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Nothing new on Bahnhofstrasse! — These are the first words to occur to me upon arrival With the word arrival, though, I’ve already said too much: there’s something so familiar in the soapy taste of the air that I wouldn’t dream of describing my walk into town as a return: I don’t think of myself coming back; I’ve never been away No, I never really left the town, sometimes I fled it, that’s all: in truth it was the town that never really left me The town took me over with its drab devastation, in which some perpetually stalled upheaval seemed in progress, an inexplicable upheaval I always had this impression, long before the whole country’s upheaval, and it lingered after the country’s authorities had surrendered and fled, after the government and its closest vassals had been replaced: this town seemed in no way to confirm the changing of the system In a past apparently impossible to fathom now, the town must have plunged into paralysis, and that collapse had survived the regime change   For years I fled from the town, years that have sped from my grasp as though chased by the furies, and yet never passed quickly enough for me These are all the years I can recall with ease, quite in contrast to those I spent here in this town It’s as though in those other cities, the bigger, more attractive ones I chose to live in, I never really settled down Those cities’ easily summoned images were dimmed by a sense of loss, a sentimental feeling originating in this town to which I return from time to time It’s here that this barely explicable sense of absence grew on me, one I only really felt once I had settled down elsewhere with the more or less firm resolution to stay It made itself felt as a kind of living without a background, it was a state of severance, a state without a past, and yet I’d learned to feel severed from the past in the small town afternoons   Time persisted here in dogged immutability; the autumnal fog