I must have fallen asleep; when I woke up, the room was dark. I didn’t know where I was anymore, Zurich or Berlin. No light filtered through the blackout curtains. I could vaguely make out a shape next to me: Una had slipped under the sheets and was sleeping. I spent a long while listening to her gentle, even breathing. Then, with infinite slowness, I brushed back a lock of hair from her ear and leaned over her face. I stayed there without touching her, breathing in her skin and her breath still tinged with the smell of cigarette. Finally I got up and, tiptoeing on the rug, went out. In the street I realized I had forgotten my cap, but I didn’t go back up; I asked the porter to call a taxi for me. In my room at the hotel, the memories kept flowing in, feeding my insomnia, but now they were brutal, confused, hideous memories. As adults, we visited a kind of Torture Museum; there were all kinds of whips there, tongs, an “iron maiden of Nuremberg,” and a guillotine in the back room. At the sight of that instrument my sister flushed bright crimson: “I want to lie down on it.” The room was empty; I went to see the guard and slipped him a bill: “That’s to leave us alone for twenty minutes.”—“Fine,” he agreed with a slight smile. I closed the door and heard him turn the key. Una had stretched out on the bed of the guillotine; I lifted the lunette, made her put her head through it, and closed it on her long neck, after carefully lifting her heavy hair. She was panting. I tied her hands behind her back with my belt, then raised her skirt. I didn’t even bother to lower her panties, just pushed the lace to one side and spread her buttocks with both hands: in the slit, nestling in hair, her anus gently contracted. I spit on it. “No,” she protested. I took out my penis, lay on top of her, and thrust it in. She gave a long stifled cry. I was crushing her with all my weight; because of the awkward position—my pants were hindering my legs—I could only move in little jerks. Leaning over the lunette, my own neck beneath the blade, I whispered to her: “I’m going to pull the lever, I’m going to let the blade drop.” She begged me: “Please, fuck my pussy.”—“No.” I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg. But this memory is dubious, after our childhood we had seen each other only once, that time in Zurich, and in Zurich there was no guillotine, I don’t know, it was probably a dream, an old dream perhaps that, in my confusion, alone in my dark room at the Eden Hotel, I had remembered, or even a dream dreamt that night, during a brief moment of sleep, almost unnoticed. I was angry, for the day, despite all my distress, had remained shot through with purity for me, and now these foul images were coming and soiling it. It repelled me but at the same time troubled me, since I knew that, memory or image or fantasy or dream, this also lived inside me, and that my love must have been made of this too.

In the morning, around ten o’clock, a bellboy knocked on my door: “Herr Sturmbannführer, a phone call for you.” I went down to reception and took the receiver; Una’s joyful voice resounded at the other end: “Max! Can you come have lunch with us? Say yes. Berndt wants to meet you.”—“All right. Where?”—“At Borchardt’s. You know it? On Französischestrasse. At one o’clock. If you get there before us, give our name, I’ve reserved a table.” I went back up to shave and shower. Since I didn’t have my cap anymore I dressed in civilian clothes, with my Iron Cross on my jacket pocket. I arrived early and asked for Freiherr von Üxküll: they led me to a table set a little back and I ordered a glass of wine. Pensive, still saddened by the images from the night before, I thought about my sister’s strange marriage, her strange husband. It had taken place in 1938, when I was finishing my studies. After the night in Zurich, my sister wrote to me only rarely; that year, in the spring, I had received a long letter from her. She told me that in the fall of 1935, she had become very ill. She had gone into analysis, but her depression had only gotten worse, and they had sent her to a sanatorium near Davos to rest and regain her strength. She had stayed there for several months and, in the beginning of 1936, had met a man there, a composer. They had seen each other regularly since then and were going to get married. I hope you will be happy for me, she wrote.

