The Hotel Years

58. The Old Poet Dies

A few days ago in the Frankfurter Zeitung I wrote a piece about the eighty-year-old Linz poet Eduard Samhaber. I concluded with the wish that the eighty-year-old might live to be a hundred. Now I read in the Kölnische Volkszeitung that three days before the appearance of my piece, and as I can now relate, on the very day I was writing it, Eduard Samhaber passed away. I wrote it at night. Samhaber, the dead man, was dear to me, and I didn’t know while I was wishing him a long life that I was actually writing his funeral oration. On the day of his death, moreover, he was given an honour: the silver medal that the Austrian republic gives its distinguished poets. Now both the state medal and my wishes are redundant. Genuine violets will sprout from his bones — and he will have eternal life in the section of paradise that is reserved for poets. He has put aside his wonderful earthly face and left it to us to remember him by. Honour to his beautiful inheritance!

Frankfurter Zeitung, 2 April 1927

59. The Third Reich, a Dependency of Hell on Earth

After seventeen months, we are now used to the fact that in Germany more blood is spilled than the newspapers use printers’ ink to report on it. Probably Goebbels, the overlord of German printers’ ink, has more dead bodies on the conscience he doesn’t have, than he has journalists to do his bidding, which is to silence the great number of these deaths. For we know now that the task of the German press is not to publicize events but to silence them; not only to spread lies but also to suggest them; not just to mislead world opinion — the pathetic remnant of the world that still has an opinion — but also to impose false news on it with a baffling naïveté. Not since this earth first had blood spilled on it has there been a murderer who has washed his bloodstained hands in as much printers’ ink. Not since lies were first told in this world has a liar had so many powerful loudspeakers at his disposal. Not since betrayal was first perpetrated in this world was a traitor betrayed by another, greater traitor: has there been such a contest between traitors. And, alas, never has the part of the world that has not yet sunk into the night of dictatorships been so dazzled by the hellish glow of lies, or so deafened and dulled by the screaming of so many lies. For hundreds of years, we have been accustomed to lies going around on tiptoe. The epoch-making discovery of modern dictatorships is the invention of the loud lie, based on the psychologically correct assumption that people will believe a shout when they doubt speech. Since the onset of the Third Reich the lie, in spite of the saying, has walked on long legs.* It no longer follows on the heels of the truth, it races on ahead of it. If Goebbels is to be credited with a stroke of genius, then surely it is this: he has caused official truth to walk with the limp he has himself. The officially sanctioned German truth has been given its own club foot. It is no fluke but a knowing joke on the part of history that the first German minister of propaganda has a limp.

But this sophisticated attention to detail on the part of world history has had little effect on foreign reporters. It would be wrong to suppose that journalists from England, America, France, etc. didn’t fall for the lying loudspeakers and loud speakers of Germany. Journalists too are children of their time. It is a mistake to think that the world has an accurate sense of Germany. The reporter who has sworn to be true to the facts bows to the fait accompli as before an idol, the fait accompli that is recognized by powerful politicians, rulers and wise men, philosophers, professors and artists. Even ten years ago a murder, never mind where and of whom, would have been a thing of horror to the world. Since the time of Cain innocent blood that cried out to heaven has found hearing on earth. Even the murder of Matteotti — not so long ago! — stirred the living to dread. But ever since Germany has started using its loudspeakers to drown out the cries of blood, these have only been heard in heaven, on earth they have been degraded to a common news item. Schleicher and his young wife were murdered. Ernst Röhm and many others have been murdered. Many of them were murderers themselves. But it wasn’t a just, but an unjust punishment that befell them. Cleverer, nimbler murderers have murdered others, less clever, less nimble than themselves. In the Third Reich, it isn’t just Cain killing Abel; it’s also a super Cain killing plain Cain. It is the only country in the world where there aren’t just murderers but murderers raised to the power of n.

And as I say, the spilt blood cries out to that heaven where the terrestrial reporters do not sit. They sit instead at Goebbels’s press conferences. They are only human. Stunned by loudspeakers, baffled by the speed with which suddenly, in spite of every natural law, limping truths start to sprint, and the short legs of lies stretch out to overtake the truth, these reporters tell the world only what they are told in Germany, and hardly anything of what is happening in Germany.

No reporter is equal to a country where, for the first time since the creation of the world, not just physical but metaphysical anomalies are propagated: monstrous hell births; cripples that run; arsonists who incinerate themselves; fratricidal brothers; devils biting themselves in the tail. It is the seventh circle of hell whose dependency on earth is known as “The Third Reich”.

Pariser Tageblatt, 6 July 1934

* Long legs: German says Lügen haben kurze Beine—Lies have short legs.

