“and flattened it again into a shallowly surging roar, for now the manikin was suddenly in the midst of the human dough and cutting through it.

“This time, he sliced through it like a shark’s fin, slowly and calmly—after all, he was entirely in his element. He stood upright and exposed in his bulletproof but open Mercedes, but neither the car nor the cops encrusting it were visible, they were kneaded into the fermenting dough. Only the manikin loomed above it and sliced closer, ringed by the roaring madness of ecstasy all around him. And he kept slicing closer through the human dough, closer and closer, toward me, until I could look into his eyes.

“He had put his oversize doorman’s cap on again and was snuffling morosely on his minimal mustache. Very slowly, like one of the automatons in the Prater that begin to move when you hit the bull’s eye on their bellies, he lifted and lowered his right arm, displaying his slightly curved palm. His left hand held tight to his belt buckle, as though he were afraid that his pants might fall down. He seemed withdrawn, pensive, and very solitary. And his eyes radiated, sky-blue and foolish.

•

“Eight years later I managed to witness another historic event, which, after this and several subsequent ones, more or less summed things up.

•

“At the defendants’ bench in the Nuremberg court, one defendant gets to his feet, eerily lizard-like, a saurian emerging from the primal ooze: Rudolf Hess, the Führer’s deputy. He lets his arm move up in order to be sworn in as a witness with a lamentably raised forefinger. It is impossible to say whether he is merely pretending to be crazy or really is crazy. If he’s just pretending, his act is brilliant, with a highly effective dramatic climax at just the right moment.

“It is the tormenting hour when the defendants make concluding statements before judgment. For nine months, this hour has been marked in all minds as a coming event. For nine months, they have looked forward to it impatiently. More and more hope has adhered to this hour. The hope that these final words of the defendants would make it clear what monsters and monstrosities have been on trial here. The hope that this leadership elite of the Third Reich would finally own up to being the true perpetrators of the crimes they are being tried for here: the destruction and conflagration of a continent; the rape of a civilization professing Christian principles; the bloody besmirching of the name of a once great nation until the end of history; the final annihilation of faith in the moral reliability of mankind.

“For nine months in Nuremberg, people have been waiting, in greater and greater despair, for one of the twenty-two prisoners at the bar to step forth from behind the mask of a banal average man, a mask that has made it impossible to comprehend that he—an irreproachable officer, an excellent office manager, a solicitous paterfamilias—had allowed what happened to happen, a mask that made it hard to believe it really had happened and had not just been dreamed or invented by sick minds. Nine months, prolonged more and more unbearably, with weeks of tedious readings of documents and interrogations of witnesses, days in which horror has become an everyday routine and finally a matter of the bleakest boredom. And throughout these nine months, one has looked forward to the moment when some dark confession, some satanic word, some perverse thought—expressed defiantly or involuntarily—might reveal that a drive, a desire for evil had been operating, and that the dreadful things exposed and testified to every day had not taken place only because they had not been prevented.