“By the way, the volumes of the Gazette du bon ton I saw as a six-year-old must have been old issues. The magazine no longer appeared in the time I am speaking of—1926. It had ceased publication in Paris in 1916 and was continued, strangely enough, in Berlin until 1919 by Flechtheim. I once found an issue in Aunt Selma’s room. Thus does the cultural heritage intertwine generation with generation. It was only natural that I should fall in love with a Vogue fashion model . . .

“Last but not least, certain austere bell tones in Miss Fern’s voice transmitted culture, especially when she spoke of Florence, rolling her r in a way that sounded like a muted drumroll. Before the war, she had looked after a little girl ‘of a very noble family’ there, and she always held up her charge’s exemplary breeding to me. In a strange blend of desire, envy, and hatred, I was secretly and hopelessly in love with the little girl: my future anima, Dame Cultura personified.

“But things got dark after that, my friend. I spent the years of my Viennese upbringing in preparation for the raw power at the breast of Mother Nature. Twelve long years. The first four in a totally idiotic school in the Twelfth District, then eight in the dreadful obtuseness of a high school in the Thirteenth. Until Stella rescued me: taking me to the commencing summer-solstice festival of the year 1938.

“And you know: what kept me from going completely obtuse during the twelve bitter years of this apprenticeship in triviality, mere usefulness, or pure decoration (culture as a status symbol), what protected me from becoming a will-less instrument of the zeitgeist, chaff in the wind of time—it was the CITY. The city as a promise, you understand: the Jerusalem still to be built: ANTHROPOLIS . . .

“The promise of the city comforted me first for the loss of my mother and all the luxurious circumstances and happenstances of my previous life. Of course, I was despairing, disturbed, disoriented. But even as a child, I wasn’t exactly sentimental. Despite any disquiet, I did find the change extremely interesting. I lived in a twofold awareness, a dichotomy at least as exciting as the wonderfully scary and shivery moments at home in the evening before my leap into the crib: when I eerily imagined that the wolf would now come shooting out from underneath to grab my bare legs, even though I knew there was no wolf under there.

“This, of course, with effectively exchanged emotional values. I convinced myself that the things I was told were true, and that my mother really had just gone off on a long trip from which one fine day she would return and take me home again—yet I simultaneously knew that this was nonsense: that my mother had died and the truth of her death was merely lying in wait in order to shoot out from its hiding place and pounce on me, as the paralyzing terror of reality pure and simple. But in the meantime, there were so many new and exciting things to see and to experience.