To form a fixed image of another person is a subtle betrayal: it fixes them as what they were and withdraws the permission to change, so love consists precisely in refusing to finish forming your picture of someone. The sin is not hatred but the premature completeness of the portrait we carry.
Encountering postwar Germans, the observer finds atrocity rarely meets a monstrous author; it is administered by ordinary, courteous people who performed their small assigned function and feel personally blameless. Evil at this scale is distributed across competent functionaries, which is why no single confrontable villain can be located.
The diary treats a life not as the single path taken but as one realization among the many that were equally available, so fiction becomes the method for inhabiting the biographies one did not live. Identity is thus provisional: who you are is partly the accident of which variant got actualized.
Recording experience as dated fragments (travel notes, overheard scenes, aborted plots, essayistic asides) rather than continuous story preserves the unresolved texture of thought and refuses the false coherence that memory imposes in retrospect. The form itself argues that honesty lives in juxtaposition, not in connecting the dots.