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about books, films, or actors, as well as the discovery of those years, Georg Trakl, and also Stefan George. 5 At times I suspected that my companions—no matter what the subject—wanted to talk me into having a confidence, which I myself could no longer summon up.
    On a bright November day, as I’ve never forgotten, there came certainty. Wolfgang had already died in the middle of October 1944 in the hospital in Upper Silesia, exactly one week after his twentieth birthday. Slowly, thanks to communications from my mother, which often reached me by surprising routes, I found out more details. In the course of a military operation near Riga, on the Baltic front, he had contracted a lung infection; summoning up all of his strength, he had been helped to battalion headquarters by two comrades. There hiscommander had first of all shouted at him for being a “malingerer,” then driven him back to the front line with his drawn revolver. Two hours after arriving at the makeshift dugout, he had collapsed, lost consciousness, and been taken to a hospital. A few days later a train carrying the wounded had brought him to Beuthen.
    When my mother got there, Wolfgang had passed the night with a high temperature and had difficulty breathing. On October 13, his birthday, he said to her, “Today death was with me. We came to an agreement. He granted me another postponement.” After two earlier operations he had to endure an operation on each of the following seven days. “They don’t have any anesthetic and painkillers here anymore,” he groaned after the fourth operation. “I can’t bear it much longer.” On October 19, after overcoming endless difficulties, my father got to the sickbed while Wolfgang still had moments of clarity. Ten hours later profuse perspiration set in and Wolfgang’s face was covered in glassy beads of sweat. Abruptly recovering consciousness, he begged our parents, “Please don’t write ‘In deep sorrow.’ ” Then he lost consciousness again, and minutes later, with a last movement of his hand, he died. According to my mother, he had replied to the devout consolation that she uttered, “Don’t worry! The little bit of life I had didn’t leave me any time to get up to much mischief.” And after a pause in which he fought for breath: “I liked it.”
    Wolfgang’s death was an unspeakable misfortune for our family. My mother had always said as long as we were all alive she would not complain. Now that pillarof stability had broken down. In the almost twenty-five years that remained to her, whenever Wolfgang’s name or an episode involving him was mentioned, she rose from her seat and left the room. I was there on some occasions and followed her. Each time I found her in one of the other rooms, where, her head in her hands, she tried to compose herself. Once in the mid-1960s, when I inadvertently talked about Wolfgang, she simply looked at me and with an imploring “Please!” left the room. Later, she said that after everything else, Hitler had also taken her son and she hoped, quite without Christian magnanimity, that he would never be granted forgiveness for it.
    At the news of Wolfgang’s death all the lordly manner of my supposedly unapproachable grandfather collapsed. His villa not far from the Seepark had already been destroyed in an air raid, and with my grandmother he had moved into my parents’ apartment, half-empty now, since my sisters, to avoid evacuation, were at a girls’ Gymnasium in the Neumark east of Berlin. He had locked himself in his room for two days, not let anyone in, and answered all pleas with a dismissive blow on the door. My two sisters, who liked to call him “hardhearted,” later related that when he silently returned to the family table his eyes were red from weeping.
    For me, too, the death of my brother was a profound break. I had once said to Reinhold Buck that in his life each person has four fundamental experiences: first, being overwhelmed by a perfect