2 Friday, August 7, 1970 1952-53 The day when Leon and Fela sailed for Montreal was a few days before the start of school, and Brigitte had just completed her engagement in Norderney. She took the first ferry and the train via Bremen to Bremerhaven, where she met Miki and joined him in the farewell. One of the last things that Leon said to Miki was, “Make sure that you take French again. Je t’écrirai en français.” At the high school, French was an elective, given two hours a week after the regular school day. Miki had taken it in the ninth grade, and it was in French class that he first noticed Brigitte, before meeting her again at his piano teacher’s house. To conclude the farewell, all of them, including Fela, who didn’t know French, said “Au revoir!” On their way home, Miki and Brigitte spent the night in a hotel in Bremen, after a dinner in the Ratskeller. The waiters and hotel clerks treated them as a young adult couple, and one of them addressed Brigitte as Frau Wilner, since it was Miki who had registered them. “I like the sound of that,” she later told him. “From now on, my stage name will be Brigitte Wilner.” By the time they married, four years later, and the name became legally hers, she was already well known under it. Not long afterward she was a star. A letter from Leon, in French, was not long in coming. It turned out that in Montreal most people did speak French, but most Jews did not; they spoke only English, as did most of the people in the business world – banking, insurance and the like – that he needed to deal with. He would need to learn English after all. Meanwhile, it would be Fela, who already knew English, who would be the English-speaking partner in their business (whose nature was left unspecified). *      *     * The six books that he had brought were in four different languages: German, English, French, and Spanish. He blessed his multilingual childhood for his ease in learning languages. The two German books were not original; they were recently published translations of the English ones, which had come out in 1951 and 1964, respectively. The more recent one was Understanding Media by the Canadian theoretician Marshall McLuhan; the German version bore the title Magical Channels, somehow implying an irony that was not in the original. The earlier was The True Believer, by the American working-class intellectual Eric Hoffer. The translated title was, however, The Fanatic; in this case it must have seemed to the translator, and Miki tended to agree, that the irony of the original title would be lost on the German reader. But why, exactly, would this be so? Did it have to do with the Hitler years? Before 1933, irony had been a hallmark of German literature, from Lessing through Heine to Thomas Mann. But the symbols and slogans of the Third Reich were so absurdly, unintentionally self-parodying – Charlie Chaplin did not need to exaggerate in order to make Hitler into a farcical figure – that the German people, being forced to take them seriously, had lost their sense of proportion in that regard. Not all German people, to be sure; not his mother-in-law, Helga Kranz (formerly Bechmeyer – she had remarried shortly after the marriages of her daughters, in 1956), nor her husband Bruno, a violinist. And, of course, not Dr. Roselius. *      *     * It was Dr. Roselius who had suggested Hoffer’s book to him. In the twelfth-grade English class, each student was to choose two books, one fiction and one non-fiction, to read and to write an essay about, in English. For fiction he chose Babbitt, but when he felt daunted by the length of the non-fiction books that he saw in the English section of the school library, Dr. Roselius lent him his own copy of Hoffer’s book, which he had recently received from an American friend. He found the book’s analysis of the Nazi phenomenon, which he had experienced in the flesh, so penetratingly accurate that, when Hoffer applied a similar analysis to Communism, he let himself be swayed by it and lost whatever sympathy he might have felt for Communism. The movement to which Refadim belonged was not formally Communist – it couldn’t be, since Zionism and Communism were formally incompatible – but it was on the leftmost fringe of socialism and so strongly oriented towards the USSR that there were pictures of Lenin and Stalin on the dining-room walls. His conversion was already well underway when news of the Slánský trials came to his attention. He was not as shocked as he might have been without Hoffer’s insight. He was not quite so convinced by Hoffer’s view of Christianity, at least Christianity before Constantine, when it was a small, persecuted sect that did not fit Hoffer’s paradigm of a mass movement. True, mass movements often begin as such sects. But the fanaticism of a small sect was, Miki felt, fundamentally different. He, at least, had found fundamental differences between the outlooks of those of his acquaintances who were Communists and those who were Hasidic Jews. Brigitte, for her part, had chosen Gone with the Wind as her novel – her essay was a comparison of the book and the film – and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, which she compared in her essay with a first-hand account, by an informant of her acquaintance, of coming of age in a far-left kibbutz in Israel. In addition to the English, Latin and French that were offered at the high school, Miki had taught himself Spanish in order to read Don Quixote – the supreme masterpiece