“Since then, I have been insisting on my mythology. It is based on my being an eyewitness. In March 1938, I was there. I directly witnessed a historic event—that is, of course, as close as people like us can get. In any case, fully conscious that it was a historic event. That alone was peculiar. Even back then, I did not read newspapers. I was nineteen years old. I had enjoyed a realschule education in the Federal Republic of Austria—that is, historically, not to mention politically, I was about as informed as a carp in a pond. And even though I had grabbed some of the crumbs falling from the richly laden humanist table of my cousin Wolfgang, my horizon of civic knowledge blurred away just behind the Lay of the Nibelungen, Emperor Max in the wall of St. Martin’s, and a few operetta stanzas rehashed in terms of current events. It would simply have been going too far to expect me to read the final end of Austria in the flower woman’s ecstatically bouncing ass—namely, an end of that amortization fund that had ridiculously posed as a sovereign state, a sinking fund of the Habsburg legacy of petit bourgeois staleness, Alpine folklore, and parliamentary fussbudgeting that was the Federal Republic of Austria at that time, and at the same time also the end of an epoch. And hence also the end, already twenty years prior at that point but lingering in awareness, of a geographic myth, by which the Ortler was still mirrored in the Adriatic, and behind Fischamend the world was still open far beyond the Carpathian forests, all the way to the mule paths of Macedonia and Bohemia and Moravia with their dark forests and sheaf-laden grain fields together with the hazy croaking of frogs over the ponds of Polish Galicia, still fenced in by the same black-and-yellow toll gates—it would, I tell you, have been asking too much of me to see the end of that notion of the Austrian Middle Kingdom as also the end of Europe, that multishaped, tensely dialectic Europe, which bade farewell to the Guermantes in the west while it wreaked bloody vengeance for a stolen sheep in the southeast, with the same Kalman tunes being fiddled in its ears from Brest to Braila and from Königsberg to Capua; despite the motley of costumes and patchwork of manners and mores, it was nevertheless a formation of the same culture, a world of the same life-dream, the same ideals, the same shalts and shalt-nots, the home landscape of a humanity that, for all the variety of creeds and cults, worshiped the same God, deceived HIM here there and everywhere in pretty much the same way and along with it let the Kalman tunes from the latest Viennese operetta be fiddled in their ears.