Thomas Bernhard
EXTINCTION
Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 and grew up in Austria. He studied music at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1957 he began a second career, as a playwright, poet, and novelist. The winner of the three most distinguished and coveted literary prizes awarded in Germany, he has become one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation. He published nine novels, an autobiography, one volume of poetry, four collections of short stories, and six volumes of plays. Thomas Bernhard died in Austria in 1989.
ALSO BY THOMAS BERNHARD
Concrete
Correction
Frost
Gargoyles
Gathering Evidence
The Lime Works
The Loser
My Prizes
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Woodcutters
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 2011
Translation copyright © 1995 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Germany as Auslöschung by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, in 1986. Copyright © 1986 by Suhrkamp Verlag. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Bernhard, Thomas.
[Auslöschung. English]
Extinction : a novel / Thomas Bernhard; translated from the German by
David McLintock. New York : A. Knopf, 1995.
p. cm.
1. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 2. Austrians—Italy—Fiction.
3. Rome (Italy)—Fiction. 4. Austria—Fiction.
PT2662.E7 A9513 1995
833′.914—DC20
94042886
eISBN: 978-0-307-83360-0
www.vintageanchor.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
The Telegram
The Will
I feel death ever pinching me by the throat, or pulling me by the back.
— MONTAIGNE
THE TELEGRAM
On the twenty-ninth, having returned from Wolfsegg, I met my pupil Gambetti on the Pincio to discuss arrangements for the lessons he was to receive in May, writes Franz-Josef Murau, and impressed once again by his high intelligence, I was so refreshed and exhilarated, so glad to be living in Rome and not in Austria, that instead of walking home along the Via Condotti, as I usually do, I crossed the Flaminia and the Piazza del Popolo and walked the whole length of the Corso before returning to my apartment in the Piazza Minerva, where at about two o’clock I received the telegram informing me that my parents and my brother, Johannes, had died. Parents and Johannes killed in accident. Caecilia, Amalia, it read. Holding the telegram, I kept a clear head, walked calmly to my study window, and looked down on the Piazza Minerva, where there was not a soul in sight. I had given Gambetti five books that I thought would be useful and necessary to him in the next few weeks, telling him to read them slowly and carefully: Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, Kafka’s The Trial, Thomas Bernhard’s Amras, Musil’s The Portuguese Woman, and Broch’s Esch or Anarchy. I opened the window so that I could breathe more easily and reflected that I had been right to give Gambetti these five books rather than any others, since he would find them increasingly important in the course of our lessons. I also remembered telling him in passing that next time we would discuss Elective Affinities and not The World as Will and Idea. It was a delight to talk to Gambetti again after the dreary and labored conversations I had had with my family at Wolfsegg, all of them confined to day-to-day concerns of a wholly private and primitive kind. German words hang like lead weights on the German language, I had said to Gambetti, and constantly drag the mind down to a level that can only be harmful to it. German thought and German speech soon become paralyzed under the intolerable weight of the language, which suppresses any thought before it can find expression. Under the German language, I said, German thought had developed only with difficulty and never come to full efflorescence, as Romance thought had under the Romance languages—as witness the centuries of effort that the Germans had invested in their thinking. Although I have a higher regard for Spanish than for Italian, no doubt because I am more familiar with it, Gambetti that morning illustrated yet again the lightness, effortlessness, and infinite versatility of Italian, which bears the same relation to German as a child reared in complete freedom, in a happy and prosperous home, bears to one who has been cowed and beaten into low cunning in the poorest of poor families. How much more highly, then, must we rate the achievements of our philosophers and writers? I asked. Every word inexorably drags their thought down, every sentence forces to the ground whatever they venture to think, and thus forces everything to the ground. That’s why their philosophy and their writings are so leaden. Using my hands to simulate a balance, the left representing the German scale and the right the Italian, I quoted a sentence from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, first in German and then in Italian, and showed Gambetti how the German scale sank and the Italian sprang up. For his amusement, as well as my own, I recited a number of sentences from Schopenhauer, first in German and then in an extempore Italian translation, weighing both versions in my hands and making what was at first intended as an object lesson into a kind of bizarre game, concluding with some sentences from Hegel and an aphorism from Kant. The sad thing is, I told Gambetti, that heavy words and heavy sentences are not always the weightiest. The game soon exhausted me. Standing in front of the Hotel Hassler, I gave Gambetti a brief account of my recent visit to Wolfsegg, which in the end struck me as excessively circumstantial and inconsequential. My aim had been to compare our two families, to contrast the German element in mine with the Italian in his, but in fact all I did was to play off my family against his; this was bound to distort what I wanted to say and to strike Gambetti as disagreeable and confusing rather than instructive and informative. Gambetti is a good listener and has a fine ear, trained by me, for the truth and logic of what he is told. Gambetti is my pupil, but conversely I am Gambetti’s. I learn at least as much from him as he learns from me. We have an ideal relationship: sometimes I am his teacher and he my pupil, but at other times he is my teacher and I his pupil. And there are times when neither of us knows who is the pupil and who the teacher. That is the ideal situation. Officially, of course, I am always Gambetti’s teacher, and for this I am paid by Gambetti, or rather by his well-to-do father. Only two days after returning from the wedding of my sister Caecilia and the wine cork manufacturer from Freiburg, who is now my brother-in-law, I thought, looking down at the deserted Piazza Minerva, I’ll have to repack my suitcase, which I unpacked only yesterday and didn’t even put away but left on the chair by my desk; I’ll have to return to Wolfsegg, which has in recent years become more or less repugnant to me—and this time not for a ridiculous and grotesque occasion but for one that fills me with dread. Instead of discussing Siebenkäs or The Portuguese Woman with Gambetti, I told myself, I’ll be at the mercy of my sisters, who are expecting me. Instead of talking to Gambetti about Elective Affinities I’ll h
ave to talk to my sisters about the funeral and the inheritance. Instead of walking up and down the Pincio with Gambetti, I’ll have to visit the registry of deaths and the cemetery and quarrel with my sisters over the funeral arrangements. As I packed the clothes that I had unpacked the night before, I tried to work out what consequences the death of my parents and my brother would have, but I arrived at no conclusion. I was naturally aware, however, of what was now required of me after the deaths of the three people who were closest to me, at least on paper—all my strength, all my willpower. The calm with which I gradually stuffed whatever I needed for my journey into the suitcase, while taking stock of the disruption that this undoubtedly dreadful calamity would cause in my immediate future, did not strike me as at all unnatural until long after I had shut the suitcase. The question of whether I had loved my parents and my brother was one that I at once fended off with the word naturally, but it remained fundamentally unanswered. For ages I had not had what is called a good relationship with either my parents or my brother but had one marked by tension and, in recent years, indifference. The truth is that for a long time I had wanted to know nothing about Wolfsegg or about them, and they, conversely, had wanted to know nothing about me. Hence our mutual relations were more or less confined to the exigencies of existence. Twenty years ago, I thought, your parents not only released you from Wolfsegg, after wanting to chain you there for life, but dismissed you from their feelings. During these twenty years my brother had envied me for having left Wolfsegg, for my megalomaniac self-sufficiency, as he once put it, and hated me for my relentless insistence on freedom. My sisters’ distrust had always exceeded the bounds of what is acceptable among siblings, and when once I turned my back on Wolfsegg, and therefore on them, they too pursued me with their hatred. This is the truth. I picked up the suitcase. It was, as usual, too heavy. I really don’t need it, I thought, as I have everything I need at Wolfsegg. Why cumber myself with a suitcase? Having decided to travel without a suitcase, I proceeded to unpack my clothes and return them, item by item, to the closet. It’s natural to love one’s parents, and it’s equally natural to love one’s brother and sisters, I thought, standing by the window again and looking down on the deserted Piazza Minerva. We therefore fail to notice that from a certain moment onward we hate them, without wanting to, just as naturally as we previously loved them, for all kinds of reasons that we become aware of only years later, often decades later. We can’t determine precisely when we stopped loving them and started hating them, and we don’t try, basically because we are afraid to. Anyone who leaves his family, against their will and as implacably as I left mine, has to reckon with their hatred, and the greater their previous love for him, the greater their hatred when he has done what he swore to do. For decades their hatred caused me suffering, I reflected, but I haven’t suffered from it for years now; I’ve become used to it and it no longer hurts me. And their hatred of me inevitably led me to hate them, but in recent years they haven’t suffered from my hatred either. They despised me, their Roman, just as I despised them, the Wolfseggers. Basically they stopped thinking about me, just as I stopped thinking about them most of the time. They always referred to me as a charlatan, a blatherer, a parasite who battened on them and everyone else. The sole term I could apply to them was blockheads. Their death, which can only have been caused by a road accident, I told myself, in no way alters the facts. There was no danger of my yielding to sentimentality. My hands did not shake as I read the telegram, and my body did not tremble. I’ll tell Gambetti that my parents and my brother have died and that I must postpone our lessons for a few days, I thought. After all, I won’t be staying at Wolfsegg for more than a few days; a week will be enough, even allowing for unforeseen complications. For a moment I considered taking Gambetti with me, fearing the superior force of the Wolfseggers and wishing for an ally with whom I could defend myself against their onslaught, someone of my own kind who would be a partner in a desperate and possibly hopeless situation, but I immediately abandoned the idea, as I wanted to spare Gambetti a confrontation with Wolfsegg. He’d see that everything I’ve told him in recent years is actually quite tame compared with the reality, I thought. At one moment I thought of taking him with me; the next moment I thought better of it. Finally I decided against taking him. I’d spend too much time with him, and this would cause something of a stir that I’d probably find disagreeable, I thought. They wouldn’t understand a person like Gambetti at Wolfsegg, where harmless strangers are invariably greeted with hostility. They’ve always rejected anything unfamiliar, they’ve never welcomed anything or anyone unfamiliar, as I usually do. To take Gambetti to Wolfsegg would mean deliberately exposing him to insult, and he might be deeply hurt. I can hardly cope with Wolfsegg myself, I thought, and to confront Gambetti with Wolfsegg could be a disaster, and he himself would be the chief victim. I could of course have taken Gambetti to Wolfsegg long ago, I thought, but I wisely refrained, although I had often told myself that it might be beneficial not only for me but for him, for if he saw it all for himself, my accounts of Wolfsegg would gain an authenticity that they are otherwise bound to lack. I’ve known Gambetti for fifteen years and not once taken him to Wolfsegg, I thought. Maybe he sees it differently, I told myself. It’s obviously strange to have known someone for fifteen years and been on fairly intimate terms with him without once, in all these fifteen years, inviting him to my home. Why, I wondered, have I never, in all these fifteen years, allowed Gambetti a glimpse of the hand I was dealt at birth? Because I’ve always been afraid to and still am. Because I want to protect myself against his knowing about Wolfsegg and my origins—that’s one reason—and because I want to protect him from such knowledge, the effect of which could be disastrous. In the fifteen years we have known each other I have been reluctant to expose Gambetti to Wolfsegg. It would have been the pleasantest thing in the world to go to Wolfsegg with Gambetti and spend my time there in his company, but I have always rejected the idea. He would of course have been prepared to go with me at any time and always expected to be invited. But he never was. A funeral is not only a sad occasion but an utterly disagreeable one, I told myself, and I certainly won’t invite Gambetti to accompany me on such an occasion. I’ll tell him that my parents have died, I’ll say that they and my brother have been killed in a car crash, though I’ve no confirmation of this, but I won’t say a word about his coming with me. Only two weeks earlier, before going to Wolfsegg for my sister’s wedding, I had treated Gambetti to a highly intemperate description of my parents and told him that my brother was rather a bad character, and irremediably stupid. I had described Wolfsegg as a citadel of brainlessness and spoken of the dreadful prevailing climate, which dominated and ruthlessly destroyed all who were forced to live—or rather to exist—there. But I also told him about the glories of Wolfsegg—about the beauty of the fall, of the winter cold and the silence in the surrounding woods and valleys, which I loved more than anything. Nature there was ruthless, I said, but utterly clear and magnificent. Yet this clear and magnificent nature was not appreciated by those who lived in the midst of it, because they were too brainless. If my family didn’t exist, but only the walls they live in, I told Gambetti, Wolfsegg would be the perfect place for me, as there’s no other so congenial to my spirit. But I can’t abolish my family just because I want to, I said. I can hear myself saying these words, and the terrible meaning they took on now that my parents and my brother were actually dead made me repeat them aloud as I stood at the window, looking down on the Piazza Minerva. But I can’t abolish my family just because I want to. Uttering these words to Gambetti, I had felt the utmost distaste for the people they referred to. I now found myself repeating them aloud in a distinctly theatrical manner. Like an actor who has to rehearse his lines because they are to be spoken before a large audience, I momentarily took the sting out of them. They suddenly ceased to be annihilating. However, these words, But I can’t abolish my family just because I want to, again forced their way to the forefront of m
y mind and seized possession of me. I tried to stifle them, but they would not be stifled. I no longer enunciated them clearly but gabbled them to myself several times, trying to make them seem ludicrous, but despite my attempts to stifle them and make them seem ludicrous they became all the more menacing and suddenly acquired a greater force than any words I had ever uttered. You can’t drown out these words, I told myself—you’ll have to live with them. This realization brought a sudden calm into my situation. But I can’t abolish my family just because I want to. I spoke the words once more, but this time in the tone I had used to Gambetti. They now meant what they had meant then. Except for the pigeons, there were no living creatures on the Piazza Minerva. Suddenly feeling cold, I shut the window and sat down at my desk. My mail still lay on it, including a letter from Eisenberg, a letter from Spadolini, the archbishop who is my mother’s lover, and a note from Maria. I immediately threw the invitations from various Roman cultural institutes and all the other private invitations into the wastepaper bin, together with a few letters that a cursory inspection revealed as begging or threatening, letters written by people who either wanted money from me or demanded to know what I was trying to achieve by my lifestyle and my way of thinking. They referred to a few newspaper articles I had published recently, which naturally did not suit the writers because they had been directed against all such people—people in Austria, of course, whose hatred pursued me as far as Rome. I have been getting such letters for years. The writers are not madmen, as I had at first believed, but individuals who are legally responsible—fit to plead, so to speak—yet who react to my publications in various newspapers and magazines, not only in Frankfurt and Hamburg but in Milan and Rome, by threatening me with, among other things, prosecution and death. I am always dragging Austria in the dirt, they say, denigrating my own country in the most outrageous fashion and crediting the Austrians with base and despicable Catholic and National Socialist opinions whenever and wherever I can, whereas according to the writers, no such base and despicable opinions exist in Austria. Austria is not base and despicable, they say; it has never been anything but beautiful, and the Austrians are decent people. I always throw these letters away, as I had done that morning. I had kept the letter from Eisenberg, a college friend who is now a rabbi in Vienna, telling me that he had to be in Venice at the end of May and inviting me to meet him there. He intended to take me to the Teatro Fenice—not to see anything like Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, which we had seen the previous year, but to see Monteverdi’s Tancredi. I’ll naturally accept Eisenberg’s invitation, I thought. I’ll write to him at once, but at once means after I get back from Wolfsegg. It’s always been a delight to walk through Venice with Eisenberg, I thought. It’s a delight just to be with him. Whenever he comes to Italy, if only for a few days in Venice, he lets me know in advance, I thought, and he always invites me to what he calls an artistic treat, which a performance of Tancredi in the Fenice is bound to be, I thought. I had also been sent a copy of the Corriere della Sera containing my short article on Leoš Janáček. I opened the newspaper expectantly, only to find that my article was not printed in a prominent place—which immediately put me in a bad humor. Moreover, a cursory glance revealed a number of unpardonable printing errors—which is the worst thing that can happen to me. I threw the Corriere away and reread the note that Maria had dropped in my letter box. My great poet wrote that she wanted to have dinner with me on Saturday, just with you, she wrote, adding that she had also written some poems—for you. My great poet has been quite productive recently, I thought. I opened the drawer in which I kept a few photographs of my family. I looked intently at a picture of my parents at Victoria Station in London, boarding the train for Dover. I had taken it myself, without their knowledge. They had visited me in London in 1960, when I was a student there. After spending two weeks in England and traveling as far as Glasgow and Bristol, they went on to Paris, where my sisters were waiting for them. My sisters had traveled to Paris from Cannes, where they had been staying with my uncle Georg. In 1960 I was still on tolerable terms with my parents, I thought. I had wanted to study in England, and they had not opposed the idea, as they must have assumed that after studying in England I would return to Vienna and ultimately to Wolfsegg, in order to fulfill their wish that I join my brother in managing the estate. But even at that time I had no intention of returning to Wolfsegg. I had in fact left Wolfsegg for England and London with the sole thought of never returning to Wolfsegg. I hated agriculture, to which my father and brother were passionately devoted. I hated everything connected with Wolfsegg, where the only thing that mattered was the economic well-being of the family. Nothing else mattered. For as long as Wolfsegg was in my family’s hands, no one had time for anything but maximizing the profits from its production units—its farmland, which even today covers twelve thousand acres, and its mines. They thought of nothing but how best to exploit their property. Of course they always pretended to be taken up with activities other than profitmaking, to be interested in culture and the arts, but the reality was depressing and embarrassing. True, they had thousands of books in their libraries at Wolfsegg—the house has five libraries—and the books were dusted three or four times a year with absurd regularity, but they were never read. The family kept the libraries sparkling in order to be able to display them to visitors without feeling ashamed, to show off and boast about their treasures, but they never made any practical or personal use of these treasures. The five libraries at Wolfsegg, four in the main house and one in an adjacent building, were founded by my great-great-great-grandparents, and my parents never added a single volume to the collections. It is said that our libraries, taken together, are as valuable as the world-famous monastery library at Lambach. My father never read a book. Occasionally my mother would leaf through old scientific works, enjoying the finely colored engravings that adorned their pages. My sisters never visited the libraries at all, except to show them to visitors who expressed a wish to see them. The photograph of my parents taken at Victoria Station shows them at an age when they still traveled widely and were not yet afflicted by illness. They were wearing the raincoats they had just bought at Burberrys, and carrying umbrellas on their arms, also from Burberrys. Like typical continentals, they tried to be more English than the English, and the consequent impression was grotesque rather than refined and elegant. I had to laugh every time I saw this photograph, but now my laughter was gone. My mother’s neck was rather too long to be considered beautiful, and at the moment when I took the photo—as she was getting on the train—it was stretched forward an inch or two more than usual, which made the picture doubly ridiculous. My father’s posture was always that of a man who could not hide his bad conscience from the world and was consequently unhappy. When I took the photo he had his hat pulled down lower than usual over his forehead—which made him look more gauche than he really was. I’ve no idea why I’ve kept this particular photo of my parents, I thought, but one day I’ll discover the reason. I put it on the desk and looked in the drawer for the one I had taken of my brother on the shore of the Wolfgangsee. It showed him on his sailboat, which he kept all year round at Sankt Wolfgang, in a shed rented from the Fürstenbergs. The figure in the picture is an embittered man, ruined by living alone with his parents, and the sporty attire only partly conceals the illnesses that have already taken possession of him. He has a forced smile, as they say, and only his brother—only I—could have taken the photo. When I gave him a copy, he tore it up without saying a word. I now placed the photo of my brother beside that of my parents boarding the Dover train and studied them for a long time. You loved these people as long as they loved you, I told myself, and hated them from the moment they hated you. Naturally I never thought I would outlive them. In fact I always imagined that I would be the first to die. The present situation is the one situation I’ve never envisaged, I thought. I had considered every other possible situation time and again, but never this. I had often dreamed of dying and leaving them behind, of leavi
