“We should never have forgotten these things—we who sought our salvation in writing. We would have become more tolerant, at least more reticent. We would even have found it, our salvation, if we had realized that this very search for salvation in the art of writing (or any other art) is a symptom of the times of our world within the world and not an individual destiny. It would have opened our eyes to the act of dragging the past into presence that we were committing by deluding ourselves into thinking we were something special—or even: especially alive: Artists, creative people—according to Dr. Sigmund Freud nothing more than neurotics, who are capable of healing their own neuroses—magari! Nagel for the Nobel Peace Prize! . . . We are quite simply the children of an artistic zeitgeist and not even its firstborn. We are chaff in the wind of time like everyone else in the world around us.

“We are about to wake up when we dream that we’re dreaming—isn’t that so? That was the utterance that made us brothers—do you remember? But did we actually awaken? Instead of resorting to anything (even the destruction of our artistic devices) to prolong our ever-frailer, ever-more-transparent trance, to keep dancing the shaman’s dance of artists, we late-born senile Young Writers, we sorcerer’s apprentices of the anthracite-gray magic of the Word should have realized what we were and what we were doing.

“The way we feel the wind of the zeitgeist when it barely comes up as a breeze, and the arms of our mills move with it instantly, rather than waiting till the storm shakes the trees and makes the fields bow down to the earth—how proud we were of this ability of ours! How we fancied knowing, before others knew, that the time was past when one could speak about the individual and his plights in the collective of others; or that one feels as stir-crazy in the solitary confinement of any Middle Kingdom as in the terrifying capsule of the SELF; and that the knock signals sent from one to the other merely knock them apart all the more thoroughly, these individual worlds within the world; that here too the cells begin to divide and to proliferate, and the entangled circles of the individual worlds, Middle Kingdoms, and Fatherlands fall apart into monads—so that one could no longer speak about man in general, but only of the collective and the completely isolated, unconnected SELF . . . What bitter dignity haven’t we derived for ourselves from this knowledge—but have we grasped the consequences? No! The intellectual in society—or even: The artist and his subject—aren’t these ridiculously antiquated topics? . . . The sorrows of young Werther when he reached for a quill instead of a pistol—for instance, his despair about the things that tried to express themselves out of him and the things that he succeeded in expressing