of irony – in the original. He had previously read it in Bialik’s Hebrew translation, and laughed his head off, but the famous poet’s version was greatly abridged – it seemed to be intended for children – and translated not from the original language (which Bialik didn’t know) but from a German version. In order to study the language of Cervantes he procured, in a Bad Harzburg bookstore, a textbook (intended for both school use and self-study), by an author with the strangely resonant name of Dr. Richard Ruppert y Ujaravi – a name that Miki eventually understood to mean that the man had a German father with the family name Ruppert, and a Spanish mother with the name Ujaravi. He soon discovered further that the “y” was optional: there was none between Cervantes and Saavedra. *      *     * As he was preparing to reread The True Believer, he remembered his youthful reservations about Hoffer’s seeming overemphasis on mass movements. For a different slant on the phenomenon of the mass, he turned to La rebelión de las masas, by José Ortega y Gasset. Brigitte came into the room, fresh from her run on the beach. She was dressed in white cotton – a tank top and a miniskirt – with a white kerchief around her hair and flip-flop sandals on her feet. She liked to run barefoot, right on the line separating the wet sand from the dry, and she took her sandals only for crossing the street between the beach and the hotel. She was glistening with sweat, and still panting slightly. The day was unusually humid, and, after she removed her kerchief, her blond ringlets were curled tighter than before. She dropped the newspaper she had brought with her onto the desk where Miki was sitting, and went into the bathroom to fetch a towel with which to wipe her skin. During her brief stay there, Miki quickly leafed through the paper. “Is there anything more about Hemme?” she asked on coming out, as she was wiping her right arm. “Nothing that I’ve noticed,” he replied. “Perhaps you should call someone in Stuttgart,” she said. “Don’t you know what’s-his-name at the Stuttgarter Zeitung?” “You mean Dieter Wehrle, at the Stuttgarter Nachrichten?” “Of course, I knew that. I was just testing you.” And she threw the towel at him. He caught it in flight and began to swing it around. “Ooh, that feels good,” she said as she came closer to him. “In this humid weather, we need a fan in this room.” “Shall I call and ask them to bring us one?” “No, I like this one.” When she was about a meter away, she began a dance movement to the rhythm of Miki’s towel swinging. “But please call to ask for coffee.” The mid-morning coffee was something she found indispensable. Miki put down the towel and reached for the telephone. “Power failure!” Brigitte shouted as she stopped her dance and plopped on the unmade bed, flipping off her sandals and flicking on the bedside radio, which was tuned to NDR 3. The sounds of a Mozart quartet filled the humid air. Miki enjoyed the fresh humidity that came from the North Sea. The desertlike dryness of the air in Refadim had given him respiratory allergies that cleared up the moment he boarded the Artza in Haifa, bound for Venice. He looked at his wife, who was lying on her side, facing away from him. In the course of her falling motion onto the bed, her miniskirt had ridden up, exposing her bikini bottom. Thoughts about masses and their fanaticism gave way to wondering if there was a shapelier ass anywhere on earth. *      *     * During the first year that he lived in Helga Bechmeyer’s apartment – she had asked him to call her Helga instead of Frau Bechmeyer – his clothes, books and other possessions were in what had been Renate’s room, and he did his schoolwork at what had been Renate’s desk, but he slept only a few nights a month in what had been Renate’s bed, with Helga’s explicit approval. Helga’s first serious boyfriend had been a Jewish fellow student at the conservatory, and while that relationship ended under pressure from his family, she bore him no grudge and maintained a fondness for Jews. That Franz Bechmeyer, the man she eventually married, had a Jewish grandmother was a point in his favor, and it pleased her no end that her younger daughter had a Jewish boyfriend. The nights that he slept in what in principle was his bed were the ones when Brigitte had her period. Shortly after he moved in she told him a little more about the event that had left her infertile. There was not only its brutality, but also a venereal disease, which the Kirghiz had probably picked up in the course of another rape, and which remained undetected until she began menstruating, very painfully, and the gynecologist whom she had gone to consult about it diagnosed the disease and was able to treat it with antibiotics. He could do nothing for her dysmenorrhea, however. During his nights alone he had vivid, confusing dreams that were filled exclusively with people and events from the war years and from the kibbutz period, with nothing and no one from the intervening time, in the DP camp and in Bad Harzburg, not even Leon. The two periods mingled, and so he might dream about Tzvi and Hemme, his father and Hanna, Nili and the little sister – Miriam, or Mirka, or Mirele – whom he lost along with his mother; and he was never sure whether the dream took place in Poland, Germany or Israel. On one occasion he woke up with the impression that Hanna and his mother had become interchangeable characters in his dream world. That evening he wrote Hanna a