How overnight (that is, toward morning of the day of the Upheaval or Annexation), Arctic cold had fallen upon Vienna despite the clear blue sky; and yet I stubbornly maintain that the lilac shrubs were already blooming in the Heldenplatz and in the Volksgarten. They were trampled down a few days later when one or two million enraptured people—the exact figure doesn’t matter (I still believe that even today, despite a considerable population boom, one could pack all mankind in a one-cubic-kilometer crate and throw it into the Grand Canyon so that mankind may collectively bite the dust)—as I was saying, the shrubs were trampled down when an entire big-city populace boiled together into a seething gruel of spastically dislocated limbs, twitching arms, hands, and swastika armbands hurled high and thrashing about as if drowning, with undulating banners and roaring mouths. They were welcoming Adolf Hitler, leader, unifier, and expander of the Greater German Reich, to ex-Mayor Lueger’s imperial city. . . But more of this later.

The bizarre thing about the weather was not just the coldness but, above all, the dematerialized light. With such a brilliant blue sky, one naturally expected the sun to come out at some point during the day—even as just a freshly polished brass disk, simply for the sake of the picture-perfect order of the world, which had suddenly gone crazy. But the sun did not show itself. The events took place in a light that did not emanate from the sun’s rays. It was the illumination of total emptiness. It was the light of abstraction. The coldness, so razor sharp it cut deep into the marrow of your bones, peeled out the objects, which were more or less logically lumped together, peeled them so very subtly along the contours of their isolation. It penetratingly clarified them as things. It drove connections apart and turned them into adjacencies. All at once, everything was displayed openly and lucidly. Not, of course, in the interflowing tonal values of a brilliant painting. Everything was separated thing by thing, like a pasted silhouette of colored paper. Despite all the particolored variety in the world, an unbelievable simplification had come about . . . I repeat—and I am ready to swear an oath—the sun did not come out for three days. It had stopped in the heavens, as on the occasion of biblical military actions at Gibeon or Jericho, but it had not stopped over Vienna.

Nevertheless, it was light outside. So light that your eyes hurt—for three days. Until the Führer and Reich Chancellor entered the city.

•

Naturally, I take the liberty of squeezing historical events together a bit for the sake of poetic truth. It could just as easily have been the fourth or fifth day when the Führer and Reich Chancellor entered the city. But that doesn’t matter. For when the sun remained suspended somewhere else in the sky (only not over Vienna; perhaps over Berlin?), time stopped too. I tell you, for three whole days.