He passed away in 1957, the year after “de-Stalinization” began and the year before Field-Marshal von Manstein published Lost Victories; this death rather fittingly resulted from a progressive sclerosis which allowed his mind to contemplate its hopeless situation up to the last moment, increasing the impairment on all sides while his body became unable to move, even to twitch, until even the heart got overwhelmed. He is said to have borne this agony with the utmost patience. Thanks to bureaucratic difficulties at the border, Ernst arrived too late to say goodbye. I think he might have borne his father back to Baden-Baden, to place him at Coca’s side; on the other hand, I’ve also read that he was buried in Dresden. Doubtless both accounts are true; I’ve seen with my own eyes that Christ possesses two tombs in Jerusalem. Creepers and wistaria overswarmed his grave, then red sumac berries burst out in triumph. He was the last Field-Marshal. Not for him had any mausoleum been assigned: neither pillar nor crypt, no granite eagles, no sad sooty knights killing snakes of stone. But he perished lucky; they’d granted him the slate-roofed heaven of a Saxon summer, lazy linden-games of light, clouds sweating rain. They’d given him that house which resembled an attempt to construct a breast out of plane surfaces. Later the Stasi took it over, for the furtherance of democratic police power.