ng them alone without me, of freeing them from me by my own death, but never of being left behind by them. The fact that they were now dead and I was alive was not only utterly unforeseen, but quite sensational. It was this sensational element, this overwhelming sensation, that I found shattering, not the simple fact that they were dead, irrevocably dead. Though my parents had been pathetic in every way, I had always regarded them as demons, and now suddenly, overnight, they had shrunk to the ridiculous, grotesque photo that I had in front of me and was studying with the most shameless intensity. The same was true of the photo of my brother. All your life you feared these people more than any others, I thought, and this fear cast a monstrous blight on your life. All your life you tried repeatedly to escape from them, but you always failed. You went to Vienna to escape from them, to London, to Paris, to Ankara, to Istanbul, and finally to Rome—all to no avail. They had to have a fatal accident and shrink to this ridiculous scrap of paper called a photograph before they could cease to harm you. The persecution mania’s over, I thought. They’re dead. You’re free. Looking at the photograph of my brother on his sailboat at Sankt Wolfgang, I felt sorry for him for the first time. In the photo he now seemed far more comic than when I had first looked at it. I was alarmed by my ruthless honesty. My parents too looked comic in the photo taken at Victoria Station. All three of them, lying on the desk in front of me, not four inches in height, fashionably dressed and in grotesque physical attitudes that betrayed mental attitudes no less grotesque, were even more comic than when I had looked at them before. The photograph reveals only a single grotesque or comic moment, I thought, not the person as he really was more or less all his life. The photograph is a perverse and treacherous falsification. Every photograph—whoever took it, whoever is pictured in it—is a gross violation of human dignity, a monstrous falsification of nature, a base insult to humanity. On the other hand, I found the two photos immensely characteristic of both my parents and my brother. That’s how they really are, I thought—or were. I could have brought many other photographs of my parents and my brother from Wolfsegg and kept them in my desk. The reason why I brought these is that they show my parents and my brother as they really were when I photographed them. I did not feel in the least ashamed of this thought. It was not fortuitous that I had brought these particular photographs to Rome and kept them in my desk instead of destroying them. What I have here are not idealized images of my parents, I told myself, but my parents as they really are—or were, I said, correcting myself again. And my brother as he really was. All three were so timid, so ordinary, so comic. I’d never have put up with falsifications but tolerated only true and genuine likenesses, however grotesque—and possibly repulsive. And it was this photo of my parents that I once showed to Gambetti, a year ago. I even remember where—at the café on the Piazza del Popolo. He looked at it, but made no comment, though I recall that after looking at it he asked, Are your parents very rich? Yes, I said. I also remember that I later felt embarrassed at having shown it to him. You should never have shown him that photo, I told myself at the time. It was stupid. There were—and still are—countless photos that show my parents looking serious, as they say, but they do not correspond to the image I have always had of them. And there are serious photographs of my brother, but they too are misrepresentations. I would never have shown Gambetti any of these misrepresentations. In any case there is hardly anything I detest more than handing photographs around. I do not show people photographs, and I do not let them show me theirs. The fact that I showed Gambetti the one of my parents at Victoria Station was quite exceptional. What made me do it? Gambetti has never shown me any of his photographs. Of course I know his parents, and his brothers and sisters, so there would be no point in his showing me pictures of them; he would never think of it. Basically I detest photographs, and it has never occurred to me to take any, except for the ones taken in London and Sankt Wolfgang, and another that I took in Cannes. I have never owned a camera. I despise people who are forever taking pictures and go around with cameras hanging from their necks, always on the lookout for a subject, snapping anything and everything, however silly. All the time they have nothing in their heads but portraying themselves, in the most distasteful manner, though they are quite oblivious of this. What they capture in their photos is a perversely distorted world that has nothing to do with the real world except this perverse distortion, for which they themselves are responsible. Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity, which is not only enamored of such distortion and perversion but completely sold on them, and will in due course, given the proliferation of photography, take the distorted and perverted world of the photograph to be the only real one. Practitioners of photography are guilty of one of the worst crimes it is possible to commit—of turning nature into a grotesque. The people in their photographs are nothing but pathetic dolls, disfigured beyond recognition, staring in alarm into the pitiless lens, brainless and repellent. Photography is a base passion that has taken hold of every continent and every section of the population, a sickness that afflicts the whole of humanity and is no longer curable. The inventor of the photographic art was the inventor of the most inhumane of all arts. To him we owe the ultimate distortion of nature and the human beings who form part of it, the reduction of human beings to perverse caricatures—his and theirs. I have yet to see a photograph that shows a natural person, a true and genuine person, just as I have yet to see one that gives a true and genuine representation of nature. Photography is the greatest disaster of the twentieth century. Nothing has ever sickened me so much as looking at photographs. And yet, I now told myself, the longer I look at the distorted images of my parents and my brother in these pictures—the only ones I ever took of them—the more I see the truth and the reality behind the distortion. This is because I’m not concerned with the photos as such; I don’t see the people portrayed in them as they are shown by the distorting lens of the camera but as I myself see them. My parents at Victoria Station in London is written on the back of one photo. On the other is written: My brother sailing at Sankt Wolfgang. I put my hand in the drawer and took out another photo. It showed Amalia and Caecilia posing in front of Uncle Georg’s villa in Cannes. Uncle Georg, my father’s brother, bought this villa with the money my father made over to him—a one-shot payment, as they say—after my grandparents died. He invested it so shrewdly in several French portfolios that he not only was able to live quite comfortably but could afford a degree of luxury that suited his tastes. He got a better deal than my father, I thought, looking at the photograph of my sisters with their rather mocking expressions. Uncle Georg died four years ago, as suddenly as his brother, after suffering a heart attack in his garden while inspecting his roses, which were his only passion in later life. At thirty-five he was able to leave Wolfsegg and retire to the Riviera with masses of money and loads of books. He loved French literature and the sea, and he devoted himself entirely to these two loves. It often strikes me that I take very much after Uncle Georg, at least more than after my father. I too have always loved literature and books and the sea, and I too left Wolfsegg, at an even earlier age. On the back of the picture are the words: My sisters Amalia and Caecilia at Uncle Georg’s villa. I last went to Cannes in 1978. I visited Uncle Georg at least once a year. A few days spent with him at his villa always did me good. To the horror of the family, he designated his manservant, whom he always called affectionately my good Jean, as his sole heir. On several occasions Uncle Georg came to see me in Rome, a city that we both loved and appreciated more than any other. Gambetti and he got along well with each other and spent many evenings on the Piazza del Popolo or, if it was raining, at the Café Greco, discussing everything imaginable, especially painting. Uncle Georg was a keen collector, and I know that he spent the interest from his investments largely on acquiring pictures and sculptures by contemporary artists. Thanks to his good taste and a quite extraordinary instinct for the value of the works of art he preferred, his passion f
or collecting soon brought him a second sizable fortune, amounting literally to millions. The unknown artists he patronized became famous soon after he had more or less discovered them and brought them to public notice by buying their works. Uncle Georg had no time for the primitive business sense of my family; he abhorred the yearly exploitation of nature that goes on in the country, and he despised the centuries-old traditions of Wolfsegg—the production of meat, fat, hides, wood, and coal. Most of all he detested hunting, which was a ruling passion with my father and my brother (his brother and his nephew). Of all detestable passions, he had the profoundest detestation for hunting. Whereas his parents and his brother were devotees of hunting, Uncle Georg always refused to join in their sport. Like me he did not eat game, and when the others were out hunting he would shut himself in one of the libraries and divert his mind from their hunting excesses by intensive reading. While they were out killing deer, he would say, I was sitting in the library reading Dostoyevsky, with the shutters firmly closed so as not to hear the shooting. Like me Uncle Georg loved Russian literature, especially Dostoyevsky and Lermontov, about whom he had some perceptive things to say, and he read and reread the revolutionaries Kropotkin and Bakunin, whose memoirs he thought the best in the genre. It was he who introduced me to Russian literature, about which he was very well informed, being as well versed in Russian as he was in French. It was from him that I acquired my love of Russian literature, and later of French literature. Indeed, I owe much of my mental capacity to him. At an early stage Uncle Georg opened my eyes to the rest of the world, so to speak, and made me aware that there was something else beyond Wolfsegg and beyond Austria, something far more splendid, far more tremendous, and that the world consisted not just of one family, but of millions of families, not just of one place, but of millions of places, not just of one people, but of many hundreds and thousands of peoples, each in its own way more attractive and more important than the others. The whole of humanity teems with countless beauties and possibilities, he said. Only an imbecile believes that the world stops where he stops. Uncle Georg not only introduced me to literature and opened it up as an infinite paradise, he also opened my eyes to the world of music and the arts generally. It’s only when we have a proper concept of art that we have a proper concept of nature, he said. It’s only when we can apply the concept of art correctly and enjoy art that we can make proper use of nature and enjoy it too. Most people never acquire even the most rudimentary concept of art, and so they never understand nature. The ideal contemplation of nature presupposes an ideal concept of art, he said. People who claim to see nature without having a concept of art see it only superficially, never in an ideal way, in its infinite splendor. For a thinking person it is possible first to arrive at an ideal concept of art by way of nature, and then to arrive at the ideal contemplation of nature by way of the ideal concept of art. On our visits to Italy, Uncle Georg, unlike my father, did not rush me from one column to another, one monument to another, one church to another, one Michelangelo to another. He never took me to see a work of art. I owe my understanding of art to him precisely because, unlike my parents, he never dragged me from one famous work of art to another. He never pestered me with them but simply pointed out that they existed and told me where they could be found, instead of bashing my head against some column or some Greek or Roman wall, as my parents constantly did. Having been bashed against so-called famous antiquities from early childhood, my head soon became quite insensitive to art of any kind; my parents’ head-bashing brought me no closer to art, but only sickened me with it. It took me years to set my head right after it had been brainlessly bashed against hundreds and thousands of works of art. If I had been under Uncle Georg’s influence as a child, I thought, when my parents were indiscriminately stuffing everything into my head, I would have benefited greatly. But the fact is that I had to be virtually destroyed by my parents before I could be cured by Uncle Georg, by which stage I was over twenty and, it seemed, hopelessly lost. By the time I realized what Uncle Georg meant to my future and my whole development, I was almost beyond treatment. I ultimately owe my salvation not only to my resolve to get away from the destructive ambience of Wolfsegg and halt the damage inflicted on me by my parents but also to Uncle Georg’s perspicacity. The result was that in adulthood, instead of being forced into the kind of life my family led, I was able to lead an entirely different one, like Uncle Georg’s. They hated Uncle Georg as long as he lived, and in the last ten or twenty years they took no trouble to conceal their hatred. In due course they treated him exactly as they treated me, thought of him as they thought of me, and went behind his back as they went behind mine. But he was not beholden to them in any way. One day, having settled his financial affairs, he boarded a train and went to Nice. There he rested for a few weeks, and then, fully refreshed, as he often said, he looked around for a place that would suit him. It had to be by the sea, set in a large garden, with the best air, but with good transport connections. His first picture postcards were sourly received at Wolfsegg. My family had visions of Uncle Georg lolling in the sun or strolling on the beach in linen suits, made to measure by Parisian tailors, of course, and in their dreams, which of course were always nightmares, they saw this good-for-nothing rogue, as they called him, walking into banks at smart Riviera resorts to collect the interest on his ever-growing fortune. They were too stupid to believe that anyone could lead an intellectual existence. Uncle Georg led one, as is attested by some hundred notebooks that he filled with his thoughts and observations. The narrowness of the Central European, who lives to work, as they say, instead of working to live, and without ever pausing to wonder what is meant by work, soon got on Uncle Georg’s nerves, and he drew the unavoidable conclusion. Marking time was not for him. One must let fresh air into one’s mind, he used to say, and that means letting the world into one’s mind, day after day. At Wolfsegg they never let fresh air—or the world—into their minds. Stiff and rigid by nature, they sat stiffly and rigidly on their estate, their life’s mission being to ensure that this immense mass of inherited wealth progressively solidified and under no circumstances dissolved. In the course of time they all took on the rigidity and solidity, the absolute hardness, of this mass and fused with it into a dreadful, sickening unity, without even noticing what was happening. Uncle Georg noticed, however. He wanted nothing to do with this mass of wealth. He waited for the propitious and probably ideal moment when he could detach himself from the Wolfsegg mass. They had, as I know, suggested to him that instead of withdrawing his inheritance from Wolfsegg he should settle for a more or less guaranteed pension. But his perspicacity saved him from doing anything so foolish. When the need arises, people like my parents are never more unscrupulous than in their dealings with members of their own families. They recoil from no baseness, and under the cloak of Christian principle, high-mindedness, and social conscience they are merely rapacious and treat anyone as fair game. Right from the beginning, Uncle Georg failed to fit in with their plans. They were actually afraid of him, because he had seen through them at an early stage. Even as a child he had caught them out in their underhanded dealings, with which he was never afraid to reproach them. He is said to have been the most feared child at Wolfsegg. Clear-sighted from the beginning, he is reputed to have developed an early passion for exposing his family. As a small child he would spy on them and confront them with their unprincipled conduct. No child at Wolfsegg was known to have asked so many questions and demanded so many answers. My parents would always reproach me by saying that I was getting like my uncle Georg, as though he were the most dreadful person in the world. You’re getting like your uncle Georg, they would say, but they achieved nothing by holding up Uncle Georg as a warning example, because right from the start there was no one at Wolfsegg whom I loved more. Your uncle Georg is a monster, they would say. Your uncle Georg is a parasite! Your uncle Georg is a disgrace to us all! Your uncle Georg is a criminal! The list of horrific designations they came up with for Uncle Georg never pro
duced the desired effect on me. Every few years he would come over from Cannes to visit us for a few days, occasionally for a few weeks, and during these visits I was the happiest person in the world. I had a great time whenever Uncle Georg was at Wolfsegg. It suddenly became a different place. It had the air of the big city about it. The libraries were aired, books moved around, and rooms that at other times seemed like cold, dark, silent caverns were filled with music. The rooms at Wolfsegg, usually forbidding, became cozy and homey. Voices that usually spoke in harsh or suppressed tones suddenly sounded quite natural. We were allowed to laugh and to speak in normal conversational tones, not only when instructions were being given to the staff. Why do you always talk French when the servants are present? Uncle Georg asked my parents fiercely—it’s quite ridiculous! It made me happy to hear him say such things. Why don’t you open the windows during this glorious weather? he would ask. Whereas the mealtime conversation normally centered on pigs and cattle, on wagonloads of timber or on whether the warehouse prices were favorable or unfavorable, we suddenly heard words like Tolstoy, Paris, or New York, Napoleon or Alfonso XIII or Meneghini, Callas, Voltaire, Rousseau, Pascal, or Diderot. I can’t see what I’m eating, my uncle would say without the least compunction, whereupon my mother would jump up from the table and open the shutters. You must open the shutters wider, he would say to her, so that I can see my soup. How can you exist in this semidarkness all the time? It’s like living in a museum! Everything looks as though it hasn’t been used for years. What’s the point of having that fine china in the cupboards if you don’t eat off it? And your expensive silver? I admired Uncle Georg. There was never any boredom when he was around. He did not sit stiffly and rigidly at table like the others but constantly turned to one or another of us to ask a question, tender sound advice, or pay a compliment. You must wear more blue, he once told my mother—gray doesn’t suit you. You look as if you were in mourning, and it’s fifteen years since Father died. You, he once told my father, look like one of your own employees. That made me laugh out loud. When the meal was served, a procedure normally attended by complete silence, he would joke with the maids, which was something my mother found hard to endure. It won’t be long, he once said, not in the least inhibited by the presence of the maids, before there’s nobody to serve you. Then you’ll suddenly come alive. There’s a whiff of revolution in the air. I’ve got a hunch that something’s coming that’ll liven everything up again. Hearing such remarks, my father would shake his head and my mother would stare fixedly into my uncle’s face, as though she had no qualms about showing her dislike for him. In Mediterranean countries everything’s quite different, he said, but he did not elaborate. I was seventeen or eighteen at the time and wanted to know in what way things in the Mediterranean countries differed from things in Central Europe; he said he would explain it to me one day when I visited these countries myself. Life in the Mediterranean countries is a hundred times more rewarding than here, he said. I was naturally eager to know why. Central Europeans behave like puppets, not like human beings, he said. They’re all tense, they don’t move naturally, everything about them is stiff and ultimately ridiculous. And unendurable. Like the language they speak, which is the most unendurable language. German is quite unendurable. I was thrilled when he talked about the Mediterranean countries. It’s a shock to come back here, he said. It did not worry him in the least that his remarks spoiled the appetites of his audience. And what atrocious food! he exclaimed. In Germany and Austria, and even in German-speaking Switzerland, it’s not food, it’s just junk! The much vaunted Austrian cuisine is just a joke, an insult to the stomach and the whole of the body. When I’m back in Cannes it takes me weeks to recover from Austrian cooking. And what’s a country with no sea? he exclaimed, without pursuing the idea. After taking a mouthful of wine he would wrinkle up his nose. I could see that he even disapproved of Austrian mineral waters, which are generally well thought of, but he made no comment on them. He must be infinitely bored at Wolfsegg, I thought at the time, for he never had the chance to take part in a lively conversation, which was what he always enjoyed most. Sometimes, at least early on in one of his visits, he would try to initiate one, for instance by throwing the name Goethe into the arena, more or less apropos of nothing, but they did not know what to do with it, let alone with names like Voltaire, Pascal, or Sartre. Being unable to keep up with him, they contented themselves with disliking him, and their dislike intensified from day to day until in the end it turned to overt hatred. They were always intimating that while they worked hard, he had apparently made idleness, and the cultivation of idleness, into the daily content of his life, into a lifelong ideal. You know, he once told me, I come to Wolfsegg not to see the family but to see the house and the landscape, which bring back my childhood. Then, after a pause, he said, And to see you. In his will he left instructions that he was to be buried not at Wolfsegg, as the family expected, but in Cannes. He wished to be buried by the sea. Dressed in somewhat pompous and utterly provincial outfits, my parents rushed to his funeral expecting to inherit an immense fortune, only to be confronted, as I have already indicated, by what my mother called the greatest disappointment of our lives, which was all they had to take home with them. The good Jean, the son of a poor Marseille fisherman, inherited stock to the value of twenty-four million schillings and real estate worth at least twice as much. Uncle Georg left his art collection to the museums in Cannes and Nice. His gravestone, erected by the good Jean, was to bear only his name, followed by the words: who left the barbarians behind him at the right moment. Jean adhered strictly to Uncle Georg’s instructions. When my parents visited the grave a year ago on their way to Spain, they are said to have been so outraged that my mother swore she would never visit it again. She thought the epitaph a monstrous disgrace, and on her return to Wolfsegg she is said to have talked of nothing but the crime that her brother-in-law had perpetrated. I went for long, interesting walks with Uncle Georg in the country around Wolfsegg, as far as Ried in one direction and Gmunden in the other. He always had time for me. Thanks to him I know that there are more things in the world than cows, domestics, and public holidays that have to be strictly observed. I owe it to him that I learned not only how to read and write but how to think and fantasize. It is to his credit that I attach great importance to money, but not the greatest, and that, unlike my parents, I regard people outside Wolfsegg not as a necessary evil but as an endless challenge, a challenge to get to grips with them as the greatest and most exciting monstrosity. Uncle Georg initiated me into the secrets of music and literature and familiarized me with composers and writers, who now became living people, not just plaster figures that had to be dusted three or four times a year. I owe it to him that I began reading the books that seemed to have been locked away in our libraries forever and a day and have never stopped reading them, that I finally learned to philosophize; that I developed not into the sort of person who automatically became a cog in Wolfsegg’s financial and economic mill but into one who could properly be called a free agent. I have him to thank for the fact that I have never made the kind of brainless educational journeys, so called, that my parents went in for, taking me with them in my early years—to Italy and Germany or to Holland and Spain—but have learned the art of travel, one of the greatest pleasures in the world and one that I still enjoy. Thanks to Uncle Georg I have become acquainted not with dead but with living cities; I have visited not dead but living peoples, read not dead but living writers, heard not dead but living music, and seen not dead but living pictures. Instead of sticking the great names of the past on the inner walls of my brain like so many dreary transfer pictures from an equally dreary history, he presented them to me as living actors on a living stage. Every day my parents would show me a totally uninteresting world that progressively paralyzed my mind, a world in which life was basically not worth living, whereas Uncle Georg showed me the same world as one that was invariably interesting. Thus, as quite a small child I already had a choice betwee
