At some point, I left a few pages there, the draft to a screenplay presumably, it couldn’t have been anything else back then. Scherping, who was a regular customer of Gisela’s, found these pages, read them, and took them along—ever the publisher. He showed them to Carlotta, who had meanwhile left Witte and had become Scherping’s secretary and dame de compagnie. And Carlotta showed them to Schwab, with whom she was still living in conjugal union then, and said she thought she knew who the author was—we were seeing each other from time to time.

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.