The Loser [antikvár]

Prologue Hans Winterschild was born on the 17th of October, 1920, in the little town of Langensalza, on the border separating Prussia from Thuringia. His father, Friedrich Winterschild, looked down at the little, writhing shape, with its moss of silver hair and its searching fists, and knew that his prayers had been answered. Kissing his wife tenderly on her moist forehead, he murmured, 'Mutti, you have given me a boy.' For many generations the family had been one of moderate importance in the town, the father of Friedrich Winterschild even having stood unsuccessfully for mayor at the turn of the century. Friedrich himself, now in his late fifties, had commanded a local artillery regiment, serving for four years on the Western Front and rising to the rank of full colonel before his guns were confiscated and destroyed as a bitter consequence of the Armistice. His wife, born Wilhel-mina von Weza-Babersbeck, had given the family the thin glazing of aristocracy after which it hankered for so long. 'If my mother had been the vow instead of my wife,' Colonel Winterschild used to say, 'there would have been no question of the artillery. It would have meant the cavalry, and useful introductions to the General Staff.' He failed to recognize the fact that,, since Germany was deprived of an army, these niceties would have meant nothing in any case. To him, the armed forces were one reality, and life another. They did not have to be reconciled to one another in the realm of possibility. Their children had come with difficulty. There was a daughter, Hannele, now twenty-two and a predestined spinster. She rather embarrassingly preserved the sweet ways of childhood by teaching movement and mime in a kindergarten. She was seldom without a whimsical smile, and grew older visibly at her father's knee, never having left the nursery in spirit. The other daughter, nicknamed Mopsel, had married a man called Helmut Bollmann, who had about him all the aggressive, wounded majesty of one