But for us, if you please, this was once the sweet core of the world, a sturdy world, a world whose morbid charm and kitschy beauty you and your kind could scarcely have come to know in their juicy freshness, not after the steel tempest of WWII. Despite the efforts of people behind the times like Schwab and little old me, you could at best assimilate those values into Disneyland. Indeed, it was a wonderworld of many-towered cities, teeming with colorful people in colorful costumes (bourgeoises placidly strutting about among them, the biggest one a man with a skew nose, clipped mustache, polka-dot bow tie and dachshund: a man and his dog tried and tested in disorder and early sorrow). Our souls lived in that old world of faraway times, when Nuremberg was renowned for its Lebkuchen and its toy boxes, not for its trials and the subsequent gallows: the gingerbread houses crowded in intricate confusion around the cute dignity of the stepped town-hall gables, shadowed by the heavenward soaring of cathedrals. When the intimacy of town and country would be enjoyed in an Easter promenade along the city walls (with many-voiced bells ringing for Beethoven’s deaf ears and the seductive devil playing around as Schopenhauer’s black poodle). When the vast countryside was lovely with its silent lakes and ponds reflecting the cloud castles of the minnesingers and the poetic Wittelsbachs on the mountains. The lead-glistening light of storm-brewing, grain-ripening summer afternoons long ago; the murmuring of brooks under alders and hazelnut bushes, from which beautiful Melusina peers out, palely glimmering in the evening, when the birdsongs go silent and the wan sky over the forest has kindled the first star. Melusina, mind you, and not the radioactive refuse of the nearest chemical factory . . . And Alpine peaks, whose glaciers shine over King Laurin’s rose garden and not over the Munich–Venice highway, which even South Tirolian separatists approve of. The fragrance of firs over Fontane’s sandy marches and Stifter’s timber forest of spruces, amidst the mourning torches of cypresses at Duino and on D’Annunzio’s Versiglia shores. And Mozart, Bach, and Handel, and crisp golden-brown Viennese Backhendl with fresh green lettuce . . .

Right, Mr. Brodny, old pal? That was Europe for us. Or rather, that was us. We were Europe. We carried it within us, in our thoughts and feelings, in the self-assurance of everything we did, the way the French carry France and the hard city of Paris within themselves, though with the slight difference that we, at that time, were alive, were made of flesh and blood. Europe—that was the native soil of our style, continuously producing new forms, our always definite, specific essence, the this-and-no-other way of our existence.