60. Far from the Native Turf

I

Heinrich Heine is a poet for the ages and a perennially current writer. His lasting, so to speak, continually reawakening journalistic relevance vies with his poetic immortality. He was always a darling of the Graces and of women, and therefore always detested by Germany. This country that is forever trying to prove itself was minutely understood, loved, pitied and despised by him. He is its prophet. He foresaw the course Germany would take. Read him, and save yourself the daily reports of events in Germany. Every new German calamity bears him out. Every new pubescent phase of this people that is unable to attain maturity and as a result sees itself (and unfortunately other countries as well) as “dynamic”, confirms Heinrich Heine’s words about his fatherland. No wonder the number of Heine biographies almost matches the number of German catastrophes. The newest one, to our knowledge, is by Antonina Vallentin, published in French by Gallimard.

Probably it is the discreetest of all the Heine biographies, cautious, tender, forgiving, and more than half in love. The personal wretchedness of the poet, the happiness and grief of his love affairs are discerned with greater reliability than literary science and research can establish for a fact. Which is not to say that this book lacks knowledge. On the contrary: it is full of diligence. But it takes the gentle hand and sensitive heart of a woman to order so much knowledge that it appears only in the background. It sometimes seems as though the author had known Heine personally, and only then, as if to cross-check her impressions, consulted the more substantial and objective sources. And all the time, the epoch that Heine crowned and represented is not lost from sight, nor his continuing relevance, which we noted above. A very alert publicistic sense compels the tender eye of the authoress, watching the suffering darling of the Muses with pity, to keep returning to the actual scene, and to draw the analogy between those days and ours.

It is a distinguished book. The author walks in the shadow of her great hero — and yet her discretion betrays her sympathetic presence. The book, written in German, appears in French, one of the few worthy gifts that German writers across the borders of German barbarism have been able to offer the French admirers of Heine and his spirit.

II

An evidently significant coincidence brings us, almost simultaneously, a new book by the noted Heine biographer and politician Hermann Wendel. Readers who are acquainted with pre- and post-1914 politics will need no introduction to Hermann Wendel. Born in Metz of German parents, tending in his heart a love of France and a wish for a free and dignified Germany, Hermann Wendel was a socialist MP out of poetic élan, an active politician from idealism, not a realist but an idealist politician, if you like. The very embodiment of the frontier man, German and Gaul, European in a way that no longer exists.

Hermann Wendel has now published his memoirs (Recollections of a Citizen of Metz) with the Strasbourg house of Mésange: written in German, felt in European, like everything from the pen of this politician, historian and publicist. These memoirs radiate a kindly melancholy, a forgiving melancholy. (Wendel certainly has much to forgive socialism and Germany.) His book is important, and of broad interest, even though seeming to contain only personal experience. But Wendel has the grace of the writer and the man of the world. Everything he says is cultured, delicate, powerful, valid and rich in suggestion.

III

The third book that seems to me worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the two foregoing are the thoughts of the well-known Berlin lawyer Dr. Alfred Apfel on the background of German justice (Les dessous de la justice Allemande, again from Gallimard.) These are revelations. Germans reading this book will recall with pain that Germany was all set to become a Third Reich long before Hitler was ever thought of. French readers will see what they were slow to learn, and perhaps have learned too late. (By their justice ye shall know them!) Apfel, himself imprisoned by the Hitler regime, has managed to escape to France, and it seems to me both indicative and correct that these revelations first appear in French. If one has escaped to France, then how else thank this country except by illuminating the French. It’s not just a thank you, it’s also meritorious, whatever our barbarians may say about “high treason”. Remember, our fatherland is not the one where we fare well! A country where bad things happen and more bad things are prepared than in any Hell’s kitchen, no longer deserves to be called a fatherland. We can’t love soil that puts forth such weeds.

Each chapter of Alfred Apfel’s book has an epigraph from Heinrich Heine, that prophetic and forever momentous Heinrich Heine whom Antonina Vallentin has illuminated.

