that comes to pass and I’m exposed to what I dread — having to live with the embittered faces of my sisters and the fatuous face of my brother-in-law, bursting into mindless mirth every moment over the least triviality. On the other hand, I reflected, arrogance is not an appropriate means to use against people around us whom we despise and therefore find unbearable. Yet without arrogance we’d be lost. It’s a weapon that has to be used against a world that would otherwise swallow us whole. If we had no arrogance it would give us no quarter. We have to use our arrogance in self-defense, I told myself, deploying it wherever we’re in danger of being devoured. For let’s not deceive ourselves: the people we call stupid and consider beneath us are the most ruthless of all. They don’t care about our feelings, so long as they can discomfit and finally destroy us. Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world, a world in which arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it’s only feigned, I thought. The truth is that we project our arrogance in order to assert ourselves. It is a perfectly logical proposition to say that I am arrogant in order to survive. Before long, of course, we don’t know whether our arrogance is feigned or genuine, but it’s not necessary to ask ourselves this question all the time; to do so would make us crazy and ultimately demented. It’s a matter of indifference to me that my brother-in-law doesn’t know who Max Bruch is, for even if he had known when my mother put him on the spot over dinner, it wouldn’t have made him a better person. She could just as easily have asked me some question that I couldn’t answer. I don’t know all that much; in my own way I’m no better informed than the wine cork manufacturer, I thought, and it’s quite immaterial how cultured a person is. Indeed, anyone whose culture earned my mother’s admiration would have been essentially an awfully mindless creature, what I would call a cultural idiot, but the wine cork manufacturer thinks it important to know who Max Bruch is, who Friedrich Kienzel is, and so forth. Even if he didn’t know who Kant was, this would have no bearing whatever on his character. But the wine cork manufacturer has no character, I thought. I’ve always wondered about the wine cork manufacturer’s lack of character, about the kind of insolence that camouflages itself as helplessness and is quite unscrupulous in its upward mobility. Caecilia was conned, I thought as I watched my brother-in-law standing by the wall. What wouldn’t he be capable of? I wondered. What couldn’t he set his hand to, as they say? But then it occurred to me that if he actually did do something, if he did set his hand to something, he would do it so incompetently as to make himself even more ludicrous. If he were not so lacking in character he would long since have endeared himself to the gardeners, but they’ve been avoiding him — a sure sign something’s wrong with him, I thought, since the gardeners have an incredible instinct where people are concerned. They sense who is to be trusted and who isn’t, and they’ve avoided the wine cork manufacturer from the start, as I saw at the wedding. They positively distrusted him, not just as they would normally distrust any stranger, but quite unequivocally. He must have behaved toward them in a way that made him seem both helpless and characterless. It’s always been instructive to see who is trusted by the gardeners; they’ve never been wrong. Even the way they relieved my brother-in-law of the box he was carrying was indicative of their distrust. It suddenly seemed ridiculous to spend so much time at the window watching my brother-in-law, and so I went down to the entrance hall, though not without stopping in front of the portrait of my great-great-great-granduncle Ferdinand. My Descartes has meanwhile lost some of his philosophical stature, I told myself; with a face like that he can’t have written any Essays. Amalia appeared from the kitchen and said that as it was now late afternoon the first visitors would probably be arriving to express their condolences — a dozen had already turned up that morning — and not just people from the village like the headmaster and the doctor. We should be ready to receive them, she said, preferably in or near the entrance hall. The chapel, or even the kitchen, would be a suitable place to receive them, as she did not want them going up to the second floor. It would be best to exchange just a few words with them, not more, and then send them away. I dreaded the thought of how the very people I really loathe would be coming up to see us one after another — middle-class people from the neighboring towns who would unhesitatingly seize upon the opportunity to visit us, as their right, without being invited, and to drive their cars into the grounds without so much as a by-your-leave. I could already see these inquisitive visitors getting out of their cars one after another and importuning us with their sickening condolences, which we would have to receive graciously. At all events I’ll shake their hands more coldly than any I’ve shaken before, I thought, and so avoid adding any cordiality to our relations with these people. Mentally I was already practicing my handshake