Yet, the basement rat is not intimidated. It scurries out of its corner and leaps at him, hurls itself at one of his leg columns and embraces it in a perfect tackle—straight out of Yale. A middle linebacker hit like that will shake Congress, will be discussed for decades at the White House . . . but the avenging angel isn’t in the mood today (maybe his Fräulein gave him a dose of the clap, or a superior chewed him out for having a hint of five o’clock shadow or not having the dewy scent of Mennen). He merely swings out his leg (“Fuck off, you bastard!”)—and the rat flies through space with a whine, landing in its corner, crumpling in pain, wrapped up, burrowed up in its rags, and its face peeps up, that blob of slime, and it is the dismayed, deeply frightened face, marked by utter sorrow and utter injustice, of an abused child with huge injured eyes, which comprehend nothing and accuse the incomprehensible—

and this child says, tonelessly, hopelessly, desperately, in a small, soft, child’s voice, “But it’s you who taught me to be a smart boy . . .”

1948, autumn, Munich-Geiselgasteig.

To get the feeling that I live in a dream world, I wouldn’t need the junk and the false magic of this movie world: palaces consisting only of façades, rooms with only two walls, singers interrupted in their singing, dropping their arms in the middle of the most theatrical gesture, closing the mouths that had just been snapping at the air as though hunting an invisible fly—while their voices keep right on singing dulcetly in playback until the sound engineer interrupts and spools them back in a whistling monkey jibber for replay . . . I wouldn’t need the suspension of logic in the lapse of time: the film stories narrated back and forth, a mishmash of events, the end filmed first and the beginning at the end. Or the lack of division between fiction and reality: Robinson Crusoe, Madame Dubarry, and Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud all joining me for lunch at my table in the canteen, each of them totally immersed in his part, whereas, in front of the camera, they are embarrassingly the disguised actors Meyer, Müller, and Lembke. Everyday life outside, beyond this world of shadow and folly, is no less a surrealistic dream.

The city of Munich is still lying in its mortar dust under the intact Bavarian postcard sky, with buildings broken out of the streets like teeth from a carious mouth. But the gaps now exert a magical lure. The rubble fields are gilded, they once again have a tangible realty value. New buildings are sure to proliferate shortly: business fortresses, office palaces, tenement barracks, twice, thrice, ten times bigger than the houses and buildings that used to stand here and have sunken into debris, ten times more efficient in their use of space, divided up like honeycombs, yielding ten times more rent, so that new capital is quickly created to tear down whatever still survives on either side and replace it with buildings that grow high, ten times, twenty times bigger, roomier . . .