“But let’s stay awhile in perished Berlin. Just look: the young man I encountered there in 1944 on a smoldering and sizzling Kurfürstendamm—his stumbling and reeling, the way he kept walking, mechanically drunk, and yet that unswerving gaze into nothingness, that blind seer’s gaze that made me realize something extraordinary had happened—that young man was already a citizen of a city of the dead. A walking corpse. He had no living reflexes left. What kept him upright on two legs, and even caught him when he almost fell, was, so to speak, life in a different environment; that was, at best, the reflexes of the teeming maggots inside him—movement, true, but no longer his: a certain sense of balance still, but no longer his. A condition that we perhaps do not sufficiently take into account, we who intend to tell stories about the living. And this, you see, was the extraordinary thing I realized through him. An enormously simple truth: merely marching upright on two legs is not enough to live. You aren’t living if you live as if life doesn’t concern you. As a biological process, life is eternal, right? It merely changes form. The maggots that will teem in our cadavers after we die are even, biologically speaking, life to a higher degree—though not our life, alas. In order to preserve what we call our life, the mind must, they say, be preserved. But our mind—is this not our life dream? . . . I know I am telling you very trite things—do forgive me!—the world consists of such trite things, and their phenomenal wealth often confuses us so thoroughly that we lose sight of it—and that is the very point I am trying to express in my awkward fashion. It took a walking corpse to show me that in 1944 I was not witnessing the death of a city, I was attending the cremation of its cadaver: and that the city had died because it no longer dreamed itself . . . The very genus of city died out because its mind, its dream, its myth died out: because the dream of ANTHROPOLIS, the City of Mankind, had died. We had all died with it, because we no longer dreamed ourselves.

“It doesn’t mean very much if a city goes up in flames. Very many cities have gone up in flames—ancient Rome, for example, a good dozen times before Emperor Nero let it go up in flames again. However, its mind, its dream, its myth, have remained alive for one and a half millennia. And especially in regard to the year of our LORD 1944, dozens of cities were going up in flames; there was an epidemic of burning cities. The burning of a city was nothing out of the ordinary; the fiery heavens of the apocalypse threatened to burst open over Germany at any moment so that a powerful angel might appear and blow his trumpet, announcing the end of a city. . . However, the end had long since come to many cities. In Vienna, the angel had already appeared in 1938 in the guise of a Viennese flower woman, and his trumpet had blared out a brassy ‘Siegheil!’