So that was what we had been living toward, as things turned out historically. The five of us penned up in a four-room apartment on the fourth floor of a tenement in the Twelfth District (Schönbrunn in its abstract glory before our noses). Each of us in his enormously empty space, casting a long shadow, a monument to his own lonesomeness and indifference. Around us roared the city of Vienna—it too an empty space, its roaring similar to the kind one hears in an empty seashell. To be sure, each of us filled his space with some kind of activity, fiction, illusion, even with ghosts. Not just Cousin Wolfgang, who sought out the plaster busts in the corridor of his humanistic gymnasium for this purpose: . . . Uncle Helmuth, for instance, had real phantoms. Every Saturday evening, he would frequent them in his spiritist circle, the way other people went bowling or to a tarot game. When the medium went into a trance, her eyes rolled back and the whites peered out like the ones the good soldier faces when his bayonet plunges into the body of his enemy. From her lips (she normally stammered, heavy-tongued, and in shredded sentences), Uncle Helmuth had relayed many an interesting tiding from the beyond, which he repeated to us. As early as 1937, when nothing as yet hinted that he would one day tend in this direction (although he often remarked upon the miraculous doings in the Reich, as opposed to the slovenliness here in Austria), he announced something to us in conspiratorial secrecy. He had received a revelation from over there (the beyond, I mean, not the Reich). He had learned that there, in the immaterial and actual Reality and Truth beyond ours, Adolf Hitler occupied a much higher rank than here on earth, higher even than Buddha’s and Helena Blavatsky’s and his, Uncle Helmuth’s, as well. And he, the Führer, had taken the ordeal and degradation of an earthly, material existence upon himself willingly, like Jesus Christ, in order to bring mankind one level closer to God.

(Of course, Uncle Helmuth asked us to keep this to ourselves for the time being. The spirits, he said, pursued their goals in a very complex manner, which we earthlings could scarcely comprehend. Their intentions could be discerned by us only after they were carried out and on the basis of the results. We therefore had to be careful not to interfere rashly in this delicate spinning and weaving . . . Incidentally, Uncle Helmuth was extremely annoyed upon learning that Wolfgang had joined the illegal Nazi movement, and he declared Wolfgang’s membership null and void since he was still underage.)

I say: That was how we lived back then (three years before this winter of 1940, but far away, before the start of the Ice Age). Each of us lived his dreary days in his own emptiness and either stared into nothingness or filled the terrible hollow of our existence with frail actions, fictions, fancies, yes, even with ghosts. Aunt Hertha (to remember her too with piety) filled her emptiness (and, one hopes, other of her hollow spaces) entirely with Uncle Helmuth. She worshiped him, but not for himself. She worshiped him as her counterpart.