“The Western is life; the Biedermeier dresser a genre picture. The only use the hero in the Western has for the Biedermeier dresser is as something to block the bullets from the bad guy’s revolver—that kick of his boot heel that knocked the dresser on its side is what gave the American myth its strength, its persuasive strength. Could people like us do that? What would you do if bullets started flying? You would spread out your arms and throw yourself in front of the Biedermeier dresser. Shall I confess something to you? I disgust myself. I’m sickened by the evasive way I sneak out of cities at nightfall as if from the scene of a collective infamy which I have taken part in only as an observer. As an observer and occasional thief. For I carry off a small prize. I’ve spirited away something of the museum exhibit, and with it I slip into the black sack of night, which draws tighter and tighter around me. I steal away with a voluptuously tickling fear in the back of my neck, a fear that may drive the sentimental value away again. I carry the city along, virtually purged of artistic invalidity: for instance, a Munich consisting of nothing but spice-card cottages, gingerbread palaces, wax-dip churches, crowding around color-splotched squares on which mushroom-cultures of parasols proliferate, among which rustic market women peddle their tiny witch brooms of soup greens. A Munich of jovial, house-proud streets, which lead to the water-lily tangles of Schwabing’s art nouveau landscape garden jungle. A Munich, then, that doesn’t at all exist outside my imagination, which utilizes old postcards and fairy-tale illustrations as cutouts placed in front of a totally different reality. But I imagine I have taken along its soul, the soul of a bourgeois city aired by mountain breezes and set with Hellenistic serenity in pleasing farmland, which the yellowed autumnal pages of a fin-de-siècle calendar have lent the friendly spaciousness of time of a summer resort, in the not at all petty tranquility of which the arts abound in fruitful liberty. I envisage this under the glass bell of a delicately fleecy sky, powerfully blue, with the lace of snow-covered Alpine peaks along its brim. And I visualize it for solace, when I realize I am breathing a sigh of relief to leave Munich, the real, present one, which transmits entirely different, nightmarish impressions: an unreality confusedly spun into the steel-brace network of high-rises, the display-window unreality of department stores, an unreality that, from behind the reflections of swarms of contemporaries and torrents of traffic-lava—reflections insanely reiterated as in a fly’s faceted eye—offers the instrumentarium of a modern-day deification of nature: the tents, raincoats, hiking boots, sleeping bags, folding boats, snowshoes, loden coats, felt hats of the bawling backpackers:

Oh, just see the archer stride

Over hill and dale,

Bow and arrow at his side . . .