letter, informing her of his decision to stay in Germany, and expressing the hope that some day he would see her again. On a cold January dawn he woke up under the down comforter, sweating and panting. The dream had clearly taken place in the heat of the Negev, it was explicitly erotic, and only characters in it were he and Nili. It was his first – and last – wet dream. He felt self-disgust, shame and guilt. He wiped himself dry with a handkerchief and sneaked into the bathroom, where he washed both himself and the handkerchief. The sheet and comforter case, fortunately, were not soiled. As he crawled back into bed, he began to reflect on his feelings. He had not felt guilty about his real-life doings with Nili; why, then, the remorse about a dream? He concluded that his feelings betokened the depth of his devotion to Brigitte, that he would go whither she went. Were she to be discovered by Hollywood – and they had joked about it, with her speaking English like an American – he would follow her to California. In the far likelier case that her career would be in Germany, he would remain here. He knew that he was very young to be making such a commitment. The normal way would be to take his time, to get to know a lot of girls before settling down with the one. But his case was not normal; he had already known a lot of girls. Perhaps a narrow slice of the female spectrum, but it didn’t matter. He felt sure enough. Thinking about his decision suddenly brought two facts to his mind: he was about to turn eighteen, and he was a citizen of Israel, something that happened automatically with his aliya, under the Law of Return. He decided that on his eighteenth birthday he would apply for citizenship in the Federal Republic of Germany. He hesitated over whether, in doing so, he should change the spelling of his surname from Wilner to the more typically German Willner. When he told Helga and Brigitte about his decision over breakfast, they were visibly touched. “It’s marvelous,” said Helga, “that you can so forgive the nation that has caused so much death and suffering, for you and for many others, that you want to be a part of it.” “For love is strong as death,” he quoted from the Song of Songs. Brigitte rose from her chair and kissed him with all her might. She had not kissed him like that since the day she told him of there being no need for condoms. He suddenly remembered that there was something he had been meaning to ask her, but he would do so later, in private. Helga also rose, and put her arms around both of them. “I need to tell you something,” she said, her voice welling up. “I think that I am also falling in love.” “With Bruno?” they asked in unison. Her friend, who played in the resort orchestra and with whom she performed recitals, was Miki’s favorite visitor to the Bechmeyer household. Helga nodded with a happy smile and teary eyes. “We will have some celebrating to do,” Miki said. “Let’s see if Jürgen and Renate can join us,” said Brigitte, to Miki’s surprise. She had told him time and again that she didn’t like Jürgen, that she didn’t like Renate’s having moved away to be with him, nor the way that he ogled her, Brigitte, when he was near her. Miki, who had not yet met Jürgen, had a difficult time faulting him. Renate was pretty, but Brigitte was dazzling, and they both knew it. Renate probably needed to get away in order to escape the orbit of her younger sister’s blinding beauty. During their walk to school that morning he asked her, “Do you know anything about Ogino or Knaus?” She laughed. “The Knaus-Ogino method? It’s how good Catholics are supposed to practice birth control, according to the Pope.” And she explained the gist of the method to him, adding, “Renate tells me that she uses it sometimes.” Before she could ask him why he had asked, he changed the subject. “Do you remember my teacher, Hanna, that I wrote you about?” “How could I forget? A teacher who’s called by her forename – how can one forget that?” And she laughed. “Well,” he said, “I wrote her a letter a couple of months ago, and I haven’t received an answer. I would like to write her again, that I’m going to be a German citizen. I am really curious about what she would think about it, but I don’t know if I should write now or wait until she writes me back.” “If you feel like writing then just write. Who knows why she hasn’t written you back – perhaps she misplaced the envelope with your address.” “You’re right,” he said. “I want her advice about something.” “What’s that?” “Whether to change the spelling of my surname, from one to two Ls.” “Please don’t change it,” Brigitte said tenderly. “I love your name as it is.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Please,” she said again. “But then, whenever someone asks me for my surname, I will have to say ‘Wilner with one L,’” he said. “Only until you’re famous,” she said, kissing him again. “Or until you are,” he said, kissing her back, “if you really are going to use my name. But anyway, I will write her this afternoon when we get home from school, before I start on my homework. ” But when he came home that afternoon, Helga was out, so that he went to her piano and played some Mozart until it was time for homework. He never wrote the letter. *      *     * The music ended. It was ten o’clock, and time for the news. “The so-called War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel is about to come to an end, it was announced in Washington. Both governments have agreed to the