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state apartment , with a3-acre desk that he swears was designed by Albert Speer. Herr Dr Johannes Ullrich, whether he likes it or not, is henceforth a senior representative of the West German Foreign Service.

    To see Johannes in full flood, which was my good fortune on several occasions, you must picture a hunched, vigorous man in his fifties, so restlessly on the move that you could imagine him still pacing out his Siberian cell. Now he darts a quizzical glance at you over his shoulder in case he is being too much. Now he rolls his troubled eyes in horror at his own behaviour, lets out a hoot of laughter and takes another spin around the room, arms waving. But he isn’t mad, like the poor prisoners he was chained up with in Siberia. He is brilliantly, unbearably sane, and once more the madness isn’t in him, but around him.
    First, every detail of his state apartment must be minutely described for the benefit of the spellbound dinner guests gathered at my diplomatic hiring in Königswinter beside the Rhine: the imaginary Bundesadler, the black eagle with its turned head and red claws scowling down on him from the wall – he mimes for us its disdainful sneer over its right shoulder – the ambassadorial cutlery set with its silver inkwell and penholder.
    Then, pulling open an imaginary drawer of the Albert Speer 3-acre desk, he extracts for us the West German Foreign Office’s own confidential internal telephone directory, bound, he tells us, in finest calf. He is holding it out to us in his empty hands, head devoutly bowed over it as he scents the leather, rolls his eyes at its quality.
    Now he opens it. Very slowly. Each re-enacting is an exorcism for him, a choreographed purging of whatever came into his head the first time he saw the list of names staring at him. They are the same aristocratic names and the same owners who earned their diplomatic spurs under the ludicrous Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, who from his death cell in Nuremberg continued to proclaim his love of Adolf Hitler.
    They may be better diplomats now, these noble names. They may be reformed champions of the democratic way. They may, like Globke, have struck their deals with some anti-Nazi group against the day when Hitler fell. But Johannes is not of a mood to see his colleagues in this kindly light. Still watched by our small audience, he slumps into an armchair and takes a pull of the good red burgundy I have bought in his honour from the Economat where we diplomats do our privileged shopping. He is showing us that this is what he did that morning in his state apartment after he had taken a first look at the calf-bound, confidential West German Foreign Office internal telephone directory: how he flopped into a deep leather armchair with the directory open in his hands, silently reading one grand name after another, left to right in slow motion, every von and zu. We watch his eyes widen and his lips move. He stares at my wall. This is how I stared at the wall in my state apartment, he is telling us. This is how I stared at the wall of my Siberian prison.
    He bounces out of my chair, or better the chair in his state apartment. He is back at Albert Speer’s 3-acre desk, even if it’s only a rickety mahogany sideboard next to the glass door leading to my garden. He flattens the directory on the desk with his palms. There is no telephone on my rickety sideboard but he has picked up an imaginary receiver and with the help of the forefinger of his other hand he is reading off the first extension number in the directory. We hear the zup-zup of an internal phone ringing out. This is Johannes, zup-zupping through his nose. We see his broad back arch and stiffen and hear his heels snap together in approved Prussian style. We hear the military bark, loud enough to wake my sleeping children upstairs:
    â€˜ Heil Hitler, Herr Baron! Hier Ullrich! Ich möchte mich zurückmelden! ’ – Heil