It was probably during that time that I learned to live with unfinished things, and with the knowledge that houses built for eternity aren’t really eternal. Only as an adult did I learn that when Hitler planned the major building projects for his Thousand-Year Reich, he intended them to be magnificent ruins even after those thousand years had come to an end. So the destroyed city of Berlin offered many opportunities to learn which parts of a dome or a department store survive, to learn that it’s possible to live quite comfortably in the bottom two floors of an apartment building even when the top two floors have been bombed to rubble. And that’s the sort of knowledge that you never forget. Even today, without thinking too much about it, I automatically transform all shopping malls into the ruins of shopping malls, I see clouds of dust rising up in luxury boutiques, I imagine the glass facades of office buildings shattering and crashing to the ground, revealing the naked offices behind them where no one is working anymore. I know very well what it would be like if all of the rubber trees in the living rooms and all of the geraniums on the balconies dried up because no one was there to water them, or because the people who were there had more urgent tasks to attend to than watering their plants. I see fountains full of wreckage, I see streets that are no longer passable, and I wonder which pieces of furniture in my apartment might still have a piece of floor left to stand on when the rest of the apartment is no longer there. Similarly, I’ve always known how the people sitting across from me on the subway — children, teenagers, adults in the prime of life — will look when they’re 80 years old, I’ve had no choice but to transform those people into their own ruins, too, into sick, wise, barren, or overripe ruins of faces and bodies, I’ve known what kind of decay awaits them, and I’ve seen it again and again in different forms. This compulsion for transformation is still with me today, as if the decay of everything in existence were simply the other half of the world, without which nothing could be imagined.

And at the same time, I myself was living right in the middle of a construction site that could only be there because nothing, or almost nothing, remained from before — but I didn’t even understand what I was experiencing. And that’s probably always the case: It takes us an entire lifetime to unravel the mysteries of our own lives. Layer upon layer of knowledge accumulates upon the past, revealing it anew each time as a past that we certainly lived through, but couldn’t even begin to understand.