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me?’
    Alma answered him just as quietly and very quickly: ‘Yes! It was the same way the Russian looked at me this afternoon outside the chemist’s shop — as if I was a brick wall or an animal.’ Doll nodded briefly, and nothing more was said about this incident by either of them, either that day or subsequently.
    But Doll pictured himself standing there in front of the three men, with a grin on his face, the greeting ‘ Tovarich !’ on his lips, his fist raised and his right hand extended in greeting — how false it had all been, and how embarrassing it had been for him! He’d got it all so wrong; right from the start, when he had woken early that morning feeling so cheerful, and then thrown himself into his work on the shrub borders so as to make the path ‘safe’ for their liberators, he had completely misread the situation!
    And then he of all people had gone and boasted to the neighbours that he was going to meet the Russians at the door of his house and welcome them as liberators. Instead of reflecting on what his wife had said that afternoon and taking it as a warning, he had simply seen it as an affirmation of his own blind and foolish attitude. Truly he had not learned a single thing these last twelve years, however firmly he had believed otherwise in many a time of suffering!
    The Russians had been right to look upon him as a vicious and contemptible little creature, this fellow with his clumsy attempts to ingratiate himself, who seriously imagined that a friendly grin and a barely comprehensible word of Russian would suffice to wipe out everything the Germans had done to the world in the last twelve years.
    He, Doll, was a German, and he knew, at least in theory, that ever since the Nazi seizure of power and the persecutions of the Jews, the name ‘German’, already badly damaged by the First World War, had become progressively more reviled and despised from week to week and month to month. How often had he said to himself: ‘We will never be forgiven for this!’ Or: ‘One day we’ll all have to pay for this!’
    And although he knew this perfectly well, knew that the word ‘German’ had become a term of abuse throughout the world, he had still put himself forward like that in the fatuous hope of showing them that there were ‘still some decent Germans’.
    All his long-cherished hopes for the post-war future lay in ruins, crushed under the withering gaze of the three Russian soldiers. He was a German, and so belonged to the most hated and despised nation on earth, a nation lower than the most primitive tribe of the African interior, which could never visit so much destruction, bloodshed, tears, and misery on the planet as the German people had done. Doll suddenly realised that he would probably not live long enough to see the day when the German name would be washed clean in the eyes of the world, and that perhaps his own children and grandchildren would still be bearing the burden of their fathers’ guilt. And the illusion that they could persuade people of other nations by a simple word or look that not all Germans were complicit — that illusion, too, was now shattered.
    This feeling of utterly helpless shame, which frequently gave way to extended periods of profound apathy, did not diminish with the passing months, but instead was intensified by a hundred little things that happened. Later on, when the war criminals were put on trial in Nuremberg, when thousands of shocking details gradually emerged to reveal the full extent of Germany’s crimes, his heart wanted to rebel, unwilling to bear any more, and he refused to let himself be pushed down deeper into the mire. No! he said to himself — I didn’t know that ! I had no idea it was that bad! I’m not to blame for any of that!
    But then came the moment — always — when he reflected more deeply. He was determined not to fall prey a second