He was not to blame, only stupid in a way which excluded tragedy or perhaps was the basis for it. I didn't know. ...What was it that made this kind man, my father, so hard and so strong, why did he talk on the TV screen about social oligation, about national consciousness, about Germany, about Christianity even, which he admitted he didn't believe in, and what was more, in such a way that you were forced to believe him. It could only be money, not the concrete kind you use to buy milk and take a taxi, keep a mistress and go to the movies--but money in the abstract. I was afraid of him, and he was afraid of me: we both knew we were not realists, and we both despised those who talked about "Realpolitik." There was much more to it than those idiots would ever understand. I read it in his eyes: he couldn't give money to a clown who would do only one thing with it: spend it, the very opposite of what you are supposed to do with money. And I knew, even if he had given me a million, I would have spent it, and to spend money was in his eyes synonymous with wasting it.
--The Clown