and rehearsing the bland words I thought I would have to say to them. But these were not the people I was afraid of. I’ll deal with them cursorily, in a way that won’t cause me the slightest irritation, I thought. The people I was afraid of were the two former Gauleiters who I knew had announced their intention of attending the funeral, and the fairly large contingent of SS officers, whom I had once believed to be long dead or at least to have received their due punishment, but who, as I learned some years back, had gone underground and remained in contact with my family for decades, with my parents and many other relatives. They’ll use this funeral, I thought, to appear publicly again for the first time. But I can’t prevent them from attending the funeral, I thought. They’ll come whether I want them to or not. The former Gauleiters won’t be put off. I know that one of them sent thousands of people to Austrian or German prisons and that his signature consigned thousands of others to Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. And I know that the other sent just as many people, mainly Jews, to concentration camps in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. To say nothing of the so-called League of Comrades, which inevitably parades at every funeral and seems to me to be a wholly National Socialist organization, for its mentality is thoroughly National Socialist and its members, wherever one sees them, no longer have the least compunction in brazenly wearing their National Socialist insignia on their chests. I was actually afraid of the Gauleiters, not knowing how I should greet these friends of my father’s — first of all his school friends, or lifelong friends as he called them, and then those he remained in close touch with after the war, knowing them to be informers and murderers. Despite this knowledge he supplied them with a hiding place and food and everything they needed to make ends meet, as he would have put it. For years, it seems, he hid them in the Children’s Villa, though at the time we children had no inkling of this. I later recalled that for years we were not allowed in the Children’s Villa. There was a simple explanation for this: in the postwar years our parents used it to hide their National Socialist friends. They wisely made sure that the villa looked completely uninhabited and let the exterior fall into disrepair, while the wanted men inside — informers, murderers, and members of the Blood Order — lived not at all badly, for my family never had to suffer from a shortage of food; even during and after the war they had everything in abundance, as they say, while the rest of the population, as my mother called them, starved and went without. The Children’s Villa was the Gauleiters’ hiding place, but I fancy that my parents’ many SS friends were also allowed to share in our abundance. I got to know gradually about this period, which had always seemed a weird time to us children when I was thirteen or fourteen, as may be imagined. We were expressly forbidden to enter the Children’s Villa, but when I was about fifteen it was finally thrown open to us, for I remember that at that time we used to put on our plays there. Even today, although I have always loved the building, I find it a rather sinister place because of the way it was desecrated. My parents may have hidden and supported other adherents of their National Socialist faith, not only in the Children’s Villa but in various hunting lodges we owned, even, I suspect, in the one above Weieregg, which is almost inaccessible. My parents always kept quiet about these dark doings, and it was impossible to get anything out of them. As they vouchsafed no information, the only evidence of their close association with these people was the fact that they corresponded with them all regularly until their deaths. While my parents dined with the Americans or toasted General Eisenhower at their champagne breakfasts, the Gauleiters sat just a few hundred yards away, no doubt enjoying equal conviviality and an equal abundance of food and drink. Wolfsegg has always been a perverse place, and my parents pushed this perversity to the limit. The huntsmen were probably privy to this perversest of all its secrets, I think, and never dared betray it to the gardeners. I shall now have to receive these people, I thought; there’s nothing else for it. Today they all live scot-free in agreeable circumstances, in all the country’s beauty spots, and draw enormous state pensions. But today’s society gets what it deserves, I thought. It deserves these perverse conditions, being itself totally perverse. Basically, I thought, these people — the Gauleiters, the SS officers, and the members of the Blood Order — are its people. These are the people my countrymen regard as heroes, not just as yesterday’s heroes, as is frequently maintained, but to an even greater extent as today’s heroes. These National Socialists are the people they look up to and secretly acknowledge as their leaders. I’ll have to shake hands with these secret leaders of my countrymen, I thought. I won’t be able to prevent these secret leaders from taking their places in the front ranks when the cortege moves off. I was sickened by this embarrassing prospect, this