Weser wasn’t wrong. I returned to Berlin in the second week of July to report on my activities and await new instructions. I found the Reichsführer’s and the RSHA’s offices hard hit by the March and April bombings. The Prinz-Albrecht-Palais had been completely destroyed by high-explosive bombs; the SS-Haus was still standing, but only partly, and my office had had to move again, to another annex of the Ministry of the Interior. An entire wing of the Staatspolizei headquarters had burned down, giant cracks zigzagged through the walls, boards blocked up the gaping windows; most of the departments and sections had moved to the suburbs or even distant villages. Häftlinge were still working to repaint the hallways and stairways and clear away the rubble of the destroyed offices; several of them had been killed during a raid in the beginning of May. In town, for the people who stayed, life was hard. There was almost no running water, soldiers delivered two buckets a day to destitute families, no electricity, no gas. The functionaries who still laboriously came to work wrapped scarves around their faces to protect themselves from the perpetual smoke of the fires. Obeying Goebbels’s patriotic propaganda, women no longer wore hats, nor elegant clothing; those who ventured out into the streets wearing makeup were scolded. The big raids with several hundred aircraft had stopped sometime ago; but the little Mosquito attacks continued, unpredictable, exhausting. We had finally launched our first rockets against London, not Speer’s and Kammler’s, but little ones from the Luftwaffe that Goebbels had baptized V-1, for Vergeltungswaffen, “retribution weapons”; they had little effect on English morale, even less on that of our own civilians, much too downcast by the bombings in central Germany and the disastrous news from the front, the successful landings in Normandy, the surrender of Cherbourg, the loss of Monte Cassino, and the debacle at Sebastopol at the end of May. The Wehrmacht was still keeping quiet about the terrible Soviet breakthrough in Byelorussia, few people knew about it, even though rumors were already flying, still short of the truth, but I knew everything, especially that in three weeks the Russians had reached the sea, that the Army Group North was cut off on the Baltic, and that the Army Group Center no longer existed at all. In this glum atmosphere, Grothmann, Brandt’s deputy, gave me a cold, almost scornful welcome, he seemed to want to blame me personally for the poor results of the Hungarian Einsatz, and I let him talk, I was too demoralized to protest. Brandt himself was in Rastenburg with the Reichsführer. My colleagues seemed in utter confusion, no one really knew where he was supposed to go or what he was supposed to be doing. Speer, after his illness, had never tried to contact me again, but I still received copies of his furious letters to the Reichsführer: since the beginning of the year, the Gestapo had arrested more than three hundred thousand people for various offences, including two hundred thousand foreign workers, who had gone to increase the workforce in the camps; Speer was accusing Himmler of poaching his labor and was threatening to go to the Führer. Our other interlocutors were piling up complaints and criticisms, especially the Jägerstab, which believed itself deliberately wronged. Our own letters or requests received only indifferent replies. But that was all the same to me, I read through this correspondence without understanding half of it. Among the pile of mail awaiting me, I found a letter from Judge Baumann: I hastily tore open the envelope, took out a brief note and a photograph. It was a reproduction of an old picture, grainy, slightly blurry, with strongly contrasting tones; one could make out men on horseback in the snow, with disparate uniforms, metal helmets, navy caps, astrakhan hats; Baumann had drawn a cross in ink over one of these men, who was wearing a long coat with an officer’s stripes; his oval, minuscule face was completely indistinct, unrecognizable. On the back, Baumann had written COURLAND, NEAR WOLMAR, 1919. His polite note told me nothing more.

