller-Jabusch, Karsch, and Harlan — the gentile spouse who holds on. (Pension B.'s Frau B., where I lodged 1948–66, gives the counter-scene: a Jewish lodger taking poison before being "fetched," and the doctor's tirade when Frau B. runs for help — "Ner alten Judensau wollen Sie helfen ... nicht einer wird einen Fuß in Ihren Judenstall setzen, hätte längst ausgeräuchert gehört" — the healing profession perverted, the exact negative of my standing faith in "jüdische Ärzte.") And the love-of-the-familiar note via Kiaulehn: "Die Berolina ... ist zwar sehr häßlich, aber wenn man sie jahrelang ... gesehen hat, liebt man sie" — my topographical attachment, the Berliner Zimmer, the 28-metre corridor.

The systematized mutual lie (East): the compulsory-"voluntary" cinema night, everyone asleep, then "War doch ein schöner Abend, nicht wahr?" and all answer "so interessant" — "So lügen wir uns alle gegenseitig an, obwohl wir alle wußten, daß wir uns anlügen." My truth-becomes-unprovable theme in its purest form.

HAMBURG 1948 — the Effingers publication and reception (essential to my translation). At lunch the Springers' "Nicht bei mir" (old Springer closing the Altonaer Zeitung rather than let the Nazis censor it) — another of my "characters." Then Herr Voss, the "Musterleser," quoting Effingers back to me by heart: Schlemmer's "Wir kalkulieren nich," the machines "im großen Salon der alten Villa," the "Gestelle für die Rheintöchter." I note my own sources: Schlemmer's machine-factory (founded 1852, visited by Paul Effinger in 1884) came out of Emil Rathenau's biography (founder of the AEG) — and I only grasped how characteristic it all was when I saw early industrialization in Yucatán (a sisal machine under a painted Baroque ceiling), the Latin workers grieving the waste exactly as we would. — Voss's question: "wie wird das antisemitische deutsche Volk diesen Roman aufnehmen?" The answer, flat: "es nahm ihn gar nicht auf. Von dreitausend Buchhändlern verkauften ihn nur dreißig." Pre-currency-reform; people had to buy furniture, curtains, cars — "Aber auch das Thema war tabu." The book the Germans would not read. This is the weight behind every page I translate.

The heart of the matter — Eggebrecht on what Effingers does. Marek (Rowohlt's editor) had preferred a novel about Polish Jews "die entweder nur an Geld interessiert oder Kommunisten waren" — safer to hand the Germans a book about foreign Jews. Against this, Axel Eggebrecht (NDR, Xmas 1952): the book treats "das besondere jüdische Schicksal inmitten des allgemeinen deutschen ... auf eine gedämpfte, delikate, ja ... stille Art," and — the line that names my whole method — "Auf den ersten zweihundert Seiten möchte mancher Leser kaum merken, daß es sich hier um Schicksale mit einer besonderen tragischen Färbung handelt." My own gloss: "Juden, bei denen man das zweihundert Seiten nicht merkt? Unmöglich" — i.e. that very integration, German Jews indistinguishable for 200 pages, is the unbearable, untellable thing. TRANSLATION DIRECTIVE: the manner is gedämpft, delikat, still — quiet, undramatized; the tragedy enters late and sidelong, never announced. I must not heighten or "Judaize" the prose; the restraint IS the meaning. (Rowohlt's lost pre-'33 world: "Ich habe nie genug jüdische Bücher. Es ist doch das beste Lesepublikum.")

Rowohlt — the apolitical genius, foil to the "character." In the bombed Alster flat, the bravado gone; loving for the first time; "Panchaotiker." His urging me to "sich's mit dem Osten richten" (he had it on the communist Reuter-man's word that the Russians would take Berlin in August) — "ungemein gut gemeint ... aber das äußerste Gegenteil von Heinz und Karl, ... das Gegenteil der Haltung, auf der die Demokratien aufgebaut sind. ... kein Zynismus, sondern eine merkwürdige Abwesenheit von politischem Sinn, erschreckend bei so einem genialen Mann." Genius without political sense — the very thing the Harlan trial will anatomize. (The rororo idea: world literature on newsprint, fifty pfennig.)