This letter had left me prostrate for many days. I stopped going to the university and didn’t leave my room anymore; I stayed on the bed, facing the wall. So, I said to myself, that’s what it all comes to. They talk to you about love, but at the first opportunity, at the prospect of a nice happy bourgeois marriage, upsy-daisy, they roll onto their backs and spread their legs. Oh, my bitterness was immense. It seemed to me the inevitable end of an old story that pursued me relentlessly: the story of my family, which had almost always persisted in destroying any trace of love in my life. I had never felt so alone. When I recovered a little, I wrote her a stiff, conventional letter, congratulating her and wishing her all happiness.

At that time, I was beginning to form a friendship with Thomas, we were already calling each other by the familiar du, and I asked him to find out about the fiancé, Karl Berndt Egon Wilhelm, Freiherr von Üxküll. He was much older than she; and this aristocrat, a German Balt, was a paralytic. I didn’t understand. Thomas gave me some details: he had distinguished himself during the Great War, which he had finished as an Oberst with the Pour le Mérite; then he had led a Landeswehr regiment into Courland against the Red Latvians. There, on his own property, he had been hit with a bullet in the spinal column, and from his stretcher, before being forced to retreat, he had set fire to his ancestral home, so the Bolsheviks wouldn’t soil it with their debauchery and their shit. His SD file was quite thick: without being regarded exactly as an opponent, he was seen in an unfavorable light, apparently, by certain authorities. During the Weimar years, he had acquired European renown as a composer of modern music; he was known to be a friend and supporter of Schönberg, and he had corresponded with musicians and writers in the Soviet Union. After the Seizure of Power, moreover, he had rejected Strauss’s invitation to enroll in the Reichsmusikkammer, which had in fact put an end to his public career, and he had also refused to become a member of the Party. He lived in seclusion on the estate of his mother’s family, a manor house in Pomerania where he had moved after the defeat of Bermondt’s army and the evacuation from Courland. He left it only for treatment in Switzerland; the Party and local SD reports said that he received few guests and went out even less, avoiding mingling with the society of the Kreis. “An odd sort,” Thomas summed up. “A bitter, uptight aristo, a dinosaur. And why is your sister marrying a cripple? Does she have a nursing complex?” Why, indeed? When I received an invitation for the wedding, which was going to be held in Pomerania, I replied that my studies prevented me from coming. We were twenty-five then, and it seemed to me that everything that had been truly ours was dying.

The restaurant was filling up: a waiter pushed von Üxküll’s wheelchair, and Una was holding my cap under her arm. “Here!” she said cheerfully as she kissed me on the cheek. “You forgot this.”—“Yes, thanks,” I said, blushing. I shook von Üxküll’s hand while the waiter removed a chair, and I declared somewhat solemnly: “Freiherr, delighted to meet you.”—“Likewise, Sturmbannführer. Likewise.” Una pushed him into place and I sat down opposite him; Una came and sat down between us. Von Üxküll had a severe face, very thin lips, gray hair in a crew cut: but his brown eyes seemed sometimes curiously laughing, with crow’s feet. He was simply dressed, in a gray woollen suit with a knit tie, no medals, and his only piece of jewelry was a gold signet ring, which I noticed when he placed his hand on Una’s: “What will you have to drink, darling?”—“Some wine.” Una seemed very cheerful, happy; I wondered if she was forcing it. Von Üxküll’s stiffness was obviously entirely natural. They brought the wine, and von Üxküll asked me some questions about my wound and my convalescence. He drank as he listened to my answer, but very slowly, in little sips. Then, since I didn’t really know what to say, I asked him if he had been to a concert since he arrived in Berlin. “There’s nothing that interests me,” he answered. “I don’t like that young Karajan much. He’s much too full of himself, too arrogant.”—“So you prefer Furtwängler, then?”—“There are rarely any surprises with Furtwängler. But he is very solid. Unfortunately, they don’t let him conduct Mozart’s operas anymore, and that’s what he does best. Apparently Lorenzo da Ponte was half Jewish, and The Magic Flute is a Masonic opera.”—“You don’t think it is?”