March 12, 1938, was, as we all know, an unusually cold day. Arctic iciness plunged like a guillotine blade into the loveliest and most promising spring. Yet the sky remained blank and blue, not a breeze was stirring. The sun’s smile was caught, like that of a beheaded man. And because the saps of spring had begun to rise, buds and shoots and perhaps also hopeful hearts froze to ice so suddenly that they shone, the world looked as if it had been placed under a glass bell: extraordinarily smart and delicately pretty and well-nigh varnished all over. The springtime seething was cut off, naturally. And with it the mood of the first half of my life.

On that March 12, 1938, I was in Vienna with Stella. She had long since taken my destiny in hand and was already preparing my return to Romania, my call-up for military service there, and my visit to Uncle Ferdinand in order to enter the sphere of influence of reliable friends; thus, she had already launched the entire intrigue that made me unreachable, lifted me over the coming events, kept me hovering, as it were, between heaven and earth throughout the war, but ultimately cost her her life.

We spent a summer of near-exemplary beauty in the Salzkammergut and managed to enjoy many more hectic days of sunshine in the following year, 1939, before the first shot was fired in September and Europe committed suicide for good. But, retrospectively, the iciness of March 1938 passed directly into that of February 1940 in Bessarabia, and then, fairly uninterrupted, into the diluvial period of Hamburg until 1947. And it goes on, visibly losing light, turning grayer and drearier, more and more wintry. I cannot recall a single bright day during the so-called Age of Rubble or of Reichsmarks from 1945 to 1948 in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, Germany. Never did the sun shine but through aseptic gauze, even during the brief Arctic summers when trees and shrubs were greening amid the yellow tundra grass in Pöseldorf or Övelgönne.

At any rate, by February 1940, which I am now telling about, it has been going on for almost two years—this Ice Age that keeps getting grayer and grayer, perhaps because it keeps filling up with gray iron men and smoking, fire-spewing iron weapons, and more and more gray men keep dropping and turning into phantoms under the smoke-and-fire spewing of these weapons, many many hundreds of thousands of gray phantoms, flowing together in a denser and denser wintry fog that shrouds the world and veils the sun so thickly that it hangs as a small, pallid, powerless disk in the grayness, even after the thundering of the fires has been snuffed out.

I too, in my nettle-cloth uniform, yellow-green like dried peas, am now (in February 1940) one of the iron men. I too occasionally wear an iron helmet with a chin strap, and I handle iron weapons that are ready to spew fire. My regiment is ready for action. Each one of its four thousand young men secretly prays to God that, if it comes down to it, he will be among the few hundred survivors. We have sworn to serve our Fatherland unto death with our weapons in our fists, and the makers of this cant and these weapons are trying to harden our mood, our combative will, our readiness to die—harden them like iron. But nonetheless we are a rather sorry lot, shaking with fear whenever things look serious for us too, fatalistic whenever the immediate danger is merely put off until tomorrow. And terribly hopeful, by the way: that the Germans’ll get it done.