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Truly, I have never been concerned with such possessions, nor do I care about them today. I don’t even know the location of my mother’s grave. (Presumably, she was fished out of the pond in Bessarabia and then buried somewhere; Uncle Ferdinand had been too tactful to touch on it, and I too cowardly to ask). Nor would I lift a finger to find out whether any sort of paternal legacy has devolved upon me, which apparently is meant to be the origin of humanity (assuming I could determine which of my mother’s countless lovers can claim the questionable honor of having sired me). My cousin Wolfgang, as I have said, lies in Vienna’s Central Graveyard, to which nothing draws me; and I was not informed whether the corpses were salvaged from the basement air-raid shelter of the building in Vienna’s Twelfth District where, in the summer of 1944, a bomb forever ripped my rather worn tie to my foster parents. And so it has remained.

Thus, facing the hill of flowers into which my brother Schwab had been transformed, I could not understand why his further transformation into the contents of an urn, and eventually into humus under a grave slab, should bind me to the Hamburg soil, which had not succeeded in binding me to itself, even though I had spent years wearing out my shoes upon it—usually during long walks when I brooded about the enigmatic fate that had cast me ashore here in the first place.

True, my dead friend, while alive, had tried everything in his efforts to convince me it had happened so that I could tell stories, to narrate—but what? A glance at the faces of the philistines here informed me that it was bound to lead to a misunderstanding—whatever it was.

For they would again be the victors and somehow turn it into grist for their mills, whether I told them edifying tales as Nagel did or tried to play the little insect nagging at their consciences, even though they kept swarms of them for their own titillation:

—the a capella choir of Jeremiahs, to whom everyday German life assigns the cultural business as a sort of natural preserve so that German Cassandra cries will not be missing from the swan song of the West: in the tenor of the eternal (and, alas, ubiquitously betrayed) values of beauty, goodness, and truth; in the baritone of old, traditional humanitarian principles (that not even a dog observes); in the bass of generally (albeit rhetorically) accepted categorical imperatives—

and yet so very dramatic in the gesture of the decent man who has taken the globe upon his shoulders and now summons the whole world to help bear responsibility when it rolls off; so intimately moved by himself in the role of powerless knight whom no one heeds, so that no eye in the public refrains from widening in fear and pity, and no lips refrain from agreeing: “How true! What a daring and global vision! How terribly ineluctable!”—