I SPENT THE summer after the trial in the reading room of the university library. I arrived as the reading room opened and left when it closed. On weekends I studied at home. I studied so uninterruptedly, so obsessively, that the feelings and thoughts that had been deadened by the trial remained deadened. I avoided contacts. I moved away from home and rented a room. I brushed off the few acquaintances who spoke to me in the reading room or on my occasional visits to the movies.

The winter semester I was much the same way. Nonetheless, I was asked if I would like to spend the Christmas vacation with a group of students at a ski lodge. Surprised, I accepted.

I wasn’t a good skier, but I liked to ski and was fast and kept up with the good ones. Sometimes when I was on slopes that were beyond my ability, I risked falls and broken bones. I did this consciously. The other risk I was taking, and to which I succumbed, was one to which I was oblivious.

I was never cold. While the others skied in sweaters and jackets, I skied in a shirt. The others shook their heads and teased me about it, but I didn’t take their worries seriously. I simply didn’t feel cold. When I began to cough, I blamed it on the Austrian cigarettes. When I started to feel feverish, I enjoyed it. I felt weak and light at the same time, and all my senses were pleasingly muffled, cottony, padded. I floated.

Then I came down with a high fever and was taken to the hospital. By the time I left, the numbness was gone. All the questions and fears, accusations and self-accusations, all the horror and pain that had erupted during the trial and been immediately deadened were back, and back for good. I don’t know what the doctors diagnose when someone isn’t freezing even though he should be freezing. My own diagnosis is that the numbness had to overwhelm my body before it would let go of me, before I could let go of it.

When I had finished my studies and began my training, it was the summer of the student upheavals. I was interested in history and sociology, and while clerking with a judge I was still in the university often enough to know what was going on. Knowing what was going on did not mean taking part—university and university reforms were no more interesting to me than the Vietcong and the Americans. As for the third and real theme of the student movement, coming to grips with the Nazi past, I felt so removed from the other students that I had no desire to agitate and demonstrate with them.

Sometimes I think that dealing with the Nazi past was not the reason for the generational conflict that drove the student movement, but merely the form it took. Parental expectations, from which every generation must free itself, were nullified by the fact that these parents had failed to measure up during the Third Reich, or after it ended. How could those who had committed Nazi crimes or watched them happen or looked away while they were happening or tolerated the criminals among them after 1945 or even accepted them—how could they have anything to say to their children? But on the other hand, the Nazi pa............