Unrepentance, catalogued. The two men in the street plotting to play the English off against the Russians; Hobbing's chauffeur ("Konzentrationslager in Oranienburg. Da war ja der Deutsche human dagegen") against the Hamburg taxi-driver's Nazi- nostalgia ("Unter Hitler waren alle gleich, jetzt gibt es wieder oben und unten"; the DPs "alles Gesindel" — and my correction that they were slave-labourers driven from home: "Er schwieg"). The Bentheim border "wo unter Hitler die Juden aus den Zügen geholt wurden"; the officer's "So ein schöner deutscher Name und dann ein englischer Paß." Germany's "Ahnungslosigkeit ... von ihrem Lebensstandard" — richest land after England before 1914 "mit einer viel gesünderen Vermögensverteilung," yet demanding "ein Platz an der Sonne" → "Volk ohne Raum" → the Maoist change-wish: my standing thesis on discontent amid plenty. (And the Mölln pages: Montaigne's Germany "der Glanz Europas"; Lesser's Sacred Geometry; Clärchen, who "starb den Tod einer preußischen Frau," whose teeth a Nazi official punched out for refusing to divorce her Jewish husband; Lesser's Königsberg-Prussian incomprehension of England — "Der König ist ein Popanz ... Ich lese nicht Zeitung. Man hat ja doch nichts in der Politik zu sagen!" — redeemed only by a late French second marriage and its "Minnedienst." Thomas Mann at 75: "Stefan Zweig ist der einzige deutsche Schriftsteller mit Weltruhm.")

THE HARLAN TRIAL — the moral apex of the book, and of my whole vision. I covered it as journalism (the Jupiter lamps now in the courtroom that once forbade a camera). Veit Harlan, director of Jud Süß: never in the party, married to a Jewess he sheltered, weeping for his Jewish friends — "Meine Partei ist die Kunst, meine Politik ist die Heimatliebe." Goebbels with his green ink ("Huren schreiben gern mit grüner Tinte") and red ink for love; the gondola obscenity; the 51 % of Ufa. Gründgens and Marian refusing Jud Süß, Goebbels: "Raus! Alle raus!" Erich Engel's advice — "Mache die andern so scheußlich wie du kannst, mache den Juden so gut wie du kannst" — the sabotage-from-within that Harlan would not perform. And the exchange that is the Kernproblem — not of one film but "der führenden Geistigen überhaupt": Judge — "Warum hat der Ewige Jude nicht gewirkt?" Harlan — "Wahrscheinlich war er schlecht. Dramatisierter Stürmer. Aus der Schächtszene sind die Leute rausgelaufen. Mein Film ist ein Kunstwerk. Ich habe doch nur die Möglichkeit, Propaganda in Kunst umzuwandeln." My verdict: the actors chose to act badly; he would not. Why not make the vile script viler, "Filme, die keiner sehen wollte"? — The gift turned to the tyrant's service is the deepest guilt of all; the talented servant of evil is worse than the brute or the mediocrity. This is my "order-vs-morality" theme ("man stand ... unter dienstlichem Befehl") at its highest pitch, and — because I too am an artist who works in this world — its sternest self-address. The cultured man is the dangerous one; "der Mob vergreift sich am liebsten an den Zarten," but it is the Harlans who make the mob possible. (The East-Berlin coda: the conformist Prokofiev opera played to "nur befohlene Soldaten, weil keiner sich das anhören wollte" — the same machine, the other colour.)

Memoir, lines 7990–8729 — Belsen; the emigrant train; Buchenwald; blockaded Berlin; the Soroptimists; Karl on the East; the "Nachwort" theme