n two worlds: my parents’, which I always found uninteresting and merely tiresome, and Uncle Georg’s, which seemed packed with tremendous adventures and in which one could never be bored but wished to live forever, hoping that it would never end; the automatic consequence was that I wanted to live in this world perpetually, for all eternity. To put it simply, my parents always took everything as it came, whereas Uncle Georg never took anything as it came. From their birth my parents lived by the laws laid down for them by their predecessors and never dreamed of making themselves new laws to live by, laws of their own, whereas Uncle Georg lived solely by his own laws, which he himself had made. And these self-made laws he was forever overturning. My parents followed a preordained path, and they would never have thought of deviating from it for a moment, but Uncle Georg went his own way. To cite another instance of the difference between them and my uncle: they hated what they called idleness and could not imagine that a thinking person simply did not know what idleness was and could not afford it, that when a thinking person indulged in apparent idleness he was actually in a state of extreme tension and excitement. This was because theirs was true idleness and they did not know what to do with it, for when they were idle there was actually nothing going on, as they were incapable of thinking, let alone of engaging in a rigorous mental process. For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness. My parents’ idleness was of course genuine idleness, for when they did nothing there was nothing going on in them. By contrast, one might say, the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people like my parents and my family in general. Yet on the other hand, my parents did have an inkling of the nature of Uncle Georg’s idleness, and this was why they hated him, for they guessed that his idleness, being quite different from theirs, not only could become dangerous, but always was dangerous. The thinking person who is idle appears as the greatest threat to those for whom idleness means simply doing nothing, who actually do nothing when they are idle. They hate him because, in the nature of things, they cannot despise him. At the age of four Uncle Georg is said to have taken himself off to Haag, a village about five miles away, where he told total strangers that he came from Wolfsegg and did not intend going back. The villagers, understandably at a loss to know what to make of this strange child, brought little Georg back, kicking and screaming, to his parents. Most of the time his parents, and others who were put in charge of him, more or less had to chain him to Wolfsegg like a little dog to stop him from running away. He told me that as a very small child he had resolved to stay at Wolfsegg no longer than was absolutely necessary. But naturally I waited for the moment when I could free myself from Wolfsegg without hardship, he once told me in Cannes, that is to say until I had all the means that were necessary for total freedom. Of course, Wolfsegg itself is a wonderful place, he said, but the family has always soured it for me. Your father, he once said, is a weak character. He’s actually a kind man, but insufferable. And your mother’s a greedy woman who married him only for venal motives. Of course, she was a nobody. She’s said to have been pretty, but there’s no sign of that now. Your father isn’t basically a greedy man. It was your mother who aroused a kind of primitive greed in him. But even before he met your mother I didn’t get along with him. We were complete opposites. Sure, he’s good-natured, he still is, but please don’t be angry when I say he’s a stupid person. Your mother has him completely under her thumb. Yet at school he was better than I was. Everything he did was excellent. He handed in the best work. He was popular, and I wasn’t. He always got better grades than I did. But although we were dressed alike, I always looked smarter than he did. I don’t know why. But I only say this, said Uncle Georg, because basically I’ve always loved your father, who after all is my brother. And the last time he was in Rome Uncle Georg actually told me more than once that he still loved his brother more than anyone else in the world. If only that woman, your mother, hadn’t appeared on the scene! A woman turns up and marries a man, against his will, and then proceeds to drive out his good qualities, his good character, and destroy him, or at least to turn him into a puppet on a string. Your mother made your father her puppet. My God, Uncle Georg exclaimed, how your father could have developed if he’d found himself a different wife! I know no woman more uncultured than your mother, he said. She goes to the opera but doesn’t understand the least thing about music. She looks at a picture but understands nothing about painting. She pretends she reads books but she doesn’t read any. Yet at mealtimes she prattles away nonstop and talks down all around her with her arrant nonsense. All the same she ought to know how money can be made to multiply by itself, not in the perverse, idiotic way that she goes about it and that your father has taken over from her. Uncle Georg was referring to his own gift for making money and continually adding to his fortune. It’s almost unbelievable that your father and I are from the same stable, he often said. I’ve always had lots of ideas, he said, but your father’s never had one. I’ve always traveled because I’ve wanted to and have a passion for travel, but your father’s never felt the slightest need to travel and has only ever done so because it’s the thing to do. He always arranged his journeys in accordance with stupid plans made for him by others, all of them revolting individuals who called themselves art experts. You must go to Rome and visit the Sistine Chapel. You must see the Giorgione in the Accademia, called La Tempesta, they told him, and so he took a train to Venice to see La Tempesta. You must go to Verona and see the grave of Romeo and Juliet, they said, and so he went and saw it. The Acropolis is something you must see, they said, and so he went to Athens and saw the Acropolis. You must see Rembrandt, you must see Vermeer, you must see Strasbourg Minster, Metz Cathedral. He went everywhere and saw everything that his so-called art experts recommended. And what frightful people they were, those advisers of his, dreadful people with petit bourgeois minds and professorships, whose only reason for approaching him was that it gave them a chance to spend a few days free at our lovely Wolfsegg. Those appalling specimens from Vienna whom he was forever inviting—university professors, art historians, etc.—because he took them to be cultured people. Those horrors from Salzburg and Linz who came to Wolfsegg on weekends and polluted the atmosphere with their malodorous presence, so-called philosophers, scholars, and lawyers who did nothing but exploit him. They came in droves and spent the weekends gorging themselves and regaling us over dinner with their pseudoscholarly garbage. And then there were those revolting doctors he sent for from Vöcklabruck or Wels. Who only ruined him—mentally. Your father was persuaded, quite wrongly, that high-sounding academic titles were a guarantee of high mental capacity. He was always wrong. All my life I’ve hated such titles and their holders. I find nothing so repellent. The very word professor makes me feel sick. Such a title is usually proof positive that its holder is an egregious nincompoop. The grander the title, the greater the imbecility of its holder. And then his wife, your mother! Where she comes from they’ve always trampled on the intellect. And in the years she’s been married to your father she’s added many refinements to the art. But your father was never capable of independent thought: he hadn’t the wherewithal. He always admired others whom he took to be thinking people and let them do his thinking for him. He’s always been indolent, of course. And this indolence has left its mark. He’s never developed. I’m sorry, said Uncle Georg, but your father’s a particularly stupid man. And such a man was just what your mother needed. She was always artful. Looked at in this way, your parents were an ideal couple. I can still hear him saying this. We were sitting in the open on the Piazza del Popolo late one afternoon, and Uncle Georg became more talkative than ever before because, contrary to his custom, he had drunk several glasses of white wine that afternoon. It’s because I’ve always loved your father, my brother, and still do, that I allow myself to speak of him like this, said Uncle Georg—you know that. I always hoped your father would marry somebody different from your mother. But after al
l, he said, suddenly looking at me in consternation, she is your mother. Maybe it was a mistake for you to get to know me. Perhaps you’d have been happier without me—who knows? I said, simply, No. He was staying at the Hotel de la Ville, his favorite hotel, by the Spanish Steps, only a few yards from the Café Greco. He came to Rome at least once a year—when Cannes gets on my nerves, he would say. Once a year Cannes got on his nerves. I don’t care for Paris, he often said, but I always enjoy Rome. Partly because you’re here. In a city you love there’s always a person you love, he said. It’s a pity that Rome has become so noisy. But then all cities have become noisy. Although Uncle Georg did not appear on the photo of my sisters Amalia and Caecilia taken at his villa, it was of him that I thought, with him that I was mainly preoccupied as I looked at the photograph and tried to divert my attention from the telegram from Wolfsegg, the full horror of which I had not yet taken in. My parents dead, dead beyond recall, and my brother, Johannes, dead too. I still could not cope with this fact and its consequences, and I put off trying. Uncle Georg would have been the best support to have at a time like this, but I had no support. I must not think of what lay in store for me. I placed the photographs one above the other on the desk, so that my uncle was on top, though he was not visible on the picture of my sisters taken in Cannes, occupying a position above my parents, and my brother, Johannes, below them. All three dead, at one fell swoop. How, I wondered, did they relate to one another and to me? At the Hotel de la Ville, where of course he occupied the best and most beautiful of all the rooms, my uncle had once told me that he was bound to love his family, though he could not help hating it. This was precisely how he described his relations with the family. His brother, my father, he both loved and despised. My mother he detested as a sister-in-law, while respecting her as the mother of myself and Johannes. They’ll live to a ripe old age, he once said. People like that reach a great age. Their stupidity encloses them for decades like protective armor plating—they don’t drop dead suddenly like us. He was wrong. They have chronic illnesses that prolong their lives instead of shortening them, he said. Such illnesses are irksome but not fatal—they don’t come along all of a sudden and carry you off. Such people aren’t worn down by their interests or driven mad by their passions, because they don’t have any. Their equanimity and ultimately their apathy regulate their day-to-day digestion, so that they can count on reaching their dotage. Basically there’s nothing in the world that attracts them and nothing that repels them. They don’t indulge in anything to the point where it could debilitate them. The moment they realized that I was a disruptive element, said Uncle Georg, they excluded me from the charmed circle, first covertly and then overtly. Basically they would have paid any price, however high, to be rid of me. Quite automatically I had assumed a function at Wolfsegg that they couldn’t accept. I was the one who constantly drew attention to their shortcomings, who spotted every symptom of character weakness and always caught them out in unworthy behavior. How surprised they were, said Uncle Georg, when I pointed out one day that they hadn’t unlocked our libraries for six months and demanded access to them. People were always surprised when I said our libraries, for others could at best have spoken of our library, having only one. But we, having five, had much more to be ashamed of intellectually than those who had only one. One of our great-great-great-grandfathers inaugurated these five libraries that I’ve been so proud of all my life. He certainly wasn’t a madman, a crazy intellectual, as they always said at Wolfsegg. He could afford to set up these libraries—with the greatest understanding of literature—instead of filling the house with drawing rooms, which serve only to promote boredom and brainlessness. One day, said Uncle Georg, I burglarized these dead libraries, as it were, and was never forgiven for it. But when I left Wolfsegg they locked them up again and didn’t set foot in them for years, until word got around that the libraries existed and they were obliged to show them to the curious rather than lose face. At Wolfsegg nothing was ever used, said Uncle Georg, until I suddenly started using everything, sitting on chairs that no one had sat on for decades, opening cupboards that no one had opened for decades, drinking out of glasses that no one had drunk out of for decades. I even walked down passages that no one had walked down for decades. Right from the start I was the inquisitive one, whom they couldn’t help fearing. And I began to leaf through our centuries-old documents, which were stored in big chests in the attics and which they had always known about but never looked at, as if they were afraid of discovering something unpleasant. I was interested in everything, said Uncle Georg, and of course I was especially interested in our family connections, in our history, though not in the way they were, not just in its hundreds and thousands of glorious pages but in the whole of it. I ventured to do what they had never dared to do—to look into the fearful depths of our history—and this angered them. Georg was a name they all came to fear at Wolfsegg, said my uncle. They were afraid that the child I was then might one day control them, instead of their controlling me. My parents, your grandparents, chained me to Wolfsegg and gagged me, he said, which is precisely what they shouldn’t have done. And your parents learned nothing from your grandparents’ mistake; on the contrary, they used even worse methods in dealing with you. But on the other hand, he said, what would have become of you if they hadn’t behaved to you as they did? The question needed no answer: it answered itself. When I look at you, said Uncle Georg, I’m actually looking at myself. You’ve developed exactly as I did. You parted from them, got out of their way, turned your back on them, and escaped from them at the right moment. They never forgave me, and they won’t forgive you. My God, he said, Rome is to you what Cannes is to me. In this way we can deal with Wolfsegg, from a distance. When I think of those dreary evenings with the family, when the most marvelous topics fizzle out as soon as they’re broached. Whatever you say is met with incomprehension. Nothing you mention is taken up. If your father reads a paper, it’s the Upper Austrian Farmers’ Weekly; if he reads a book, it’s the accounts book. And then, because they have to make use of their theater subscription, they go to Linz and see some dire comedy, without feeling in the least ashamed of themselves. And they go to those ridiculous concerts at the Bruckner House, where innumerable wrong notes are played at maximum volume. These people—I mean your parents—haven’t just taken out subscriptions for the theater and concerts: they live their whole lives on a subscription basis. Every day of their lives is like an evening spent at the theater seeing some frightful comedy or at a ridiculous concert where wrong notes predominate, and they’re not ashamed of it. They live their lives because it’s the done thing; not because they want to, not because they have a passion for life, but because their parents took out a subscription for them. And just as they clap in all the wrong places at the theater, so they clap in all the wrong places in their lives, applauding when there’s no occasion for applause, just as they do at concerts, and making the ghastliest grimaces when they should be laughing heartily. And just as the plays they see are of the most dismal quality, so their lives are of the most dismal quality. On the other hand, he said, we should by now be indifferent to what they do and what they’ve made of their lives—it doesn’t concern us. And who’s to say that we’ve taken the right course? We’re not the happiest of people either—always searching for the ideal and failing to find it. The fact is that we’ve all tried to find a way of getting closer to one another and ended up farther apart. The closer we’ve tried to get, the farther apart we’ve become. Our overtures have ended only in bitterness, and we’ve only ever given up because otherwise we’d have been smothered with reproaches. We made the mistake of not resigning ourselves to the fact that Wolfsegg no longer concerns us. It’s their Wolfsegg, not ours. We always tried to force our Wolfsegg on them, instead of leaving them alone with theirs. We’ve always interfered with their Wolfsegg when we’d have done better to leave them in peace. They paid us off, and we ought to have been content with that, once and for all. We no longer have any right t
o Wolfsegg, he said. I looked carefully at the photograph of my sisters, taken when they were twenty-two and twenty-three. Their mocking faces have taken their revenge on them, I thought. They remained alone; they didn’t have the strength to break away from Wolfsegg. These mocking faces were their only weapon against their surroundings and their parents, from whom they couldn’t escape, but it was a weapon that scared off all the men they wanted. My sisters were never beautiful, I thought. And they weren’t interesting either. They haven’t developed: they’ve remained the silly country cousins they always were. Twenty years on, their mocking faces, no longer fresh, are lined with bitterness. In fact they’re rather ugly. Caecilia is probably more good-natured than Amalia. The greed they inherited from their mother is compounded by bitterness. At one time they were both musical, and Uncle Georg tried to make musicians of them—a futile attempt that was doomed to failure. They lacked the staying power and had no real interest in music, and so naturally their talent was lost; they were just about good enough to be stand-ins for the church choir. At the age of four or five their mother started dressing them in dirndls, always identical in pattern and cut, in which they were bound to atrophy sooner or later. Both have delicate health, inherited from their mother, but it is the kind of delicate health that augurs a long life. They are always coughing. I have never known them not to cough. At Wolfsegg they cough all over the house, but their coughing is not to be taken seriously; it is not lethal. It is as though coughing were their one passion, the easiest fun that life could afford them. Their musical talent seems to have withdrawn into coughing. Even in company they cough all the time. They have nothing to say but never stop coughing. Each wears a silver chain around her neck, inherited from our grandmother, and if asked what they are, the first word they utter in reply is Catholic. They were both sent on cookery courses at Bad Ischl, where it was hoped they would learn Austrian imperial cooking, but neither learned to cook at Bad Ischl. Their cooking is even worse than Mother’s, whose incompetence always comes to light when the cook is on vacation at Aschach on the Danube. Potato soup is the only dish Mother cooks well. But none of us likes potato soup—except Father, who is passionately fond of it, or so he says. My sisters were always well brought up, as they say, but this does not alter the fact that they have always been the most devious creatures imaginable. If one of them picked up a book, the other would knock it out of her hand. They were always seen together, never alone. There is a year between them, but they behave like twins. If I say that I have always loved them, this does not mean that I have not always hated them in equal measure. When we grew up I naturally hated them more than I loved them. It now occurs to me that hate may be all that is left. They were always disappointed in me. They had only bad things to say about their brother, as I know, especially when others were present and they knew it would have a devastating effect. And what stories they invented in order to disparage me! Stupid people are always the most dangerous, it occurs to me. To say that I always loved them does not mean that I was not continually cursing them. Right from the start their mother chained them to herself and never let them loose. They were not allowed to travel or attend balls, and even at the age of about twenty they still had to ask permission to go to the Thursday market at Lambach. They got only so much pocket money, not enough for them to step out, just enough for a drink and a slice of bread to go with it. Their shoes were mostly made to measure by the shoemaker at Schwanenstadt, who had made our grandparents’ shoes. They were always unfashionable, and in time my sisters developed a rather clownish gait, which remained in later years, when they were able to buy shoes in Vienna. I cannot say which of them is the more intelligent. I cannot say that Caecilia has better taste than Amalia. I cannot say that Amalia knows more than Caecilia. Their voices are so alike that if one of them calls out it is difficult to know which of them it is. Since they were always together and neither felt the need to break loose from the other, they were for a long time unable to find a suitable husband. In fact I do not think either ever thought of marrying until last year, when Caecilia went to visit an old aunt of ours at Titisee in the Black Forest. There she met the wine cork manufacturer. Caecilia married him and thereby incurred the hatred of her sister Amalia. Amalia moved out of the main house into the Gardeners’ House, put in a brief appearance at the wedding breakfast after the church ceremony, and then left, not to be seen again. Knowing her, I guess that she stayed in the Gardeners’ House until she heard of the death of her parents and her brother and then, having a much greater sense of the theatrical than her sister, emerged from the Gardeners’ House and ran screaming to the main building, though of course I have no way of being sure. At the time of the accident Caecilia’s husband was probably still at Wolfsegg, I thought, as he didn’t intend to return to the Black Forest and Freiburg for two more weeks. Caecilia’s marriage was supposedly engineered, as they say, by our aunt in Titisee. It is typical of Caecilia that she should have thought she could stay on at Wolfsegg after the wedding. What it must have cost my mother to persuade her to go to Freiburg with her husband, considering that she had secretly sworn not to let either of her daughters leave Wolfsegg, as she had a lifelong dread of being left alone! Both her daughters were to stay with her at Wolfsegg so that if she should lose one of them she would still not be entirely alone. Mother always planned well ahead and took all eventualities into account, especially where her own future was concerned. She had always reckoned with losing my father, but then I’ll still have my daughters, even if both my sons are no longer at Wolfsegg. This was her plan. And if one daughter leaves home I’ll still have the other. Throughout the wedding festivities she was angry with Caecilia for deserting her and let her feel it, but as she is shrewd—or rather was shrewd—she was careful not to display her anger and sudden hatred for the deserter; on the contrary, she made a point of expressing her delight at what she called this happy union. Now at last she was the happy mother she’d always wanted to be, she said, to the disgust of all who knew the truth. She had herself photographed with her son-in-law all over Wolfsegg—although she had never let herself be photographed by a stranger, so to speak—in all kinds of silly and, it seemed to me, shameless poses. At every moment she would embrace her son-in-law and ask one or another of the bystanders to take a picture of them. Her histrionic skill undoubtedly reached its peak at this wedding. And from the Black Forest! she exclaimed more than once. I’ve always loved Freiburg! And Titisee! Her tastelessness knew no bounds. Secretly she longed for nothing so much as a speedy breakup of Caecilia’s marriage to her awkward husband, who probably has no idea what he has done to deserve it all. She had never been fastidious. It may well be, I think, that our aunt in Titisee fixed up her niece Caecilia with the wine cork manufacturer in order to avenge herself on my mother, for it is abundantly clear that our aunt is to blame for this grotesque marriage. She could never stand my mother, and now she had her triumph. While my mother was putting on that distasteful act of hers during the wedding festivities, she was, I believe, already turning her mind to the question of how to destroy this unwelcome marriage as soon as possible. As she projected the image of the deliriously happy mother to the wedding guests, the mechanism of destruction was already at work in her mind. How sad that Uncle Georg couldn’t have lived to see this day! she exclaimed. My father behaved with a good deal of indifference during these days of celebration, attending to his business and spending most of his time at the Farm or in the woods. He had always disliked such festivities and put up with them only to please his wife and because she forced him to do so. All the time he was calmness itself, as they say. It struck me that he had suddenly become old, weak and quite apathetic. But I cannot say that I felt sorry for him. In childhood I had what seems to me a normal, though not especially good, relationship with my sisters, but when we grew up it was always a bad relationship, and now, with my parents and Johannes dead, I was afraid of having to face them. They’ll cause me the greatest difficulties, I thought. I won’t be able to endure their mo
