“And, of course, you mustn’t forget, the life was exciting, very exciting. We felt—he did, and I did, too—like we had our hands on ‘the throttle of history,’ as we used to say. That’s an extraordinary feeling. When Hitler rose to power and all those lost, floundering liberals were wandering around saying ‘How could it happen in cultured, civilized Germany?’ we knew. That was a tremendous comfort. We were inside the circle of light, unlike those poor benighted others in the dark outside. They had to contend with the existential dilemma of a crumbling civilization. Not us. That, of course, was the other side of the coin. Not one of us knew what the hell was going on inside ourselves, but we all could explain the world.