8 Thursday, August 13, 1970 1958-59 In the morning the thought that had come to him the night before came back. Was there a psychological predisposition to fanaticism? Were there any studies in that regard? He would write some speculative comments on the matter in his conclusion. Meanwhile he had to finish his discussion of fanatical nationalism, and, in particular, the Irish situation He had finished page 12. It was beginning to look as if the length of the essay would be closer to twenty than to fifteen pages. He was just now getting to the issue of Islam. Late last year Sinn Féin and the IRA split into “provisional” and “official” wings, and it is the provisional wing that harbors the fanatical nationalists. Guerrilla action has not been late in coming.. As we have seen, postmodern nationalist movements tend to label themselves as socialist, Marxist, or even – as in the case of ETA – Marxist-Leninist, though anyone who has read Marx or Lenin would know that they would scoff at the ethnic nationalism that these groups espouse. It requires a certain amount of sophistry to link an ethnic group’s struggle for “liberation,” whatever that may mean, with the Marxian class struggle. But, once again, such an embrace of contradictions is precisely what makes these movements postmodern. In the case of Northern Ireland there may be some legitimacy to a class-based orientation if the claims of anti-Catholic discrimination on the part of the Protestant-dominated authorities (in the distribution of housing, jobs and the like) are valid. But with regard to most of these movements one may well suspect that, far from representing a core belief, Marxist self-labeling is an opportunistic appeal for support, perhaps most immediately from the leftist oppositionist groups that I have discussed above, but more importantly, from the powers of the bloc that calls itself socialist. If and when that bloc dissolves, or loses interest in stirring up trouble in countries outside it, the label may well change from red to another color. If, in particular, an ethnic identity is defined wholly (as in the case of the Sikhs in India) or partly by religion, then the color could be that of the religion. In the case of minority nationalities that are Muslim in largely non-Muslim states (such as the Moros, the Patani Malays and the Ogaden Somalis), this would of course be Islamic green, since it would be a simple matter to identify the cause of “national liberation” of such groups with the larger cause of jihad. He was at the end of page 13, and on the verge of changing paper, when suddenly his private line rang. It was just half past ten. “Dr. Wilner? Billung speaking. There is a problem with your booking.” “Yes?” “I just got a call from Lufthansa. It seems that your name is on a temporary blacklist that they got from the BGS, and you are not allowed to leave the country.” His name? The Federal Border Guard? There must be some confusion. “My name?” he asked. “Michael Wilner with one L? Are they sure?” “Oh, yes,” Billung said. “Name and passport number, all in order. They said that the BGS will contact you soon.” “Thank you, Dr. Billung, but I don’t intend to wait. I am going to contact them.” “Well, Dr. Wilner, I hope you resolve this little problem in the next day or two. Your reservation is being held for you, for the time being.” Miki tried to call Major Patzert of the Hamburg BGS office, whom he had once interviewed in connection with an article about immigrants from Turkey, but could not get through to him. Eventually he was put through to an official whose name he didn’t catch and who told him that he, Michael Wilner, was involved in a police investigation about whose nature the official knew nothing, but that Dr. Wilner would be contacted in due time by Hamburg police. In due time! How very German! What could possibly be going on? Should he call Hamburg police himself? No, that would be useless; he would certainly get the same “in due time” response. If there was one thing that made Miki Wilner anxious, it was uncertainty. He had experienced plenty of it during his wartime childhood. He had since learned to deal with the anxiety – yoga postures, deep breathing, thinking about other matters, and, best of all, talking about it with Brigitte – but not to stave it off. Something as trivial as a delayed flight without an estimated departure time could bring it on. Taking a walk or a bicycle ride might have helped, too, but if the police were going to call him at some indefinite time, he had to be at home. He went back to his desk and looked over what he had written. Rather than continue on the same track, he felt himself sidetracked by the fact that he was now in a kind of adversarial position with the state. He began page 14. The potential for violence in the postmodern fanatical movements lies in the fact that, in almost every case, they are engaged in conflict with a modern entity: the state, to which, according to Max