Trying to find words of remembrance for Berg is paralyzed by the fact that he himself had anticipated the exercise with macabre irony. When I was studying with him he occasionally amused himself during walks we took together around Schönbrunn by imagining the obituaries Viennese newspapers would one day have in store for him. He was convinced that one of them would confuse him with a Jewish folk humorist, by the name, I think, of Armin Berg; in another, a critic we knew all too well – one whose threat to write a book had to be forestalled by the 1937 volume published by Reich, Krenek, and me – would caw his panegyricus about the “Bard of Wozzeck”: “As before him our Schubert, our Bruckner, our poor unforgettable Hugo Wolf, so now he, too, has died of hunger in his supremely beloved, unappreciative native city, which nonetheless carries him deep in her heart. Yet another link in the unending chain of immortals …” The impossibility of banishing the nightmarish visions of this feverishly wakeful dreamer – visions that have meanwhile been far surpassed by the robust stupidity of the survivors who honor and label him – compels one to confront and examine them: not with reference to the world which they so accurately reflect, but with regard to the self concealed within them. Desperate humor was the satrap of death in a life that had grown around death as around its core.