Belsen, and the even-handed catastrophe. I went with Jewish officials to Bergen-Belsen as the first train of 600 left for Israel; we slept in the SS-Kaserne, the wind howling — "Eine Landschaft, verdammt in alle Ewigkeit. Ich hörte die Hunde, die Peitschen, das tobsüchtige Gebrüll der viehischen SS." The houses, like the burned camp, "durften nicht stehen bleiben." (Wollheim, for the Jews, records the honest surprise that Jud Süß triggered no pogrom: "es ist nirgends geschehen.") — And then the train's freight: emigrants from the German camps and from Siberia — Jews who fled east before the Wehrmacht and were "genau so behandelt ... wie die Russen," 40 rubles a month, woodwork at –50°, a prayer-book worth two years' prison. Hitler on one side, Stalin on the other, the same starving train between them — my even-handed horror is not a thesis here but a manifest of passengers. The old Yiddish actor — "Was soll ich denn in Palästina, als jiddischer Schauspieler" — to whom "ich wagte ... nicht die Wahrheit zu sagen, es gibt kein Jiddisch sprechendes Volk mehr. Nirgends." Old Grynszpan, seven sons murdered, one alive in Palestine. 150 children born in Belsen, "die zweiten Kinder"; the pregnant women — "Das jüdische Volk hat doch genug Menschen verloren ... muß man doch sehen, daß man sie ersetzt." (Buchenwald: Eisenhower's telegram, the RAF flights, the corpses on the ladder-wagon, Mrs. Tate — who had argued for interning the anti-Nazi refugees — taking her life days after; "Das Notizbuch von Driberg behielt noch wochenlang ... seinen Todesgeruch von Buchenwald.")

Blockaded Berlin (1949), and the Wall foreshadowed. Frankfurt's Paulskirche "scheußlich renoviert ... Naziarchitektur für Asen, für Mettrinker" — the 1848 humanist monument spoiled; yet "schön, daß die Demokratie wieder fähig ist, die Paulskirche zu füllen." Marie-Elisabeth Lüders on the list-vote — but "am Wahlrecht lags nicht" (under English rules Hitler would have governed legally by 1930). The telling language-gap: no German word covers "Nonkonformist," "Minoritymind" — "denn Einzelgänger stimmt nicht, in England und Amerika sind sie ja ganze Haufen, nur nicht die Mehrheit." The German absence of a tradition of principled dissent, read straight off the lexicon — a deep observation I keep returning to. In the East: power 3–5 a.m. only; the coal-cars vanishing at Lichterfelde; the border streets already torn up with "spanischen Reitern ... schon zwölf Jahre vor der Mauer." "Die Verlogenheit zeigte sich, da es im Ostsektor ... viel besser war als in der Ostzone, in die keiner rein oder raus kam." The Wall I did not yet know was coming, but I saw its rehearsal.

The Soroptimists and the stolen years. The women's club (Heinz: "wenn Goethe drin gewesen wäre, hätten sie Schiller nicht aufgenommen") that had meant so much when "überall nur Männer" — dissolved in 1933 rather than expel its Jews. The reunion's shock: "Sie waren alle alt ... Zum erstenmal im Leben sah ich, was Alter ist." Aging seen all at once, because exile broke the slow shared continuity in which "man im grauen Haar immer noch das dunkle sieht": "Die großen Jahre des Lebens einer ganzen sehr wertvollen Generation waren nicht gelebt worden." The stolen-years theme in its tenderest form. (And "ein Ansehen haben" — the Kindl landlord, 1933, "ganz in Braun und beklunkert": "was ist denn unsereiner gewesen? ... Jetzt bin ich in der Partei und habe ein Ansehen. Das war ein Grund für ... Millionen.")

KARL'S LETTERS ON THE EAST — the even-handed verdict in another man's hand. I transcribe them whole, and they carry the book's politics more bluntly than I would let my own voice do — which is exactly why I use his: "1945 waren wir trotz Ruinen, Hunger und Kälte froh, von der Diktatur des Faschismus befreit zu sein. Dafür haben wir jetzt die Diktatur des Proletariats, und dagegen waren die Nazis die reinsten Waisenkinder." Stalin "Inhaber des Denkmonopols"; "Wer anders denkt ... wird ausgemerzt"; "Im Kommunismus sind die Möbel Staatseigentum, und da Eigentum Diebstahl ist, ist der kommunistische Staat der größte Dieb." On the 1953 rising: "zwischen SED-Diktatur und Hitlerdiktatur ist kein Unterschied" — and the bitter cut that they had not risen under Hitler, rising now only because "es ihnen nicht so gutgeht, wie im dritten Reich, wo ja alles besser war." And on Goebbels/"Hinkedey": "der unkeusche Josef gar nicht gelogen hat, es waren tatsächlich 99,9 % dafür. Und für Verdummung brauchte er auch nicht zu sorgen, die war hundertprozentig vorhanden" — Karl himself "zu dem verlorenen Häuflein der 0,01 % Neinsagern." The Yes-sayers and the No-sayers: the whole moral arithmetic of the era. — Note the method: my fiercest political statements are spoken by real people, transcribed; I stay the recording-band.