Weber, belongs the monopoly of violence. In strictly modern terms, an opposition to this monopoly constitutes anarchism, another modern concept that has been rationally formulated – though in more than one way – by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and their followers. But the postmodern opposition consists not of disputing the monopoly but of flouting it. This was enough for now, he thought. He went to the living room and sat down at the piano to play the Beethoven “Waldstein” sonata that lay open on the music stand. He played it straight through, with no repeats and at full speed, wrong notes be damned. What would Helga have said! But the headlong rush of the first movement, the meditative calm of the adagio and the ever-wilder dance of the rondo suited his mood perfectly. *      *     * During his week in London, Miki Wilner found, to his surprise and to a certain guilt-ridden annoyance with himself, that he did not miss Brigitte as much as he thought he would. The meeting with his uncle, after four years, was joyful. Leon spoke to him in English, and his English speech proved to be just as stilted as his letter had been. “I am overjoyed to see you,” he said. “And how is your academic progress?” Miki assured him that his progress was just fine, that he already had an idea for his dissertation, and that he had been getting serious about a career in journalism, something that he had already intimated to Leon in a letter. “I am very pleased,” Leon said. Eventually, and spontaneously, their talk changed to Yiddish, and then it felt like the old days. They had dinner with some of Leon’s London business associates, and a number of young people, around Miki’s age, were present as well. Some of them were working in the businesses, others were family, and Miki never quite got it straight who was who. But it was clear that all were Jews. He arranged to meet the next day with four of the young people, who for various reasons had the week free and who would be his guides for the rest of his stay: two young men named Alan and Jack, and two young women named Vicky and Helen. Helen, who was very pretty in a fresh-faced, makeup-free way, was significantly younger than the others, no more than twenty or so; she was a student at King’s College, where she read modern history, and thought she might become a teacher. She was also the only one in the group who did not smoke. In almost every conversation that Miki participated in, he was asked a question that went somewhat like this: “How can you, a Jew, a survivor and all that, live among the Germans?” When he answered that now he felt himself to be a German, he was met with incredulity. “How can that be?” he was asked rhetorically. He was told that when German Jews escaping Hitler came to Britain in the thirties and then the war broke out, they were treated as enemy aliens and interned, until Jewish community leaders persuaded the government, with difficulty, that these people were Jews and that Germany did not consider them Germans. “So how can you consider yourself a German?” “Because I am a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany,” he answered. Helen then suggested pertly, “Then perhaps you can be called a Germanian instead of a German, the way a citizen of Italy is an Italian and not an Ital.” The word Ital, rhyming with little, provoked laughter, and Alan immediately made up a limerick: “There once was a woman named Gitl / Who said, ‘Jewish men are too little. / If I were to choose, / I wouldn’t want Jews, / I’d rather make love with an Ital.’” Helen laughed heartily, but Jack, who had read classics, said that Ital might be a perfectly valid word, from the Latin Italus. Miki said that he liked the term Germanian, and if Germany were to be reunified, he would call himself that. He noticed, however, that on the few occasions that he identified himself as a West German rather than simply a German, no further questions were asked. The four friends – for it seemed to Miki that they were that, and they never indicated what other relationships there might be among them – kept Miki busy with museums, theater and restaurants. He became acquainted with the cuisines of China and India, with My Fair Lady and A Taste of Honey, with the British Museum and the National Gallery. His time with Leon was, for the most part, limited to breakfast at the hotel. But it was a warm and happy time, in the course of which Miki regained his fluency in Yiddish. A few times, when he would return to the hotel at a time that was not too late, he tried calling Brigitte at home in Göttingen, but there was never an answer. On the morning before the day of his departure, Leon brought to the breakfast table a gift-wrapped package. “Something useful for a future journalist,” he said. It turned out to be an Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter. “I special-ordered a German keyboard for you,” Leon added. That evening he was alone in his hotel