“This is the final, macabre joke of the middle-class jokesters: the hara-kiri of the brains. The voiding of the contents of brains for a trichinosis inspection before blue philistine eyes. The presentation of the no longer expressible SELF in its timeless presence, in which the past and the future are shuffled together, memories and wishes, traumas, anxieties, and fears, like a well-shuffled pack of cards, and formless, proliferating with millions of its kind in a fermenting dough—SELF split up into millions and proliferating into a monstrous cancerous tumor with rapid hybrid growth—an explosion in slow motion—

“and we have tried to keep living individually, have stubbornly and contrarily kept believing in ourselves and our mission, have tried to fulfill our promise, as if we didn’t know any of this—

“and yet we knew it ever since the days that cut us off from the first half of our lives. I, at any rate, knew it since 1938.

•

“It was on a day in Vienna—the last of the three days on which, as I stubbornly maintain, the sun stood still in the heavens. The Führer and Reich Chancellor of the now truly greater Greater German Reich was staying at the Hotel Imperial—the world comes to an end nobly and symbolically!—and now he wanted to show himself to the ecstatic people of the Ostmark. Not just whooshing by, as on the second day—through the dividing sea of the people, hurrying as though fleeing—but static at last, lapidary, and entire: that is, as a bust. For unless, in accordance with nature, we place a great personality on four legs by inserting a horse underneath him, then he is most effective as a bust—there must be something wrong with our extremities, they seem humanly convincing only on crucified bodies.

“The Führer and Reich Chancellor knew this, of course. He wanted to show himself to his Ostmark people as monumental, as rut-breasted, so to speak: I embrace you, all you millions. Let me kiss the whole wide world! (In the enveloping battles later on, the text was varied: Let me kill the whole wide world!) And the ecstatic people of Vienna came swarming out in oppressively full attendance to throw themselves at this bust. The Heldenplatz was packed full. Vienna was empty again. As shiny as a shell washed ashore. It became clear what a city really is: this enormous hive, this once so beautifully formed and now stone honeycomb, proliferating hybridly and pumping millions of human beings through itself in a pulsating osmosis—but only so long as it’s alive, of course: and once it dies, it’s nothing but a many-pored crustacean shell grown into and carved out of the earth, produced by the unconsciously guided will to form of the particular species of life-form that lived within: witness of this strange collective urge toward form (which WHAT directs? WHO? With what intention? According to what plan? To what end? . . .