Here, the borders of no Middle Kingdom are respected. What in God’s name do I care about the Congo? What am I to do, what can I do about the extermination of the giraffes in East Africa or about Konrad Adenauer’s stubbornness? . . . Yet here, these issues are urgently presented to me as though my material and spiritual welfare depended on them, my happiness, my moral integrity, my ethical climate. This surprises me somewhat. I must admit: Until now I haven’t expected anything other than a shallow means of passing the time, distraction—at the dentist’s, for example, or at the hairdresser’s (when I’m waiting for a girlfriend haloed in blue light and hygienically decapitated by the barber’s smock fastened under her chin in the thin-walled cubicle, mysteriously deaf and dumb like the Trunk Lady in a carnival stall, giving me the absent smile of Brigitte Helm in Metropolis under a massive space helmet of glittering nickel, she likewise holding a magazine in her hands, which are no longer at all connected to her). It can presumably be traced back to this that I had the notion that one reads illustrated weeklies with one’s fly undone—

which is to say: with the carefree distraction of a three-year-old playing with his oatmeal. But this is a mistake, people take me for far more grown up than I am, I note this now, here: threatened by five hundred forty balconies that aim down at me from nine residential machines. An astounding development in the consciousness of the global citizen, in the contemporary conscience, in the feeling of responsibility of the individual for the fate of all, must have taken place in Germany during my frequent (often lengthy) absences in the last five, six years, and consequently a simultaneous mobilizing of public opinion, which is yielding quite the audacious results. I am struck by the boldness of the published word. We didn’t have this before in this country. It almost makes me feel there is now no danger in making daring statements. Perhaps this was always the case, but intelligent self-censorship always considered the possibility of consequences. However, consequences no longer seem to occur. Anyway, it is flatteringly assumed here that I have taken part in this agreeable development, that I on my end am prepared to emotionally carry out the aggressive new West German journalistic élan. Alas, I am not: I live abroad too much, where events occur much less robustly, with kid gloves on, as it were. I am struck by the combativeness with which, for instance, a government minister is publicly accused of corruption here; since his continued stay in office would lead one to conclude that he can effortlessly refute the charges, why doesn’t he do so? There’s something out of kilter: Either the accusations are false, which would have to have consequences, or they are correct, which would certainly also have consequences. But nothing happens; the whole thing seems to take place in a vacuum. Perhaps there are two realities: a pedestrian reality, so to speak, in which I move, in which probably most of the Middle Kingdoms lie—that is, in which what I and everyone else directly experiences takes place—and another reality, superordinate, vaster, and more comprehensive, in which the dramatic public events that I see here take place: a superreality, in which the gods struggle as in the Iliad . . .