room, and decided to put his new toy to the test. In the desk drawer he found some paper with the hotel’s letterhead. The reverse side was blank, and he inserted a sheet, blank side up, into the typewriter. He typed, in English, German, West German, Germanian and he underlined the text. He returned the carriage twice and went on in German, typing double-spaced.. When I travel outside Germany and I am asked to identify myself by nationality, I normally say that I am German. When I am asked for more details, and I reveal that I am by birth a Polish Jew, people are perplexed. I understand their perplexity. It can be explained on many levels, but above all by the recent history of relations between Germany and the Jews. People have not forgotten that, not so many years ago, Germany, or at least the regime that ruled Germany with wide popular support, rejected its Jews, before attempting to exterminate them, along with any other Jews it found along its path of conquest. Knowing all that, and having lived through it, I have made the choice of becoming a German. It is a choice that I wish to make known, in spite of any perplexity that it might produce. I would like to reveal, however, that, during a recent stay in London, I accidentally discovered a way of identifying myself that, for some reason, does not produce the perplexity. I can say that I am a West German. Why does saying “West German” instead of “German” produce a different response? That, too, can be explained on several levels, because “West German” can be interpreted in more than one way. The most obvious interpretation of “West German” is that of a citizen of West Germany, officially known as the Federal Republic of Germany. That is, by calling myself a West German I am announcing my citizenship or belonging to a state, and not my ethnicity or belonging to a people. He was at the end of the page. He took out the sheet, inserted another and went on. In the Western world, it is accepted that citizens of a state can be of many different ethnic backgrounds. In our neighbor France, for example, the only meaning that being French has is citizenship in the French Republic, but French people can be of German ethnicity (as in Alsace-Lorraine), or Breton, or Basque, or Italian (as in Corsica), or they can come from France’s overseas possessions – the Antilles, Indochina, Africa, the Maghreb – or be immigrants from Europe, even Polish Jews like me, or their descendants. All are considered, at least in principle, equally French. Conversely, those who might be considered ethnically but not politically French – the Walloons of Belgium, the Romands of Switzerland, the Valdôtains of Italy – do not, in fact, regard themselves as French at all. The situation, as we know well, is quite different to our east. There, all the ethnic Germans – the Sudeten Germans, the Transylvanian Saxons, the Banat Swabians and so on – have always been Germans first, and only secondarily citizens of whichever state or empire might, at any point in history, lay claim to their loyalty. The same is true of all the other ethnic nationalities living there – Magyars, Poles, and so on. He thought back to Niemann’s seminar on the history of nationalism. It was already pointed out by Meinecke – and before him by F.J. Neumann – that there exist two different concepts of the nation: state nation and cultural nation. It was the Austrian chancellor of the twenties, Ignaz Seipel (who was also a political scientist and a theologian), who pointed out the east-west division of the concept, and postulated the existence of a dividing line. He also noted that his own Austria lies to the east of the line (he regarded Austria as “a German state outside the Reich”) and Switzerland to the west, so that the Austrian-Swiss border, if one disregards Liechtenstein, is a well-defined segment of the line. If, then, we extend the line northward, it goes right through Germany, thus producing another east-west division of our land. The last paragraph was a long one, and he needed to insert yet another sheet in the middle of it. Can such an extension be formed literally? If so, then it would coincide, at least initially, with the border between Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, and would imply that those who live in the former are, in the Seipel sense, easterners, and those in the latter, westerners. While it is true that the foremost advocates of a cultural and not political definition of German nationality were true easterners, such as the Saxon Fichte, the Prussian Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the Thuringian Ranke, their position is not so different from that of the Württemberger Schiller when he writes that “the German empire and the German nation are two different things.” In reality, then, Seipel’s line, when it enters the territory of Germany, becomes a philosophical and not a geographic line. In the Seipelian sense, a West German is one who regards himself