“for far, far beyond the vast square, over there on the sandstone-colored façade of the imperial castle, where the thick black-and-white swastika spiders of the national insignia billowed restlessly in a tangle amid the bloody surge of flags, a microscopically tiny, mustard-brown manikin had stepped out on a tiny balcony and shoved his chest against the balustrade and raised a tiny arm for the Nazi salute and turned his minimal tiny head (now without the oversize doorman’s cap but merely smeared by the skewed ink-wiper of a strand of hair), turned it to and fro, slowly—a tiny mustard-brown particle, a single part in the proliferating human dough (think how infinitely tiny his snuffling pleasure-seeking mustache must have been!) . . .

•

“You must forgive me, but I was really standing very far away—or rather, hanging very far away from the manikin, hanging in a cluster of people, with Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma, on the shaft of a candelabrum beyond the vast square at the gates of the Volksgarten. We had not been able, alas, to conquer any better places in the human dough; Cousin Wolfgang, however, had been rewarded for hush-hush underground loyalty and, freezing in the white shirt and black-booted trousers of the national warrior, he was permitted to stand in the middle of his marching column barely a hundred and fifty yards away from the Führer and palpitate in the rhythmic Siegheil! of the mass beast—again in rhythm, I say. For after the mustard-brown manikin on the far, far balcony let the booming incense of the shouts rise to the heavens for a while, he lifted his hand, and the roar was now chanted as a stomping hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .

“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 . . .’