THE "NACHWORT" — the theme of the whole book named outright. I could have stopped, I say, but I want to tell "wie das Leben von Menschen ... weiterging, die frei nach moralischen Grundsätzen leben wollten und denen ein gesichertes Leben ganz gleichgültig war." — There it is, undisguised: people who chose to live by moral principle, indifferent to security. That is the measure of every figure I honour (Heinz, Karl, old Springer, the uncles who would fly no swastika) and the spine of Effingers too. And the European inheritance as "alles zu Bejahenden": Karl at Schloss Glienicke in his English joy — "The architect was a Mr. Schinkel ... God save the Heinz" — the Lysikrates temple with the iron curtain twenty metres behind it ("wir gehen fast täglich an die Front"); the carefree week we ourselves never had "zwischen 1933 und 1960." (Heinz's two recurring tendernesses here: the two eggs with bacon "über den Tellerrand" hanging, his "Huch"; and Flaubert's Éducation sentimentale ending — the two old friends left only with a shared memory — which he quoted his whole life, and which became literally true of the Kindl lunch, "Storchennest und eine Ecke im Kindl.")

Memoir, lines 8729–9468 — end of the "Nachwort" (Karl's last years; Heinz's death); and the start of Nicole Henneberg's editorial afterword

END OF THE NACHWORT (by me). Karl's letters darken by degrees — the whimsy (the rainbow and the thousand gulls, "ein seltenes Naturschauspiel und völlig kostenlos"; the cows of Denmark "haben kollaboriert ... Heil Hitler!") curdling into the bitter rubber-stamps he had made for himself: "Nazigeschädigter ohne Entschädigung," "Diplomrindvieh der Bundesrepublik weil kein Nazi gewesen." The intolerable injustice catalogued — Eisele, Zind, Oberhäuser, Lina Heydrich's war-widow pension, "Sawade" (Heyde): "Nazi Ärzte, Nazi Richter, und Nazi Verbrecher bilden weiterhin eine verschworene Gemeinschaft"; "Mehr Corpsgeist für den Töter als für den demokratischen Staat." My ethic stated at its plainest, in the Darwinian inversion: Hitler's rule was "das Überleben der Ungeeignetsten" — the survival of the unfittest — against the premise that "der Staat und die Religionen" exist to shield "den Zarten, Gewaltlosen, Anständigen" (the tender, the non-violent, the decent) "gegen den rohen Ellenbogenmenschen." (Hence Grete and all my Berlin women refusing to denounce even the neighbour who had betrayed them — "Wir hatten zwölf Jahre Denunziationen hinter uns – damit muß nun Schluß sein" — though I confess my reservation: "damit überleben die Nazis, und die Anständigen sind ... umgekommen.") Bach-Zelewski's true word: the Jews were "die einzigen Bewohner Polens, die nichts mit Partisanen zu tun hatten," yet Himmler blamed them for all of it. And the question under everything: "Wie wird ein Mensch mit dem Bösen fertig, seit er sich nicht mehr mit dem Bösen in der Hölle und dem Guten im Himmel beruhigen kann?" — evil without the consolation of heaven and hell. (The Bruno Frank story — the boy dashing a dog's head on a Venice wall, the witness who goes home and shoots himself — "Es war nur ein Schritt von dieser Verzweiflungstat zu Karl.") The apparatus-identity, exact: the last Auschwitz commandant on arrest — "Ich bin Offizier. Behandeln Sie mich dementsprechend" — word for word what Guillaume the DDR spy said. Karl's 4,000 No-sayers out of 40 million. And the great consolation, dated 1959, when my father came to England with ten marks and we heard a BBC speech: "Freiheit, Demokratie war nicht eine Erfindung von Theodor Wolff oder Heine ... Millionen glaubten daran. Wir waren nicht mehr einsam im Weltall. Wir lebten in Frieden mit unserer Umgebung." The end of the exile's cosmic loneliness — freedom not a Jewish notion but a thing millions hold. Then the long-deferred happiness: Karl and Freia at 74 finally in "unser Haus" (the Pitchpine floor) after nineteen years; the parallel deprivations — "wir von 1933 bis etwa 1956, Karl von 1945 bis 1964"; the Bois de Boulogne "märchenhaft glücklich," "die Welt war besser geworden." And the flat death-sentence that closes it, my signature cadence at full strength: "Heinz lebt nicht mehr. Karl und Freia haben sich noch."