primarily as a citizen of a state of Germany, and an East German is one who identifies with the German people. Medieval historians have proposed yet another division. They define western Germany as the land that was populated by German tribes in Carolingian days, and eastern Germany as the land that was originally populated by Slavs. The dividing line is, at least in part, the middle course of the Elbe, and coincides roughly with the final line of the Red Army’s western front, as though the land that was Slavic a thousand years ago had to be occupied (“liberated”) by Slavs. But if this division has any contemporary relevance, it is not easy to discern. He was now on the fourth page. It was time to conclude.. For myself, I can say that I am a West German in every one of the meanings I have discussed. But what will I call myself if and when Germany is reunified? An English acquaintance suggested a new term, Germanian, to designate a citizen of Germany who may or may not be ethnically German; it is related to Germany in the same way that Italian is related to Italy. In German, one could introduce the term Deutschländer, related to Deutschland in the same way that Engländer is related to England or that Holländer is related to Holland. In this way, Danes in South Schleswig or Sorbs in Lusatia could refer to themselves as Deutschländer without being Deutsche. For myself, I will have no problem in being both a Deutschländer and a Deutscher, despite my background. It was almost midnight when he stopped. He now had almost four sheets that made up a hundred-line article. What should he do with it? Knowing that he would need to get up by seven in order to make his ten o’clock BEA flight from Heathrow, he decided to forgo thinking about it and go to sleep. The next day, after the bus from Hamburg Airport dropped him at the Hauptbahnhof, he went to the nearest public telephone booth and called Heinrich Braune. This time Braune had no trouble remembering who Michael Wilner was, and when Miki told him what he had for him and what it was about, Braune said, “Wait for me. I’ll go get it myself.” Three mornings later Miki, who by then had been most happily reunited with Brigitte despite occasional intrusions of Helen’s lovely face into his mind, went out, with Brigitte still asleep, to the railway station. There, at the newsstand, he bought a copy of that day’s MoPo. He brought it home and placed it on the breakfast table, open to the feuilleton page, so that Brigitte, once she got up, could find an essay titled German, West German, Germanian by Michael Wilner, identified as a doctoral candidate at Göttingen. *      *     * Brigitte did not come home for lunch, so that he ate alone while rereading what he had written to date. After lunch he went back to the piano. She came home about three in the afternoon. The first thing that she said to him after giving him the chaste kiss that was typical of her menstrual times was, “Well, did you get your trip confirmed?” “Yes and no,” he said. “Billung got the flights for me, but then he called back to tell me that I’m not allowed to travel abroad. I’m involved in some sort of police investigation.” “What have you done?” she asked with a laugh. “I wish I knew. It’s complicated: BGS told Lufthansa to block my flight, but BGS says that it’s on orders of the Hamburg police, and they’re supposed to call me. I have no unpaid traffic tickets that I know of, and I have not killed anyone that I know of.” “Something in between, perhaps?” She laughed again. “Perhaps they just need you as a witness.” “Perhaps,” he said. “Anyway,” she said, “if you aren’t going to Israel this Sunday then I had better change my plans.” “What plans had you made?” “Just getting together with some actress friends. But if you aren’t going then I’d rather be with you.” “I don’t know what’s happening with me,” he said, and burst out laughing. “You know how I get when I’m in a situation of uncertainty. And this is worse than uncertainty – it’s complete ignorance! If at least I’d been given a hint…” “That might have made it worse,” Brigitte said. “It might have stimulated your imagination in some weird direction.” She suddenly smiled. “Not that I mind your weird imagination when it’s directed at me…” “Sometimes I can make it go in your direction,” Miki said, smiling in response, “but I don’t think this is one of those times.” “Poor Miki. Too bad I’m not in a condition to help you relieve your anxiety in my way.” Too bad indeed, Miki thought. He knew of women – Margot, for example, according to what Helmut had told him – whose readiness for sex was not only not impaired but even enhanced during their periods, while Brigitte’s sexuality would be, as it were, turned off. He consoled himself, as always, by remembering that when it was turned on, which was about five-sixths of the time, there was probably no woman who could match her in that regard. “I’m tired,” Brigitte said. Miki was not surprised. The second day of her period was usually when her energy was lowest, and she had probably spent much of what she had left at the rehearsal, or script conference, or costume fitting, or whatever it was that she had done at the studio. “I’m going to take a nap,” she went on. “Would you like to join me?” “No, thanks,” he said. “Don’t you remember? I’m waiting for a call from the police.” “Oh, yes,” she said with a yawn. “Then I’ll nap in my room.” She immediately yawned again and, after giving Miki another kiss like the initial one, went upstairs. *      *     * For the third consecutive year the young Wilners began life in a different city. And for Miki it might as well have been a new city. The two years that he had spent in Göttingen before his marriage, when he was living in a rooming house, eating in the Mensa and spending much of his free time in Hanover or Bad Harzburg, were quite unlike his new life there, living with his wife in an apartment, acting as the principal housekeeper and cook for their family of two, and preparing for the final oral master’s examinations, his doctoral dissertation, and his career as a free-lance journalist. His earlier experience in Göttingen came to be a mental map, which he used to explore the city as he was now coming to know it. His first article earned not only a check for 50 marks, but also a great many letters to the editor, mostly positive. He agreed with Braune’s suggestion that he hone his journalistic skills by writing in a regional paper like the MoPo before attempting a wide-circulation periodical such as Die Zeit. Braune also wrote him that any future articles should be sent to an assistant editor named Margot Klohse-Wallmann, who had told Braune that she remembered Michael Wilner from their Göttingen days. So Margot had moved to Hamburg with Klohse, and now they were married! Which came first, Miki wondered, the move or the marriage? In October, in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was awarded to Karl Jaspers. His acceptance speech, titled Truth, Freedom and Peace, and the speech in his praise by Hannah Arendt had many ideas that Miki found inspiring. Jaspers’ book on Schelling had been crucial to his study, though he did not always agree with the interpretations, and he had recently read Jaspers’ The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind as well as Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Soon thereafter, he handed to Witte a single-spaced typed sheet with the draft of what would be the introduction to his master’s thesis. A century and a half ago Europe was, just as it is now, divided into two contending blocs. In one of them, then as now, a single despotic power, risen from a betrayed revolution, ruled, under the guise of liberation, over its satellites. The other bloc was, then as now, a heterogeneous coalition – actually, a shifting series of coalitions – of states whose constitutions ranged from liberal to tyrannical, united mainly by its enmity to the other bloc and what it stood for. And, then as now, the dividing line passed right through Germany. Then it was the Rhine Confederation, now it is the German Democratic Republic. Then it was Austria and Prussia, now it is the German Federal Republic. Like all analogies, this one must not be pushed too far. One hundred and fifty years ago the steamship was in its beginnings, and the railway, the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, and the radio – all the tools that have made the world of today so much more compact than the world of then – were still in the future. Consequently, the place of Europe in today’s world is far different from what it was then. It can no longer be viewed in isolation from the rest of the world, but as an integral part of it, and its division into blocs has its counterparts elsewhere in the world. The Iron Curtain has faraway offshoots across Korea and Indochina and may even, if the trend indicated since Castro’s takeover of Cuba continues, isolate that island from the rest of America. And if the one constant in the shifting alliances against Napoleon was a European power, Great Britain, its anti-Communist counterpart today is the United States of America. What is more, if Napoleon’s empire-building was, at first, not restricted to Europe – witness the campaigns in Egypt and the Levant – he quickly learned to limit the territorial extent of his ambitions, selling Louisiana to the United States and voluntarily abandoning Haiti. But if the spotlight is to be on Germany, then it is sufficient to limit the background to the European stage, even in the present day. Germany has, mercifully and through no merit of its own, been freed of the extra-European connections, of a colonial nature, that are currently the plague of other European states. And so it seems safe to continue with a then-and-now consideration of history. For then, as now, European minds, and especially German ones, have grappled with the concept of