March 1938, for example:

The Arctic-blue emptiness of those days—and Vienna, washed up on their shore like a lovely dead seashell . . .

Certainly: as a story, it was smashing. Blissfully, I stuffed it into the light blue of Schwab’s eyes, how many times—and these eyes were never fed up, they kept gaping, round as tennis balls, gawking through the thick glasses. And thus I never got fed up with telling stories—that is, wreaking vengeance. For that’s what it really was, an act of revenge each time. Revenge for the betrayal of our life’s dream, for our wasted youth, our now empty and abstract life, revenge for the loss of reality, for our lost innocence, for the demiurge’s shameful game, imposing upon us an existence under scornful conditions: giving us life in order to steal our lives from us . . . Blissful revenge, turning into gall, until even its bitterness was no longer palatable—until I was only chewing ashes: “Yakkety-yak—why am I blabbering to you about the magic and the death of cities—you who saw, who breathed Berlin: a son, a legitimate offspring of the splendid, legendary Berlin of the 1920s, of the first decade after WWI—until 1933, until the oriflamme of the Reichstag fire. That was another radiant star, a sister star of the city of Paris in the diadem of Europe. I mean, before the hopelessly aged, bull-borne girl donned cowboy pants and New Mexico boots, became the hit of the county fair, despite her crone face and multiple unsuccessful face-lifts, the bronco-busting rodeo star Miss Yurop with neon tubes around her Texas hat . . . Back in that faraway morning hour of the world, when we were all boys, you, friend Schwab, and Nagel and Cousin Wolfgang and I—you, as the firstborn, could spend a few blissful holiday weeks there, in that legendary Berlin, presumably in furuncular late adolescence, but blind from too much reading, and mature enough to note the quickening of your pulse when reading Gottfried Benn and ascribing it to increased distrust, and yet happily enjoying the well-crafted wordsmithery of Else Lasker-Schüler, and associating jazz with Otto Dix’s paintings of the world war or the brown shirts and red-white-and-black armbands of the SA with the songs of Brecht & Weill, Inc.—devouring all this like a whale gulping down plankton: to drink the world, to be drunk on the zeitgeist—you lucky man! Born to such riches! . . . And where is it now, your precious Berlin? Does it exist in reality and not just on political maps and in Bild magazine as the scene of the German Wailing Wall? . . . Cross your heart and own up to it: that city never really existed, it was a legend, wasn’t it? A dream that a city dreamed about itself? . . . How can I believe anything else? I was shown a settled spot in Brandenburg and told it was Berlin, and I wandered through it, up and down, in every nook and cranny, before it was destroyed by fire. And I can assure you: nothing there, absolutely nothing evoked even the slightest echo of that legend, of that dream of a city. . .