The world is there in every word, no matter how small. The world is poured into each of these literary words as into a funnel, which draws together all of the writer’s life circumstances and experiences, everything the writer knows, and possibly hates, about culture and history, but also about vegetation, landscape, climate, the sense of time, and other elements of the writer’s surroundings, incorporating them into a single stream. Because literary writing is always, at the same time, an act of translation, condensing everything you know, everything you have experienced, into a few words — and the writer’s choice of words always depends upon all the countless other stories that have been poured into those words, on the charges the words carry, on the world that has called them forth.

[...] Berlin was a capital city, but those infernal terms like “desirable location” were still foreign to us, because all of East Berlin lay outside of the world in which desirable locations existed. Idyll. Innocence. Indecency. Inbreeding. My parents’ furniture was in the Biedermeier style, and our money was light like play money. So I could certainly talk about the fall of the wall — and if someone asked me about my feelings at the time, I would say something like: It dragged us into this big, wide world so quickly that there was no time to think. Did it drag us forward or backward? Backward, I felt. Only after several weeks of refusal did I set foot in that foreign land that spoke the same language, even the same Berlin dialect, only then did I cross the border for the first time. A door that only opens once a century had opened, but now that century was gone forever. Something was going too quickly, going wrong, I felt. If nothing else, the skeptical attitude that we had cultivated toward our own government had taught us once and for all to keep a critical distance, to maintain our independent thinking in light of the government’s flawed stewardship of our common goal. None of my friends believed that the world in which we had lived was the best of all possible worlds — but now, all of a sudden, we were supposed to believe that that best of all possible worlds had been found? There was a lot of talk of freedom now, but I couldn’t make much of this word freedom, which floated freely in all sorts of sentences. Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford it?) Or freedom of opinion? (What if no one cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop? (But what happens when we’re finished shopping?)

Only at that moment did I experience a sort of virginal amazement at the fact that a book isn’t there until you write it. If I don’t make the girl appear, she doesn’t appear. If I don’t make her think, keep quiet, say something now and then, meet this or that person, then she doesn’t think, doesn’t keep quiet, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t meet anyone. Then there’s no girl, and no story.

And yet the story wasn’t even there in my head yet either, at least not in the sense that I could simply write it down.

Yes, there is a field there that is beckoning (indeed, many important scenes in the theater take place in an “open field”), but the story isn’t there yet. Woyzeck hunts for mushrooms at night in an open field, it’s more or less like that. So I make my way across the field, blind and seeing at the same time. Groping would probably be a better way to express it, the way that I try to conjure up something that isn’t even there yet, to make it materialize out of a blind spot; my search leads me out, that is, I lead myself — but the reverse is also true, as it is in every search, I’m led by the thing I’m searching for. So it’s a state in between the knowledge that something is there and the ignorance of what that something is. This, I think, is what makes the work of writing so much like love, makes it exert a pull on us like love. By the way, this process of groping is also the reason that sentences which may be false in their own right can still be true, because the field that I make my way across as I write can only be partly comprehended by the understanding.

All right. I want to hide behind the girl, she’s my mask, as you know, the mask I wear so that I can run naked across the playing field. So the girl can’t look like me. And she can’t act as I would act. While I turn a smiling face to the world, a face that always makes me look younger than I really am, while people give me friendly advice because they think I need it, while things come easily to me because people aren’t afraid of me — the girl has to be uncouth and unshapely, dirty where I’m clean, timid where I’m confident, uptight where I’m uninhibited, weak where I’m strong, but nevertheless this girl is my mask, nevertheless this girl still has to accept advice when someone thinks she needs it, she can’t make others afraid, she has to be able to be happy. And the reverse is true, too: I also have to be uncouth, unshapely, dirty, timid, uptight, and weak. Because otherwise I wouldn’t know this character well enough to wear her as a mask. The mask has to fit me but nevertheless hide me, the story has to be my story but still someone else’s, if I’m going to be able to tell it at all. That’s why Josef Winkler can write in his book Roppongi: “When my father died, we were staying in Japan . . . , we drove from Tokyo into the mountains of Nagano, past smoking volcanoes, to a literature symposium,” but the Josef Winkler in the book isn’t identical to the writer Josef Winkler; and Thomas Bernhard can write in his book A Child: “At the age of eight I rode my first few yards on a bicycle in the street below our apartment in the Taubenmarkt in Traunstein. It was midday, and the streets of the self-important little provincial town were empty.”1 And the eight-year-old child is not identical with the child that Thomas Bernhard, the author of the book, was, because of course it’s also possible to wear a mask that shows your own face.