“But believe me, dearest friend, that was not what I saw burning down in the year of Our Lord 1944, aside from a few remnants not worth mentioning. What I saw was a dried-up, parched-up, silted-up training ground for the populace. A barren metropolis of perioecians, a steppe city that was already, in essence, half Russian and half American long before its division. Hence, the other, legendary Berlin must have died quite a bit earlier, silently. And not in slow, rattling final breaths but from one day to the next, like my Vienna in March 1938 . . . When a city dies, it does so from one moment to the next, while the people keep treading in their tiny ruts of destiny, life in the streets goes on teeming, the traffic keeps moving with no visible break or jam, the buildings still stand with windowpanes glittering in the sun—and all at once, it’s happened: an incomprehensible alteration in the feeling of the world, the quality of life, an indefinable but all the more decisive change of the hour, the beginning of a new phase of life for everyone . . . It is a planetary if not a cosmic event. There is nothing more anguishing than the death of a city before it vanishes from the face of the earth. This perishing of its spiritus loci is a metaphysical process, and not even a Hitler can take credit for initiating it. For all the undeniable merits that this minion of nature acquired in nature’s game, I do not truly regard him as directly responsible for the death of Berlin. But rather as an executive organ: the leader of the swarms of maggots that beset a corpse. Supreme functionary of the decomposition, if you will, the most furious enzyme of disintegration, but not the murderer. After all, he marched into Vienna only after the city breathed out its soul in the ecstatic “Siegheil!” of the flower woman (one of the city’s root spirits, no doubt) . . .