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tell us how there had been a moment back in the late 1960s or early 1970s when they, too, might have become terrorists. But instead they had—despite
Berufsverbot
—become teachers, or social workers, or academics. Or they had gone back to poetry and painting, or on to publishing and journalism, or got into other isms: environmentalism, feminism, structuralism. Claudia was a schoolteacher, Paul an eternal student and part-time art dealer, Peter an artist, Yvonne a psychologist and translator, Elmar a political scientist. Friedrich was a freelance journalist, now embarked on a crusading investigation of the way in which the West German courts had failed to pursue Nazi crimes—and especially the crimes of German lawyers and judges themselves. Here was a particular interest of the German sixty-eighters: exposing the sins of the fathers.
    Early in 1979 I moved into what was called a
Wohn-gemeinschaft
—the sixty-eighters’ term for a communal flat—in the Traunsteinerstrasse in Schöneberg. My flat-mates, or fellow communards, were a nice, mildly left-wing American academic called Hugh and a man called Bernd. Bernd’s father had worked for the Nazis as an aircraft engineer, and then been carried off by the Americans to work for them. In the wake of 1968 Bernd had become not just a leftist but a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Westberlin, a puppet-sister of East Germany’s ruling communist party. He wanted, as he tells me now, to join something that was “serious,” by whichhe meant: connected to real power. At that time it still looked as if Soviet power was growing, while, after Vietnam, that of the United States seemed to be fading. Helped by his Party card, Bernd had got a job with an East-West trading company that was, though I did not know this at the time, a direct subsidiary of an East German enterprise with close connections to the Stasi.
    Bernd was a heavily built, irascible man, with a brow that creased into thick worry lines. His touch could not be described as light. Nazism and Marxism furnished his spontaneous terms of reference and abuse. My diary records that when I overstayed my allotted time in the bathroom one morning, so that his careful daily routine was disrupted, he beat on the door with his fists and shouted, “Ruling class!” When Heiner, the main tenant, threatened to sue him for having his children in the flat, Bernd retorted: “You Nazi pig. You’re like the concentration camp guard who murders people during the day and then plays the piano and drinks his wine in the evening.”
    In fact I owed my place in the commune to this titanic quarrel between the two of them, which had resulted in Heiner’s moving out. Before he left me his two beautiful, airy, high-ceilinged rooms, with an arrangement of empty picture frames on the white-painted walls, he sat me down for a chat. By candlelight, and through clouds of cigarette smoke, I found myself launched into a two-and-a-half-hour psychoanalytic session, which mainly consisted of Heiner talking about himself. I record one characteristic passage describing how he had seen himself at the age of fourteen: “At that time I started from the assumption that I was stronglyego-positive, heterosexual, but perhaps with anal aspects.” All this just to hand over the keys.
    When he had gone, I noted the contrast with Jay, the British public school and Oxford friend who had just visited me: “from the reserved, oblique, ironical, snobbish, inhibited, emotionally-tangled Englishman to the open, direct, earnest, left-wing, jargon-ridden, liberated, emotionally-tangled German.” A few days later the telephone rang. I picked up.
    “Hello, is Heiner there?” asked the anonymous caller.
    “No.”
    “Well, are you gay?”—he used the German word
schwul
.
    “No,” I said, and put the phone down. Seconds later, it rang again.
    “Hello,” said the same voice. “Are you an Englishman?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, what I meant was: do you sleep with