I put my two selves side by side, testing them for this or that aspect, this or that value. I find that the twice seven years of exile, the hateful formative Viennese years with Uncle Helmuth, Aunt Hertha, Aunt Selma, and all their bloody fucking middle-class thinking and feeling and reasoning and arguing and praising and condemning and accusing, as well as the diabolically tempting Cain-like brotherhood with Cousin Wolfgang, were in many, many respects a wholesome testing, a hardening. And the no longer so finely groomed attitude, the no longer so sheltered and protected nature, the slight air of neglect—all these things they have so clearly left with me are balanced by a keener sight and a certain nobility in being able to hate.

But not even this has anything to do with me, really. This too is already a legend, which someday I may have to cultivate—like the other legend of myself in my childhood, the other myth with which I deliver myself into timelessness; I could not have existed otherwise . . .

Now, here, returning home to the land of my damnation to form myths of myself, I am once again new, different, something I have never been before:

A man who is everywhere a stranger, but most of all in his own home.

18

My book (which, as you know, was unfortunately never completed) was also supposed to describe a different cold world: the Ice Age five, six, seven (there we are again!) years later in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, Germany: WWII’s aftermath, known as the Age of Rubble, or the Age of Reichsmarks.

This period is experienced by the same person, an alien everywhere, soon at home everywhere, and most alien to himself in his own home—

experienced by a person who has virtually come out of himself and is beside himself, for whom, to be sure, this schizoid split became so much a part of his nature even then (1947) that it produced a peculiar, gleeful well-being,

a feeling of immunity, of invulnerability—not a resistance to surprises, which our cherished life always has in store for us, but an ultimate inviolability in regard to surprises (the result, of course, being a totally abstract relationship to existence, to the world, and, last but not least, to morality).

In my manuscripts, I have gone to great pains to explain and clarify how this trance-like state was induced by the experience of March 12, 1938—the day Adolf Hitler came home to his homeland, Austria, which German troops occupied amid the jubilant delirium of the people. But even the most conscientious analysis boils down to inexplicables. It was the day when one era ended and another began. A day of solstice, when the sun stood still in the heavens. It is easy to write this down, of course, but proving it will be far more difficult. However, that will be done elsewhere.

What I wish to say here can probably be best expressed in a description of the climatic conditions.