human freedom. It is my aim, in this thesis, to investigate how German minds of the Napoleonic era, and especially Goethe and Schelling, envisaged human freedom, and to see how their conceptions are relevant today. I plan to compare them with the ideas of our contemporaries such as Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt. “I really like the analogy between the present day and the Napoleonic era,” Witte said. “There were those who romanticized Napoleon then, and still do today, just as there are those who romanticize Stalin.” “Yes, even after his death,” Miki remarked. “That’s right,” Witte agreed. “So what do you think, Herr Professor?” Miki asked. “I think the idea has a lot of promise, but it will require a lot of work. You will have to extricate what Schelling, for example, says about freedom – to the extent that it can be interpreted as political freedom, which is what I suppose you have in mind – from what he says about God, and nature, and mind.” “I think it’s going to be fun,” Miki said, “now that the library is being heated in the winter.” “But there is more. You will need to dig into what Schelling’s immediate predecessors, for example Kant and Fichte, had to say about the matter, not to mention his contemporary Hegel.” “That goes without saying, Herr Professor,” Miki said. “And of course Schopenhauer too.” “Yes, taking a wide leap across the nineteenth century is risky; you could fall and hurt yourself,” Witte said with a laugh. “Oh yes,” Miki said. “I will make myself a safety net out of Heine and Nietzsche. Heine as philosopher and Nietzsche as poet, perhaps.” Witte laughed again. “Have fun, then,” he said, “and good luck, Herr Wilner!” After they shook hands, Miki walked out of Witte’s office with a strange sense of elation. Somewhere in the back of his mind an idea was forming. By the time had reached the street, it had come to the fore. The eventual introduction to his thesis would of course have to be drastically expanded. But he could use the proposed one, less the last three paragraphs, as the first part of a reflection comparing the cult of Napoleon with that of Stalin. He sent the finished article to Margot Klohse-Wallmann, and received, with the acceptance letter, a friendly and witty note from her. Shortly thereafter, another copy of the MoPo, open to the feuilleton page, greeted Brigitte Wilner at breakfast. It featured an article titled From Napoleon Bonaparte to Josef Stalin by Michael Wilner. *      *     * Miki spent the rest of the afternoon in his study, listening through headphones to music from the cassette player that he had there. He knew from experience that he would have no trouble hearing the ring of the telephone if he kept the volume low enough. He had recently bought the newly released cassette of Gieseking’s recordings of some Beethoven sonatas, including the Waldstein, and he had not listened to it yet. He had gone to hear Gieseking in Bad Harzburg, with Helga and Brigitte. Helga did not care for Gieseking as a Beethoven interpreter – she preferred the more muscular playing of Arrau or Backhaus – but Miki remembered being entranced with the sound of Beethoven as an impressionist. He let himself be entranced once more, half a lifetime later. By dinnertime there was still no contact from the Hamburg police. Miki’s anxiety was growing visibly, and was spoiling his appetite for dinner. He barely picked at his food. He also thought that, had Brigitte been sexually available to him that night, he might be too nervous to perform, and so it was just as well that she was not. “Do they have both of your telephone numbers?” she asked him after dinner. “They’re the police!” he exclaimed. “Of course they have them.” “Then perhaps we can go out, to a cinema or a jazz club. They could leave a message on your answering machine.” “I don’t know if they know how to use those things,” he said. “Besides, the man at BGS did not say ‘telephone’; he said ‘contact,’ so maybe they intend to come to the house.” “But he didn’t tell you that you had to stay at home, did he?” “No,” he admitted, “but I’m feeling nervous, and if there is a contact, I want to be here to receive it.” *      *     * By the end of the winter semester Michael Wilner was not only a Magister Artium Univesitatis Regiae Georgiae Augustae, with an embossed diploma to show, but, with the help of numerous splices from his master’s thesis, about a third of the way through his dissertation. With Brigitte busy evenings playing Emilia in Emilia Galotti to sold-out houses and days rehearsing Rosalind in As You Like It, Miki decided to spend the February break by writing an article, or a series of articles, on Göttingen as a cultural center that went beyond its status as a university town, in particular as a center of theater, film, music and publishing. His starting premise was that, as a rule, practically every German city that is a center of culture has a history, well into modern times, as either