There was a growing circle of people around the jeep. Here, as elsewhere, the vanquished were behaving with curious familiarity. The kids, fairly well dressed, however did they manage? The women, worn to a shadow… The journalist chose Herr Schiff, an average elderly German, former officer and civil servant by the looks of him; he beckoned him to come over. Schiff, fulminating against the universe, didn’t budge. The journalist moved toward him. The children, interested, stepped out of the way. The journalist introduced himself in passable German. He mentioned his press agency, whose name meant less to Herr Schiff than the canals on Mars. The old man introduced himself in turn: “Professor Herman-Helmut Schiff.” “If you’ll allow me,” the reporter said, scrawling a few shorthand signs into his notebook.
“Now then, what do you think about the Americans?”
A didactic question could never catch the professor off guard, for he was constantly putting them to himself, and supplying interminable answers in the form of monologues upon eugenics, the world conceived as a representation, the genius of race, or the political errors of Julius Caesar and Wilhelm II.
“A very great people, the Americans… The United States is presently the foremost industrial power in the world, and superior at waging war… On the other hand, there is a certain lack of social cohesion and spiritual tradition…”
“You think so?”
“Beyond a doubt,” Schiff declaimed, getting into his lecturer’s stride. “You will realize that in fifty years.”
“Phew, we got time to turn around then.”
A swift pencil and shorthand pad recorded the schoolmaster’s extravagant ramblings for the benefit of countless newspaper readers.
“Do you people feel guilty?”
If there was one emotion which had never been experienced by Herr Schiff (at least not since his adolescent religious crises) in his half century of diligent service, that emotion was guilt. It is healthy to live one’s life in the meticulous fulfillment of duty. The school-teacher cocked his head obligingly. “Pardon me. I didn’t quite catch…?”
“Guilty for the war?”
Schiff’s gaze swept the horizon of the broken city, strewn with the dead doves of humiliation. The grander generalizations existed for him on a different plane from everyday reality. The Second World War was already down as a great historical tragedy — a quasi-mythological one — which neither Mommsen, Hans Delbrück, Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Oswald Spengler, or Mein Kampf could elucidate entirely… The sons immolated themselves upon the altar of blind gods. A new, unholy war, unworthy of human nobility, had begun with the destruction of Altstadt; and this war alone existed in reality.
“Guilty?” Herr Schiff said in flinty tones, with the air of a livid turkey-cock. “Guilty of that?” (And he bobbed his head at the surrounding devastation.)
“No,” the reporter said patiently, not quite grasping the response, “guilty for the war.”
“And you,” Herr Schiff retorted, “do you feel guilty for this?”
Franz could not contain his delight. He slapped his thigh uproariously. “Wunderbar! Wonderful old idiot!” Alain’s hairy face expressed furious disgust.
“My dear Professor,” the journalist began, striving for an offensive politeness, “you started this war… You bombed Coventry.”
“I?” said Schiff, in frank astonishment. “I?”
Several women were following the exchange from the sidelines, noting the green glasses and heavy mustache of the American and Herr Schiff’s upstanding attitude. They were too discreet to come close enough to hear properly, but it seemed certain that important matters for the neighborhood were being discussed. Franz butted in unceremoniously: “Well, I fought in the war, as perhaps you can tell by looking at me. I give you my faithful, one hundred percent amputee’s word of honor that I didn’t start it.”