ceasefire terms proposed by the American Secretary of State, William P. Rogers.” Brigitte turned off the radio as the announcer began to read the next news item. Miki flashed her a grateful smile. “A little peace, at last,” he said. “I wonder for how long.” “Do you thinks it’s the end of the Long Seventh Day?” she asked, alluding to his recent book. “I wish, but I doubt it.” A knock on the door announced the arrival of the coffee. Brigitte got up, smoothed her skirt and went to the door to open it and take the tray from the maid. “Thank you, Lise,” she said. The maid curtsied and closed the door behind her as she withdrew. Turning towards Miki as she placed the tray, with the pitchers of coffee and milk, and the two cups on their saucers, all in matching Rosenthal china, on the table, she said, “You don’t sound very optimistic.” “When I was in Israel last year,” he said, “and I probably already told you this, at the meetings where I talked, there were practically no young people, except Hanoch Levin and his crowd.” She had met Hanoch on their Israeli vacation, three months since. “And that girl,” she corrected him between sips of coffee. “Oh yes, that one girl with the enormous hoop earrings.” He laughed at the memory, recalling also that the earrings weren’t the only big things on her. “And, as you remember I told you, she paid no attention to what I was saying.” “She only stared at you admiringly,” Brigitte said, adding – or rather singing – in English, “She only had eyes for you.”. He smiled sheepishly. “Go on singing,” he said, also in English. She was, by then, a veteran of the American musical, of which she had been one of the first performers in Germany. The voice lessons at the Academy had served their purpose well. “Are the stars out tonight? I don't know if it's cloudy or bright ‘Cause I only have eyes for you, dear…” She drank some more coffee, and went on. “The moon may be high But I can't see a thing in the sky ‘Cause I only have eyes for you…” She emptied her cup and finished the song. “I don't know if we're in a garden Or on a crowded avenue. You are here, so am I, Maybe millions of people go by, But they all disappear from view And I only have eyes for you.” She lay on the bed again, this time on her back, with her knees up. “We’re still on vacation,” she said as she slid her bikini bottom up over them and down over her feet. Miki, who had quickly undressed, grabbed his camera and shouted, “More!” “No more,” she said. She moved the hem of her tank top upward past her breasts to show that they were bare and then covered them again. He snapped twice, dropped the camera on a chair and joined her on the bed, but not before she said, as she had done on several previous occasions, “You really ought to get a Japanese camera, they’re quicker.” That their vacation was ending was left unsaid. All the arrangements for departure had been made. The bill had been paid, and they were almost fully packed. After showering and finishing their packing, they would have a little lunch at the hotel’s café, then a taxi would come to take them to the port, where they would take the 13:30 ferry to Norddeich. They had a first-class compartment reserved on the train to Bremen and on the connecting one to Hamburg. *      *     * Shortly before his eighteenth birthday, at the end of the first semester of the twelfth grade, the school authorities announced that as of that year, the high school, which until then had gone up only to the twelfth grade, would begin its transition back to the status of a Gymnasium by adding the thirteenth grade, the traditional Oberprima (though it was not to be called that), and that no Abitur examination would be given until the following year. The decision did not affect Brigitte’s plans, since the Academy of Music and Theater did not require the Abitur, but Miki’s entrance into the university would be delayed by a year. He was faced with a dilemma: he could transfer to a Gymnasium in Hanover for the final year in order to remain close to Brigitte, or remain in Bad Harzburg and finish school with teachers and classmates that he knew. He felt himself experiencing the classic conflict of heart and mind, perhaps not quite on the scale of young Werther, but real nonetheless. His heart told him to go to Hanover, to remain as close to his love as possible. To his surprise, he was encouraged in that direction by Leon, but for a different reason: his uncle, who, though a lifelong Zionist, had always been – like Miki’s parents – a leftist nonbeliever, wanted him in a place with a Jewish community, where Leon had friends that Miki could live with. Miki surmised that he was hearing the influence of Fela, who was more traditionally Jewish. Dr. Roselius, on the other hand, warned him against the risk of taking his Abitur examination, which would take place in the spring of the final year, in a school different from the one that had prepared him. Brigitte, for her part, was ambivalent. Of course she wanted Miki near her, but the school she would be attending was one that would consume so much time, with readings, rehearsals, and the like, that they might not be spending all that much time together. Finally, it was Helga who pointed out, seemingly from personal experience (which she did not specify), that if they saw each other only occasionally during what would be a very busy time for both of them – whether Brigitte on homecoming visits or Miki on special trips to Hanover – then such occasions would be