this is the stuff with which—on which—they will create the tremendous conjuring trick of the currency cut, the sinister prestidigitation of the onsetting economic efflorescence and thus the new reality:

the abstract world of the prosperity-termites in the baleful profiteering, proliferating administration of deranged production and demented consumption: the horrible, abortive total of identical life-drained days in the nightmare geometry of cities of utilitarian buildings, shooting up like crystals in some nasty mother liquid:

Already built into the trashy boxiness are the ruins of tomorrow, the tin-and-concrete wasteland of secondhand Americana, with mangebelts of rust and mortar, seething and teeming with ever-swelling, ever-swarming masses of more and more colorless more and more dissatisfied more and more demanding more and more hopeless more and more evil supermarket consumers in ever swifter, tinnier, more hastily glued-together, more and more perilous automobiles: highway rest stop eaters with empty gazes over munching chewing kneading swallowing mouths . . .

Christa’s empty, inward gaze into the emptiness beyond the wall of the Fürth law court, while the kneading, munching, chewing swallowing of her thrifty lips betrayed the secret—guarded by good breeding—of wanton voraciousness: a vision of the future, a blueprint of the world our son was to be born into:

the emptiness in the gaze of the innocent culprits, having lost the wonderful possibilities that were soon to be forfeited forever, with that final start of the new era in 1948.)

the time I’m telling you about is still 1947; the Ice Age, which has lasted ten years, is clamping down one last time: one evening, a day drawing to a close as the future dawns (the food rations are approaching those of Buchenwald, but the film industry is already back in bloom), during one of my aimless strolls through the world of the lotus-eaters (the first star is already sharply needled into the turnip-water-stained sky over a starving Hamburg), I wandered into the red-light district of the Gänsemarkt

(long since vanished, this ultimate remnant of the old walkway district, now replaced by the Axel Springer building with its utilitarian geometry towering into emptiness—

but at that time, it was a place of profound Christmastide expectations, a stronghold of seething, sap-driving, vital warmth and the seashell-carbolic-acid smell of whore cunts, an El Dorado of sexual plight and the torment of erotic fantasies,

in the honey light of dim bulbs in windows at the base of the swiftly darkening shafts between half-timber gables on bowing gingerbread houses, the sparkle of promises shimmers like a treasure half buried in a dark riverbed: the Rhine gold of rubble-dwellers, the abstract fabled wealth of association