At the age of twenty, his artistic dreams frustrated, Hitler was a tramp: park benches, soup queues. Given just a little more talent, perhaps, he wou… - Martin Amis

Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied, par excellence and a fortiori, (by many magnitudes), to the victims, or to those who lived for more than an hour and had time to confront their own reflections. And yet it also applied to everyone else, the malefactors, the collaborators, the witnesses, the conspirators, the outright martyrs (Red orchestra, White Rose, the men and women of July 20), and even the minor obstructors, like me, and like Hannah Doll. We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were.
Who somebody really was. That was the Zone of interest.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

One recalls John Updike’s argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so.