And in March of the year 1938, my schooldays were practically yesterday. I owe it to Stella’s generous hand that my clothing no longer had the bleak, fermenting stench of breakfast bread and pubescent urine and blackboard erasers from the classroom—a stench I had only just recently escaped with a high school diploma that bore the misleading title of “maturity certificate.” And hence, it would be quite wrong to assume that I could have discerned a sign of Satan in the devil’s tongue with the swastika poison-pill in the white circle (which, in those March days, would soon be dangling, fiery red, not only from the City Hall but also from the tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, from the Stick-in-Iron House, from Sickartburg’s and van der Nuell’s botched-up opera house, from the hotels on the Ring, from the Head of Cabbage Building of the Vienna Secession, from the Diana Bath and Main Post Office, and generally from every flagpole and lightning rod and every broomstick thrust out of a skylight and every window bolt and shutter hook of the city of Vienna . . . If there was anything devilish about it, then it was some delightfully Viennese diabolatry. The dangling red rag looked like the red tongue lolling out of the raisin-eyed, almond-croissant fig-skull of the prune Krampus, Santa’s hellish little helper, whom the Viennese give to one another as pre-Christmas presents on St. Nicholas’s day. And this was familiar and festive. Vienna in those ice cold late winter days was as festive as at St. Nicholas’s Feast, celebrating anachronistically a pre-Christmas festival going way back to pagan times . . . For you are not going to try to tell me that what made my flower woman dance across New Market like a whipped top was the thought of incorporating a few goitered peasants of Ötztal and a few Styrian cider-heads into a Germany already free of hoarders and Jews, waving its wheat and building its Autobahn, a Germany that could at last drink Alpine milk. Her engagement with the world and politics was about on my level . . . No, no. Something far more mystical, more atavistic, had transported this troll in tulip-bulb guise, making it whirl like a fat fly whose wings have been ripped out. Vienna was celebrating the empty festival of a new era . . . I’ve already told you: The sun had halted invisibly in the universe during those days. God took a new breath, and that which was happening happened.

“It happened on the second of the three days on which the sun did not appear in the sky (although it gave all its light, all its bright radiance—but not itself or its warmth. It came to pass that the emptied city filled up with human beings again—pig swill, I can tell you: a compactness, a suffocating excess of people. Never before had Vienna choked so much humankind out of itself. It rolled out of all the streets, foamed across all the squares, filled every cubic yard of free space from Hütteldorf to Mariahilf to Schwarzenberg Square. It hung in clusters from the cast-iron poles of street candelabra, was baked into druses on the wall cornices, proliferated in umbels out of every window frame, tasseled over the railing of every balcony, and it seethed and simmered. A human gruel so thick that the spoon stood up in it (as in fairy tales about poor people living it up for once) . . . What had driven them out into the streets? The Reich Chancellor and Führer was coming.