Lying on my bed in the darkness, I thought about the men of the Sixth Army: the evening took place at the beginning of March, the last units had surrendered more than a month before; the survivors, rotting with vermin and fever, must have been on the way to Siberia or Kazakhstan, at the very same moment that I was so laboriously breathing the night air in Berlin, and for them, no music, no laughter—shouts of an entirely different kind. And it wasn’t just them, it was everywhere, the whole world was twisted in pain, and people should not be having fun, not right away in any case, they should
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