According to John, it is both a tragic and a grotesque (i.e., tragicomical) error that WWII is likewise being waged among nations, peoples, states, rather than, by unanimous international consent, between the representatives of a coming new world and those of a dying old world (among whose representatives John certainly counts himself). With incomparably fewer losses, he feels, they could achieve the same end that will ultimately come out of the slaughter and that (with the exception of Russia) did not emerge fully from WWI: namely, the extermination of the old upper crust and the takeover by the bloody fucking middle classes. Not by the proletarians, mind you, as the latter have always been promised, but by Uncle Helmuth and his kind.

This notion has been haunting me for some time now (namely, since the post-March days of 1938 in Vienna, in their abstract vacuum). The gray iron men who came to us down the Nibelungen river, pouring into a human sea that surged with enthusiasm, these young men with the heavy, stomping boots, the wonder-craving eyes under gray helmets, and the gentle names (Adolf Emil Wolfgang Helmuth), were soldiers in a civil war. And though it never came to a German civil war at that time, and for the moment brothers and sisters embraced jubilantly, people soon realized that once again an hour of vast collective bloodshed had come.

You didn’t have to hear the Führer’s speeches on the radio or to read the newspapers. You sensed it, the way animals whiff a storm, a flood, a fire. It surfaced when the intoxication, the delirium, the yowling, howling ecstasy of the first few days (or rather, the three-day-long day) subsided. The roar, in that steel blue Ice Age coldness, was followed by a sudden, huge silence. In this silence, you sensed it. You sensed it the way a murder victim senses his murderer’s breath on the back of his neck even though the murderer is still far away, not yet visible: when you turn your head, the street is empty, he is still skulking along somewhere far behind you, around a corner, hugging the walls, but he is coming, he is coming, he is drawing closer to you and closer . . . Thus, too, the hour of vast collective bloodshed. No drums were booming or trumpets blaring when the hour finally came on September 1, 1939; it came as if it had been sneaking up for a long time and had finally arrived. And no matter how hard you tried and how willing you were to find some historically meaningful necessity, you couldn’t come up with an obvious one. Unless you sensed that the Adolfs Emils Wolfgangs Helmuths had made up their minds to exterminate anything that was not of their kind. And, indeed, you sensed it. It was their turn.