exceptional and far more meaningful than attempts to find common time by two busy people living together. *      *     * They spent most of the train ride finally catching up on their reading. Brigitte, in particular, had not progressed very far into the outline of the television series, and she was due to meet with the producers the next morning at NDR headquarters. She was inclined to accept the part – the offer was both challenging and potentially lucrative – and she thought that Hetty, her agent, ought to be present at the meeting. It was a almost seven when the taxi dropped them at their house in Blankenese, whether they had been living for two years now. Frau Schmidt, their housekeeper, let them in and Miki carried both of their bags upstairs. They always traveled light on their trips to Norderney, since Brigitte had no need there for the kinds of outfits that she would be expected to wear in more publicity-oriented places. When she went to her bathroom to refresh herself after the journey, he went downstairs to check his mail, which Frau Schmidt had left splayed on the desk in his study. “A young lady came looking for you yesterday, Herr Doktor,” she said as she met him at the foot of the stairs. “She spoke no German, only English, and I had to call Klaus” – her son – “so that he would translate.” “What did she want?” “She wanted to know if you remembered Nili.” “Nili?” he said, astounded. “She was a friend of mine, many years ago, in Israel.” “No, this young lady could not be an old friend; she’s not much more than twenty. Very pretty, with the biggest earrings I’ve ever seen, like a Gypsy.” That girl! Who could she be? Why would she follow him to Germany? “What did you tell her?” he asked. “I told Klaus to tell her when you would be coming back, Herr Doktor. She said nothing and just left.” He wondered whether to tell Brigitte. Of course he would, but not just yet, not until he knew a little more about the girl. Besides, Brigitte’s period was due shortly – the vacation had been planned around it – and this was a time that called for discretion on his part. As he started up the stairs, he remembered that he had been distracted by Frau Schmidt and had not checked his mail. It doesn’t matter, he thought; he was in no mood for reading mail anyway. When Brigitte was ready, they went downstairs again to eat the dinner of roast chicken, fried potatoes and salad that Frau Schmidt had prepared for them. It was nice to eat simple food again, after the rich seafood dishes of Norderney. After dinner, with Brigitte back upstairs, he looked at the array of mail. None of it seemed to be personal. There was the usual monthly envelope from Wegner, his publishing house, containing letters that had been sent to him at Wegner’s address, mostly from readers of his recent book. The Long Seventh Day had come out in German in 1968 and in English, French and Hebrew in 1969, but by the middle of 1970 the stream of mail had dwindled to a trickle, and the envelope was a C5, probably containing just a few others of size C6. He would open them in the morning, when Brigitte was at her meeting. He also looked at his Regina answering machine, which he had acquired on moving into the house. It was a wonderful invention, and a beautiful piece of Ulm School design. It looked just like a tape recorder, but it was connected to one of his two telephone lines, and automatically recorded messages that callers left, which he could then play back at will. His other line went to an ordinary telephone that he would answer, and only a few people knew the number: Brigitte of course, and Fela, and his editors, and his travel agent, and a few close friends, such as Margot (who had once been his editor) and Helmut. He saw that the tape had advanced, indicating that there were messages on it. That, too, could wait until tomorrow. He went upstairs to join his wife, who was in her room, removing her makeup in front of the dresser mirror. When she saw his reflection, she greeted him with a smile that told him that her period had not come yet. *      *     * Helga’s argument, together with Dr. Roselius’ warning, was enough to sway Miki. He had to use a German-French dictionary in order to find the mots justes with which to explain his decision to Leon, but the explanation was effective. He presently received a telegram saying JE TE COMPRENDS STOP TON ONCLE. A letter, in which Leon promised to continue supporting Miki monetarily and in every other way for as long as necessary, came in due time. Leon’s business enterprise in Montreal, whose nature he still did not explain, had gotten off to a blazing start, thanks to the capital he had managed to accumulate in Germany. Miki was startled to read Dieu merci intercalated in this report. Where was his uncle, he wondered, the atheist socialist Zionist? On the day the world learned of Stalin’s death, he finally wrote the letter to Hanna. He wrote it, like the previous one, in German, but he decided that on the envelope, above the word ‘Israel,’ he would write ‘Hanna Kidron / Kibbutz Lehavot Hadarom’ in Hebrew rather than in the Latin letters he had used the first time. It was the first Hebrew he had written in nine months, since he no longer used the Holy Tongue in his correspondence with Leon. When the time came for making plans for the upcoming vacation, Brigitte decided that, since from that autumn on acting would be her life, she would not do any that summer. Even before receiving any word from the Norderney