cking and by now embittered faces, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they dress, and the way they constantly hurl unfounded accusations at me. They had always reproached me for having rejected Wolfsegg and dealt my parents a cruel and more or less mortal blow, and now that our parents were dead their reproaches were bound to be even more shameless. They won’t shrink from the basest and most absurd accusation, I thought. It’ll be no good restraining myself and trying to keep out of their way: they’ll be there all the time, blaming me for the whole disaster. And Uncle Georg too, in spite of his having been dead for so long. They won’t miss a single opportunity of saying that I drove my parents crazy, that I drove them insane and wounded them mortally. Even though it has nothing to do with me. During their lifetime I was always to blame for their misfortune; not just our parents’, but theirs too. They had a theory according to which my leaving Wolfsegg and turning my back on Wolfsegg was the reason for their being chained to Wolfsegg and forced to languish there, unable to develop, unable to marry, and so forth. I was to blame for the fact that the whole atmosphere of Wolfsegg had darkened in the last twenty years, from the moment I moved to Rome. For the fact that their father and Johannes became ill and their mother started to suffer stomach and kidney disorders in addition to her lifelong migraines. For the fact that the health of all of them had deteriorated so much. For the fact that nothing had been renovated at Wolfsegg. Even for the fact that no repairs had been done to the roof. I was to blame when it rained in and they had to rush to the attic with their cloths and buckets to mop up the water. Earlier, before I left for Rome, Wolfsegg had always been fun, but not since. There was suddenly no music at Wolfsegg, for instance. Wolfsegg had become silent, Amalia once told me, because of me, because of my big-headedness, which had driven me to Rome, because I had no sense of responsibility, because I lacked all filial affection and had always hated my parents, whereas they had always loved them. My parents, they said, spent all their money on me and in doing so deprived them, because they had a claim on it too. According to Caecilia, my expensive lifestyle had reduced their standard of living and was responsible for the increasingly alarming depreciation of their inheritance, and so forth. They even went so far as to assert that my only reason for going to college and choosing to study at the most expensive universities in Europe was to keep them as short of money as possible. Why does it have to be London and Oxford, they repeatedly asked, when Innsbruck would do just as well? For as long as I can remember they always referred to me as their big-headed brother who squandered their money, though in fact it was my money, or at most my parents’. Because of my urge to show off I always went around dressed in the most expensive clothes, they said, while they were forced to wear the simplest. You’re to blame for our going around in rags, Amalia once told me. At first they blamed everything on Uncle Georg, and then they blamed me. My brother too had the gall to reproach me for the way I lived and informed me that Wolfsegg could not afford to keep me in such style. These were his very words. I could not believe my ears, but I had not misheard him. For the most part my brother and sisters only echoed my parents’ remarks, which they had to listen to all year round. Whenever I was at Wolfsegg they gave free rein to their malevolent idiocies and did not hold back. They repeatedly said that I led a useless and utterly futile life and tried to persuade my parents to discontinue my monthly allowance or at least radically reduce it, constantly urging them to make short work of me and not let themselves be led up the garden path. I happened to hear Caecilia say this one day when she and my mother were having tea in the summerhouse and I happened to turn up earlier than expected. I was continually subjected to their insolence, and for as long as I can remember they were secretly tormented by the thought that I got more than my due and seemed to lead a better and more agreeable life, to which they did not consider me entitled. What is he after all? they would say. Who does he think he is? If I was silent at table it displeased them; if I spoke it displeased them. You never say anything, they would complain, or alternatively, You’re always talking. If I stayed home they said, Why don’t you go out? If I went out they said, Why don’t you stay home? If I wore a light suit I should have been wearing a dark one; if I wore a dark suit I should have been wearing a light one. If I talked to the doctor in the village they would say disapprovingly, He’s always talking to the doctor, about us. If I did not talk to the doctor they would say, He doesn’t even talk to the doctor. If I said I preferred Rome to Paris they at once reacted by saying that I praised Rome only because they hated it. If I said I did not want a dessert they related this to themselves, though when I said it I was not thinking about them at all. Whatever I said, they assumed that it was directed against them. After a while I could no longer stand it at Wolfsegg. If I felt like driving to the lake they would accuse me of everlastingly driving to the lake, which was absurd, for I drove to the lake at most once a year, unlike my brother, who drove there every two or three days, and even more often in summer, but it never occurred to them to criticize him. If I went for a walk in the woods they thought I was crazy, but if my brother went into the woods it was entirely normal. When I once ordered a martini at the local hotel they immediately said, He always orders an expensive martini. If I sent them a picture postcard from somewhere they immediately said, He’s only sent it to offend us. He can afford to travel to Cannes, Lisbon, Madrid, and Dubrovnik, but we can’t. So I soon stopped sending them postcards. But when the postcards stopped coming they said, He doesn’t send us postcards because he’s too cheap. For a whole five or six days they would be angry with me because I had opened the windows in my room during a very cold spell in winter in order not to suffocate. I was accused of squandering their money at a time when it was in short supply and wood was so dear. Without fresh air I cannot exist, let alone engage in any mental activity, but I am never forgiven for ventilating my room in winter. They would rather suffocate than show any consideration for my wish to air my room at Wolfsegg, where they have enough wood to heat the house for a thousand years. The first time I returned to Wolfsegg from Rome, expecting a cordial welcome, I happened to say, in the first few moments, how beautiful Rome was in February, when one could sit in the open air outside a café, quite lightly dressed, and drink coffee. They were immediately angered by the thought of my drinking coffee in Rome in the open air and constantly reproached me for sitting around drinking coffee, while they had to work hard, not just in February but all year round. Can you imagine how hard we have to work at Wolfsegg? they repeatedly asked me. We can’t afford anything, not a thing. You live in luxury while we work our fingers to the bone to keep Wolfsegg going! In the years since I left Wolfsegg my sisters have taken to addressing me in a disagreeably patronizing tone that I simply cannot endure. Do you have to fly when it costs only a third of the price by rail? my mother asked last time, and this piece of nonsense was immediately seconded by my sisters. Just as they used to gang up with my mother against me in their shrill, squeaky voices, they now do the same in their grating middle-aged voices, which set my teeth on edge whenever I have to listen to them. My mother would make some vicious remark, and my sisters would mindlessly echo it. I would never have dared to show Gambetti that dreadful place, and in all these years I have taken care not to invite him. What I have so far told him about Wolfsegg is, I think, perversely anodyne compared with the reality. It would have been quite wrong to allow Gambetti a glimpse of this snake pit. My sisters were not liked in the village. If I kept my ears open I heard only the most unpleasant remarks about them. My mother was not popular either. My father, however, was respected, and people were secretly sorry for him, having to live with such a wife and such daughters. As for my brother, Johannes, they had to work with him on the farm, in the forest, and in the mines. Whether they liked this I do not know. He was not wholly unapproachable, and he was not really as arrogant as he was said to be. True, he did not have an agreeable manner, and most of the time he gave the impression of arrogance, but this was a misleading impression, due to shy
ness rather than conceit. Unlike my mother and my sisters, but like my father and me, he was always on good terms with the local people and knew how to win them over. But it is fair to say that my sisters were unpopular with everyone. And they never tried to make themselves popular. The fact that even in later life they were always seen together was not just comic but offputting, not just grotesque but actually repellent, and so was their continued habit of dressing alike. Even now they are still their mother’s squeaky-voiced marionettes through and through. If they ever agreed to darn my socks, the stitching was so wide that the socks were unwearable, and the color of the darning wool seldom matched. They thought nothing of darning green socks with red wool and were profoundly hurt when, instead of thanking them, I threw their frightful handiwork in their faces. I found it particularly silly that they always went around in the atrocious local costume. Every year they had dirndls made for them by Mother’s dressmaker. I found these distasteful, and whenever I returned from Rome and they ran to meet me, dressed in their dirndls, I had to take a firm hold on myself lest I said something offensive. When they were little they wore pigtails, but later they put their hair up in buns. The blond buns have meanwhile grayed. I recall that even as small children they never let me sit in the garden and read a book. They would not leave me in peace but incessantly taunted me by calling me a failed genius, an expression borrowed from their mother’s vocabulary. I found it highly offensive, and they would shout it at me until I threw down my book, jumped up, and slunk off to my room. I wish I could think of something pleasant to say about my sisters, but nothing occurs to me. Given time, of course, I could tell a few stories that would show them in a better light, but so few, compared with the dreadful things that went on between us, that they would not be worth recounting. I must say that I am not afraid to record the truth about this pair, who throughout my life have done nothing but torment me and have begrudged me every breath I drew. I would be guilty of gross dishonesty if I forbore to mention the torments and indignities they inflicted on me. They deserve no such forbearance, and neither do I. Once or twice a year I cheer myself up by buying one of those Roman straw hats that are sold in Trastevere for next to nothing and, being lighter than other hats, afford the best protection against the Roman heat, which is at times unbearable. I once turned up at Wolfsegg, which I still thought of as home, wearing one of these cheap straw hats and was taken to task by my mother. Did I have to buy myself such an expensive straw hat, she asked, when there was such a catastrophic economic crisis and the upkeep of Wolfsegg had become almost impossible? This is just one instance of the awfulness of my family, to whom, when I come to think of it, the words shame, sensitivity, and consideration meant virtually nothing. And who never felt the slightest need to improve themselves, having stopped in their tracks decades ago and been content to stay put ever since. I have always been eager to improve myself, to take up and assimilate whatever I could, but they have not made the least effort in this direction. Just as most graduates, like many doctors of my acquaintance, believe that after completing their studies they have done all that is required of them and need no longer try to extend their knowledge, broaden their understanding, or develop their character, having already reached what they consider the high point of their existence, so my family, once they had left high school, made no further effort but stayed where they were for the rest of their lives. It is appalling that anyone should think it unnecessary to broaden his mind and regard any extension of his knowledge, in whatever sphere, as superfluous and any development of his character as a waste of time. My family very soon gave up extending their knowledge and developing their characters. Having left high school at age nineteen, they grossly overrated themselves and were so satisfied with what they had achieved that they stopped working on themselves. Whereas Uncle Georg spent his whole life endeavoring to extend his knowledge, develop his character, and realize his full potential, they had no time for any such endeavor when once they had reached the minimal acceptable level of attainment. At about age nineteen they stopped assimilating anything new, ceased to exert themselves, and shunned any effort at self-improvement. Yet it goes without saying that we should continue to extend our knowledge and strengthen our character as long as we live, and that anyone who fails to do so, who stops working on himself and exploiting his potential to the full, has simply stopped living. They all stopped living at age nineteen, and since then, I am bound to say, they have merely vegetated and become a burden to themselves. Every hundred years the family has produced an extraordinary character like Uncle Georg and then pursued this extraordinary character with hatred and animosity all his life. Looking at these pictures of my family, I am inclined to think that they could have made something of themselves—and perhaps even achieved something great—yet they made nothing of themselves, because they settled for indolence and were content with the daily round, which demanded nothing more of them than the traditional stolidity they were born with. They staked nothing, risked nothing, and chose to take it easy, as they say, when they were still young. They never exploited the potential that they undoubtedly had, that everyone has. And if one of them did exploit this potential, as Uncle Georg did—I do not wish to dwell on my own case—he was punished with incomprehension and disfavor. My sisters stopped in their tracks as soon as they had graduated from high school. They left it with their heads held high, clutching their graduation diplomas, which they regarded as lifelong guarantees of something extraordinary, when all they guaranteed was extraordinary mediocrity. They stopped in their tracks, and now, at about forty, they are still where they were at nineteen. Everything about them is little short of ludicrous, and at their age, of course, not pitiable but pathetic. Father too came to a stop early in life. Having qualified at the forestry school in Wiener Neustadt, he thought he had reached the culmination of his existence and began to ease up. After coming to a halt at twenty-two, he became increasingly rigid, and atrophy set in. And my brother, Johannes, ceased to develop after graduating from the forestry school at Gmunden. Like ninety percent of humanity he believed that, with good final grades on his certificate from the last school he had attended, his life had reached its apogee. This is what most people think. It is enough to drive one up the wall. They collapse in upon themselves, one might say. And anyone who fails to exert himself is bound to be a disagreeable person whom we can view only with distaste. At first he depresses us, then distresses us, and finally infuriates us. No action we take against him is of any avail. Human beings, it seems, exert themselves only for as long as they can look forward to idiotic diplomas that they can boast about in public. Having gained enough of these idiotic diplomas they take it easy. For the most part their sole aim in life is to obtain diplomas and titles, and when they think they have collected enough of them, they lie back and relax, featherbedded by their diplomas and titles, and appear to have no further ambition in life, no interest in an independent existence or indeed anything but these diplomas and titles, under which mankind has for centuries been in danger of suffocating. They do not strive for independence and self-sufficiency or for the natural development of their personalities; they are utterly obsessed by these diplomas and titles and would gladly give their lives for them if they were conferred unconditionally. This is the depressing truth. They set so little store by life itself that they see only these diplomas and titles, which they proceed to hang on their walls. These diplomas and titles hang on the walls of butchers and philosophers, of scullions, attorneys, and judges, all of whom spend their lives staring at them with greedy eyes, eyes made greedy by their constant staring. When they speak of themselves, they do not say, I am this or that person; they say, I am this or that title, this or that diploma. They associate not with this or that person, but with this or that diploma, this or that title. Taking mankind as a whole, then, we may say that most associations take place not between human beings, but between diplomas or titles. To put it baldly, human beings count for nothing: only titles and diplomas count. One does not meet M
