the promise that Israel had been built in Austria: that promise had been crushed under the wheels of this vast, insane, malfunctioning machine in its unstoppable, senseless drive to jolt life into an Aryan German greatness that had never existed, and never could exist, because its blinkered puritanism was the very antithesis of all that makes a society great. Nazism could no more be great than a strutting actor in a gilt cardboard crown could be a king.