—“It may be, but I challenge you to show me a German spectator who would realize it on his own. My wife told me you like old French music?”—“Yes, especially the instrumental works.”—“You have good taste. Rameau and the great Couperin are still far too neglected. There is also a whole treasure trove of music for viola da gamba from the seventeenth century, still unexplored—but I’ve been able to consult some manuscripts. It’s superb. But the early French eighteenth century is truly a high point. No one can write like that anymore. The Romantics spoiled everything, we’re still struggling to emerge from it.”—“You know that Furtwängler did conduct, this week,” Una interrupted. “At the Admiralpalast. That Tiana Lemnitz sang there, she isn’t half bad. But we didn’t go. It was Wagner, and Berndt doesn’t like Wagner.”—“That’s an understatement,” he went on. “I detest him. Technically, there are some extraordinary discoveries, some truly new, objective things, but that’s all lost in bombast, gigantism, and also the coarse manipulation of emotions, like the vast majority of German music since 1815. It’s written for people whose main musical reference is still basically the military fanfare. Reading Wagner’s scores fascinates me, but I could never listen to them.”—“Is there any German composer who finds favor with you?”—“After Mozart and Beethoven? A few pieces by Schubert, some passages from Mahler. And even there, I’m being indulgent. At bottom, there’s almost no one but Bach…and now, of course, Schönberg.”—“Excuse me, Freiherr, but it would seem to me that it would be difficult to describe Schönberg’s music as German music.”—“Young man,” von Üxküll retorted dryly, “don’t you try to give me lessons in anti-Semitism. I was an anti-Semite before you were born, even if I remain old-school enough to believe that the sacrament of baptism is powerful enough to wash away the strain of Judaism. Schönberg is a genius, the greatest since Bach. If the Germans don’t want him, that’s their problem.” Una let out a ringing burst of laughter: “Even the VB still talks about Berndt as one of the great representatives of German culture. But if he were a writer, he would be either in the United States with Schönberg and the Manns, or in Sachsenhausen.”—“Is that why you haven’t produced anything in ten years?” I asked. Von Üxküll shook his fork as he answered: “First of all, since I’m not a member of the Musikkammer, I can’t. And I refuse to have my music played abroad if I can’t present it in my own country.”—“So why don’t you enroll, then?”—“Out of principle. Because of Schönberg. When they threw him out of the Academy and he had to leave Germany, they offered me his place: I told them to go screw themselves. Strauss came to see me in person. He had just taken the place of Bruno Walter, a great conductor. I told him he should be ashamed, that it was a government of gangsters and bitter proletarians and that it wouldn’t last. Anyway, they kicked Strauss out two years later, because of his Jewish daughter-in-law.” I forced myself to smile: “I’m not going to get into a political discussion. But it’s hard for me, listening to your opinions, to understand how you can think of yourself as an anti-Semite.”—“But it’s simple,” replied von Üxküll haughtily. “I fought against the Jews and the Reds in Courland and in Memel. I advocated the exclusion of the Jews from German universities, from German political and economic life. I drank to the health of the men who killed Rathenau. But music is different. You just have to close your eyes and listen to know right away if it’s good or not. It has nothing to do with blood, and all great music is equal, whether it’s German, French, English, Italian, Russian, or Jewish. Meyerbeer isn’t worth anything, not because he was Jewish, but because he’s not worth anything. And Wagner, who hated Meyerbeer because he was Jewish and because he had helped him, is scarcely any better, in my opinion.”—“If Max repeats what you’re saying to his colleagues,” Una said, laughing, “you’re going to have problems.”—“You told me he was an intelligent man,” he replied, looking at her. “I’m doing you the honor of taking you at your word.”—“I’m not a musician,” I said, “so it’s hard for me to answer you. What I’ve heard of Schönberg I’ve found inaudible. But one thing is certain: you are definitely not in tune with the mood of your country.”—“Young man,” he retorted, shaking his head, “I’m not trying to be. I stopped meddling in politics a long time ago, and I’m counting on politics not to meddle with me.” We don’t always have a choice, I wanted to reply; but I held my tongue.