r. Huber at the coffeehouse: one meets the doctorate of that name. One has lunch not with Mr. Maier but with the engineering diploma of that name. Human beings, it seems, have not really arrived until they have ceased to be mere human beings and become holders of engineering diplomas; when they are no longer merely Mrs. Müller but the counselor’s wife. And in their offices they engage not Miss So-and-So but her first-class diploma. This addiction to titles and diplomas is of course endemic throughout Europe, but there is no doubt that in Germany, and to an even greater extent in Austria, it has developed a monstrous, grotesque, and quite staggering virulence. Only recently I told Gambetti that Austrians and Germans had no respect for human beings but respected only titles and diplomas, believing that a human being began to exist only when he had obtained a diploma or received a title and that until that point he was not a human being at all. Gambetti thought this a gross exaggeration, but in the course of our future lessons I shall prove to him that it is not, that these conditions prevail not only in German-speaking Europe but seemingly throughout Europe, and that in a frighteningly short time they will prevail throughout the world. But of course this addiction to diplomas and titles is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon: mankind has always suffered from it. Centuries ago human beings, having insufficient respect for themselves, decided to boost their self-esteem by presenting themselves in the form of diplomas and titles. Uncle Georg used to say, Whenever I go to Austria and sit in a train, I have the impression that the compartment is occupied solely by professorships and doctorates, not by human beings, that the streets are teeming not with young people or old people but with counselors. My father, having qualified at the forestry school, had his diploma framed and hung it over his desk like an altarpiece. My brother, Johannes, did the same after qualifying at the forestry school in Gmunden. They felt that their graduation from these undoubtedly necessary but quite ludicrous academies was the high point of their lives. And my sisters were always squawking about their high school without even being asked about it. The whole world suffers from this addiction to diplomas and titles, which makes it impossible to lead a natural life. But the extreme state of affairs that so depresses you in Austria and Germany has certainly not been reached in the Latin countries, said Uncle Georg. And I don’t think this Austro-German condition will ever prevail there. The Latin peoples are not so narrow-minded and never have been. Natural life still flourishes there, but here it has almost died out. In Germany and Austria natural life has not been possible for centuries, having been extinguished by the craving for diplomas and titles. In early childhood I had a good relationship with my brother, Johannes. He is—or rather was—only a year older than I. Until we started school and our sisters were born we were good friends. But while we were at school our ways diverged. At the age of six, I think, each of us set off in the direction that was to determine his whole life, and we went in precisely opposite directions. While Johannes took more and more to the fields and the woods, I moved with equal determination away from the fields and the woods, with the result that he became more and more bound up with Wolfsegg as I grew farther and farther away from it. In the end he was not just pervaded but dominated by Wolfsegg and, I believe, sucked in and devoured by it, as I was ultimately by the world outside it. Very soon my brother’s favorite words were grain, pigs, pines, and firs, while mine were Paris, London, Caucasus, Tolstoy, and Ibsen, and his repeated attempts to fire me with enthusiasm for his favorite words, like my attempts to inspire him with an interest in mine, soon became pointless. Emulating Uncle Georg, I spent most of my time in our libraries, while Johannes was usually to be found in the stables. He would wait in the cowshed for a cow to calve, while I was busy in the library decoding a sentence by Novalis; as he waited impatiently for the calf to be born in the cowshed, I waited with equal impatience for Novalis’s idea to be born in my head. On graduating from high school he bought himself a sailboat; I spent my graduation present on a trip to Anatolia with Uncle Georg. When Uncle Georg still lived at Wolfsegg I spent every spare minute with him, but my brother had scarcely any interest in Uncle Georg; he preferred to be with my father, whom he accompanied to the fields, the woods, and the mines, and to various offices in the neighboring towns. From the beginning I regarded Uncle Georg as my teacher, while Johannes saw Father as his. And unlike my brother, I did not hang around my mother. I detested the way he always clung to her skirts. I never clung to my mother’s skirts, and I always drew my head away when she made to kiss me. He was forever demanding to be kissed by her. At night, when he was asleep, I often left our shared bedroom and went to Uncle Georg to hear one of his stories; he invented hundreds of them to please me. My brother never dared to flout the rules at Wolfsegg, but I was always flouting them. I left the house whenever I wanted—he did not. I ran down to the village whenever I wanted, to observe the people who lived there—he did not. I talked to the villagers whenever I wanted—he did not talk to them unless he was given permission. Finally, when I had my own room I arranged it to suit my own taste; he would never have thought of doing such a thing. His schoolbooks were always clean and his writing like copperplate; my schoolbooks were always dirty, my writing careless and all but illegible. My brother was always punctual at mealtimes, but I had a problem with punctuality. I encouraged him to join in adventures, but he never encouraged me. The adventures usually ended with his getting hurt and crying, for he was always the clumsier of the two of us, often falling into a stream or a pond, tripping over a root, or grazing his face or his legs on bushes. Such things never happened to me. When I asked him whether he could see something or other in the distance, he never could because he was shortsighted, whereas I have always had good vision. I had no trouble learning to ride a bicycle, but it was ages before he could balance on one. He was no match for me at running. If we had to swim across a river he usually found it too much and had to give up. The consequence of all this was that at a very early age he came not so much to hate me as to develop a strong sense of inferiority, from which he continued to suffer and which ultimately turned into a more or less unbridled hatred that at times revealed itself quite openly. I could, for instance, run down to the village in three minutes, but it took him five. At school he was the most attentive pupil, and when the teacher called out his name he would jump up at once, whereas I was the most inattentive and usually did not hear my name called out, which naturally led to my being punished. Neither of us had friends during our first year at school, as we were not allowed to bring our classmates home and had to go straight back to Wolfsegg after school. But in later years, when we were allowed to bring friends home, we each had friends who were suited to our temperaments and differed as we did. My brother always slept soundly and was fully rested in the morning, but I suffered from sleeplessness, even as a child. I had the wildest and most exciting dreams—he did not. He took a long time to find a particular location on a map—I did not. I loved maps more than anything. I used to spread them out in front of me and go on long imaginary journeys, visiting the most famous cities and traveling the seas in my dream ships. My brother had quite different interests: he would crouch in the corner of the stable and watch the animals. When the Medrano Circus put up its tent in the village—we were five and six at the time—I went down to watch the circus people whenever I had a chance. I was particularly fond of the trapeze artists. For hours I would sit in a hidden corner, watching in admiration as they rehearsed their exciting acts. My brother had no interest whatever in the circus. In winter I would watch the curlers on the ice until I was half frozen, longing to join in the game. At first I was strictly forbidden to, but I soon found a way around this prohibition and went down to the village on my own hook, as they say. I went down to the village whenever I could; as soon as I could walk I was fascinated by the village and by the new and quite different people I saw there. My brother did not share my interest and could never be persuaded to accompany me. This would have been a transgression, and at an early age he rejected the idea on principle, not daring t
o transgress. I thought nothing of calling at all the houses in the village, introducing myself and talking to the occupants. I made friends with them and observed how they spent their day, taking an interest in their work and their recreation. The more people I met on my forays into the village, which is more than two and a half miles long, the better it suited me. Above all I got to know the simple people and saw how they lived and worked and celebrated special occasions. Until my fourth or fifth year I had no idea that there were any other people outside Wolfsegg, but I soon discovered that there were hundreds, thousands, and millions of them. I visited the tradesmen and watched them at their work—the turner, the shoemaker, the butcher, the tailor. I visited poor people and was surprised to find how friendly they were to me, for I had always been led to believe they were intolerant—as my parents always described them—narrow-minded, unapproachable, stubborn, deceitful, and treacherous. But I discovered that they were kinder than we were up at Wolfsegg, that they were kind and approachable, unlike us, that they were cheerful, unlike us. And suddenly it seemed to me that it was we, not the village people, who were unapproachable, stubborn, deceitful, and treacherous. My parents had told me that the village was a dangerous place, but I discovered that it was not the least bit dangerous. I thought nothing of going in and out of all the doors and looking through all the windows. My curiosity knew no bounds. My brother never accompanied me on my expeditions. On the contrary, he reported them to my parents. He’s been down to the village again, he would say, and look on shamelessly, not batting an eyelid, as I was punished for my offense. My mother would beat me with a rawhide that she always kept in readiness, and my father would box my ears. I had many whippings, but I cannot remember my brother being whipped or having his ears boxed. I was interested in anything that was different, but my brother was not, I thought, examining the photo of him in his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee. I once told Gambetti that my brother was always an affection seeker, but I never was. I tried to explain what I meant by the term. At mealtimes my brother was always silent and never dared to ask a question; I constantly asked questions and was reprimanded by my parents for asking the most impossible questions. I wanted to know everything—no question must remain unanswered. My brother was a slow eater; I always ate hastily, and still do. I always walked fast, wanting to reach my destination as soon as possible; my brother had a slow, one might almost say a deliberate, gait. As for my handwriting, it was fast and careless and, as I have said, almost illegible, whereas he always wrote in a careful, regular hand. When we went to confession he always spent a long time in the confessional, whereas I was in and out in no time. It did not take me long to list the many sins I felt obliged to confess, while he took at least twice as long over the few he had committed. Until I was about twelve we shared the same room, and I recall that in the morning I always dressed very quickly. Hardly had I woken up than I was washed and dressed. Johannes took at least three times as long. Right from the beginning, in fact, he resembled Father more than Mother, at least when it came to quickness, restlessness, curiosity, and percipience. Naturally my essays were better than his, even at primary school, but this did not mean that I got better marks. On the contrary, my marks were always worse than his, even though my essays were undoubtedly better; this is not surprising, however, as our teachers thought the form of an essay more important than the content. I always chose interesting subjects—what I called exotic subjects—when essays were assigned. Johannes always chose the simplest subjects, which he developed and presented in a simple manner, a manner that was not just simple but tedious and pedestrian, while my essays were always composed in a complicated and interesting manner, as is attested by the exercise books lying around in cardboard boxes in our attics. My brother was less interested in widening his knowledge and improving his mind than in winning the teachers’ approval. This was never my aim, and I was never in the teachers’ good books, as they say. They disliked me because they always found me intractable, but they loved my brother because he was so uncomplicated. And instantly obedient. I was often impatient and recalcitrant, and never at a loss for words. He did whatever he was told and never rebelled, whereas I rebelled almost every day and so incurred the hostility of the teachers. Like my family, they were driven to distraction, as I now realize, by all the questions I asked and were nearly always out of their depth. I distrusted them, and my distrust was reciprocated. Unlike my brother, I had no respect for authority. Very early on, Uncle Georg had told me the truth about teachers: that they were moral cowards who took out on the pupils all the frustrations they could not take out on their wives. When I was very young Uncle Georg impressed on me that among the educated classes teachers were the basest and most dangerous people, on a par with judges, who were the lowest form of human life. Teachers and judges, he said, are the meanest slaves of the state—remember that. He was right, as I have discovered not just hundreds but thousands of times. No teacher and no judge can be trusted as far as you can throw him. Without scruple or compunction they daily destroy many of the existences that are thrown upon their mercy, being motivated by base caprice and a desire to avenge themselves for their miserable, twisted lives—and they are actually paid for doing so. The supposed objectivity of teachers and judges is a piece of shabby mendacity, Uncle Georg said—and he was right. Talking to a teacher, we soon discover that he is a destructive individual with whom no one and nothing is safe, and the same is true when we talk to a judge. My brother always began by trusting people and was hurt when they let him down, as they usually did. I, on the other hand, trusted hardly anybody on first acquaintance and was seldom let down. Having been let down so often, he became embittered at an early age and soon took on the embittered features of his father, whom life had generally let down—or rather he took them over, as one takes over a property—and he soon came to resemble his father in every way. How often have I thought to myself, Your brother walks like your father, sits like your father, stands like your father, eats like your father, and strings his words together like your father, in long, ponderous sentences; in thirty years he has become identical with your father. He adopted all the habits of his father, who was my father too. Like him, he very soon became an indolent person, who feigned activity, though in reality he was inactivity personified. He pretended to be constantly on the go, working nonstop and never allowing himself a moment’s rest—and all for the sake of the family, who wished to see him as he pretended to be. The family took this show seriously, not realizing—or not wanting to admit—that they were watching an actor, not the essentially indolent person behind the act. The truth is that my brother did as little work as my father and merely feigned the unremitting activity that they all admired, the dedication to work that satisfied them and in the end satisfied him too, for suddenly even he could no longer see it as a pretense. Throughout his life my father played the part of the immensely hardworking, even work-crazy, farmer who never let up for a moment because, as a good family man, he could not permit himself to. And the same applied to my brother, who naturally copied my father’s act: both of them soon realized that it was sufficient to play at work without actually doing any. Basically they did nothing all their lives but polish their act, and in this field—not to say this art—they became consummate performers. Most people feign work, especially in Central Europe. They constantly play at working and go on polishing their act right into old age, but the act has as little to do with real work as a play has to do with real life. Yet because human beings would rather see life as a play than as real life—which they regard as far too tedious and laborious, indeed as a gross indignity—they prefer playacting to life and, therefore, to work. Unlike the others, I never attached much importance to my father’s capacity for work, knowing that it was for the most part just playacting. So was my brother’s, who imitated and improved on my father’s act in order to show it off to an admiring public. But it is not just in the higher classes, so called, that work is simulated rather than performed; even among supposedly simple
people the simulation of work is widespread. Wherever we look, we see work being simulated and activity feigned by people who are in fact idling, doing nothing at all, and creating nothing but mischief instead of making themselves useful. Most workers today believe that all they have to do is put on their blue overalls and do nothing—certainly nothing useful. Having donned their costume, the ubiquitous blue overalls, they rush around all day in this costume and often even break out in a sweat, though it is a spurious sweat, generated not by work but by the simulation of work. Even ordinary people have realized that such simulated work is more profitable than real work, though certainly not healthier—far from it. Today they merely simulate work instead of actually working, and the result is that suddenly every state is on the verge of ruin, as we can see. The truth is that there are no longer any workers, only actors who put on a show of working. Everything is acted, nothing is done. Watching my father at work, I often told myself, He’s only acting, he’s not working at all, and the same applies to my brother. I don’t blame them for simulating work and hoodwinking the public, as the rest of humanity does, I told myself, but they really shouldn’t say at every turn that they’re working themselves to death, let alone that they’re doing it for the family and even, on occasion, for the country. I can honestly say that Father always took it easy at Wolfsegg, and so did my brother. They did not overtax themselves, and under their regime Wolfsegg became generally run-down. Uncle Georg was right when he said to me once, Your father and brother are pretty smart; they pretend to be the family robots, when in fact they’ve turned Wolfsegg into a cozy rural stage on which they make fools of us all. We don’t take advantage of them—they take advantage of us. And we fall for their hypocrisy. If a farmer wants to pass for honest and hardworking, all he has to do is open the farm gate, turn up the sound of grunting pigs, as one turns up the radio, and broadcast the sound from the world of bad conscience. People are actually foolish enough to fall for such tricks. Every morning millions of people slip on their overalls and are taken seriously as workers, though in fact they’re an army of highly skilled idlers who only make mischief and think of their bellies. But the intellectuals are too stupid to see this, said Uncle Georg. Even the feeblest performance by an idle worker or craftsman suffices to give them a bad conscience, provided that he appears in his theater workshop dressed in his blue costume. The intellectuals have only a minor role to play in this revolting workshop, where work and activity have been in the repertory for over half a century, performed with the most spine-chilling professionalism and panache. I’ve nothing against people not wanting to work, said Uncle Georg, but they ought to come clean and admit that they’re lazy, and so spare us this nauseating charade. Your father and your brother are both superb principals on this particular stage. And your mother directs the show, at any rate at Wolfsegg. My sisters, it occurs to me, have a habit of hopping, a hysterical condition acquired in early childhood, which became one of their most striking characteristics. They hop all day long—they don’t walk. They hop from the kitchen into the hall and back, into the drawing room and back. They really don’t walk—they hop. I always see them hopping, like the children they were thirty years ago. Although they now walk normally, they always seem to me to be hopping. I cannot see them walk without imagining that they are still hopping as hysterically as they did when they were little girls with long pigtails. They are now forty and graying, but I still see them hopping when they are actually walking. When I thought I had finally escaped them they would suddenly turn up, hopping and giggling; they never left me in peace but drove me half demented with their giggling. And all day they would sing songs that I hated and do everything possible to torment me. They were always dancing around me, encircling me and pouncing on me, even in my dreams. It was as though my parents had brought them into the world deliberately to spite me. I often woke from a dream in which they were about to kill me. They left my brother alone; they felt no urge to torment him, their greatest pleasure being to drive me to desperation. Their attitude to me was always malign, and they developed a routine for putting their malignity into effect. For a long time I was utterly at their mercy. They spied on me and informed on me, then gloated over the punishments that were meted out to me. They watched gleefully, unable to restrain their giggles, as my mother struck me over the head with the rawhide or my father boxed my ears. I cannot say which of my sisters was the more devilish, for Amalia would first be egged on by Caecilia, then Caecilia by Amalia. To me the so-called weaker sex was at that time the stronger, the more ruthless, as it took the greatest delight in tormenting me, more or less without compunction. My sisters were endlessly inventive and daily devised ever more subtle and diabolical torments. At an early age my sisters formed a conspiracy against me. They were believed, I was not; their word carried conviction, mine did not. And so I resolved to avenge myself. I locked them in the dark, airless larder, pushed them into the pond, or shoved them from behind so that they would fall full-length in their white Sunday-best dresses and get up dirty and bleeding from top to toe. The prospect of the terrible punishment that would ensue did not deter me from wreaking cruel vengeance, in various ways, for their atrocious behavior. I would lead them into the wood, then run away, leaving them in mortal terror and ignoring their cries. But their cruelty to me came first and was from the beginning much worse than any I inflicted on them. In the photo I can see all this cruelty quite plainly; their story and their character are written in their faces. These cruel children grew up into equally cruel adults. As children they might have been called beautiful, but as adults they are downright ugly. It is hard to say which of them is more like her father and which more like her mother. Of course they both inherit everything from their parents, but in a coarsened form. At table they sit like dolls, talking the same twaddle they have talked for decades. They sit down together and jump up together, and if one of them runs to the bathroom the other goes with her. These women are incapable of being alone, even in the bathroom. In winter they used to spend most of their time sitting on the sofa in their room, knitting sweaters that fitted no one and were always a disaster, the ugliest sweaters I have ever seen. Either the sleeves were unequal in length, the back was too wide, or the waist and the neck were too narrow. The garments were sloppily knitted, with excessively large stitches, because my sisters were of course incapable of concentration. And they chose the most tasteless colors. My brother and I had to try on the half-finished sweaters; they would force us into them, pulling and stretching them in all directions, and finally pronounce them a success, though it was obvious from the start that their knitting was indescribably amateurish. At Christmas their hideous knitwear was placed under the tree, and we had to perform the most incredible contortions to get into it, and then we had to admire it. At Wolfsegg on Christmas Eve the whole family sat around in my sisters’ knitwear like a bunch of cripples. It is as though my sisters, with their craze for knitting, were determined to make us look ridiculous in their knitwear, after spending weeks and months locked in a kind of unnatural intercourse with the wool. For months before Christmas Wolfsegg was dominated by wool. Then on Christmas Eve our sisters dressed us all up in their hideous woolen garments and we had to thank them. I have always detested home-knitted garments, just as I detest home cooking and anything else homemade. Canning jars I find a nightmare, and we had hundreds of them at Wolfsegg, not just in the larders but on the cupboards in the other rooms. At an early age the prospect of having to spend the next few decades consuming all the jam that was stored in these jars, carefully labeled by my mother and sisters, filled me with a permanent loathing for everything jarred, especially jam. The larders also contained hundreds of jars full of preserved chicken thighs, pheasant thighs, and pigeon thighs, which were of a dull yellow color that never failed to nauseate me. Although we ate gradually less and less jam and less and less jarred fruit at Wolfsegg, my mother and sisters jammed and jarred increasing quantities; having been obsessed with jamming and jarring for as long as I could rem
