In 1878, adopting an aphoristic style that simultaneously reflected the declining state of his own health and his recent break with Wagnerian Romanticism, Friedrich Nietzsche published Human, All Too Human, A Book for Free Spirits. Only 1,000 copies were printed, and of these, only 120 were sold. Eleven of the sales apparently took place at the Konrad Joseph book store in Munich, to the members of Joseph Konrad Josephson's socialist reading circle.

In the margins of his own copy, Josephson mounted a vigorous and enthusiastic response to Nietzsche's arguments: he disagreed with nearly every statement Nietzsche made, yet the book filled him with an almost joyous energy, a kind of atheistic afflatus. 110 years later, as Roger McAllister deciphered Josephson's commentary, he couldn't help smiling at the idealistic book seller and his spirited defense of the values he held so dear: compassion, volition, benevolence, community. In the intellectual debate between author and devoted reader, Josephson was clearly outclassed, and yet there was something charming about the way this generous family man felt bold enough to go toe-to-toe with the bitter neurasthenic genius.

On the day the reading circle was to gather, a wrapped bundle arrived at the bookstore, posted from Grüssau Abbey, in Silesia. Josephson opened the package, found a manuscript within, and spent some moments glancing over the first few pages. Josephson presumed, of course, that the manuscript was from his friend Adalbert Kehr, who resided at the Abbey, but instead of an personal note, Josephson could only find a brief discussion of Medieval High German prosody, which concluded that the enterprise of translating its strophes into modern German was doomed, utterly doomed.

Puzzled, Josephson set the manuscript aside, and went to host his reading circle.

Of the book circle's discussion that evening no record exists, a lacuna for which Roger McAllister was most grateful. To be honest--and Roger McAllister could be honest, late at night, alone, with a decent claret in hand--at such times, in fact, he fancied himself to be brutally honest--the only thing interesting about Joseph Konrad Josephson was that his descendents had become rich enough to pay McAllister to be interested; the only thing interesting thing about Nietzsche was that he was good, a damned fine writer, and a man like McAllister could always recognize quality when he saw it; and as for the ephemeral reactions of a group of nineteenth century German leftists to a badly-printed first edition marred by excessive marginalia, well, there could have been nothing interesting in that room at all. For McAllister, there was only one thing of any interest in the Konrad Joseph bookstore on that distant day in 1878: Adalbert Kehr's manuscript, the same manuscript that McAllister had recently found, underneath the copy of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, in the Josephson family's "Chest of Nazi Papers."

After the reading circle adjourned, Josephson returned to his desk. No doubt the book circle had left his mind buzzing with ideas; no doubt he found it difficult to sleep; perhaps one of his children was ill and fussing with a mild fever--in any case, Josephson stayed up all night reading. Despite the lack of a introductory letter, it soon became clear that this manuscript was Adalbert Kehr's translation into modern German prose of his great discovery, the Heinrichlied, which he had found in a secret library deep within the recesses of Grüssau Abbey.

In the morning, Josephson's wife rose to find her husband agitated and distraught. She begged him to rest. He refused to go to bed, but consented to retire to the back room of the bookstore, where there was a divan, a small desk, and no windows. His wife shut the door, hoping he would sleep. But instead Josephson lit a candle, and there in the back room, surrounded by the Judaica he had hidden from his secular comrades, he spent the day writing and re-writing a letter to Kehr. McAllister found seven drafts of the letter, and from internal evidence deduced the existence of at least four or five more, which must have been torn up and discarded.

In the first draft, Josephson inquired as to the health of his friend--and then, in an overwritten scrawl, asked himself whether freund was too strong a word for someone he had known for five days of radical exhilaration followed by three years of exchanging letters--especially when the letters from Kehr had routinely ignored whatever Josephson had written. In the second draft, Josephson volunteered to visit Grüssau, but then immediately withdrew the offer, because, after all, his wife was pregnant.

The third, fourth and fifth drafts became increasingly less personal but more forceful--more focused on the text itself. Josephson adopted the tone of a polemicist, and denounced the Henry portrayed in the manuscript. Grudgingly, Josephson conceded that Henry's victory over the Catholic Church played a part in the dialectic of progress, but this Henry was no symbol of the potential of German culture, no hero to the working classes of the nineteenth century--just a strong man who callously sent other men to their deaths. Only a general, a criminal overlord, or a factory manager (or their militarist lackeys on the right) could find anything to admire in this Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor of the Salian Dynasty.

In the sixth draft, Josephson abandoned literary criticism and addressed Kehr directly. He asked his one-time companion whether he really ever had any commitment to the socialist movement. "Even in Gotha," he wrote, "there was something of the tourist in your manner... But you were not an infiltrator, no! It pains me even to consider the idea long enough to reject it...."

In the seventh draft, Josephson bluntly stated his belief that Kehr had gone mad. "I do not believe that what you have sent me is a translation. I do not believe you have discovered a Medieval manuscript in the cellars of the monastery. I believe you have lost your mind and composed a fantasy--a fantasy that conjoins Bismark and the Kaiser into one false and monstrous hero. If you recover your senses, you are always welcome in Munich. Your friend, Konrad Joseph."

McAllister, of course, destroyed these letters before he began work on his own translation.