Do I know myself? Am I who I am? What is this shadow that passes for me? I am wood, I am dust, I am darkness. I am a single point in the universe but the universe does not know me. I am the creak of a floorboard and must extinguish myself. Yet I must live, or the universe will die.

1

Just before eleven o'clock, during the daylight bombardment that preceded the final armored assault on Lohenfelde by units of the 346th Infantry Regiment on April 3, 1945, the city's art museum received a direct hit from a phosphorus shell and caught fire. The solid walls of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum now encased flame. Gallery after gallery was filled with smoke that flashed and spat into flame. Flames crawled up the walls and writhed across the ceilings. Great balls of twisting flame burst through the double doors that Herr Wolmer the limping janitor would close carefully behind him each evening and whose round brass handles the head cleaner, Frau Blumen, would polish with enjoyment to a shine every Monday morning. Now, like a small color television thirty years before its time, each brass knob mirrored the glare of flame in perfect focus. The rooms, happily emptied of their last precious artworks over a year before, waited in turn for the flames to enter them. The dull thudding of the bombardment outside was obscured by the roaring and crashing within the walls of the museum itself, though in the gallery wings not yet touched this internal business seemed as far away and faint as the sea. The odd large sculpture, too heavy to remove — mostly modern works by (or in the style of) Arno Breker, Wackerle, Klimsch — grim, heroic figures with wrestlers' chests, their abdominal muscles chiseled squarely in crude imitation of Hellenic models, leaning their weight on the left leg, relaxing the right, holding vast Teutonic swords or Olympian torches, dumb and brutal rather than Hellenically lithe (almost pornographic in the case of the one female nude, Dawn, her nipples like bullets, her back arched ... a piece the youngish sculptor had hoped might bring him to the attention of the Führer) — these large works waited like the remnants of a greedy god's praetorian guard for the flames to arrive. When the flames did step over the threshold, they seemed to occupy each room swiftly, almost hastily, the stone or bronze figures vanishing and then reappearing in gouts of gold streaked with black (smoke, or the shadows the fire made upon itself as it twisted and spun), their faces in the cube-shaped heads taking on a dazed, cretinous look rather than one of heroic defiance. Perhaps if they had been genuine works of the Hellenic school, or fine Roman copies of the Greek, their expressions would have yielded an infinite sadness as the holocaust did its work around them; but they were not. They were, in fact, vulgar imitations that muddled the plastic ideal of abstraction with surface realism; the nude Dawn showed swollen veins in the crook of her elbow and on her ankles, but this labored detailing wriggled about on a crudely realized geometry of perfection. The result was something cheaply pretending to be flesh, but flesh unanimated by the breath of humanity and vulnerability — as, say, the Aphrodite of Cyrene breathes, for all its idealization of a certain form of beauty. Yet how many visitors had greatly admired the Kaiser Wilhelm Dawn, set at the top of the sweeping staircase as if on the landing of a brothel, their hearts swelling with pride at the manifold achievements of the Reich? Now, as the blaze mounted the staircase like a lithe athlete, three steps at a time, Dawn looked like a common bawd waiting for a client. The flames licked her cold body, hugged her in their spiraling vortex, enfolded her so completely that it was as if she had never been. Then the ceiling above collapsed, weakened by the initial impact of the shell. A beam struck her head and, broken at the neck, the head rolled down the stone stairs until the staircase gave way in a jet of sparks, the supporting girders buckling in the heat; part of the iron balustrade, however, remaining suspended in its usual position. A fine porcelain milkmaid from the Allach factory in Dachau, set in an oyster-shaped depression halfway up the stairs, remained untouched — the kind of freak marvel that often happens in fires. Similarly, the janitor's folded newspaper on his table was still there when the American soldiers arrived, picking their way over the smoking rubble while an old woman in black with a cane watched from the road, hand to her mouth, crying softly. The table stood in a sea of destruction, quite intact, with the newspaper folded on top and unmarked under its coat of ash and soot; while plump, chain-smoking Herr Wolmer, janitor for thirty-one years, friendly once you got to know him, the position of every painting in the museum fixed in his head, who had a secret passion for the reclining Dawn and had once pledged himself stickily to her in the silence of the night hours, lay like a charred log beside the table, indistinguishable from the blackened sculptures scattered in the rubble beyond.

Listen: voices. Voices below. When you have no voice, you are a book without words or pictures. I have no voice. Those voices belong to others, and are come to tear me to shreds.

2

Most of the paintings, the sculptures, the elaborate church carvings in worm- eaten wood and the precious old books lavishly bound in pigskin and vellum, as well as a small but important collection of Renaissance globes that showed Iceland but not America, were deep down in a salt mine some thirty kilometers from Lohenfelde. They had been placed there some months after the firebombing of Hamburg, which disaster had persuaded the curators (encouraged by an order from the Propagandaministerium) that the contents of the museum were in danger, despite the relative unimportance of Lohenfelde as an industrial or strategic center. An inventory was made and, as soon as the salt mine was sufficiently prepared, the works were transported to safety through the Thuringian woods on a foggy March day in 1944.

Few of these works were ever recovered. Of the 480 paintings in the picture galleries, for instance, 431 were lost — some of them no doubt looted before the salt-mine depot was destroyed during fierce fighting between American troops and a contingent of the Waffen-SS on April 5, 1945.

A certain number of works had been discreetly concealed in the vaults of the museum itself. These hundred or so paintings — not necessarily the most valuable — had remained hidden in the vaults throughout the last years of the war, a fact known to very few.

I must keep the shape of time. But time does not exist outside myself. My blood is time. I can hear it, beating. Blood is not a shape, it is sound. Maybe I must keep the sound of time.

3

A photograph taken in 1901, on the occasion of the unveiling of an illustrious burgher's memorial, shows a fence behind the gathered crowd — the uneven planks covered in torn posters — and a few thin trees peeping over. This was the site of the museum, which had previously been "a castle, a tanner's...