ember, they could no longer be cured of this obsession. And every week they made bread crumbs from the stale bread, so that we had whole galleries of jars full of bread crumbs, which were never used, as we no longer had schnitzels, Viennese cooking having gone out of favor. We went in mostly for Parisian-style cooking, which was to my mother’s taste, and at Wolfsegg her taste prevailed in all things. Looking at Wolfsegg, one could see quite plainly that hers was the predominant taste. As soon as she moved in she got rid of all the things my father liked and replaced them with whatever she liked. My father’s house, I have to say, became my mother’s house, and not to its advantage, as is testified by the countless aberrations in the furnishing of the rooms. And not only the rooms: everything at Wolfsegg, even the gardens, gradually came under my mother’s influence and has consequently been deteriorating for a long time. For centuries the gardens at Wolfsegg had formed a park, cultivated in accordance with certain strictly observed principles, until my mother transformed it radically. At one time, as I know from old prints, the grounds consisted of a great tract of natural landscape, but they have since been converted into a more or less conventional and excruciatingly dreary park that could almost be described as suburban. Everything bears Mother’s imprint, so to speak. I have to say that her big ideas have gradually diminished everything. A woman who comes up from nowhere is not necessarily a disaster for an estate like Wolfsegg, but my mother was. My father was weak and lacked the force of character to call a halt to his wife’s megalomaniac idiocies. Indeed, he approved of everything his wife wanted and considered it the sum of all wisdom, welcoming all her errors of taste and extolling them as something good, outstanding, and even magnificent, with the result that she felt increasingly entitled to regard herself as the savior of Wolfsegg and to act accordingly. Yet all the time she was in fact its greatest despoiler. And she soon turned my sisters into obedient and unquestioning assistants, who propagated and promoted her tasteless ideas whenever they could and in time became her two most dangerous mouthpieces. These mouthpieces were always standing, sitting, or lying in wait. Sisters like these are capable of darkening an inherently happy scene, I once told Gambetti. On an estate like Wolfsegg such a mother and such characterless sisters can turn day into night whenever they choose. And they’ve darkened so many days, even years, at Wolfsegg. They’ve quite simply turned the light out on us all, for no other reason than that they felt like it. When a man like my father marries, I told Gambetti, he turns the light out on himself. He no longer lives as he did previously but gropes around more or less clumsily in the darkness, to the delight of those who created the darkness. Men like my father are at first reluctant to embark upon any liaison, let alone marriage, and they continue to put it off until suddenly, fearing that they will otherwise be lost and become a laughingstock, they run into a trap laid by some scheming woman. The trap immediately snaps shut and proves fatal, I told Gambetti. My father, unlike Uncle Georg, was naturally made for marriage, I said, but not to a woman like my mother. He married a woman who destroyed and betrayed him. Naturally I love my mother, I told Gambetti, but I am not blind to her meanness and destructiveness. Baseness comes into its own, I told Gambetti, and morality becomes a joke. Of course there are counterexamples, where a woman appears on the scene and actually saves everything. But this woman, our mother, was bent on destruction. On the other hand, I told Gambetti, this may just be the way I see it. It may be that the situation is really quite different and that without my mother the disaster that’s befallen Wolfsegg would be even greater. Uncle Georg often described the conditions that my mother introduced at Wolfsegg as his biggest stroke of luck. My calculations worked out, he often said. And I have to admit that my own calculations worked out too. It is probable that my development would have been quite different if Wolfsegg had developed differently and my father had married a different woman. I would not be the man I am if Wolfsegg had been different. On the whole I consider myself lucky, especially as I can live in Rome, I told Gambetti, so I’ve no reason to speak of Wolfsegg as a disaster all the time. Yet perhaps I have a sense of guilt, I said, to which I have to admit, over the rather inconsiderate manner in which I left Wolfsegg in its present state. As we know, we hate those who provide for us, and this is partly why I hate Wolfsegg, I told Gambetti, for Wolfsegg provides for me—whether rightly or wrongly is beside the point. We feel hatred only when we’re in the wrong and because we’re in the wrong. I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking—and saying!—that my mother is revolting, that my sisters are equally revolting, and stupid with it, that my father is a weakling and my brother a pathetic fool, that they’re all idiots. I use this way of thinking as a weapon; this is basically contemptible, but it’s probably the only way to assuage a bad conscience. They could just as well rail at me and pillory me for the same malevolence that I’ve discerned in them all these years. We very soon get used to hating and condemning people without ever asking ourselves whether this hatred and condemnation are in any way justified. All in all, we should have most sympathy with poor people, I told Gambetti, because we know ourselves and know that they, like us, lead a miserable existence, whether they want to or not, and have to come to terms with it. Why are we always more ready to dwell on the faults and foibles of others than on their virtues? I asked. But on examining the photos I was forced to revert to my earlier attitude, because they showed my sisters as the ridiculous women they really were. I no longer doubted that they were ridiculous. But do they deserve to be called repulsive? I asked myself. At this time? I felt ashamed but immediately told myself that we could not get outside our own heads, and so I persisted in the belief that my sisters were both ridiculous and repulsive. A so-called family tragedy, I told myself, doesn’t justify us in fundamentally falsifying the image of the family concerned, in yielding to an access of sentimentality and more or less giving up, out of selfishness. No tragedy, not even the most terrible, can justify us in falsifying our thoughts, falsifying the world, falsifying everything—in siding with hypocrisy, in other words. I have often observed that people who throughout their lives have been judged repulsive and distasteful are spoken of after their death as though they had never been repulsive and distasteful. This has always struck me as tasteless and embarrassing. When someone dies, his death does not make him a different person, a better character: it does not make him a genius if he was an idiot, or a saint if he was a monster. It is in the nature of things that we have to endure such a calamity and suffer all its attendant horrors, in the certain knowledge that the true image of the victims has not changed. It is said that we should not speak ill of the dead—but this is base hypocrisy. After the death of somebody who throughout his life was a dreadful person, a thoroughly low character, how can I suddenly maintain that he was not a dreadful person, not a low character, but a good person? We daily witness such tastelessness when someone has died. But just as we should not be afraid to say, when a good person dies, This good person is dead, so we should not be afraid to say, This base, despicable person is dead—with all his faults, we should say, and with all his wonderful and delightful qualities, if he had such qualities. A person’s death must in no way be allowed to distort our image of him. We should tell ourselves that for us he remains what he was, and let him rest in peace. I won’t return to Wolfsegg for a long time, I had told Gambetti, and now I have to return immediately, I thought. I can’t endure Wolfsegg any longer, I had said. I can’t stand the house, any more than I can stand the people, and I now find the climate unbearable. I hadn’t thought it would become unbearable so soon, I had told him. I can’t stand my parents any longer, or my brother and my sisters, but it’s my sisters who get on my nerves most of all, I said. I’ve been in Rome too long, I’ve been abroad too long, I’ve become a foreigner. I find it unendurable to spend a single hour at Wolfsegg; I can’t imagine that I’ll ever go back for any length of time, I told him. Wolfsegg no longer means anything to me; I loathe everything connected with it; the history of Wolfsegg is a crushing burden that I won’
t take up again. And now I have to return to Wolfsegg immediately. And under what circumstances, what awful circumstances! I said to myself. Less than four hours earlier I had told Gambetti I would rather not visit Wolfsegg again. It had become intolerable, I had told him. The whole place is a lie, Gambetti, I had said, dominated by an unendurable artificiality that you can’t imagine. These people are deaf to everything that means so much to me, to nature, to art, to anything of real importance. They don’t read, they don’t listen to music, and all day long they talk only about the most futile and banal things. One can’t have a worthwhile conversation with them—only the most depressing one. Whatever I say, they don’t understand me. If I try to explain something to them, they stare at me with a total lack of interest. They don’t have the slightest taste. If I talk about Rome, which is after all the center of the world, it bores them. And the effect is the same if I talk about Paris, or about literature or painting. I can’t mention a single name that’s important to me without being afraid that they’ve never heard it. Everything there is paralyzing, and somehow it’s cold even in summer, so that I always feel frozen. You don’t realize, Gambetti, that these people have nothing on their minds but the most basic concerns—money, hunting, vegetables, grain, potatoes, wood, coal, nothing else. My mother goes on about her stocks and is always saying that she’s made the most disastrous investments. The word warehouse is always on my father’s lips. My brother thinks the world revolves around his sailboat and his Jaguar. And just imagine: the people who visit them are always the most awful people—stupid, ridiculous, dreary people from those dreadful small towns, people with whom one can’t have the slightest conversation. One can’t broach a single topic without coming to an immediate halt. If possible I won’t go back to Wolfsegg for another year, I had told Gambetti, not even for Christmas. That’s another habit that has become repugnant to me, because it’s at Christmas that the mendacity at Wolfsegg reaches its peak. I won’t go to Wolfsegg for at least a year. If I go at all, it’ll be for my father’s birthday, I said, as we stood in front of the Hotel Hassler. This time too I took flight from Wolfsegg and hurt their feelings, I said, though it’s not really possible to hurt their feelings, as they don’t have any. The insensitivity that prevails there defies description, Gambetti. I now find everything Austrian unendurable, and everything German too. Rome has spoiled me for Wolfsegg, I said. Rome has made Wolfsegg impossible. My taste for Wolfsegg was ruined first by London, then by Oxford, then by Paris, and finally by Rome. I don’t know how I could ever have had a bad conscience when I refused to go to Wolfsegg just because they wanted me to, for they didn’t deserve that I should ever go there again—or fly there, I said—and thereby put myself at a disadvantage. I always put myself in the wrong just by turning up at Wolfsegg. I would turn up and immediately be in the wrong. No sooner had I arrived than I put myself at a disadvantage. Everything there is mean and vulgar, I said, if I exclude the few moments I can describe as endurable. Talking to Gambetti, I had worked myself into a state of immense indignation against Wolfsegg. This angry tirade suddenly struck me as utterly perverse and insupportable, but I could not call a halt to it; I had to give it free rein, as I was so overjoyed at being back in Rome. Never before had I been so elated. Unable to restrain myself, I made Gambetti the hapless victim of my tirade against Wolfsegg, which turned into a tirade against everything Austrian, then everything German, and finally everything Central European. I find that the north has become quite unbearable, Gambetti, I said. The farther north I go, the more unbearable it becomes, and to me Wolfsegg lies in the far north. It’s the ultimate dim Thule. Those endless boring evenings, I said, that tasteless food, those undrinkable wines, those labored conversations, which are so excruciating that I can’t describe them to you—I’m just not up to it, my dear Gambetti. You’ve no idea what it means to me to be back in Rome, to be on the Pincio again, to see the Borghese Gardens, to look down from here on my beloved Rome. My revered Rome. My wonderful Rome! Anyone who’s been in Rome as long as I have has simply blocked off all access to a place like Wolfsegg. He can’t go back—it’s become an impossibility. For days I walk around in the various buildings at Wolfsegg, trying to calm myself, and I can’t. For days I walk up and down in my rooms, hoping I’ll be able to endure it, and of course it becomes less and less endurable. For days I try to find ways of surviving at Wolfsegg without constantly feeling that I’ll go mad, but I find none. Five libraries, I said, and such hostility to the intellect! In the Latin countries even the simplest people have some taste, some culture, I said, but at Wolfsegg no one has even a modicum of taste. The Austrians don’t have the slightest taste, or haven’t had for a long time. Wherever you look, tastelessness reigns supreme. And a total lack of interest in everything—as though the stomach were all-important and the mind quite superfluous, I said. Such a stupid people, I said, and such a magnificent country—an incomparably beautiful country. Natural beauty such as you find nowhere else, and a people that has so little interest in it. Such a wonderful age-old culture, and such a barbarous absence of culture today, a devastating anticulture. To say nothing of the dire political conditions. What ghastly creatures rule Austria today! The lowest of the low are now on top. The basest, most revolting people are in power, busily engaged in destroying everything that means anything. Fanatical destroyers are at work, ruthless exploiters who have donned the mantle of socialism. The government operates a monstrous demolition plant that functions nonstop, destroying everything I hold dear. Our towns and cities have become unrecognizable, I said. Great tracts of our countryside have been despoiled. The most beautiful regions have fallen victim to the greed and power-lust of the new barbarians. Wherever there’s a beautiful tree it’s cut down, wherever there’s a fine old house it’s demolished, wherever a delightful brook runs down a hillside it’s ruined. Everything beautiful is trampled under foot. And all in the name of socialism, with the most appalling hypocrisy one can imagine. Anything even remotely connected with culture is suspect, called into question, and obliterated. The obliterators are at work—the killers. We’re up against obliterators and killers, who go about their murderous business everywhere. The obliterators and killers are killing and obliterating the towns, killing and obliterating the landscape. Sitting on their fat arses in thousands and hundreds of thousands of offices in every corner of the state, they think of nothing but obliteration and killing, of how to kill and obliterate everything between the Neusiedlersee and Lake Constance. Vienna has been almost done to death, and Salzburg—all these fine cities, Gambetti, which you don’t know but which are actually among the most beautiful in the world. The landscape we see as we drive through Austria from Vienna has been almost totally killed and obliterated. One eyesore succeeds another, one monstrosity after another forces itself on our eyes. It’s become a perverse lie to say that Austria is a beautiful country. The truth is that the country was destroyed long ago, deliberately devastated and disfigured as a result of perfidious business deals, so that one is hard put to find a single unspoiled spot. It’s a lie to say that Austria is a beautiful country, because the truth is that the country has been murdered. Was it necessary in this century, I asked Gambetti, for humanity to lay violent hands on this most beautiful of all worlds, to kill and obliterate it? The villages, Gambetti, are unrecognizable when we revisit them after a number of years, and so are the inhabitants. What were these people like just a few years ago, and what are they like now? A chronic lack of character has taken hold of them like a deadly disease—greed, ruthlessness, depravity, mendacity, hypocrisy, baseness. They’ll do anything to achieve their base ends, and they employ the utmost ruthlessness in pursuing them. You enter these villages, delighted at the prospect of seeing them again, but you soon turn your back on them, repelled by so much baseness. You visit these once beautiful towns and cities, but by the time you leave them you’re depressed by the crushing certainty that all these towns and cities are lost—disfigured and destroyed by the new barbarism. In order to find them y
ou have to consult old books and engravings, for they have long since been obliterated by the reality of today. All those splendid houses in Upper Austria, in Salzburg, for instance, as well as in Lower Austria, have lost their faces. Their handsome, centuries-old faces have been disfigured by today’s insane fashions. Everything beautiful has been ripped out, so that now, utterly mutilated, they stare scornfully at the horrified visitor who remembers them as they once were. Nothing but ruined facades, I told Gambetti. It’s as if all these towns and cities had been visited by a hideous plague, a deadly disease unknown in earlier times. What’s more, I told Gambetti, whole sections of the towns have been eviscerated and mutilated. The surface of the earth has been disfigured by architects, egged on and abetted by cynical politicians. At first it seemed as though our towns and our countryside had been ravaged by war, but they have suffered far greater ravages during the perverse peace that followed, thanks to the unscrupulous deals done by our rulers and the activities of their henchmen, the architects, who were given unlimited license. And what havoc the architects have wrought in these decades! The destruction we suffered in the war is mild by comparison, I told Gambetti. And in no country has the work of destruction been carried out with such horrendous efficiency as in Austria. Or so unscrupulously. The nation has been hoodwinked; the country and its cities have been mutilated and virtually obliterated, I said. For decades the utmost tastelessness has been preached and propagated. Among our rulers we have had so many unscrupulous profiteers, so many obliterators of our state, and hence of our country, that it doesn’t bear thinking about; they all held on to their cabinet seats long enough to promote and carry through the destruction and annihilation of our landscape and our cities. But in a country where vulgarity and tastelessness prevail it’s no wonder that the results are so ubiquitously shattering. For while these people were in power, destroying, despoiling, and more or less obliterating the landscape and the cities, they were simultaneously destroying the nation’s soul, its whole mentality. The souls of my compatriots have been depraved, I said, their characters vulgarized and debased. A malign atmosphere prevails everywhere. Wherever you go you come up against this malign and depraved mentality. You think you’re talking to a decent person—which he might have been once—only to discover that he’s the lowest of the low. There’s been a universal character switch, the effect of which is that anyone who once was decent has been corrupted and reveals his depravity in every way, making no attempt to suppress it, but displaying it quite openly. You go into a village that you remember as friendly and welcoming, but you very soon discover that it has become malign and hostile and that you meet only with sullen suspicion. The whole of Austria has been turned into an unscrupulous commercial concern in which everything is bargained for and everyone is defrauded. You think you’re visiting a beautiful country, but in reality you’re visiting a monstrous business enterprise. You think you’re entering a land of culture, but you’re dismayed by the primitive mentality you encounter everywhere. From the very beginning you find yourself in a brainless atmosphere in which you can hardly breathe, I told Gambetti. It’s as though all the monuments, including those that were set up as recently as the last century, were dismayed too as they surveyed the indescribable chaos created by our present rulers. You can’t imagine how repulsive it’s all become, Gambetti, I said, how charmless. Nothing so repulsive and charmless would be possible in Italy, I said, or in Spain. In no other country have they taken the brainless slogans of progress as seriously as in Austria, I said, and thereby ruined everything. Everything brainless is taken seriously in Austria, I told Gambetti, in deadly earnest—and you know what that means. Until now I always thought socialism was a temporary nervous disorder that was basically harmless, I told Gambetti, but in reality it’s a deadly disease. I mean the socialism that prevails today, which is just a sham, Gambetti, a spurious socialism that relies on shameless pretense. Today we don’t have real socialism anywhere in the world, only the mendacious, simulated variety, as you should know. Today’s socialists are not real socialists but devious dissemblers. This century has succeeded in dragging the honored name of socialism in the dirt to such an extent that you want to throw up. The inventors of true socialism, who actually believed in it and thought they’d established it for all time, would turn in their graves if they could see what their unspeakable successors have made of it. They’d turn in their graves if they could open their eyes again and see everything that’s peddled and purveyed to the peoples of the world under the honored name of socialism. They’d turn in their graves if they could see the dirty tricks that are played in Europe and the rest of the world under the cover of this honored name. They’d turn in their graves if they knew about this gigantic political misappropriation. They’d turn in their graves, turn in their graves, I repeated several times. I won’t go back to this country for a long time, not for a year at least, I had told Gambetti. And now I had to go back at once. In the photograph my brother has a rather depressed posture, almost cowering, I thought, although he makes quite an elegant impression. He’s a countryman, whereas I’m a townsman, a metropolitan, and always have been. He’s instantly recognizable as a countryman, however fashionably he’s dressed. Like his father, who usually wore city clothes but could at once be recognized as a countryman. From time to time, to please my mother, they go—or used to go—to Vienna, taking in an opera (at Easter it would be Parsifal) and having supper at the Sacher. After breakfast the three of them would go for a walk across the Graben and along the Kärntnerstrasse as far as the Ring. If they were feeling generous they would take my aunt Elisabeth with them. They wore city clothes but were immediately recognizable as country folk. They would visit the most famous shops, and my mother would choose the very best dresses, which were at the same time the most tasteless—Milan and Paris designs that she would then wear to the theater in Linz or to concerts in Salzburg, for which they had had subscriptions for years. My brother looks healthier in the picture than he really was. He harbored all his father’s ailments, but they had not yet manifested themselves, as they had in Father’s case; they were biding their time and had not yet broken out. Yet in the photo I could already discern them in his face and his generally pathetic posture. I once said to Gambetti, They all have pathetic physical attitudes, which match their pathetic mental attitudes. Everything about them is pathetic, outwardly and inwardly, and I explained to Gambetti what the word pathetic meant. It has no equivalent in Italian and is not easy to translate. They went to the opera or the theater and were basically terribly bored, but at the end of the performance they always clapped enthusiastically and made no attempt to appear sophisticated, having paid so much money for their tickets. They always paid the standard price, which no Viennese would dream of doing. The Viennese never pay the full price for their tickets but at most pay half price, leaving the full price to foreigners and provincials, who always clap most because they’ve paid so much for their seats. We always had to stand with Mother in front of the famous shops, which were not always the best shops, and gaze at the window displays. She would then go in, head held high, and I never knew her to leave without having made a purchase. After visiting two or three shops we had to walk beside her, loaded with large parcels, and it was only when they became too heavy for us that she would relent and agree to take a rest at the Sacher or the Bristol, where we usually stayed. She would have loved to buy up everything and take it all home to Wolfsegg. What are you going to do with all these things? my father would ask. You won’t wear them. You can’t wear them at Wolfsegg because that would be ridiculous, and in Salzburg nobody will appreciate how expensive they are, or in Linz for that matter, let alone in Wels. They’ll all hang in the closet and go out of fashion, and then you’ll sell them or give them away. But Mother would have none of this. They always returned from Vienna with a dozen parcels, and at least half a dozen more would arrive subsequently, containing items that she had bought surreptitiously, without witnesses. Mother spent a fortune on clothes, but sh
