Extinction

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 PortugueseWoman with Gambetti, I told myself, I’ll be at the mercy of my sisters, who are expecting me. Instead of talking to Gambetti about ElectiveAffinities I’ll have 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 Gam¬ betti, 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 my 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 wont 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—foryou. 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 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 leaving 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 wont 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 for 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. Whilethey 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-nothingrogue, 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 produced 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 between 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 LaTempesta,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 all, 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 to 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 mocking 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 surfer 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 shyness 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 Mr. 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.