Memoir, lines 9257–9468 — Nicole Henneberg's afterword "Wer sind Sie überhaupt?" (NOTE: this is about me, by my editor — external apparatus — but it is the single most useful document I have for HOW my prose works; I mine it as a style-key while remembering it is not my own voice)

The question my whole life's work asks. Henneberg names it: "Wie konnte es einer kleinen, gewalttätigen Gruppe gelingen, vor den Augen der Deutschen und der ganzen Welt eine Demokratie zu zerstören?" — and notes that to liberals and intellectuals the usurpation seemed "so unglaublich und absurd, dass niemand sich ernsthaft gefährdet fühlte. Nur Carl von Ossietzky war vielleicht etwas misstrauischer." She fixes the dated hinge: Ossietzky and I agreed at my last Weltbühne visit, Feb. 1933, "dass man bleiben müsse, wollte man der Historie zusehen"; two days later he was in the KZ, two weeks later I fled after an SA raid to Prague. My "politische Dünnhäutigkeit" toward "ein in ihren Augen zu reichen und zu selbstbewussten Deutschland" — confirmation that "discontent amid plenty," the too-rich too-confident Germany, is read by others as my deepest theme.

The genesis and the "Tadsch Mahal" metaphor (my own image for the book's method). Friedenthal's command — "schreiben Sie nichts über Hitler ... Nur Ihre persönlichen Erlebnisse!" — turned "Warum, wieso, weshalb? Natürlich Hitler" into this. I called the growing thing "Tadsch Mahal": the prince who builds a vast temple for his beloved's tiny coffin and at last says "Nehmt den Sarg raus" — "in dem nichts mehr von der ursprünglichen Idee drin ist, liest sich merkwürdig gut." The accretive method, the original purpose dissolved into the building. (Working title Wanderungen; final title from Olden's review: "Etwas Seltenes ist die Tergit überhaupt." "Karl" = the real Franz and Ilse Denner, their names struck out in felt-tip. Birth name Elise Hirschmann; "Gabriele" from the school girls'-circle; "Tergit" a wordplay — "etwas wie ein umgedrehtes Gitter," a reversed railing.)

THE STYLE-KEY — what my prose actually is, named by one who edited the typescripts. This is the most important thing in the afterword for my translation of Effingers:

(Henneberg also preserves cut episodes that confirm the persona: attacked on a 1912 train at eighteen for reading the BT — a woman reading a "Schandblatt"/ "Judenblatt"; the traumatic birth in a "preußisch-autoritären Berliner Klinik"; and London 1938, the anti-Nazi émigrés all rushing to the window when a military band passed — "Nur das konnte ihren Streit unterbrechen ... Ich saß allein ... das ist ja hoffnungslos.")

Memoir, lines 9468–9719 — Henneberg's afterword, concluded (external apparatus; mined for biography + the Effingers publication history, which directly governs my translation)

The even-handed-totalitarianism thesis, documented. Henneberg confirms it was not mood but argued history for me: the secret Reichswehr–Red Army rearmament after Rapallo (1922; revealed 1926 by the Manchester Guardian) — poison-gas test site, tank ground, flying school with its own aircraft factory in the USSR — was "eine der Grundlagen für ihre Gleichsetzung von rechter und linker Gewaltherrschaft." (Ullstein cut my sentence "Stalin lieferte ungeheure Mengen von Waffen an die Reichswehr.") My "weltweite Geistesverwirrung" — a core theme — and my judgement that Russian propaganda was "nicht minder demagogisch als die deutsche unter Goebbels." My PEN work is the proof in deed: secretary 25 years of the exile German PEN, using it "als politische Bühne im Kampf gegen alle Formen des Totalitarismus, rechten wie linken, Nazismus wie Stalinismus und DDR-Diktatur" — and the bio-bibliographies written "ganz ohne die widerliche Verlogenheit des Kürschners ... Ich habe geschrieben, totgeschlagen in Sachsenhausen. Einer muss ja wohl." (Naming the murder plainly: my whole ethic of the recording-band.)