a free city or as the seat of a secular or ecclesiastic prince, and in such a city the major cultural institutions are usually creations of the state. The exceptions are those where the citizenry itself creates these institutions, and the only such exception among the large cities is Leipzig, while, among smaller places, one of the few exceptions is Göttingen; Freiburg im Breisgau might be another. His goal, as he explained to Margot in a letter, was to explore what makes such a place, and Göttingen in particular, special. Margot replied that she had discussed Miki’s proposal with Braune, who thought that this was a worthy goal indeed, and that, in order to gather information, Herr Wilner was free to present himself as a correspondent of the Hamburger Morgenpost. He would be our man in Göttingen, and if he kept the articles coming at the rate of one or two a week, he could be named as an intern on the editorial staff, with his name on the masthead, and a regular – if modest – salary. He would begin by interviewing leading figures in the world of theater and film who had established operations in Göttingen in recent years, beginning with the most recent, Hans-Günther Klein, who only a year before had founded the Junges Theater where Brigitte now worked, and whom he had already met. He went on to contact the renowned Heinz Hilpert, the former assistant to Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, who had brought that famous company to Göttingen and installed it in the municipal theater. But before Miki had a chance to put any questions to Hilpert about his thoughts of Göttingen, what he heard was “So you are the husband of Brigitte Wilner!” Hilpert further told him that he wanted her as Gretchen for the Faust and as Katharine for the Taming of the Shrew that he was planning for the following season. “Does she know this?” Miki asked. “Of course,” Hilpert said. “And has she given you a reply?” Miki asked further. “No, we’re still negotiating,” Hilpert said Miki felt some irritation over Brigitte’s doing such negotiating with letting him know. Of course, he had not told her about his negotiations with Braune either, but his journalistic work was a sideline that did not affect their life together, while a commitment on her part to another season in Göttingen meant that they would be remaining there, whether or not he wanted to, and that was something that had not yet been decided. His feeling of annoyance prevented him from conducting the interview as smoothly as he would have liked. It took some effort to get Hilpert to explain the reasons behind his move from Berlin to Göttingen. The explanation was quite roundabout, but Miki got a sense that the problems created by Hilpert’s Nazi-sympathizing past, despite having been a disciple of the Jewish Reinhardt, had something to do with his preference for a city that was not a political or judicial center. He wondered how he could express this hunch in writing in a way that would not cast aspersions on the famous director. When he told Brigitte about the incident, and his feelings in the matter, she answered coolly that her professional life was her business, just as was the case for him. “I would not sign a contract without talking it over with you,” she assured him, “but what leads up to it is like sausage-making.” The next people to interview were the film producers Hans Abich and Rolf Thiele, the founders of Filmaufbau. He spoke with them on successive days, and he got from both of them a similar reaction to that of Hilpert, about his being Brigitte’s husband. It was dawning on him that his wife was already being regarded as a star, if a nascent one, of a greater magnitude than he had realized. Abich told him that he was about to change his career from films to television, and that he and Thiele were planning to sell Filmaufbau, which might not remain in Göttingen. Film and television were becoming inextricably intertwined, he said, and it was difficult to maintain a studio in a city that was not also a broadcasting center; he himself would be moving to Bremen. But they still had a few projects on the books, and there was one in particular that might have a good part for Frau Wilner. “Does she know?” Miki asked. “Oh, yes,” Abich said. Thiele was the only one of the four who, besides thoughtfully answering all the questions that Miki put to him, expressed interest in his interviewer, leading Miki to think that Thiele, who was a screenwriter and director as well as a producer, might be gathering ideas for a screenplay. He asked Miki about his background, about how he met Brigitte, and about his studies, finally asking, “So when do you think you will kiss the Goose-Liesel?” Miki told him that he hoped to have his dissertation done by the end of the summer semester, but that might extend into the following academic year. “But I am getting practice in kissing,” he said. “My wife looks like what Liesel would be if she were a little older.” “You’ve