“Okay, Austria had been annexed. Vienna was coming home into the Reich. All well and good. This was—I can only repeat it—not so surprising or overwhelming. People had known that this would happen. It had always been the most ardent desire of the people of the Alpine lands. The cowherd in the picture in my classroom depicted it very graphically. Every second town councilman, to the Aryan core of his being, had always been stuck up to the hilt inside Germania . . . Of course, the national guard had fired cannon at workers’ bastions and policemen had beaten their rubber clubs with equal violence on Communists, Jews, and illegal Nazis. But these had been carnival free-for-alls, in which nothing of importance was carried out that had not been carried out in reality long ago. In its mind, its soul, its Eros, Austria, or rather Ostmark, had long been part of Hitler’s Third Reich.

“Well, then, what was happening now? Why had the people of Vienna and the Austrian federal states gone crazy overnight, sizzling in ecstasy, in delirium, foaming over like freshly tapped beer? Certainly not because something long expected had arrived, something long consummated had now finally become evident! . . . No, no. Something more significant was happening. It had something to do with God’s breath, or, if you prefer, with the mysterious whirlwinds that your ancient Greeks talk about in certain speculations on nature . . . In any case: it was happening . . .

“It was happening in a strangely inhuman way—I want to say, in a way that transcended the human. Over the seething human gruel hung its noise, veiling, weaving, echoing—like the croaking of myriad frogs in the ponds around Băneasa during a moon-rapt July night—surging across the dappled surface of thousands and thousands of heads, pulling up the faces. Every cry that mounted, every voice that rose, every word that emerged from a gaping jaw, was caught up and carried further, like a stone hurled flat across a watery surface, danced off with hundreds of thousands of other cries over the ecstatically raised heads. These were no human sounds; this was a telluric din, whole gravel slopes were ricocheting and being covered by ones that were caroming back—and others were covering these . . . And then the spring tide roared up from Mariahilf, coming closer in an eardrum-shredding gush—raging, roaring, thundering ahead of a motorcade that zoomed through the chasm in the wild boiling human gruel, a chasm that opened before it like the Red Sea for the Jews. Pharaoh’s plumed chariots shattered and perished when the walls of water collapsed upon them, sank with broken wheels in the tumult of helplessly struggling horse legs . . . But this time the water opened before them, they passed through with dry feet—and speedily: they flew by like ghosts: three, four, five large black open bulletproof Mercedes escorted by rattling motorcyclists, a couple of plainclothesmen clinging like monkeys off the back of each car; inside the cars, wasp-gold on brown Party-bigwig uniforms, blood-red trickle-stripes on generals’ uniforms . . . And in the middle, standing upright, his skull weighed down by an oversize doorman’s cap, automatically throwing up an arm like a jumping jack whose other arm has been ripped off—HE: crookedly pasted ponce hair over a doughy face, snuffling morosely on the small black stench of his mini-mustache . . . It all whooshes by, and the flood closes in on you, you sink with pharaoh’s Egyptians, are torn into the depth, struggle, are struck, punched, kicked, and poked, squashed; you gasp for air and your throat is full of your shriek, you choke it up, throw it up with stars before your eyes. The spring tide has rolled over you, and around you everything is swimming, houses, towers, treetops, streetlights, the human gruel in the writhings (afterwrithings) of a collective orgasm. The men have dark circles under their eyes, their mouths quiver slackly, the women have wet spots in their panties, their hair hangs over their faces. Please explain that to me! Something isn’t right here. This isn’t the way of an explicable world, the kind that’s in the news every morning . . . Even back then, the newspapers were incapable of describing what had happened, words failed them, reason failed them, common sense—at least mine. All I knew was that I had witnessed a natural event—had known it, in the biblical double meaning of the word. Together with Viennese humankind, the Alpine German humankind, I had known Nature: in a tremendous mass coitus—my ears were still buzzing, my knees still buckling, red circles were still dancing in front of my eyes . . . But what do you want: we had known Mother Nature: BIG, STRONG, HIGH-HANDED Mother Nature . . .