e never wore them, or wore them only two or three times, after which she would throw them away or hand them on. But heaven forbid that my sisters should ever fancy designer dresses like hers! They were not allowed to buy a single dress in Vienna, even when they were forty. Even at forty they had to make do with one or two dresses from the sales in Wels, since our Lambach dressmaker was still the chief purveyor of their wardrobe, which consisted, as I have said, of the revolting dirndls that their mother had made for them twice a year. They were not even allowed to choose the cloth, because Mother did not trust their taste, though she herself had no taste whatever. The dirndls always turned out either too large or too small, or the colors clashed, or the collars were too wide or too narrow, or the sleeves too long or too short. The skirts were always at least eight inches too long, and the aprons never matched the dresses. Mother always dressed her daughters like dolls. She treated them as if they were dolls and never saw them as anything other than dolls. Like so many mothers, she regarded her daughters as dolls from the day each was born, and one could probably say without exaggeration that she gave birth to them not as human beings but as dolls. Even in adulthood she had to have one or more dolls to play with. Her daughters were never more than dolls and thus satisfied her passionate play instinct; as a result she would never let go of them. They always had to react like dolls. Every day she dressed them, fed them, and took them for walks like dolls, and at night she would put them to bed like dolls. Even at forty, it seems, these dolls, my sisters, are still subservient to my mother’s play instinct. And my brother was a puppet all his life—Punch, so to speak. She brought him up as a reserve puppet, in anticipation of the time when her premier puppet, her husband, would no longer be around. To my mother, with her craze for dolls, my sisters were actually talking dolls that could be made to laugh or cry when she wished and dressed and undressed when she wished, while her husband and son were puppets, whose strings she pulled whenever the mood took her. Mother was governed by a quite perverse play instinct. She turned Wolfsegg into a perfectly regimented dolls’ world in which everyone obeyed her orders to the letter. Wolfsegg was her dolls’ house, its surroundings her dolls’ world. Not wanting to be a doll in a dolls’ house, I soon removed myself from this dolls’ house and this dolls’ world, which seem even more oppressive and hideous when viewed from outside, from a distance. Wolfsegg is a dolls’ house, I told Gambetti, and its surroundings nothing more or less than a dolls’ world, ruled by my mother in the most ruthless and inhuman fashion. Gambetti laughed loudly, accusing me of monstrous overstatement and telling me that I was a typical Austrian pessimist with a grotesquely negative outlook. I replied that my overstatements were in fact monstrous understatements and that the Wolfsegg I had described to him was idyllic by comparison with the real Wolfsegg. Gambetti, I said, you can’t imagine Wolfsegg; you’ve never had the opportunity to visit such a hideous dolls’ house. There’s no other such hideous dolls’ landscape in the world. My father, I said, is a puppet of well over seventy, with moribund limbs and a head that’s become dull and hard from being tugged at all its life. My brother is a puppet in its forties that similarly doesn’t resist the constant tugging at its head and has given up defending itself against its unspeakable puppet mother. The Germans have a mother fixation, I said, and so have the Austrians. Mothers are not to be questioned, mothers are sacred, but in fact most of them are perverse puppet mothers who tug at the heads of their families until they’ve tugged them to death. Germany and Austria don’t have mothers like those in the Latin countries, who are natural mothers, not puppet mothers, I said. In Germany and Austria there are only puppet mothers, who spend all their lives relentlessly tugging at their puppet husbands and puppet children until these puppet husbands and puppet children have been tugged to death. In Central Europe there are no longer any natural mothers, only artificial mothers, puppet mothers who bring artificial children into the world. Even in the remotest Alpine valleys you won’t find natural mothers any longer, only artificial mothers. And it’s self-evident that an artificial mother invariably gives birth to an artificial child, which goes on to procreate another. As a result we now have only artificial human beings, not natural human beings. It’s a fallacy to call human beings natural, for none of them is. What we have now is the artificial human being, and we’re alarmed when we come across a natural human being again, because it’s something we’re not prepared for, because for so long we’ve been confronted only with artificial human beings, who’ve been ruling the world for ages, a world that long ago ceased to be a natural world and is now thoroughly artificial, Gambetti, an artificial world. The artificial world produced the artificial human being, and conversely the artificial human being produced the artificial world. Nothing is natural any longer, I said. We start from the premise that everything is natural, but that’s a fallacy. Everything is artificial, everything is artifice. Nature no longer exists. We always start from the contemplation of nature, when for ages we should have been starting from the contemplation of artifice. That’s why everything’s so chaotic. So false. So desperately confused. Where there’s no nature there can be no contemplation of nature, Gambetti—that must be obvious. The photo of my brother getting into his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee shows him posing as a happy person, but in the photo he is the unhappiest person imaginable. In the photo taken in front of Uncle Georg’s villa in Cannes my sisters are frozen in an expression of happiness that makes them look far unhappier than they really are. My father and mother, pictured at Victoria Station in London, look as unhappy as they are, while trying to look happy. I wonder why it is that when people have themselves photographed they always want to look happy, or at any rate less unhappy than they are. Everybody wants to appear happy, never unhappy, to project a falsified image, never a true image of the unhappy person he is. Everyone wants to be portrayed as good-looking and happy, when they are in fact ugly and unhappy. They take refuge in the photograph, they deliberately shrink into the photograph, which produces a totally false image, showing them as happy and good-looking, or at least not as ugly and unhappy as they are. What they demand of the photograph is an ideal image of themselves, and they will agree to anything that produces this ideal image, even the most dreadful distortion. It never strikes them how appallingly they compromise themselves. The good-looking person in a photograph is invariably the ugliest, the happy one invariably the unhappiest. They have photographs taken of themselves and hang them on their walls as representations of a happy and beautiful world, though in reality it is the unhappiest, ugliest, and falsest of all worlds. All their lives they stare at the happy pictures on their walls and are gratified by them, though they ought to be appalled. But because they don’t think, they are shielded from the awful knowledge that they are unhappy, ugly, and false. They even show visitors these pictures in which they think they are portrayed as happy and good-looking people, though the visitors can see at a glance how ugly, unhappy, and stupid their hosts really are. They are not even ashamed to show them to people who actually know them and can therefore recognize them on the photos as mendacious and totally false individuals, totally lost souls. We live in two worlds, I told Gambetti—the real world, which is mean, depressing, and ultimately deadly, and the world of the photograph, which is thoroughly false, though it is regarded by most people as the ideal world. If you deprived people of their photographs, if you ripped them off their walls and destroyed them, once and for all, you’d deprive them of more or less everything. Hence, there’s nothing people cling to so much, nothing they rely on so much, as the photograph. The photograph is their salvation, Gambetti. At this Gambetti laughed and called me a forenoon fantasist. I had never heard the expression before and it made me laugh. Gambetti joined in my laughter, and we both savored the joke. Without the art of exaggeration, I told him, we’d be condemned to an awfully tedious life, a life not worth living. And I’ve developed this art to an incredible pitch, I said. To explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things cl
ear. Even the risk of being branded as fools ceases to worry us as we get older. In later years there’s nothing better than to be declared a fool. The greatest happiness I know, Gambetti, is that of the aging fool who is free to indulge his foolishness. Given the chance, we should proclaim ourselves fools by age forty at the latest and capitalize on our foolishness. It’s foolishness that makes us happy, I said. I put the photograph of my brother, Johannes, at the top and the one of my parents at Victoria Station at the bottom. The effect was amazing: my brother and my parents related quite differently to my sisters, who were now in the middle. My sisters were always defensive in their attitude to my brother, though not as obviously as in their attitude to me; their defensiveness toward him was more covert. They needed him, but they did not need me. He was their future provider, and so they always had to treat him quite differently from me, from whom they had nothing to fear. To their parents, their immediate providers and protectors, they owed respect and consideration, and therefore subservience. To Johannes too, their indirect provider and protector, they owed respect and consideration, but only when necessary, not all the time. To me they owed neither, because they never saw me as a potential provider and protector. I was easiest to deal with, the one to whom no respect was due. But they still had to consider me—for a quite different reason: they had to protect themselves against me, because I always appeared unpredictable and inscrutable, though they never regarded me as a vital person on whom they were dependent, or would be one day. One day they would be dependent on Johannes, but not on me. Their dependence on their parents automatically called for respect, consideration, subservience, and so forth. Though according me neither respect nor consideration, they were wary of me. The position of my brother’s photo, now at the top, signified that he was the most important member of the family, whereas my parents, now at the bottom, counted for much less. My sisters did not have an easy time with any of them—either with their present providers and protectors, due shortly to step down, or with their brother, due shortly to take over. I was accorded neither respect nor consideration; at first I was feared, but only until I left Wolfsegg more or less forever. I naturally posed no threat to them from Rome, or even from London or Vienna. I no longer counted, as they say. And now, I thought, looking at their two mocking faces, disaster has overtaken them, for now I am the one they depend on—there’s no doubt about that. With my parents and my brother dead, Wolfsegg has passed to me. This is a legal fact. Three weeks earlier I had said to Gambetti, When I get back from Caecilia’s wedding I won’t return to Wolfsegg for a long time. Wolfsegg is over for me. I no longer have any reason to go there; I no longer need Wolfsegg, and the people there don’t need me. What is the wine cork manufacturer like? he asked. I tried to tell him. I also told him what a dreadful place Freiburg was—petit bourgeois, Catholic, unbearable. But maybe this man’s a good match for Caecilia, I said. He could be her salvation. I never expected either of my sisters to marry. They had never shown any inclination, and their parents, especially their mother, did all they could to prevent their marrying. My aunt in Titisee engineered this marriage, I told Gambetti, this utterly ludicrous alliance. Just imagine: a wine cork manufacturer suddenly gains entrée to Wolfsegg! A Catholic petit bourgeois who had to be told by my mother that one didn’t turn up for dinner wearing suspenders! A German from the most German corner of the sticks, I told Gambetti, from the Black Forest, where the foxes say good night and German stolidity reigns supreme. I was not afraid of the wine cork manufacturer, or of my sisters. Yet although I was not afraid of them, it was clear that I would find them trying, desperately trying, in this dreadful situation. Occasionally it had occurred to me, as I once told Gambetti, that Amalia might marry one day, but never Caecilia. And now there they are, wholly reliant on me, with the intensest expectations and misgivings. Perhaps the grave has already been dug, I said to myself; perhaps the black banners are already draped from the windows at Wolfsegg. The last time the black banners were out was when Uncle Georg died. Half an hour after getting word of his death they were all running around in black. I wished Uncle Georg was still alive. He would have made everything much easier for me. The mocking faces of my sisters, captured on the photo, are doubly comic, I thought. The mockery comes from having been dominated by their mother for so many years, I told myself. These mocking faces were their only weapon. Amalia has withdrawn to the Gardeners’ House and now hates Caecilia, and Caecilia probably married the wine cork manufacturer just to spite her mother, who had always forbidden them to make overtures to men. Amalia must hate the one who got away. She at once made common cause with her mother in the hope of destroying Caecilia’s marriage. Knowing her as I do, she’s probably sitting on a stool in the Gardeners’ House, wondering how best to break up her sister’s unexpected and wholly undesirable marriage. Mother and daughter hatched a plot against Caecilia’s marriage. No good will come of this marriage between my sister and a wine cork manufacturer from the Black Forest, I had told Gambetti before leaving for the wedding. Sooner or later it’ll come apart. They’re all against it, and Caecilia is no match for the wine cork manufacturer, stupid though he is. My sister’s triumph, the trick she’s brought off, will one day end in disaster, I told Gambetti. She won’t stick it out in the Black Forest. She suspects this already: that’s why she didn’t want to go to the Black Forest with her husband straight after the wedding. She thinks she can stay on at Wolfsegg without him, but that’s absurd. She’ll have to go with him, like it or not. He’ll force her to. You can’t enter into a marriage just for appearance’ sake and in order to punish your mother, and then refuse to make it a real marriage. This man must feel totally out of place at Wolfsegg, totally miserable, I told Gambetti, and if it’s money he’s after, I think he has completely miscalculated. He has nothing whatever to expect—Mother will see to that. She’s known and feared for her shrewdness in legal matters. If he isn’t a fortune hunter, I said, I wonder what made him marry Caecilia? Caecilia’s anything but attractive, anything but marriageable. And the same goes for Amalia. But of course we often wonder what couples find attractive in each other, what induces them to marry. How is it possible—why these two? we ask ourselves, and we find no answer. We may know somebody as a certain type of person and be convinced that he will under no circumstances marry this or that person whom we know equally well. We find it totally inconceivable, yet these very people do marry, and no one can say that the marriage will be unhappy—though quite often it turns out to be the unhappy marriage that we foresaw and warned against, without being listened to. Perhaps the wine cork manufacturer thinks he’s chosen the right moment, I told Gambetti, but I think he’s made an enormous mistake. You see, my sister Caecilia is as artful as a wagonload of monkeys, and so is Amalia. Stupidity doesn’t preclude cunning. And it’s a well-known fact that the stupidest people are the most dangerous—that is to say, when stupidity is allied with baseness, I told Gambetti, without feeling the least compunction. It occurred to me now that I had only ever told Gambetti disagreeable and distasteful things about my family, because I had always thought it quite natural to reveal my feelings, and in recent years I had had the most disagreeable and distasteful feelings for my family. There had been no occasion to tell him of any other feelings. Disagreeable things. Distasteful things. Absurd things at best. And I had never felt embarrassed about it. You must never dissemble with Gambetti, I always told myself, you mustn’t let him catch you in a lie or any kind of dishonesty. After all, you’re his teacher, and a teacher is expected to be truthful and honest—that goes without saying. Your relationship with Gambetti is one of absolute trust. You must never take refuge in prevarication, let alone lying, even if this makes you appear inconsiderate, even mean. And there is no doubt that I am at times inconsiderate and mean. It is a danger that no thinking person can avoid; he has to reckon with it, resign himself to it, and live with it. He must plead guilty and not try to deny his guilt. Wolfsegg has become absolutely impossible, I told Gambetti. The atmosphere there
is stifling—it’s enough to drive you to distraction! On the other hand, Gambetti, if only you could see those magnificent rooms, those vaulted ceilings, those hallways, and the columned courtyard where as a child I used to keep deer in winter! In winter my brother Johannes and I used to keep two deer, one each, in the courtyard. These were deer that had been slightly injured, I explained. We used to feed them, talk to them, and nurse them back to health, and in the spring we set them loose. They wintered there and survived. My brother and I invented names for them, names like Sarabande and Locarnell. When we set them loose in the spring they had naturally become used to us and didn’t want to leave. We would then go through the woods and collect all the dead deer that hadn’t survived the winter and bury them, helped by the foresters. I always got along best with the foresters. They were my best friends, whom I loved more than anyone. I knew all their names, and they used to joke with me; I used to ask them to tell me about themselves, and they did so readily. I was always attracted to simple people, I told Gambetti. I felt good when I was with them, and only when I was with them. I was entirely at one with them. They always talked quietly and never too much. They had a simple, unaffected way of talking. They didn’t pretend, unlike other people, who are always pretending. There’s no doubt, I told Gambetti, that at one time, in my early childhood and for a long time while I was at school, Wolfsegg was paradise. And I knew that it was paradise. But this paradise soon darkened and turned gradually into limbo, and ultimately into hell. I wanted to get out of this hell, I wanted to leave it as quickly as possible. I couldn’t wait to go to boarding school and finally to Vienna, though I had no idea what was to become of me, what I could make of myself, where I ought to start in order to progress in the right direction. I loved the books I had read and those I still had to read, the infinite number of books in which I imagined more or less everything had been written. I can honestly say that even as a child I loved the life of the mind more than anything else, but I had no idea what I should do in order to be able to take part in it, to have a share in the life of the mind, which attracted me so much, and to lead such a life myself. I had no one to advise me until Uncle Georg got to see my grades and gave me the first hint on how I should proceed. In the first place you must free yourself entirely from your family, he said. You must make yourself completely independent, first inwardly and then outwardly. And I followed his advice: I made myself free, first inwardly, then outwardly. And of course you must get away from Wolfsegg, he said. You must ignore the views and opinions of your family at Wolfsegg and leave Wolfsegg despite them; you mustn’t follow their advice, which would be tantamount to chaining yourself to Wolfsegg for life, sacrificing yourself to Wolfsegg. You must do the precise opposite of what they advise; you must never share their views, because their views are contrary to yours and therefore harmful to your development. Their advice is no good, their opinion is no good, he told me. Of course they always say they want what is best for you, as you know, but they’re against you. They’ll do everything to chain you to themselves, and if you don’t let yourself be chained they’ll do everything they can to destroy you. It will require the greatest effort, a supreme effort, to escape from them, to pit your implacability against theirs. You’re capable of asserting yourself against them and making yourself independent, Uncle Georg said, but I must tell you that you’ll pay the very highest price. You must pay this price. I paid a very high price to become independent of Wolfsegg, it seems to me. Uncle Georg was right. I pitted my implacability against theirs, and it proved the stronger, because it was the more uncompromising. What it cost me to escape to Vienna, that useless city, as they called it! What it cost me to go to England and finally to Paris! What it cost me to gain my inner freedom, which was the prerequisite for my outward freedom! I owe my independence to my uncle Georg, I told Gambetti on the Pincio as I handed over Kafka’s Trial, which had excited me even more on a second reading than it had on the first. There are some writers, I told Gambetti, who excite the reader much more the second time he reads them than they did the first time. With me this always happens when I read Kafka. I remember Kafka as a great writer, I told Gambetti, but when I reread him I’m absolutely convinced that I’ve read an even greater writer. Not many writers become more important, more impressive, on a second reading. Most of them, on a second reading, make us feel ashamed of having read them even once. This is an experience we have with hundreds of writers, but not with Kafka, not with the great Russians—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Lermontov—and not with Proust, Flaubert, and Sartre, whom I rate among the very greatest. It’s not at all a bad method, I think, to reread the writers who impressed us when we first read them, as we then discover that they’re either far greater than we thought, far more significant, or else not worth talking about. In this way we avoid having to carry around an enormous literary ballast in our minds all our lives, a ballast that ultimately makes us sick, mortally sick, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. Uncle Georg taught me more or less everything that’s been important to me in later life. He was my teacher, no one else. It was he who brought me up, no one else. My parents didn’t bring me up, they dragged me up, until the age of eight or nine, and Uncle Georg had to step in and gradually undo the almost total havoc they had wrought. He went to immense pains, I told Gambetti, to turn my totally chaotic mind into one that was acceptable and receptive. My parents believed that they were bringing me up, but they actually destroyed me, just as they destroyed my brother and my sisters. Instead of talking about bringing me up, they should have talked about bringing me down. Thanks to their upbringing, which was purely and simply a process of destruction, as I have said, everything in my mind was mutilated beyond recognition, to borrow a phrase that is normally used in a different context. In their brutal Catholic National Socialist way they had stirred things around in my young mind and created total confusion, so that it took Uncle Georg just as long to raise order out of my mental chaos as it had taken them to create the chaos. Instead of educating us, our parents actually mutilated our minds. Being Catholics first and foremost, I told Gambetti, they ruined our minds with their appalling Catholic methods. The Catholic Church can do unimaginable harm to a child’s mind if the parents are Catholic and adhere more or less automatically to the Catholic religion. To say that we had a Catholic upbringing amounts to saying that we were utterly destroyed, Gambetti. Catholicism is the supreme annihilator of the child’s soul, the supreme inspirer of terror, the supreme destroyer of character. That’s the truth. Untold millions owe it to the Catholic Church that they have been utterly destroyed, that their lives have been ruined, their nature denaturized. The Catholic Church has the destruction of the human personality on its conscience—that’s the truth. For the Catholic Church won’t tolerate any human being other than the Catholic human being. Its unswerving aim is to turn human beings into Catholics, mindless creatures who’ve forgotten how to think for themselves and betrayed independence of thought to the Catholic religion—that’s the truth, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. We country children always delighted in Catholic ritual, which at first seemed like a fairy tale, Gambetti, undoubtedly the most beautiful we knew. And for the grown-ups it was a lifelong spectacle, the only one they knew. But the fairy tale and the spectacle have between them perverted and destroyed all that’s natural in human beings. Using the fairy tale for children and the spectacle for adults, the Catholic Church pursues a single aim, the total seduction of all who fall into its clutches. It uses the fairy tale and the spectacle to bend them to its will, to extinguish them as human beings, to turn them into unthinking Catholics who have no will of their own and whom it insolently calls the faithful. The Catholic faith, like all faiths, is a perversion of nature, a sickness to which millions succumb quite deliberately because it’s their only salvation, the salvation of the weak, who are quite incapable of independent thought and, having no minds of their own, need a higher mind to think for them. Catholics allow the Church to think for them and consequently act for them, because this make
