Ulm, the medieval German city where the Danube narrows and the great cathedral rises over the square, is the birthplace of Josef Barbanel, the elderly scientist and Holocaust survivor whose first-person testimony forms one of the novel's central narrative threads. It is the city of his first memory, his first language, and his first encounter with the idea that human work and human thought leave their mark on the material world. More than a biographical detail, Ulm stands as the origin point of a life that would be swept along by the dreadful history of the twentieth century, and its destruction in the Second World War marks the first rupture in a narrative that repeatedly asks how individual memory, urban space, and historical catastrophe are bound together.

First Memory and the Paving Stones

Barbanel's earliest memory is not of his mother's breast, his bed, or a desperately loved toy, but of a street: the paving stones of Ulm, the ones he toddled on while hanging and sometimes swinging about wildly on the axis of his wrist, in the firm grip of his papa. Each rounded stone he scuffed gave back to him its ineluctable mass, and he wondered how the stones fit so nicely, like breadloaves in the baker's oven. Then he discovered the workmen's chisel marks, which made each stone different though the same as the others. Every stone recorded its own shaping, carrying the mark of its history of human work, and all the stones together represented an infinity of decisions under one plan, an intent to make a passable street. The street went up the hill and spread suddenly in every direction into the great square of the cathedral, which was also of stone. In the shadow of the great black stone cathedral, Barbanel experienced the child's revelation that he walks on the thoughts of dead men. This insight—that the built environment is a palimpsest of human labor and intention—becomes the foundational perception of his life, the lens through which he will later read the ghetto, the city, and the cosmos itself.

The Father's Workshop and the Language of Machines

Barbanel's father's little engineering shop was located on the cathedral square, where, with his uncle Jakob, he manufactured electricity motors. The shop produced a wonderful whirring sound, a soft sound with tone to it, a language of total elision, with inseparable words, the meaning instantaneous and at the same time incomplete. This early exposure to the music of machinery—a language without grammar, a communication that is immediate yet never fully articulated—prefigures Barbanel's lifelong fascination with the relationship between sound, meaning, and the physical world. It also connects his childhood to the electrical devices that would later define his scientific career, and to the broader theme of how human beings build systems of meaning out of raw material, whether copper wire or paving stone.

The Move to Munich and the Shadow of What Was to Come

Ulm was of course destroyed in the Second World War. Well before that war, Barbanel's father and uncle took their little business to Munich, where they proposed to manufacture dynamos, arc lamps, transformers, and other electrical devices for use by municipalities. For a while everything went well; the family lived in a suburb in a big house behind a wall, with a garden of trees, and spring evenings were filled with the perfume of apple blossoms, here where the Nazis would be born. The irony is stark and deliberate: the same electrical technology that represented progress and municipal modernity would be harnessed by the regime that arose in that very city. The move from Ulm to Munich is thus the first step in a trajectory that leads from the innocent whirring of motors on the cathedral square to the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and the destruction of Ulm itself becomes a synecdoche for the destruction of an entire world—the world of German Jewish life, of small engineering shops and cathedral squares, of apple blossoms and cricket jars.

The City as a Way of Seeing

Ulm's paving stones establish a mode of perception that Barbanel carries with him throughout his life and that shapes the novel's own method of urban observation. The same attention to the material specificity of place—the chisel marks on a stone, the arrangement of a street, the way a city records its history in its physical fabric—recurs in the novel's extended descriptions of New York City, where the narrator walks through Union Square Park, past the rat-poison skull-and-crossbones warnings planted in the grass, the farmers' market with its banks of potted flowers and truck farm produce from New Jersey, the cheap clothes hanging from pipe racks on the sidewalk, and the towered Romanesque strawberry-red Jefferson Market Courthouse. The city, like the street in Ulm, is read as an accumulation of human decisions, an infinity of choices under one plan. This continuity between Ulm and New York—between the medieval cathedral square and the modern metropolis—suggests that for Barbanel, all cities are ultimately the same phenomenon: a way of passage from here to there, built on the thoughts of dead men.

The City of Birds and the Ecological Imagination

The novel extends this urban vision beyond the human, and Ulm's paving stones find their strange counterpart in the City of Birds at Valdemingomez, an enormous garbage dump north of Madrid that the narrator describes as a great urban aviary. Its population of storks, hawks, egrets, linnets, kites, jackdaws, ravens, condors, and turkey buzzards, when aroused, can circle the dump and, with a boost from the trade winds, wing-whiff its miasma of sulfurous gases as far east as Rome. The birds of Valdemingomez don't migrate—why would they?—and over a hundred thirty species of them stay summer and winter, laying eggs in old Big Mac containers, lining nests with cassette tape, flittering in and out of rusty cans, huddling in TV cabinets, and bombing old sofas with the clamshells of paella. This vision of a city built by birds out of human refuse is the ecological culmination of the perception first awakened on the paving stones of Ulm: the recognition that all life, human and non-human, constructs its world out of the materials at hand, and that the distinction between the natural and the artificial is ultimately untenable. The same lesson appears in the novel's account of the Central Park ants, domesticated house sparrows of the ant species, whose underground city is built with the same purposive discipline that characterizes human urban life. Ulm, New York, Valdemingomez, and the ant mound are all variations on a single theme: the city as the fundamental form of organized life, the place where individual wills converge into something larger than themselves.

Narrative Significance

Ulm functions in the novel as the origin point of Barbanel's consciousness and the template for his understanding of all subsequent places. His first memory establishes the key perceptual habits—attention to material detail, awareness of human labor embedded in the built environment, the sense of walking on the thoughts of dead men—that structure his testimony throughout. The city's destruction in the Second World War marks the first of many ruptures in his life, the moment when the world of his childhood ceases to exist and the history that would sweep him along begins in earnest. Ulm is thus not merely a biographical fact but a narrative device: it grounds the novel's most abstract meditations on memory, history, and urban life in a concrete, sensory, deeply personal origin, and it establishes the continuity between the medieval German city and the modern American metropolis that the novel's sprawling structure depends upon.