Fine. I had no other choice but to feel ashamed. I had not only hurt a friend’s tender feelings but, far worse, transgressed against a tendency of the zeitgeist, against the collective desire to forget.

For such was the situation in that legendary wintertide. People were willing to forget. The world was gray, but it was to be reborn. Yesterday was only a legend now. It had nothing to do with today.

There was, of course, a terrible myth about it. Everyone knew the myth and was burdened with it, as if haunted by the memory of a bad dream. A deeply gnawing malaise, a dull, irrefutable sense of guilt, a constant reminder of an incomprehensible fall of man—this lay at the bottom of reality, padding it darkly and also casting its shadow into the future.

Everyone knew: never again—even if the miraculous should happen, and the houses rose again from the rubble cities, the streets became filled again with the hustle and bustle of people, and there were all kinds of comforts again, some kinds of fullness and all kinds of change and variety, as well as summer skies, warmth, sunshine, instead of just frost and worry and gray wretchedness under hills of debris—never again would the world be the same as it had been an unimaginably long time ago (only yesterday, before its last great decline).

That much was certain. The world had been reborn—but a shade grayer and bleaker. There would be no more carefree atmosphere, no cheery optimism, no happiness that did not taste slightly ashen . . .

But even though everyone knew that lightheartedness, joy, and optimism were lost for all time, everyone pretended not to know for sure why and how they had been lost.

The dead—it wasn’t the dead. We sow our grain in the dust of the dead. It was not the huge murdering. People have murdered since the world began. People will be murdering tomorrow. So, then, what was it?

•

In those days, snow fell from the iron sky in nastily beautiful crystals, and it bit painfully into the anemic eyelids of the lost, who trudged through the rubble fields with ashen faces and with sharp shoulders pulled up to their ears because of the cold and grief and misery, and the snow pitted and patted the frost-chewed ruin of a city into a glittering white-furred Arctic, over which the charnel-house reality of yesterday hung like the northern lights.

Nothing was forgotten as yet (though everything was withdrawn into the mystical). Death still followed one step behind everyone like an aide-de-camp. Hamburg was stalked by the so-called rubble killer, who strangled his victims with a wire noose. They were found in collapsed rear buildings, stark naked and frozen stiff, with laced-in throats and bluish-red faces, tongues and eyes popping out of them like medieval gargoyles. No one knew the victims, no one knew where they’d come from, where they belonged, or where they’d been going. Hamburg, the Gateway to the World, a world that had become so suffocatingly confined, was a crossroads now for countless uprooted beings, who, with their lost papers, had also forfeited their names, their backgrounds, their reality. Their murderer too lived among us, together with the many others. And now, twenty years later, gazing up at the rectangle of blue sky over the air shaft of a lousy cheap hotel on the place des Ternes in Paris, I felt as if I could have been that murderer—not necessarily the murderer of the nameless victims during the Hamburg rubble period but the murderer of my life-dream, the assassin of the promise into which I was born, into which every human being is born . . .