“And the manikin (he was now surrounded by a bronze-brown and blood-rippled general-gray retinue—and Cousin Wolfgang told us afterward he had even seen the blue eyes of the Führer surrounded by his henchmen), the manikin let the hee-ha boom into the heavens for a while and reverberate from the emptied Nibelung city (and Uncle Helmuth bellowed into my ear that such a concentrated, rhythmically organized discharge of sound from such a tremendous human aggregate had to transform itself into energy waves, which charged the willpower accumulator of the manikin up there on the balcony with unbelievable tension). And then the manikin lifted his hand again, and silence reigned—what am I saying: a column of silence descended from the heavens and pressed down upon the human cake and choked every sound . . .

“and the manikin began to speak (and his voice thundered through the aggregate of the many hundreds of loudspeakers suspended among the chestnut candles, and his voice was almost as tremendous as the roar of the mass monster),

“the manikin began to speak and he said, ‘I . . .’

“and whether it was the fault of the metallic tone of the loudspeakers or the rapscallion baritone of the manikin or his understandably profound emotion (for, after long years of struggle, he was back in his homeland for the first time, returning triumphally as her greatest son—recognized at last in his greatness and at last victorious)—

“in any event, this ‘I,’ this ‘Ich,’ came out as a shaky umlauted ‘Üch’—and was instantly reattacked by the driving hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha of the beast, a human tumor—

“and it was repeated lamentably: ‘Üch . . .’ And once again, the roaring predator’s breath of the monster, a human metastasis, pounced upon this yearning umlaut and yanked it down and into its panting hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .

“and the manikin courageously reiterated his lamentable ‘Üch . . .’

“the tension of the willpower accumulator did not yield, but the record evidently was scratched or cracked: the needle kept hopping in the same groove: ‘Üch . . .’ Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . . ‘Üch . . .’ Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha. ‘Üch . . .’ Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . . ‘Üch . . .’ Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .

“and finally the manikin managed to blurt out, ‘Oy am sooo happppy. . .’

“But this was just so much blubbering: it sounded squashed and washed out and dull, like a fart in the bathtub: vanderLubbevander-LubbevanderLubbe . . .

“Yet the thing that rose grandly to the heavens, where it was eerily registered for the rest of my life, was that apocalyptic cry, rising heart-burstingly above everything else, that toad’s croak: ‘Üch . . .’—oh no, no majestic manifestation of sovereign self-assurance, but a fluttery call for help, which rose, forsaken, from the fermenting human dough: a cry for help from this very mass of people.

•

“The manikin had vanished from the balcony. And the human dough kept palpitating in its resonant, million-throated hee-ha, hee-ha, heeha. . .