This is what exists, the grass growing in the houses, the dandelions in the churches, and suddenly one can imagine how it might all continue to grow, how a forest might creep over our cities, slowly, inexorably, thriving unaided by human hands, a silence of thistles and moss, an earth without history, only the twittering of birds, spring, summer and autumn, the breathing of which there is no one to count any more.

Max Frisch, on the devastation of postwar Europe