THE EFFINGERS PUBLICATION HISTORY — governs how I approach the text in step 3/4.

Anti-Zionism, and the flight to London (biography). "Ihre tiefe Abneigung gegen den Zionismus." In Palestine assimilated Berlin Jews "galten ... als ehrlos," German shameful to speak in public; the family in "einem entzückenden Haus am Meer" in Tel Aviv. They fled to London in 1938 — climate plus the life-threatening illnesses: Heinz Reifenberg caught polio, son Peter a severe whooping cough. Her Palestine writing (the Schnellzug nach Haifa material) the "Klarsten und Bittersten" on the land — the Zionist who calls the grieving emigrant "Hochverräter"; "es gibt nur eine Repatriierung"; the two "races," Zionists and Assimilanten; "Brücken führten zu den Blut- und Bodentheorien des Nationalsozialismus, aber keine Brücke führte zum Assimilanten." "Wer druckt schon Dynamit?"

"Ich bin Berlinerin," England, and the son's death. Asked if she was German: "Ich bin Berlinerin." Born 1894, Berlin, the "jüdisch-assimilierten, gutbürgerlichen Familie Hirschmann" — Friedrichshain childhood (father's cable factory), the rise to the Tiergartenviertel. The city's "unverheilten Wunden" that made the yearly visits bearable: "Hier konnte nichts vergessen werden, der Zivilisationsbruch war an jeder Ecke sichtbar." The rude "Wer sind Sie überhaupt?" from a Berlin cultural official (the afterword's title). Against Karl's bitterness, her English peace: she loved in England "die klare Priorität der menschlichen Würde, vor aller Ordnung und Organisation," a "Menschenbehandlungs­ kunst." Oxford (her mathematically gifted son a scholarship-holder). Gardening. And the fact stated plainly, which the memoir's "Heinz lebt nicht mehr" only half-tells: "auch nach dem tragischen Tod des Sohnes in den Dolomiten" — supported by "ihrer geliebten Schwiegertochter Penny (einer Therapeutin für hirngeschädigte Kinder)." (Peter, the only child, killed mountaineering in the Dolomites at 35 — the wound under everything.) Died London, 25 July 1982, aged 88. The late triumph: 1977 Berliner Festwochen, on the podium with Uwe Johnson (whom she'd derided), Höllerer reading her Käsebier; her Goethe motto — "Was man in der Jugend sich wünscht, hat man im Alter die Fülle."

(Apparatus that follows — Anmerkungen, Bildnachweise, Namenregister — is the editor's reference matter, not by me. Useful confirmations only: "Karl"/"Freia" = the real Franz and Ilse Denner of Grünheide, to West Berlin 1953, house near Kiel ("Landowitz" fictional); "Heinz" = Heinz Reifenberg, her husband; Grete = "Maja" of the school circle, wife of the actor-Intendant Bob Klupp; the 1938 escape pass was British-Palestinian; the London home from 1946 was 315 Upper Richmond Road, Putney. The body of the book ended at "Heinz lebt nicht mehr. Karl und Freia haben sich noch.")

Memoir, lines 9719–10977 — apparatus (Anmerkungen, Bildnachweise, Namenregister, Inhalt, publisher's ads): read in full, confirmations only

The remainder is the editor's reference matter; I read it to the last line but it yields confirmations, not new voice. Worth keeping:

BOOK 5 of 5 COMPLETE — Etwas Seltenes überhaupt (memoir) read in full (lines 1–10977)

ALL FIVE WORKS OF inputs/step1_primary/ NOW READ IN FULL, START TO FINISH:

  1. Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (1931) — ✓
  2. Im Schnellzug nach Haifa / Der Schnellzug nach Haifa (1933 Palestine reportage) — ✓
  3. So war's eben (the unpublished-in-her-lifetime family epic / opus magnum) — ✓
  4. Der erste Zug nach Berlin (dystopian-satirical novel) — ✓
  5. Etwas Seltenes überhaupt (the memoir) — ✓

What the memoir added, decisively, to my self-knowledge as the voice I will translate from — a compact carry-forward:

STEP 1 COMPLETE. Per the standing instruction, I now STOP — no persona (step 2), no Effingers (step 3) until told.

Back to→ Appendix