Just after Hallowe'en in 1988, in Vienna--where I was living and doing research for The Magic Circle--a large display of posters suddenly appeared in the Stephansplatz, the square surrounding the cathedral of St. Stephan, at the heart of Vienna. These posters bore large blowups of old black-and-white photos that commemorated November 9, 1938--Krystallnacht, 'Crystal Night,' the Night of Broken Glass--a night fifty years earlier when Nazi gangs broke the glass of shops in the Jewish quarters of Berlin. Overnight the vandalism spread to other cities like Vienna. The photos in the Stephansplatz documented the glass splattered just around the corner in Vienna's Judengasse.

Because I'd planned to end the historical part of The Magic Circle before the start of World War II, I didn't think of Krystallnacht regarding my book. But the date, November 9th, somehow stuck in my head as important. I didn't know how important it would prove for my book--not to mention for the world--quite soon.

The city of Vienna celebrates New Year's Eve with expensive balls and galas, and I'd been told there were also fireworks displays in the Stephansplatz. So when friends from California arrived in Vienna to spend that New Year's, we made reservations at a restaurant just near the cathedral to watch the display.

Our first clue that something might be terribly wrong was when we went into the subway. There was broken glass everywhere, like an explosion in a bottling factory--like Krystallnacht--and there were several young girls lying in their evening clothes in the shards of glass, babbling, out of their minds on drink and drugs, and all the theater-goers skirting them with avoiding eyes, afraid to go near them. When we came up to the street, we realized with a horrible flash what our Viennese friends must have really meant by 'fireworks.' As we made our way, there were wandering packs of young men everywhere, drinking whiskey straight from the bottle, no police anywhere in sight. The roving thugs just ahead of us tossed cherry bombs into wastecans down the street, and trash exploded all over us as we scurried frantically toward our restaurant. When we left after dinner, things had gotten worse. There were no taxis to be found and we were afraid to descend to the subway again or to stand on a deserted corner waiting for a streetcar. The four of us walked home two miles to the outskirts of Vienna and watched as the last of the night's streetcars--racing along their little tracks a mile a minute--were narrowly missed by the stink bombs and cherry bombs that yesterday's perfectly ordinary citizens were now hurling out of their windows into the street with raucous laughter.

That night was a nightmare. But coming so close on the heels of Krystallnacht, it reminded everyone of the importance of the date November 9 in Germanic history: the date of Hitler's Munich putsch, and also of the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm that marked the end of World War I. And, in 1989 the date November 9 would also mark the fall of the Berlin Wall.