Would the book have been read as it was, would it have won you the Nobel Prize, would Volker Schlöndorff have made it into a no less remarkable movie, if your background had been known?

But you are not a literary character. You are a writer: the most celebrated in Germany, perhaps even in Europe, and winner of       every imaginable literary award, including the Nobel Prize.

For nearly half a century you have been recognised by your country's citizens as a moral arbiter, even (absurdly) as the conscience of Germany. In that capacity, you have sat in judgment on your fellow Germans, as indeed on America and just about everybody else.

Like your American counterpart Noam Chomsky, like countless writers and intellectuals of the Left from Gabriel García Márquez to Harold Pinter, you have worked hard to discredit the political and economic system to which you owed your success: capitalism. You did your best over many years to undermine the Atlantic alliance — the same alliance, incidentally, that liberated Europe from the tyranny of your countrymen.

During the Cold War, and now in the war against Islamist terror, you have frequently made use of your hard-won liberty to make common cause with its enemies. You joined in the mythologising of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist movement. You are a supporter of the European ideal, but only as a counterweight to America. You were delighted when Chancellor Schröder broke with President Bush over the Iraq issue, and legitimised the tide of anti-Americanism that then swept Germany.