I am ready to believe in Atlantis and, if you like, in Vineta and, of course, the Baghdad of Haroun ar’ Rashid. But the model arch for tinker-toy tinkering (the big Wilhelmine Memorial Church edition in the Kaiser’s birthday package for higher social classes, free delivery), this giant bourgeois toy left to the little people in the brown shirts from the back courtyard, this couldn’t possibly have been the Berlin that an entire generation dreamed about, even I in the brooding dullness of my formative years in Vienna dreamed about, like a modern Babylon . . . I had pictured it altogether differently—not architecturally, of course, but in its atmosphere, as they say: in its mood substance. The legendary Berlin of the so-called cursed Systemzeit must have been magical, like a jungle painting by the Douanier Rousseau: an adventure dappled in flickering light like the face of a predatory feline suddenly emerging out of the sickle-moon-sliced blue of the tropical night . . . At least, that was how I had pictured it when I yearningly dreamed about it in the stale air of a puberty-fermenting classroom in Vienna’s Thirteenth District. A tropical voluptuousness, especially at night, when the entangled lianas of light were reflected in the black asphalt currents and vice waxed in the moor ponds of darkness, making the overexcited mind fluoresce. So that, from the miasmas of lust-for-life and misery, luxury and crime, the orchids of the intellectual events of art, of strange, bizarre, baroque existences, of anecdotes, blossomed forth . . . You used to say you envied me for my formative years in Vienna: Klimt and Schiele, Wittgenstein and Berg, Schönberg, and so on . . . But permit me: In my time, all that was in a different paleontological stratum. It was past and past perfect, not present. It was history, myth, legend: literature, not life. Your Berlin, on the other hand, was, for at least a decade (until 1933), the most vivid present in our existence—granted, not one hundred percent the ANTHROPOLIS of the utopians, not exactly the New Jerusalem of the pilgrim fathers, but a Babylon: cesspool, chaos, yet all the more beautiful for that, all the more seductive . . .