This selectiveness may be partly the result of ingrained attitudes. Though a visceral anti-American fond of Marxist terminology, Kondylis has no use for mass democracy and its cultural and economic accompaniments. Sprung from an illustrious Greek family that produced both statesmen and military officers, he remains proud of his own antecedents. As he explained, with self-deprecation in a letter to me, unlike other Kondylises who accomplished much, “all he has managed to do is write long books in German.” His books, by the way, are not only long but recondite, written in exceedingly dense prose and marked by tortuous explications.