“and we have tried to keep living individually, have stubbornly and contrarily kept believing in ourselves and our mission, have tried to fulfill our promise, as if we didn’t know any of this—

“and yet we knew it ever since the days that cut us off from the first half of our lives. I, at any rate, knew it since 1938.

•

“It was on a day in Vienna—the last of the three days on which, as I stubbornly maintain, the sun stood still in the heavens. The Führer and Reich Chancellor of the now truly greater Greater German Reich was staying at the Hotel Imperial—the world comes to an end nobly and symbolically!—and now he wanted to show himself to the ecstatic people of the Ostmark. Not just whooshing by, as on the second day—through the dividing sea of the people, hurrying as though fleeing—but static at last, lapidary, and entire: that is, as a bust. For unless, in accordance with nature, we place a great personality on four legs by inserting a horse underneath him, then he is most effective as a bust—there must be something wrong with our extremities, they seem humanly convincing only on crucified bodies.

“The Führer and Reich Chancellor knew this, of course. He wanted to show himself to his Ostmark people as monumental, as rut-breasted, so to speak: I embrace you, all you millions. Let me kiss the whole wide world! (In the enveloping battles later on, the text was varied: Let me kill the whole wide world!) And the ecstatic people of Vienna came swarming out in oppressively full attendance to throw themselves at this bust. The Heldenplatz was packed full. Vienna was empty again. As shiny as a shell washed ashore. It became clear what a city really is: this enormous hive, this once so beautifully formed and now stone honeycomb, proliferating hybridly and pumping millions of human beings through itself in a pulsating osmosis—but only so long as it’s alive, of course: and once it dies, it’s nothing but a many-pored crustacean shell grown into and carved out of the earth, produced by the unconsciously guided will to form of the particular species of life-form that lived within: witness of this strange collective urge toward form (which WHAT directs? WHO? With what intention? According to what plan? To what end? . . .

“You see, friend S.: the difference between our current states of being—mine here at your flower mound, and yours underneath it or perhaps dissolved in the air we breathe, in the heavenly blue with which even this rainy-gray day may be lined—this difference only in degree between two varieties of dead man boils down to the fact that I have to keep asking the same old questions, while you—unlike the pastor, who believes he has an answer to these questions—no longer have to ask them. Witness to your satisfaction that this time it is I who envy you).

•