In this sense, superreality is almost paradisal, its effect is paralyzing, soporific, like an old lullaby that goes “Such is life, my child . . .” I am challenged to stay on my chaise longue and content myself with what I can experience vicariously (on the weekly balance drawn by the magazines). But on the other hand, what I thus experience is so monstrous and violent, so fills my consciousness to the bursting point with phenomena events occurrences incidents, that it keeps stretching further and further, becomes more and more expansive. Superreality has the explosive character that physicists usually attribute to cosmic events; while I rest here as a silent nucleus of overall events on the chaise longue I simultaneously fly out into the universe at a furious velocity. It is ridiculous to hold fast to the old, out-of-date idea of action, to the obsession with activity or passivity vis-à-vis history—this would mean something only if I had a history in the absolute sense, were allowed to have a history. This history would be the skin, the solidifying envelope, of the person. It would give me contours—and thus form. What once held together my SELF (at least in my imagination), giving it distinguishable, recognizable form, was the notion of a personal history. But this now proves to be a typically subjectivistic error, showing only my infantile limitation of vision; it is schizothymically autistic, correlating with my bourgeois worldview and leptosomic habitus: superreality enlightens me, makes me understand that my conception of self is completely out of proportion. Hertzog ought to prescribe group sex for me, so that I can finally realize that I have no history. The trivial circumstances of my life are stereotypical, and they integrate me pitilessly into the masses. I am (despite the silly trials and tribulations that I regard as circumscribing my personality) ultimately, unavoidably, quite simply, a contemporary. As such, I experience a banal variant of global destiny as a member of Western Civilization—and as such, in turn, am merely a mote of dust in the cloud configurations of the history of mankind, nay, of the earth—in my present situation, I am nothing more than a phenotype of my historical position and destination, by necessity earning money (at least making a living, however tardily), an unwilling taxpayer, renter, consumer, transportation user, and, especially as the last, inevitably a zoon politikon.

This is thoroughly impressed upon me here, each article is intent on firmly imprinting this upon my consciousness: The disciplined driving that I expect from others obliges me to maintain the same myself; this can also be understood in an extrapolated sense, in every aspect of life I must respect red and green lights, above all however the rules concerning right-of-way. Should this have escaped me up to now, it is here once more hammered into me. Individualism is suicide and more than that a crime against the collective. What could eventually set me apart from others like me would occur at the mercy of the journalistic organs that I hold in my hand. They alone are capable of thrusting me into the spheres of visibility, of elevating me to the status of being the subject of an interview, a photo essay, a report. But in the absence of such an (incidentally thoroughly untimely) occurrence, I’m not even able to upgrade the unwilling taxpayer in myself to an impressive evader of millions: my image would then appear in equal stature alongside other prominent figures like Aga Khan, Cordin the tailor, Eichmann, the member of parliament Rainer Barzel—so here too, nothing doing. The stroke of luck of extraordinary natural gifts (quiz show intelligence, photogenic beauty, golden vocal chords, etc.) is unfortunately not my lot, nor regretfully any stupendous abnormality (pyromaniac, Siamese twin, heart transplant patient).