“Please try to picture the background that the Vienna of the 1930s provided for this imperial myth: the feeling of imitation belonged in a certain respect to your proof of residence, whereby on top of that the image of the fathers was really everything other than unharmed: You see, the Kalman tunes were not only fiddled into your ears there by café musicians but also, and more often, cranked out of hurdygurdies by the medal-showered, stiffly saluting torsos of wounded WWI veterans with the black glasses of blind men under regimental caps, and not with their hands, but with prosthetic hooks . . . That was more or less what anything looked like if it was left over from the glory that was Old Austria and the old Europe. Vienna may still have been dispatching the Orient Express in three-quarter time, accompanied by the sobbing Gypsy violins and bedbugs of the puszta czardas and the marrow-devouring nostalgia of shepherds’ flutes and lice along the Ialomiţa, all the way to the Golden Horn. But nonetheless Vienna had long since become part of a different myth. It had long since been spiritually incorporated into the longed-for Greater German Reich. Even the Vienna of 1933, when the vanderLubbevander-LubbevanderLubbe of the Reichstag fire trial resounded through its philistine homes, had long since been placed as a bride next to your true-blue Prussian Berlin (alas, oh, alas, not the legendary Babylon of the 1920s). On the wall of the classroom, in which I had dozed away my youth, like an unhappy chained dog dozing away a summer afternoon laced with the buzzing of flies—there, amidst the pictures of Old Austrian President Hainisch’s prize cow Bella and the protected Alpine flora, hung an oleograph of the German School Association, very active with its political propaganda. Encircled by oak leaves and surrounded by black-red-and-gold flags, the oleograph showed a German-Austrian mountaineer, yodleeolay, in an Alpine jacket and with a blackcock feather on his toadstool hat: with his hobnailed shoe and vigorously bent goalkeeper knee, he was trampling down a border fence-pole and stretching his hand out to Germania, waiting on the other side in an imperial crown, blond hair, coat of mail, shield, and sword . . . For many, many, countlessly many hours of dull boyhood misery, while some teacher with a chain-smoker voice used the Mocznik-Zahradniczek method to derive the sine and cosine functions of a unit circle, my mind seized on the allegorical union between the Alpine country and the Brandenburgian sandbox under the imperial crown of Charlemagne. And my imagination thrust the border pole into the lederhosen fly of the costume-party mountaineer and wove the protected Alpine flora and oak leaves around it, the way Lady Chatterley plaited anemones in her lover’s pubic hair. And my fantasy inserted the pole into Germania, by way of unification, slitting through her exuberant coat of mail, while she forcefully farted out the entire German School Association with its gym squads and black-red-and-gold flags and Mocznik and Zahradniczek as first and second officers of a student corps, riding on Bella the prize cow and alternately singing “Watch on the Rhine” and “Oh thou, my Austria.”