“Admittedly, in a burning city, it is hard to distinguish between true events and mere spectacles. But in the Berlin of 1944 it took no Brahman’s eye to realize that the incineration of this city was merely the completion of an enormous but compelling causality that had begun a great deal earlier. This was being shouted from the rooftops—insofar as any rooftops still existed and anyone was left to shout from them. However, in March 1938, it took an especially fine nose to sense that time had taken a leap—a spinning leap, so that it was now facing away from its normal direction and would henceforth be zooming backward faster and faster to where it had come from. The Twelfth of March 1938 was the cusp in the swing of time’s pendulum—or, if this is more up your alley: the instant of turning between two breaths of God. For the LORD breathes while HE dreams HIMSELF in an enormous game of creating and annihilating myriad worlds. And whenever HE inhales in order to exhale again or exhales in order to inhale again, time changes, the dreams of human beings change—and somewhere, I don’t know where, the style, the epoch changes—I’m talking nonsense, I know. I know that any newspaper reader can refute me. There are solid causes and reasons for everything and anything; they are delivered to you with the daily paper. Had I read my newspaper carefully, I would not dare make such flimsy claims. One could just as arbitrarily assume that time changed in 1933, illuminated by the oriflamme of the Reichstag fire, which, so to speak, was the match struck for many subsequent conflagrations—an incident, by the way, that I learned about quite by chance and only many months later—please excuse me, but Vienna was so far away in its own past, so distant from all reality, it had so fundamentally betrayed its dream of itself that its people, already back then, five years before it died for good, were living in a kind of limbo—or better yet: were sleepwalking . . . I, at any rate, arrived one evening at the location of what I had been taught to view as home back then: the apartment of my Viennese relatives, stuffed with horrible furniture: petit bourgeois Biedermeier, plus crocheted doilies, Colonel Subicz’s swords of honor—you’ve probably found analogous things in Potsdam: sword-knot-proletariat; have-nots entitled to starvation pensions and with the most slavishly obedient class arrogance . . . There they sat in a family grouplet around the radio, my uncle Helmuth as usual, mental substance in his steeple head: A Manual for Engineers (a small three-volume edition for domestic use), the Veda and the Upanishads, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Madame Helena Blavatsky (née Halm von Rottenstein-Hahn) and Fräulein Fränzel’s Prophecies. His spouse, Hertha: a gruel of stupidity and misunderstood femininity. My cousin Wolfgang (whom you often resemble: very intelligent, precociously accomplished even then), having almost furiously outgrown, mentally as well as physically, his boyhood clothes—now staring with his bespectacled eyes and bending slightly, like someone who’s got constipation—the better to hear, of course) . . . And my aunt Selma: the old broken-down cart nag, her bony hands in her barren lap, the bewitched nixie-gaze into emptiness (need I tell you I loved her? She taught me how to live tenaciously with despair) . . . and from the radio the broadcast of a recording of the Reichstag fire trial welled brassily. A historic event, if you please. When I entered unsuspectingly, hence loud and unabashed, they glared at me indignantly, dressed me down with dirty looks and shushes. You could hear Göring’s voice, and then that of the presiding magistrate (do you recall the guy’s name?). He was very solemnly saying “Defendant van der Lubbe—” And because, at that time, there were no electronic tape recordings, just Stone Age resin disks into which sound waves were scratched in order to be scraped out by a needle, and that record evidently had a crack or a notch, which made the needle keep jumping into the same groove, the presiding magistrate of the historic court of law kept saying “Defendant van der Lubbe—van der Lubbe—van der Lubbe vander-LubbevanderLubbevander-Lubbe . . .” It didn’t sound world-historical, God in heaven be my witness. It sounded quite extraordinarily funny, like a fart in the bathtub . . . And that is the only reason that the event lodged in my memory—if you would be so kind as to forgive me, an exceedingly ridiculous matter even today, your Reichstag fire, an extremely silly oriflamme, and I could never believe that this was the torch that lit ANTHROPOLIS aflame and destroyed it.