They talked about death. Hoensch said that death itself was only an illusion under permanent construction, that in reality it didn’t exist. The SS officer said death was a necessity: no one in his right mind, he said, would stand for a world full of turtles or giraffes. Death, he concluded, served a regulatory function. The young scholar Popescu said that death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn’t clear, he said, or at least not to him, was toward what place, what reality, that passage led. “The question,” he said, “is where. The answer,” he answered himself, “is wherever
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