never, not even in my most frightening dreams, have I experienced such solitude, such an abyss of desolation. This is no ruin of a city, this is the negative of the very notion of a city. The existential void par excellence. No, they can’t possibly live there, not even a rat could live there now, it would become moonstruck, it would be frightened of ghosts, it would have to see a psychiatrist . . .

in the daytime, it’s still bearable (although only just). A rubble field, yes indeed, but what a rubble field. Just let someone try to move freely through such a filthy anachronism: a medieval town of gingerbread houses shattered by high-powered bombs and razed to the very foundation walls. It’s almost like a murder in a nursery. Incomprehensible, repulsively brutal. A child’s hair and bloody brain-mush sticking to a smashed rocking horse . . . and crickets are chirping from the steppe grass that has grown out of the crib . . .

you can spend hours here strolling through the brick dust without hearing any sound other than this ghostly summer chirping of crickets, without seeing anything stir. Aside from the ghostly chirping, everything is deathly silent here in Nuremberg’s old city. You tower head and shoulders above the fragments of old houses and churches. Beyond the rubble cone that gently slopes up into a hill, the castle still hovers, as though placed there from a box of toys. And at its foot (better: at its roots), a few narrow-chested half-timbered walls remain upright, a quarter of a weary old gable roof hangs askew from a chimney pillar, and timberwork torn from the walls is still supporting half of a doll’s room. It is as though in that terrible night when fire and explosives came pouring from the heavens, the tiny Gothic houses of this town tried to flee to the old stronghold to crowd, panicked, under its protection—and the destruction caught up with them before they could get even halfway there. And the ineffable, inconceivable horror ripped them apart, halving them, quartering them, mutilating them . . . Now they stand in shreds, rooted to the spot as if by some dreadful curse . . .

I sat down on the defense wall of the castle, letting my legs dangle, and gazing—gazing. It was a splendid day, a day in early autumn, full of misty light, and the demolished town of Nuremberg lay at my feet, flattened into its ground plan. The picturesque, medievally narrow world of nooks and crannies was vast and empty, topograpically marked off, abstractly drawn in two dimensions, like a blueprint. Only at the root of the castle trunk were those three or four ghosts of gingerbread houses still looming, caught by the spell as they fled . . .

and they set me to thinking: I had already seen them somewhere, once. I knew their contours, sharp as if etched in silverpoint, and this faded coloring, the watercolor in the dusty wall-yellows and old brick-reds of the rubble . . . I had once painfully absorbed all this—but when? where? . . .