company, she telephoned the director (who lived in Hanover) and asked him not to bother inviting her. He seemed disappointed. They spent most of the summer hiking in the Harz, something that Brigitte had been meaning to do for years, with occasional trips back to Bad Harzburg in order to wash their clothes and enjoy Helga’s home-cooked food. The trails they took often passed close to the border with East Germany, with the unreachable Brocken a tantalizing sight in the distance. At one point they were within a hundred meters of a border post manned by Soviet soldiers, whom they could see plainly, and who waved at them. With Stalin dead, and with his successors struggling for power in the Kremlin, their presence seemed to Miki far less menacing than it might have before. But to Brigitte, the sight of Red Army uniforms brought back such painful memories that for the next two nights, as they lay side by side in the refuge, she would not let him hold her, not even for warmth in the cold mountain air. The following morning, however, she told him that that this eight-year-old trauma was something she needed to overcome. When they passed the same post on the way back and the soldiers waved at them again, they approached them, stopping a meter short of the border marker, and Miki, using what he remembered of his Polish, engaged them in an attempt at conversation, and when he mentioned Stalin they laughed and began to throw out the names Malenkov, Khrushchev, Molotov and Bulganin, seemingly at random. Miki was having fun, until he felt Brigitte tugging discreetly at his sleeve. “Da svidaniya!” he called out to the soldiers, as they turned back in order to continue with their hike. “I feel much better now,” Brigitte said as she put her arm around his waist. It was their first physical contact in two days. *      *     * It was a little after nine o’clock when he put on his bathrobe, bent down to give the languid Brigitte one more kiss, and went downstairs. Frau Schmidt was already in her room, watching television. He entered his study, sat at this desk, opened his typewriter – which already held a blank sheet of paper – and, after leaving a space for the title, began typing. The paragraphs crystallized spontaneously. A specter haunts the world – not only Europe – a century and a quarter after Marx and Engels announced their specter. It is the specter of radical fanaticism that finds its expression in what some of us call terrorism. Let me repeat. “Terrorism,” including suicidal acts that cause victims, and even suicidal acts with no unintended victims – such as the self-immolations we have seen in recent years – is but an outgrowth; the fanaticism that drives the acts is the root. We can do nothing about the former unless we deal with the latter, just as, when weeding a garden, hacking off leaves and stems is, in the long run, a fruitless endeavor. Understanding fanaticism, however, is more difficult than one might think. Many of us have a strong enough feeling about something or other – a football team, a food, a show-business star, a form of behavior – that we might proclaim, “I am fanatical about that!” People call themselves opera fanatics, or fitness fanatics, or Rhine-wine fanatics, without expecting any condemnation. But then, such people would not dream of engaging in violent acts in order to express their feelings. Not usually, anyway. But even there, the line may be breached; witness the football hooligans of England, whose actions became so outrageous that the British Parliament, two years ago, had to pass a law to deal with them. But the kind of fanatic who is ready to commits acts of terrorism, against others or himself or both, is precisely the kind that would not think of himself as a fanatic, but rather as a true believer, as in the original title of the book that was recently published here in Germany under the title The Fanatic, by the American working-class intellectual Eric Hoffer. To Hoffer, the true believer is “the man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause,” and such men dominate “the active, revivalist phase of mass movements.” Hoffer sees an ineluctable nexus between fanaticism and mass movements. The subtitle of his book is “Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” and near the end he writes, “When the moment is ripe, only the fanatic can hatch a genuine mass movement.” He reached the end of the page, and quickly replaced the paper. But Hoffer’s analysis is limited by the very premise of his book to just the kind of fanaticism that is associated with mass movement, and this is not the only kind. He writes in the preface: “Though there are obvious differences between the fanatical Christian, the fanatical Mohammedan, the fanatical nationalist, the fanatical Communist and the fanatical Nazi, it is yet true that the fanaticism which animates them may be viewed and treated as one.” But what about the fanatical war protester? The fanatical medical missionary? The fanatical civil-rights activist? I have listed here only those whose fanaticism we find admirable, but they are not the only ones that do not conform to Hoffer’s mass-movement mold. A quick look at the page told him, without counting the lines, that he had typed about fifty. This was about half of the normal output of a typing session, but he felt tired. It’s a pretty good beginning, he thought. When I resume writing tomorrow, I will cite Ortega’s analysis of masses, where no mention of fanaticism ever occurs.