Author’s Note

The views, but not the conduct, of fictional Hermann Geisel resemble those of the Heidelberg statistician and pacifist Emil Julius Gumbel.

Similarly, the fictional Erwin Herzberg has much in common with the film historian Siegfried Kracauer, author of From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, who in 1927 was feuilleton editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung.

The story about Beethoven’s hair is invented.

Readers who wish to know who among the characters in this novel is real and who is invented are invited to trust their memory.

If they recognize the name the character is real.