Luck had been with me: my apartment had survived. Once again not a window remained, my neighbor had blocked the openings as well as she could with boards and canvas tarps; in the living room, the windows of the sideboard had been blown out, the ceiling had cracked, and the chandelier fallen; a burned smell stubbornly suffused my bedroom, for the apartment next to mine had caught fire when a firebomb had gone through the window; but it was livable and even tidy: my neighbor, Frau Zempke, had cleaned everything and re-whitewashed the walls to mask the traces of smoke; oil lamps, polished and filled, were lined up on the sideboard; a barrel and several cans of water cluttered up the bathroom. I opened the French windows and all the windows whose frames hadn’t been nailed shut, to take advantage of the late afternoon light, then went downstairs to thank Frau Zempke, to whom I gave some money for her trouble—she would probably have preferred Hungarian sausages, but once again I hadn’t even thought of that—and also coupons, so she could prepare food for me: these, she explained, wouldn’t be of much use, the store where most of them were registered no longer existed, but if I gave her a little more money, she would make do. I went back upstairs. I pulled an armchair in front of the open balcony, it was a calm, beautiful summer evening; of half of the surrounding buildings, only empty, silent façades remained, or piles of rubble, and I contemplated this end-of-the-world landscape for a long time; the park at the foot of the building remained silent, all the children must have been sent out to the country. I didn’t even put on any music, so I could take advantage of this quietness and calm a little. Frau Zempke brought me some sausage, bread, and a little soup, apologizing for not being able to do any better, but that suited me very well, I had gotten some beer at the Staatspolizei bar and I ate and drank with pleasure, caught in the curious illusion of floating on an island, a peaceful haven in the midst of the disaster. After clearing the table, I poured myself a large glass of cheap schnapps, lit a cigarette, and sat down, feeling in my pocket for Baumann’s envelope. But I didn’t take it out right away; I looked at the evening light playing on the ruins, a long, slanting light that turned the limestone façades yellow and passed through the gaping windows to illumine the chaos of charred beams and collapsed walls. In some apartments, you could see traces of the life that had gone on there: a frame with a photograph or a reproduction still hanging on the wall, torn wallpaper, a table half suspended in the void with its red-and-white-checked tablecloth, a column of tile stoves still recessed in the wall on each floor, while all the floors had disappeared. Here and there, people went on living: one could see laundry hanging from a window or a balcony, flowerpots, smoke from a stovepipe. The sun set quickly behind the ravaged buildings, projecting huge, monstrously deformed shadows. This, I said to myself, is what the capital of our eternal Reich is reduced to; whatever happens, we won’t have enough of the rest of our lives to rebuild. Then I set up a few oil lamps next to me and finally took the photograph out of my pocket. This image, I must confess, frightened me: no matter how much I gazed at it, I didn’t recognize this man whose face, under his helmet, was reduced to a white spot, not completely shapeless, you could make out a nose, a mouth, two eyes, but featureless, without distinctive markings, it could have been anyone’s face, and I didn’t understand, as I drank my schnapps, how that could be possible, how, looking at this poorly reproduced, bad photograph, I couldn’t say to myself, instantly, without hesitation, Yes, that is my father, or else, No, that is not my father, such doubt was unbearable to me, I had finished my drink and poured myself another, I still examined the photo, wracked my memory to collect scraps about my father, about his appearance, but it was as if the details were fleeing each other and escaping me, the white spot on the photograph drove them away like two magnet tips with the same polarity, scattered them, corroded them. I didn’t have a single picture of my father: sometime after his departure, my mother had destroyed them all. And now this ambiguous, elusive photograph was ruining whatever memories remained in me, was replacing his living presence with a blurry face and a uniform. Overcome with rage, I tore the photograph into pieces and threw them off the balcony. Then I emptied my glass and immediately poured another. I was sweating, I wanted to jump out of my skin, which felt too tight for my anger and my anguish. I got undressed and sat down naked in front of the open balcony, without even bothering to put out the lamps. Holding my sex and my scrotum in one hand, like a little wounded sparrow picked up in a field, I emptied glass after glass and smoked furiously; when the bottle was empty, I took it by the neck and hurled it far away, toward the park, without worrying about possible passersby. I wanted to keep throwing things, to empty the apartment, toss out the furniture. I went to splash a little water on my face and, raising an oil lamp, looked at myself in the mirror: my features were pale, distraught, I had the impression that my face was melting like wax deformed by the heat of my ugliness and hatred, my eyes were gleaming like two black pebbles stuck in the middle of these hideous, insane shapes, nothing held together anymore. I flung my arm back and hurled the lamp against the mirror, which shattered, a little hot oil gushed out and burned my shoulder and neck. I returned to the living room and lay down in a ball on the sofa. I was trembling, my teeth were chattering. I don’t know where I found the strength to go over to my bed, it was certainly because I was dying of cold, I rolled up under the blankets, but that didn’t change much. My skin was crawling, shivers shook my spine, cramps streaked through my neck and made me moan with discomfort, and all these sensations rose up in great waves, carried me away into murky, agitated water, and at each movement I thought it couldn’t get any worse, then I was carried off again and found myself in a place where the previous pains and sensations seemed almost