I sat down on the defense wall of the castle, letting my legs dangle, and gazing—gazing. It was a splendid day, a day in early autumn, full of misty light, and the demolished town of Nuremberg lay at my feet, flattened into its ground plan. The picturesque, medievally narrow world of nooks and crannies was vast and empty, topograpically marked off, abstractly drawn in two dimensions, like a blueprint. Only at the root of the castle trunk were those three or four ghosts of gingerbread houses still looming, caught by the spell as they fled . . .

and they set me to thinking: I had already seen them somewhere, once. I knew their contours, sharp as if etched in silverpoint, and this faded coloring, the watercolor in the dusty wall-yellows and old brick-reds of the rubble . . . I had once painfully absorbed all this—but when? where? . . .

When it came to me, it struck me so hard that I almost fell from my airy perch on the wall. They were the same contours, drawn with a hard pencil and sophomorically accurate, the same faded watercolors as the studies that Private First Class Adolf Hitler (at the time, more artistically than politically engaged) had doodled into his sketchbook in France during World War I: shot-up farms in September light . . . But this cannot be talked about here. Not even with the pretty survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. This is not the time or place for cultivated salon chitchat. Important things are happening here. History has caught up with itself and is now taking place in the present, is even taking a step into the future. Here, a milestone is being placed in world history, casting a warning shadow into times to come.

Everybody says this to himself three times a day (at lunch in the cafeteria, at cocktails in the bar of the Grand Hotel Excelsior, at the slow waltz shortly after the floor show in the Excelsior souterrain). Here too we live elevated by the magic of cant. We live in the nimbus of exceptionality. We are witnessing a historic expansion of international law. The Hague Convention of 1926 managed only to condemn war as a crime; it offered no legal sanctions against the perpetrators (much less defined the crime of conspiracy). Here they are now, the conspirators responsible for the last war, sitting as defendants in two fenced-in rows of benches, and we already know how this will end. The milestone in world history will once again be a gallows . . .

They seem to know this themselves. They act stoic, sharply watched as they are by helmeted GIs, who, as a token of the solemnity of this historic moment, are wearing white cotton gloves on their dangling butcher paws. And across from them, raised up on a platform, enthroned at a long table, as in da Vinci’s Last Supper, sit their judges: