Sometimes I even did a detailed drawing of the scene on soft-blue graph paper in my mathematics notebook (I was regarded as artistically gifted), thus allowing my neighbors to partake of my lack of nationalistic conviction. And, although they enjoyed my vulgarities with the boyish taste for the trivial, they never left me in doubt that they despised me for this lack of a sense of belonging to the German Nation: I was a man without a father, a man without a country, and I did not share the intense feeling of the era: the collective urge to eliminate violently the particularistic old and strive toward some universalizing new, whatever it may be, so long as it promised the happy absorption of the individual into the community of the many, the most, the very most, everyone. At that time, dear friend, when a brotherly—permit me to say, a Brother Cain–like—Germany lit the torches that blazed over the twelve-year Third Reich of our Austrian compatriot Adolf Hitler and were even supposed to light the way home for us—at that time, in the world-historic, highly significant year 1933, when you were dwelling in that legendary Berlin, which I yearned for because of George Grosz’s drawings and Cousin Wolfgang yearned for because the Nietzschean superman was allegedly coming into being there—at that time, I say, the younger generation in Austria was afflicted by the collective urge to unite, to unify, to become one, all for one and one for all, above all with our brethren in the not-yet-achieved Reich; and it was indeed a beautiful, noble urge, based on an ancient dream of humanity: the dream of the New Jerusalem, the dream of building the city of mankind, ANTHROPOLIS . . . Nothing could have been further from the minds of the credulous youth than the realization that the cities would die precisely because, with all the striving toward one another, the uniting and the unifying of one and all, they had regrettably lost the individual. While spiritually building the city of mankind, ANTHROPOLIS, they had unfortunately lost Anthropos . . . and although a few know-it-all individuals had long seen this coming and feared it, their warning cries faded without echo: the roar of the wind of time drowned them out: the spirit of the time was more powerful than the minds of the time. In any case, my memory of those days is transfigured by an unnameable promise that was held in the breathable air: even gray Vienna was filled with it, the way a foggy day is filled with the gold of the sunshine in the blue sky above. You, with all your knowledge of cultural history, surely know what I mean: after all, even the short-lived style of the era contains the optimism of a humanity that is about to shape a new world: the futuristic elements in art deco, right? . . . Well, I don’t have to tell you, do I; you always knew it, and you certainly know it now: at that time, a new era was looming, everyone sensed it in the year of our LORD 1933.