s their lives easier and they’re convinced they can’t do otherwise. And the Catholic mind of the Catholic Church has a terrible way of thinking, I told Gambetti, wholly self-serving and inimical to human nature, conducive only to its own ends and its own glory. No other state in Europe calls itself a Catholic state, I told Gambetti, or allows the Catholic mind to do its thinking, and the results are plain to see. In Austria there are only Catholics, no human beings with free and independent minds. In Austria the Catholic mind does all the thinking. Nothing has been changed by the various political turnarounds of recent years: in Austria even the socialists allow the Catholic mind to do their thinking for them, as they haven’t developed a socialist mind. Everywhere we’re confronted by the Catholic spirit, which has admittedly given us hundreds and thousands of Catholic works of art but destroyed the spirit of freedom and independence, the only natural spirit. What use are these works of art, these Catholic churches and palaces, when for centuries we’ve had no minds of our own? I asked Gambetti. Our nation suffers from chronic mental debility, I told Gambetti, which the Church has exploited more than in any other European country, even more than in Germany, where a degree of intellectual freedom and self-sufficiency still survives. In our country the Catholic Church has never had any difficulty in bringing the necessary pressure to bear and forcing the Austrian people, and hence the Austrian state, into total submission. Only in recent decades have there been hints of emancipation from Catholic dominion, from the monstrous pressure of the Church, from the age-old stranglehold of Catholicism. Only recently has it become possible to discern, here and there, the tentative emergence of a kind of thinking and philosophizing that owes nothing to Catholicism, I told Gambetti. Only in recent decades have a few Austrian minds begun to think independently, to use their Austrian heads, not just their Catholic heads. Catholicism is to blame for the fact that for so many centuries Austria had no philosophers, no philosophical thought, no philosophy. It’s fair to say that in the last thousand years all thought has been ruthlessly suppressed by the Catholic Church. And the nation has made life easy for itself under the aegis of the Catholic mind, which has always done its thinking for it, on a proxy basis and in its own way, I told Gambetti. In the last thousand years Catholicism and the Habsburgs have had a devastating effect, a lethal effect, on the nation’s spirit, as all the evidence shows. In these thousand years, one can say, Catholicism extirpated thought and ushered in an efflorescence of music. The mind having been suppressed for centuries, Austria became the land of music. Having become a thoroughly mindless people during the centuries of Catholicism, I told Gambetti, we are now a thoroughly musical people. Having been driven out of our minds by Catholicism, we have allowed music to flourish. True, this has given us Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert, I said, yet I can’t applaud the fact that we have Mozart but have lost our minds, that we have Haydn but have forgotten how to think and given up trying, that we have Schubert but have become more or less brainless. No other country, I told Gambetti, has allowed the Catholic Church to rob it so unscrupulously of the faculty of thought, no other country has allowed itself to be decapitated, as it were, by Catholicism. We have no Montaigne, no Descartes, no Voltaire, I told Gambetti, only monkish and aristocratic poetasters with their Catholic inanities. In recent years, I told Gambetti, we’ve seen the beginnings of a change, but it’ll take centuries, not just decades, to repair the intellectual depredations of Catholicism. If they can be repaired. Our nation has allowed itself to be exploited more than any other by the Catholic Church. For nearly a thousand years! It will be hard put to break free from the Catholic stranglehold, from the talons of the Church. Superficial and amateurish revolutions won’t do any good, I told Gambetti, as we see from the experience of other European countries. We can be saved only by a fundamental and radical revolution, starting with the total destruction and demolition of everything, literally everything. But at present we’re too feeble to mount such a fundamental and radical revolution. We’re not ready for it and daren’t even contemplate it. We Austrians are so enfeebled, so witless, that anything fundamental and radical is impossible. We Austrians have been utterly enfeebled for well over a century. My parents naturally didn’t think of giving me anything but a Catholic upbringing; they couldn’t have imagined any other, I told Gambetti. From time immemorial every generation at Wolfsegg has had a Catholic upbringing. Until Uncle Georg appeared on the scene. He was against Catholicism, and this meant that he was against everything. Uncle Georg prepared the way for me, pointing me first to the idea, then to the way to realize it, the alternative way, I told Gambetti. Just imagine, I said: in our libraries the secular books, as one might call them, were kept under lock and key, unlike the Catholic books. The bookcases containing the secular books had been locked for decades, if not for centuries. Only the Catholic books were accessible, while the secular books were locked up, inaccessible, not to be read. It was as if they’d locked up the free spirit in the bookcases reserved for non-Catholic books, for Voltaire and Montaigne but not for the hundreds and thousands of leather-bound volumes containing the collected inanities of numerous monks and counts. Voltaire, Montaigne, Descartes, and the like were to be sealed up in these bookcases in perpetuity—just imagine! These bookcases had never been opened, until one day Uncle Georg insisted on it. To my family it seemed as if he had opened a canister that had been sealed for centuries and would emit a dire poison as soon as it was opened, a poison from which they instantly fled, believing it to be lethal. They never forgave Uncle Georg for opening this canister and releasing the spiritual poison. They always thought that Uncle Georg had poisoned Wolfsegg by breaking the ancient seal imposed on the spirit and opening the bookcases that had been locked tight for centuries. Wolfsegg suddenly caught a whiff of the free spirit, not just the odor of Catholic imbecility; Descartes and Voltaire were now in the air, not just Catholicism and National Socialism. My family never forgave Uncle Georg. They believed they had confined the evil spirit in these locked bookcases, and Uncle Georg had released it. But it was not long before they reconfined it, when Uncle Georg left Wolfsegg, turning his back on them and settling in Cannes. Just imagine; on the Riviera, the coast inhabited by the devil and equated by my family with hell. The moment Uncle Georg left Wolfsegg with his two suitcases, their most pressing concern was to recapture the evil spirit that polluted Wolfsegg and confine it once more in their bookcases, which this time were not just double-locked but treble-locked. They obdurately refused to let me reopen them, and as I now recall, I was too scared to insist. Even at the age of over twenty I wasn’t allowed to open them. In the end I gave up trying because I dreaded the recurrent quarrels. In Vienna I began to assemble a library of my own, I told Gambetti, which would contain everything that Uncle Georg had identified as essential reading for a so-called intellectual. Before long I had spent almost all my disposable funds on collecting the most important books and assembling my own library of the evil spirit, as it were, and naturally I started with Montaigne and Descartes, Voltaire and Kant. Finally I had assembled what Uncle Georg called the essential nutriment of the mind, and of course the centerpiece was none other than Schopenhauer. I had acquired what I called a portable library of the most important works of the evil spirit, which I could easily take with me wherever I went, so that I need never be without these important works. My first acquisitions were the philosophers I had been denied at Wolfsegg, the deadly poison, in other words, to which I gradually added the works of our most important writers. In all this I followed a plan outlined by Uncle Georg. The first book I bought was Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The next, as I clearly recall, was Johann Peter Hebel’s Calendar Stories. It was a long way from these to Kropotkin and Bakunin, I told Gambetti, to Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Lermontov, whom I prize above all other writers. My first task, I now told myself, is to release the evil spirit that my parents condemned to life imprisonment at Wolfsegg. Not only will I never lock the bookcases—I’ll leave them open forever. I’ll throw the keys down the well shaf
t so that nobody can ever lock them again. My sole reason for going to Wolfsegg will be to open the windows one after another and let in the fresh air. Just imagine, I once said to Gambetti, many of the windows at Wolfsegg haven’t been opened for decades. It’s appalling. Then I’ll come back to Rome and be able to say to Gambetti, Gambetti, I’ve opened all the windows at Wolfsegg and let in the fresh air. I’ll open all the windows and doors, I told myself. As I looked at the photo of my parents at Victoria Station, I told myself that in their foolish Catholic way they had tried to gag me all my life. Just as they wanted to confine the evil spirit in the bookcases, so they wanted to confine me, an equally evil spirit, at Wolfsegg. To confine the contradictor, the recusant. The deserter. I do not remember my parents ever leaving me in peace to pursue my own interests or ever praising me for doing something I enjoyed. I would not have ignored their praise, but it was never forthcoming. When I was a small child, I think, they already regarded me with grave distrust, even in my earliest years, when they had to bend down almost to the ground to see me lying in my cot or taking my first steps. Even then they found everything about me suspicious and disquieting, as though they might have produced a child that would one day outgrow them and call them to account, and then even destroy and annihilate them. In my earliest years they treated me with the suspicion that has dogged me all my life, perhaps even with a subliminal hatred that later came into the open. At first I did not know why it should be directed at me, for what purpose, to what end. Was it directed against some innate depravity or wickedness that I harbored? To my brother, Johannes, they were always well disposed, but to me they were only ever ill disposed. It’s time to spell out the truth, I told myself as I looked at the photo. My father begot me, and my mother gave birth to me, but right from the start she didn’t want me; had it been possible, she’d have gladly stuffed me back into her belly, I told myself. At first we always tell ourselves that our parents naturally love us, but suddenly we realize that, equally naturally, they hate us for some reason—that is to say, if we appear to them as I appeared to mine, as a child that didn’t conform with their notion of what a child should be, a child that had gone wrong. They had not reckoned with my eyes, which probably saw everything I was not meant to see when I first opened them. First I looked at them in disbelief, as they say, then I stared at them, and finally, one day, I saw through them, and they never forgave me, could not forgive me. I had seen through them and formed an honest assessment that could not possibly be to their liking. To put it baldly: by bringing me into the world they had landed themselves with someone who would dissect them and take them apart. I have to say that I was implacably opposed to them from the first moment. Once, on a fine, mild day in the fall, I tried to describe Wolfsegg to Gambetti. We had returned from Rocca di Papa to the Piazza del Popolo, which was virtually our home, and were sitting on the terrace in front of the café. It was well after nine in the evening, and the sun still radiated a pleasant warmth. I’ll try to give you a precise description of Wolfsegg, I said to Gambetti. In Rocca that day I had made what now strike me as some quite inept comments on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. I always had the utmost difficulty with Nietzsche, and on this occasion I had been unable to say anything apposite about him. Look, Gambetti, I said, I’ve been wrestling with Nietzsche for decades, but I haven’t gotten any further with him. Nietzsche has always fascinated me, but I’ve never understood him properly. To be honest, it’s the same with all the other philosophers, I told Gambetti, with Schopenhauer and Pascal, to name just two. All my life I’ve found them difficult and done no more than begin to understand them. They’ve always been Greek to me, though I’ve always been attracted and excited by them. The more I study these men’s writings, I told Gambetti, the more helpless I become. It’s only in moments of megalomania that I can claim to have understood them, just as it’s only at such moments that I can claim to have understood myself, though to this day I’ve never been able to understand myself. The more I study myself, the farther I get from the truth about myself, the more obscure everything about me becomes, I told Gambetti, and it’s the same with these philosophers. When I think I’ve understood them I’ve actually understood nothing. This is probably true of everything I’ve studied. But now and then, in moments of megalomania, I venture to say that I’ve understood something about these philosophers and their writings. None of these men or their works can be understood, not Pascal, not Descartes, not Kant, not Schopenhauer, not Schleiermacher, to name only those who preoccupy me at present, those I’m working on at the moment. With the greatest ruthlessness toward them and toward myself, I added. With the greatest audacity and the greatest impudence. For when we work on one of these philosophers, Gambetti, it’s impudent and presumptuous to take hold of them and, as it were, tear the philosophical guts out of the living body. It’s always impudent to set about a work of philosophy, but without such impudence we can’t approach it and get anywhere philosophically. We actually have to attack these philosophical writings as roughly and toughly as possible—and the writers themselves, whom we must always think of as enemies, as our most formidable opponents, Gambetti. I have to pit myself against Schopenhauer if I want to understand him, against Kant, against Montaigne, against Descartes, against Schleiermacher—you understand. I have to be against Voltaire if I want to get to grips with him properly and have some prospect of success. But so far I’ve been pretty unsuccessful at getting to grips with the philosophers and their works. Life will soon be over; my existence will be extinguished, I told Gambetti, and I’ll have achieved nothing. Everything will have remained firmly closed to me. In the same way I’ve been pretty unsuccessful up to now at getting to grips with myself. I treat myself as an enemy and go into philosophical action against myself, I told Gambetti. I approach myself with every possible doubt, and I fail. I achieve absolutely nothing. I have to regard the mind as an enemy and go into philosophical action against it if I am actually to enjoy it. But I probably don’t have enough time, just as none of them had enough time. Man’s greatest misfortune is that he never has enough time, and that’s what’s always made knowledge impossible. So all we have ever achieved is an approximation, a near miss. Anything else is nonsense. When we are thinking and don’t stop thinking, which is what we call philosophizing, we come to realize that our thinking has been wrong. Up to now all their thinking was wrong, whoever they were and whatever they wrote, yet they didn’t give up of their own volition, I told Gambetti; they gave up because nature forced them to, through sickness, madness, and finally death. They didn’t want to stop, however great the privations, however grievous the suffering; they carried on against all reason and despite all warnings. Yet they all committed themselves to false conclusions, I told Gambetti—ultimately to nothing, whatever this nothing might be, which, though we know it is nothing and therefore cannot exist, still dooms everything to failure, halts all progress, and finally brings everything to an end. On the Piazza del Popolo that evening I withheld the description of Wolfsegg that I had promised Gambetti on the Flaminia and launched instead into one of my disquisitions, which no one dreads more than I and which I have taken to calling my philosophizing disquisitions, because they have become more frequent in recent years and are as fluent as philosophy proper, as philosophical discourse in general, though all they have in common with philosophy is the motive behind them. Instead of the promised description of Wolfsegg, I delivered myself of a few words about Nietzsche that would have been better left unsaid, something quite nonsensical about Kant, something about Schopenhauer that seemed at first uncommonly apposite but then rather silly, and something about Montaigne that even I did not understand the moment I had said it. For no sooner had I uttered my observation about Montaigne than Gambetti asked me to explain it. I could not do so, as I no longer knew what I had said. We say something that seems quite clear at the time, then a moment later we don’t know what it was, I told Gambetti. I’ve just said something about Montaigne, but now, two or three seconds later, I don’t know w
hat it was. We ought to be able to say something and then record it in our minds, I said, but we can’t. I’ve no idea why I spoke about Montaigne just now, and of course I’ve even less of an idea what I said. We imagine we’ve reached a stage where we’ve become a thinking machine, but we can’t rely on its thinking. This machine works unremittingly against the brain, I said. It generates thoughts, but we don’t know where they come from, why they were conceived, or what they relate to. The fact is that this nonstop thinking machine overtaxes us. The brain is overburdened but has no escape, as it’s inevitably linked up to the machine for the rest of our lives. Until we die. You say Montaigne, Gambetti, but right now I don’t know what that means. Descartes? I don’t know what that means, any more than I know what Schopenhauer means. You might just as well say buttercup: I wouldn’t know what that meant either. I once thought that if I went to Sils Maria and stayed near the Maloja Pass I’d understand Nietzsche better, that if I approached it from below, from Sondrio, I’d have a better understanding of him, maybe even a perfect understanding. But I was wrong. Having visited Sils Maria and approached it from below, from Sondrio, I understand even less about Nietzsche than I did before. I no longer understand him at all. I understand nothing about him. My visit to Sils Maria finished off Nietzsche. And Goethe was ruined for me when I committed the monumental folly of going to Weimar. And so was Kant when I visited Königsberg. There was a time when I was fired with a desire to travel the whole of Europe, seeking out the places where all these philosophers, poets, writers, or whatever had lived, but having done so I understand them far less than before. Take good care, Gambetti, not to visit the places associated with writers, poets, and philosophers, because if you do you won’t understand them at all. After visiting the places where they were born, lived, and died, you won’t be able to think about them. You must at all costs steer clear of the places associated with our great minds, I said. Don’t allow yourself to visit the places associated with Dante, Virgil, and Petrarch, because if you do you’ll destroy everything about them that you now have in your head. Nietzsche, I say, then I tap my head and find that it’s empty, quite empty. Schopenhauer, I say to myself, and tap my head—and again it’s empty. I tap my head and say Kant, only to find a complete void. It’s unutterably depressing, Gambetti. You think about some everyday notion, only to find that your mind’s a blank, that there’s nothing there. You want to grasp some quite ordinary notion, and there’s nothing whatever in your head. For days you go around with a total void in your head. You tap it and find that it’s quite empty. It drives you out of your mind and makes you desperately unhappy, utterly sick of life, my dear Gambetti. Although I’m your teacher, my mind’s a complete blank most of the time. Probably because I’ve overtaxed it, I said. By demanding too much of it. By quite simply overrating it. We overrate our minds and expect too much of them, and then we’re surprised when we tap our heads and find them entirely void, I told Gambetti. They don’t contain even the bare minimum, I said. And from time to time the philosophers who mean something to us—who may even mean a great deal to us, perhaps everything—completely withdraw from our minds, probably because we’ve misused them. They simply decamp and leave our minds vacant, so that instead of having ideas in our minds and doing something with them—sensible or otherwise, philosophical or otherwise—we’re left with an unbearable pain, a pain so terrible that we almost want to cry out. But of course we’re careful not to cry out and so reveal that our minds are quite empty, for that would inevitably be the end of us in a world that’s just waiting to hear us cry out and reveal the emptiness of our minds. Over time we’ve become accustomed to concealing everything, or at least everything we think, everything we venture to think, lest we be done to death, for we know that whoever fails to conceal his thoughts—his real thoughts, which only he is aware of—is done to death, I told Gambetti. The vital thoughts are those we keep secret, I told Gambetti, not those we express or publish, which have very little in common—usually nothing at all—with those we conceal and are always inferior to them. Our concealed thoughts encompass everything, while our published thoughts amount to next to nothing. But if we were to publish our secret thoughts, if we were once to express them, we’d be done for.