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feeling that he hid his need to avoid any kind of sentimentality behind somewhat worn phrases. He mentioned my mother’s dreadful state, the wretched farewell when he himself had to leave for the front again, and that he didn’t have much more to say. “It’s all been said, and even this call can only tell you what you already know. And as for Mother,” he added, “you have known of her sorrow and the reasons for it for a long time.”
    Then he asked me about my books and I said that I had taken some from Berlin or Freiburg, and had exchanged some for cigarettes or other things. One day I had come by an officer’s map case and since then had kept my “library” in it. It contained nothing but the obvious: Goethe’s Poems , selected ballads by Schiller, a volume of Hölderlin, and a couple of thin paperbacks with quotes from Jean Paul, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Also the copy of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs that he had given me, and I even had Josef Weinheber’s Selbstbildnis ( Self-Portrait ). “But no Thomas Mann,” I added as a weak joke. Altogether, apart from a map of the country between Cologne and Düsseldorf, there were thirteenbooks in the leather bag which was attached to my belt. Then the conversation suddenly broke off.
    The next day I unexpectedly bumped into Reinhold Buck outside the canteen, and I was so surprised that with a quite uncustomary gesture I embraced him. From then on we were, as far as conditions allowed, inseparable and spent whole evenings together in some empty hut or other. We told each other what had happened in the past weeks, and realized that without us knowing it our units had the whole time been quite close. I talked about the radio broadcast of The Marriage of Figaro , he about Mozart’s highly developed psychological understanding. When I related Wittenbrink’s “proof of the existence of God,” he said that, for once in history all the conditions of the ideal moment had indeed come together, which made the great work of art possible, and the pious might say, God had revealed Himself. For fifty years. At Mozart’s death this moment had already almost passed. Beethoven and Schubert, with extraordinary efforts, had extended it for a while. That made their contribution all the greater. With Wagner it was finally over. In him one heard too much loud panting, he said. “You must be thinking of the beginning of Das Rheingold ,” I interjected ironically, but he replied that Rheingold was one of the exceptions; there, even he (for whom the Nazis had spoiled the pleasure in Wagner) could, without any effort, hear the “breath of the universe.”
    Whenever the canteen was empty we could even listen to the wireless and, whenever possible, in the time that followed, we scoured the stations. We also talked aboutliterature, about which we agreed much less often than music, and I remember only that Buck regarded the poets “of the second rank,” such as Eichendorff, Geibel, and Kerner, as “mere text providers” for Schubert and Schumann, and called Rilke a “word cobbler” who had turned my head. At some point I told him about Wolfgang’s death. Buck said that after the war the battalion commander who forced my brother back to the front line should be put on trial. Then we talked about the first dead we had seen, and I told him about the NCO who had been sprawled across a shattered tree near Düren, while he remembered six or seven Englishmen who had lost their lives when their plane came down close to Groningen.
    On several evenings Buck spoke repeatedly about death. “Don’t have any illusions,” he said, “there’s no escaping it.” He only hoped, he added, during a walk across the barracks, whose buildings were like tenement blocks, that death trod loudly when it came. When I asked what he meant, he replied that he didn’t want to be surprised by his going. Not like a thief in the night, he added, ending with a wild giggling. One must be fully aware