pleasant, a child’s exaggeration. My mouth was dry, I couldn’t unstick my tongue from the pasty coating surrounding it, but I couldn’t even dream of standing up to get some water. I wandered this way for a long time through the dense woods of fever, my body haunted by old obsessions: with the shivers and cramps, a kind of erotic furor traversed my paralyzed body, my anus tingled, I had a painful hard-on, but I couldn’t make the slightest gesture to relieve myself, it was as if I were jerking off with my hand full of ground glass, I let myself be carried by that as by the rest. At certain times, these violent and contradictory currents made me slide into sleep, for anguishing images filled my mind, I was a little naked child crouching and shitting in the snow, and I raised my head to see myself surrounded by riders with stony faces, in coats from the Great War but carrying long spears rather than rifles, and silently judging me for my inadmissible behavior, I wanted to flee, but it was impossible, they formed a circle around me, and in my terror I floundered in my shit, I soiled myself as one of the riders, with blurry features, detached from the group and advanced toward me. But that image disappeared, I must have drifted in and out of sleep and these oppressive dreams the way a swimmer, on the sea’s surface, rises above and sinks below the limit between air and water, sometimes I rediscovered my useless body, which I would have liked to get rid of the way you shed a wet coat, then I set off into another muddled, confused narrative, where foreign policemen were pursuing me, bundling me into a patrol wagon that went over a cliff, I’m not sure, there was a village, stone houses stacked in tiers on a slope, and around them pine trees and maquis, a village perhaps in the Provençal backcountry, and I wanted that, a house in this village and the peace it could have brought me, and at the end of long adventures my situation found its resolution, the threatening policemen disappeared, I had bought the lowest house in the village, with a garden and a terrace and then the pine forest around it, oh sweet cliché country postcard image, and then it was night, there was a shower of shooting stars in the sky, meteorites burned with a pink or red gleam and fell slowly, vertically, like the dying sparks of fireworks, a large shimmering curtain, and I watched that, and the first of these cosmic projectiles touched the earth and at that place strange plants began to grow, multicolor organisms, red, white, spotted, thick and fat like certain kinds of seaweed, they grew larger and rose to the sky at a crazed speed, till they were several hundred meters high, scattering clouds of seeds that in turn gave birth to similar plants that grew upward but crushed everything around them by the force of their irresistible growth, trees, houses, cars, and terrified, I watched a giant wall of these plants filling the horizon of my sight and stretching in all directions, and I understood that this event that had seemed so harmless to me was in fact the final catastrophe, these organisms, come from outer space, had found our earth and our atmosphere to be an environment that was infinitely favorable to them and they were multiplying at an insane rate, occupying all the free space and crushing everything beneath them, blindly, without animosity, simply by the force of their urge to live and grow, nothing could check them, and in a few days the earth would disappear beneath them, everything that had made our life and our history and our civilization was going to be wiped away by these greedy vegetables, it was idiotic, an unfortunate accident, but there would never be time to find a way to counterattack, humanity was going to be erased. The meteorites continued falling and shimmering, the plants, moved by the mad, out-of-control life within them, rose to the sky, strove to fill the entire atmosphere, so intoxicating to them. And I understood then, but perhaps it was later on, when I came up from this dream, that this was right, that it was the law of every living thing, every organism just wants to live and reproduce, without malice, Koch’s bacilli, which had eaten away the lungs of Pergolesi and of Purcell, of Kafka and of Chekhov, had no animosity for us, they didn’t wish their hosts harm, but it was the law of their survival and their development, just as we fight those bacilli with medicines that we invent every day, without hatred, for our own survival, and our whole life is thus built on the murder of other creatures who also want to live, the animals we eat, the plants too, the insects we exterminate, whether they’re actually dangerous, like scorpions or fleas, or simply annoying, like flies, that scourge of mankind, which one of us hasn’t killed a fly whose irritating buzzing was disturbing his reading, that’s not cruelty, it’s the law of our life, we are stronger than other living beings and we do as we please with their lives and their deaths, cows, chickens, ears of wheat are on earth to serve us, and it’s normal that among ourselves we act the same way, that each human group wants to exterminate those who challenge it over land, water, air, why, indeed, treat a Jew better than a cow or a Koch’s bacillus, if we could, and if the Jew could he’d do the same with us, or with others, to guarantee his own life, that’s the law of all things, the permanent war of all against all, and I know there’s nothing original about this thought, that it’s almost a commonplace of biological or social Darwinism, but that night in my fever its force of truth struck me as never before or since, stimulated by that dream where humanity succumbed to another organism whose life power was greater than our own, and I understood of course that this rule was true for everyone, that if others turned out to be stronger than we, they would do to us in turn what we had done to others, and that faced with these drives, the frail barriers that men erect to try to regulate common life, laws, justice, morality, ethics count for little, that the slightest fear or the slightest strong surge bursts them like straw fences, but that then too those who took the first step should not expect that the others, when their time comes, will respect justice or the laws, and I was afraid, for we were losing the war.