Rowohlt, however, cheated of his triumph, was furious, and he never forgave the placid man for this humiliation!

But appearances could be deceptive with Rowohlt: even though he sat there like a big, contented baby, with eyes half-closed as if he could barely see a thing, he was actually wide awake and right on the ball – scarily so, when it came to figures. Not realizing this, one time when I was strapped for cash I thought to pull a fast one on him in this baby state and negotiate a particularly favourable contract with him. I can still see us both sitting there, scribbling endless columns of figures on the menus. The contract was finally agreed in something of a boozy haze, and I was laughing up my sleeve at having finally put one over on this sharp businessman. The end result, of course, was that I was the one who’d been suckered – and how! Afterwards Rowohlt himself was so horrified by this contract that he voluntarily gave back most of what he had taken from me.

But on this particular evening there was no eating of glasses or transacting of business. The mood on this particular evening was one of satisfied contentment. We had done full justice to Schlichter’s wonderful chilled salads, his bouillabaisse, his beef stroganoff and his peerless mature Dutch cheese, and with the wine we had taken the odd sip of raspberry brandy to warm our stomachs. Now we were gazing at the little flames of the alcohol burners under our four individual coffee machines, heating up our Turkish coffee while we sat back and savoured another mouthful of wine from time to time. We had every reason to be pleased with ourselves and with what we had achieved. True, Little Man – What Now? had already peaked as an ‘international best-seller’;5 like every international best-seller, it had been succeeded by something else that did even better, and I can’t remember now if it was Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth6 or Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.7 In the meantime I had written Once We Had a Child, which the public didn’t like, although the author liked it very much, and now I was working on Jailbird.8 Maybe Jailbird wouldn’t be a new international best-seller either. But give it time – all in good time. It was the easiest thing in the world to create an international best-seller; you just had to really want it. For the present I was busy with other things that interested me very much: if it interested me one day to have an international best-seller, then I could easily manage that too.

Listening to these remarks, which were more drunken ramblings than seriously intended, Rowohlt nodded like a Buddha and seconded my words with an occasional ‘Quite so!’ or ‘You’re absolutely right, my friend.’ Our good lady wives were by now rather tired of hanging on the lips of the famous author and his famous publisher and imbibing words of pure wisdom, and were now talking in whispers at the other end of the table about housekeeping matters and bringing up children. The coffee, giving off its rich, intense aroma, was slowly starting to drip into the little cups positioned beneath the spouts . . . Into this supremely relaxed and contented scene there now burst an agitated waiter, to remind us that beyond our perfectly ordered private world there was a much larger outside world, where things were currently in a state of real turmoil. With the cry ‘The Reichstag is burning! The Reichstag is burning! The Communists have set fire to it!’ he dashed from room to room spreading the word. That certainly got the pair of us going. We leapt from our seats and exchanged a knowing glance. We shouted for a waiter. ‘Ganymede’, we cried to this disciple of Lucullus. ‘Fetch us a cab right now! We’re going to the Reichstag! We want to help Göring play with fire!’ Our dear wives blanched with horror. Göring had probably only been in the government for a few days,9 and the concentration camps had not yet entered the picture, but the reputation that preceded the gentlemen who had now seized control in Germany was not such that one could mistake them for gentle lambs meek and mild. I can still see it all in my mind’s eye – a confused, anxious, and yet ridiculous scene: the two of us seized with a veritable furor teutonicus, looking straight into each other’s eyes and shouting that we absolutely must go and play with fire ourselves; our wives, pale with terror, frantically trying to calm us down and get us out of this place, which was reputed to be Nazi-friendly; and a waiter standing at the door, hurriedly writing something on his pad – an extract from our manly declamations, or so we assumed from the amused applause. Eventually our wives succeeded in steering us out of the door, onto the street and into a cab, under the pretext, I assume, of going with us to see the burning Reichstag building. But we didn’t go there all together; first we took Rowohlt and his wife home, then our car headed east out of town, to the little village on the banks of the Spree10 where my wife and I were living at the time with our first son. Meanwhile my wife’s soothing words had calmed me down to the point where, when we drove past the Reichstag, I could look into the leaping flames of the burning dome – that sinister beacon at the start of the road that led to the Third Reich – without feeling any incendiary cravings of my own. It’s a good thing we had our wives with us that evening, otherwise our activities, and very possibly our lives too, would have come to an end on that January day in 1933, and this book would never have been written. We also heard nothing more about the head waiter and his furious scribblings, although his spectre haunted us for several anxious days: he was probably just making a quick note of the bills for his tables, since all the customers were then getting up to leave.

(24.IX.44.) This little episode says a great deal about the attitude with which many decent Germans contemplated the advent of Nazi rule.