just given me an idea for a screenplay!” Thiele exclaimed. “If I write it, I will give you credit.” “But, please, not if Brigitte is in it. We keep our professional lives separate.” *      *     * The evening came and went, with Brigitte reading her script and Miki his scrapbook. On the radio there was a live broadcast of Otello from the Salzburg Festival, with Jon Vickers and Mirella Freni. It was a relief from the relentless fare of Beethoven that almost daily filled the airwaves during that year, the bicentennial of his birth. Miki, to be sure, had also been celebrating the bicentennial in his way, playing and listening. The telephone rang once, but it was on Brigitte’s line with its distinctive ring, and it was Helmut, calling to confirm that six o’clock was the time of Saturday evening’s dinner. There was nothing from the police. Brigitte was tired, as usual in her current condition, despite her nap. Miki felt tired too, but it was a nervous kind of fatigue, and thought it pointless to go to bed if he knew that he would not fall asleep. Brigitte sensed his state, kissed him on the cheek and went upstairs. For most of the evening he had given up on figuring out what the police might want with him, but now, alone in the living room, he began to speculate again. It had occurred to him, when Brigitte suggested that he might be wanted as a witness, that it might have something to do with the murder of the wrong Axel Hemme, but what would the Hamburg police have to do with that? Unless, of course, they were acting in some way on behalf of the Baden-Württemberg police. *      *     * In the end Abich had to renege on the film proposal he had made to Brigitte, since the already engaged male star, the popular Hanns Lothar, had insisted that the female lead go to his fiancée, Ingrid Andree, who was already a star in her own right. But Thiele, who had all along pursued a career as a free-lance screenwriter and director independently of Filmaufbau, would continue to do so, and he had quickly written a screenplay for a low-budget feature to be titled Goose-Liesel. It would be three tales of Göttingen students, taking place at twenty-five-year intervals – 1908, 1933 and 1958 – with each of them fantasizing about kissing the bronze statue as a celebration of passing his doctoral examination, and in each one, Brigitte would be the goose girl come to life. Preproduction, including costume fittings for Brigitte, was to start late in the spring, once she had finished her last role at the Junges Theater: Joan of Arc in Shaw’s Saint Joan. The shooting would take place during the summer and early autumn. While Thiele would be the producer, thus assuring financing and distribution, he would not direct the film himself, but let it be directed by an assistant, Horst Schmiede, in his first directing job. Thiele had a number of other projects, in particular with Nadja Tiller, whose favorite director he was. Their successful partnership, going back several years, was cemented the preceding March by the Golden Globe that Thiele won for The Girl Rosemarie, in which Nadja Tiller played the title character, the recently murdered real-life prostitute Rosemarie Nitribitt. Their current project, Labyrinth, was also expected to win awards. Postproduction would take place in late autumn and winter, and the premiere, probably in Hamburg, would be in March or April of 1960. Once the details were clear, Brigitte readily and unapologetically communicated them to Miki, along with telling him quite casually that she had been experiencing headaches while reading the densely typed screenplay, and discovered that she needed glasses for reading. She had already had her eyes examined, and asked him to accompany her to the optician’s in order to help her choose the frame. Brigitte’s film contract meant, of course, staying in Göttingen at least until the beginning of the following year, but this, by now, seemed like the natural course. He already knew that he would not complete his dissertation by the end of the summer semester, that is, by September. He was writing essay-type articles for the MoPo on a regular basis, and, in comparison, the dissertation work – the long hours of taking notes in the University Library, the seemingly endless cutting and pasting of typed pages, the continual renumbering of endnotes – felt like drudgery, not like the fun that it had seemed at first. He felt thankful that Witte, as he had made clear to him at the outset, did not expect a lengthy opus, only a meaningful one. It so happened that Miki had found a valuable source of ideas on the relation between freedom and culture in the book Of Human Freedom by the American historian Jacques Barzun. Witte, it turned out, knew Barzun; he had met him at a scholarly conference in New York, and had learned from him the adage that a dissertation should be an indication of the student’s ability to pursue his life’s work, but it should not be his life’s work.