Where? Whither? (Woher? Wo? Wohin?), 1940. Very few people on the train read books which they have taken from their shelf at home, preferring, instead, to buy something that presents itself at the last minute. They mistrust the appeal of novels that have been earmarked in advance, and rightly so. Furthermore, they may set store by making their purchase from the colourfully decorated trolley right on the tarmac of the platform. After all, everyone knows the cult to which it bids. At one time or another everyone has reached for the swaying tomes that it displays, less out of a pleasure in reading them than out of the dim sense of doing something to please the gods of the railway. He who buys there knows that the coins which he consecrates to this offertory box recommend him to the protection of the boiler god who glows through the night, to the smoke Naiads who romp all over the train, and to the demon who is lord of all the lullabies. He knows all of them from dreams, just as he knows the succession of mythical trials and perils that present themselves to the zeitgeist as a ‘train ride’, and the unpredictable flight of spatio-temporal thresholds which it passes: from the famed ‘too late’ of the person left behind – the archetype of all that has been missed – to the loneliness of the compartment, the fear of missing the connection and the dread of the unknown hall into which he draws.
