“Back then, in Vienna (and we must not forget: it was always the same weather, beribboned with springtime blue but arctically cold, and the sun stood still in the heavens), back then this honeycomb was pumped empty, down to the last rat hole. Anyone with legs or even without, anyone who could at least manage to creep or crawl or drag himself along on crutches or on the leather seat of his pants, or roll himself along on a rolling board, or be supported, carried, or pulled along by a nurse, a son-in-law, a daughter, a grandchild, on litters or in a mackintosh sack; everyone, down to the last man, the last woman, the last child, the last old man, the last old hag not yet dead in some cellar was sucked out of his home and had flooded to Heldenplatz, Heroes’ Square, and was damming up into an enormous gruel of human flesh, thickening into a human dough strewn with particolored sugar and proliferating and fermenting and rising higher and higher: the horses of the rescuer from the Turks and of the victor of Aspern reared in vain to escape this human dough, which welled and swelled up to them and eventually covered them, a dreadful cake of millions of individual creatures—and it roared.

“The human dough palpitated and roared in short, gasping breaths at the icy blue sky stretching overhead: Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .

“The individual voice might have been articulating the flower woman’s hysterical Siegheil! on the first day; but in millionfold accumulation, it was a fluttering, shallow-breathed roar. And it rose all the way to the celestial vault, which sent back a ruthlessly icy smile, and the roar reverberated back, echoed hauntingly through the empty city, which had now become its own charnel house: Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .

“And then it choked, whirling and retching, bellowing in a vomitatio that turned the innards inside out and burst into the cosmos . . .

“for far, far beyond the vast square, over there on the sandstone-colored façade of the imperial castle, where the thick black-and-white swastika spiders of the national insignia billowed restlessly in a tangle amid the bloody surge of flags, a microscopically tiny, mustard-brown manikin had stepped out on a tiny balcony and shoved his chest against the balustrade and raised a tiny arm for the Nazi salute and turned his minimal tiny head (now without the oversize doorman’s cap but merely smeared by the skewed ink-wiper of a strand of hair), turned it to and fro, slowly—a tiny mustard-brown particle, a single part in the proliferating human dough (think how infinitely tiny his snuffling pleasure-seeking mustache must have been!) . . .

•

“You must forgive me, but I was really standing very far away—or rather, hanging very far away from the manikin, hanging in a cluster of people, with Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma, on the shaft of a candelabrum beyond the vast square at the gates of the Volksgarten. We had not been able, alas, to conquer any better places in the human dough; Cousin Wolfgang, however, had been rewarded for hush-hush underground loyalty and, freezing in the white shirt and black-booted trousers of the national warrior, he was permitted to stand in the middle of his marching column barely a hundred and fifty yards away from the Führer and palpitate in the rhythmic Siegheil! of the mass beast—again in rhythm, I say. For after the mustard-brown manikin on the far, far balcony let the booming incense of the shouts rise to the heavens for a while, he lifted his hand, and the roar was now chanted as a stomping hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .