Thus it was that Schwab, an editor at Scherping Publishers, set out to find me and talk me into writing books. After all, it was reconstruction time, and literature too had to be created ex nihilo.

•

I also don’t know whether to interpret it as symbolic that my road to writing began in the whorehouse. But I can see Schwab when we met for the first time. He was taut and lanky, like all of us at that time; the scant wartime and postwar diet suited us. His hair was cropped short, and his thick glasses made him seem as if he were sorry he hadn’t died at Langemarck. He did actually appear to interpret the origin of our acquaintanceship as symbolic. He handed me the pages Scherping had found in the whorehouse and said that he, Schwab, had read them with the greatest pleasure. He then made it clear to me with some embarrassment that he knew where Scherping had gotten hold of them, and added with a heart-winning smile, “I envy you your right of domicile there.” My brother Schwab.

I knew why the burghers had piled up such a lovely flower hill for him here. They were tied to him in the same way they were tied to me. Their act of taking possession of him as one of their own and the dreadful benevolence that crept into their eyes whenever they looked at me were one and the same. They saw us as failures—and that was why they identified with us. We were all failures from the start.

•

I could now look up and peer into their eyes and see myself in their eyes as a lotus-eater among lotus-eaters. We had all forgotten where we came from and where we were going. We were all whirling in the whirlwind of our delusion, our epoch’s delusion, floating, sailing, reeling, plunging, and soaring up again on the pinions of our fictions and illusions, whirling chaotically in an unreal carnival of realities, while around us the squadrons of horlà fortresses grew into the sky and the all-covering cement would soon wipe out our very last traces. And with us, our finest dream visions would come to an end: the gardens and the cities, the Eden of regulated nature and Babylon within it, and the New Jerusalem to be built, the city of mankind, ANTHROPOLIS.

“Peace be with us, Brother Schwab,” I said to the flower hill at my feet, “once again you’ve imparted a valuable lesson to me with your generous reconciliatory gesture under your white flowery splendor: we’ve got thousands of reasons, but no right and no occasion anymore to despise the burghers here, because all of us have died—you may be a little more dead than we are, here in your blossoming grove; but these are differences of degree; in essence, it’s the same: we are all of us dead. We—you and I and our true blood relatives, our contemporaries in the highway rest stops—we can now make peace with one another. Granted, they muddled up our lives with their shaman guiles, these burghers, these bastards of the bloody fucking middle classes, they screwed up our crèche period in Nagel’s garden house with their currency cuts, and in the insanity of their fictions they destroyed beautiful Babylon and all the even more beautiful plans for the New Jerusalem. But in all fairness, we have to admit that we, and those like us, eagerly beat our drums in accompaniment. The drumbeat was mostly confusing, and that only helped them. Yet it was never clear whether we weren’t just beating their rhythm, and indeed beating it most effectively whenever we thought we were drumming our sheer hatred of them out of ourselves.