Pariser Tageblatt, 14 July 1934

61. Grillparzer: A Portrait*

I

Peevish, cantankerous, grumpy, he concealed his shyness behind an aggressive humility, a modesty that was in point of fact haughtiness. He was no “sweet-natured Austrian”, more the opposite: a highly awkward, even gloomy one. It was as though, in consequence of his promise to be a classical representative of the monarchy, he felt primarily the need to go against the picture-postcard notions the other German peoples had of Austria (and this before the advent of the picture postcard). At the same time he went against the popular type of the prickly loyal subject that was so popular in the upper echelons of his own country. He never revolted, because he was in permanent rebellion. He rebelled out of conservatism, as a supporter of hierarchical order and a defender of traditional values, which he saw as under attack, neglected, offended against not from below, but from above. Devoted to the House of Habsburg and the pan-German and transnational ideas that it symbolized, he still viewed the Emperor with a degree of cool and irritation; embittered too by his experience, which had proved to him that those in power had no vocation for it, he set himself, a poor, weak, capriciously treated official, a playwright exposed to the favour, disfavour and indifference of others, to defend the inheritance, the great, misunderstood inheritance of the Roman Emperor. Yes, he enjoyed “the very highest approbation”, he sought and required it as a formal affirmation of his idealizing picture — not sloppily idealizing, more reconstructive — but this recognition was a cold sun. And he felt such a chill already! He was full of suspicion. His great, pale eyes seemed to have been made to listen as much as look, they were hearkening lights. They made enemies for him, and awakened further mistrust. In Austria, people with listening eyes were not popular. (Only Beethoven was an exception: he was deaf.)

Rarely was he seized by yearning to be away, the longing to leave the limits of his extensive, varied fatherland that could be home and abroad at one and the same time. Once, he set off to pay a visit to Goethe. Cultured readers will know the lamentable outcome of this encounter between the humble man who hid behind his modesty, and the great one who used his greatness to keep the world at arm’s length. It was the Kahlenberg’s encounter with Olympus: tragic, because it led to the underestimation of the Kahlenberg.† Grillparzer had hoped for a while to escape the peevishness of his constricting homeland, and to be allowed to breathe the atmosphere of global horizons for two days, no more than two wretched days. And he returned home more shaken than broken, more sad than disappointed, enriched by the experience that his Catholic faith affirmed: that no man can become a demigod and that even a genius is limited to the standard five senses, a few crumbs of intuition, and sometimes a degree of good fortune that is nothing compared to the grace of suffering.

He filed this experience away with the others. He actively provoked the disfavour of fate. Perhaps the reason he went to Goethe was to see with his own eyes the happiness of a fortunate man, his better and his opposite. It was like a Friday going out to see what a Sunday is like, and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday.

II

Love entails risk. One has a justifiable dread of risks. They are distantly related to revolts, uprisings and civil disturbances. The object of love is not responsible for the unpredictable character of the feeling that is called a “passion”—and passion of course in the original sense of “suffering”. For all this the object of love, the individual woman, is of course not responsible, but as a type, as “woman”, she represents unpredictability, danger, the potential for revolution and sin. In a world of few certainties, she makes commotion and drama more probable. She can splinter the steps of hierarchic order, in the way that a child might take it into its head to loosen and break the rungs of a ladder. Grillparzer is happily in love. He fears only the other sex. Bizarre descendant from Austrian troubadours, he turns the saying of the Minnesingers on its head and loves before he adores: a moralist, not a courtier — no more than he is a courtier in his attitude to the Emperor. He wasn’t a flatterer, he was silent: his silence was reproachful.

The way he was, and the way he portrayed himself, he should have demanded to be loved: not just as a man of sorrows, but as a grump, uncomfortable and pedantic, knowing that such qualities are antipathetic to a woman’s heart. There was arrogance in him, uncertainty and the pleasure of self-denial. He fulfilled, nourished, fed his desire by denying it.

So he didn’t “know” woman in the Biblical sense. Nor did he find friends among men either. Love nuzzled him, trustfully, with interest. He could have reached out to stroke it, but instead he pushed it away; like a traveller in the desert who persists in taking an oasis for a mirage, and in his mind pushed it back to the unattainable blue horizon. He didn’t trample on happiness where it offered itself to him, but he did push it away with both hands, declined it, avoided it, looked the other way.

III

He had the gift of intuition, and he dived into the future like others into the past. None of his professionally clairvoyant political contemporaries could see the future as well as he, who wrote: “From humanity through nationality to bestiality”. Not a bon mot, but a cry of fear in view of the looming disintegration of the monarchy, the final victory of awakening national barbarism. A cry of fear, palpable even in his victory cry to Radetzky: “All Austria is in your camp!” Actually, the hinterland was by no means still intact, the army alone represented it. Sadová cast an enormous shadow.‡ Austria triumphed at sea, against the Italians, at Lissa, not in the north, on land, against Germany.§ Not only the Austrian army, but the idea of the cosmopolitan German was smashed by his step-brother, the nationalist German, whose watchwords were: centralize, vanquish, oppress, rule — the opposite of the unfairly taken against Latin motto (because misunderstood and misapplied for domestic politics): Divide et impera! A subtle translation would be: decentralize and exercise influence! Not: divide and rule!

But how many — even then — had a proper understanding of Latin? Since Joseph II, aping Prussian centralism and enlightenment à la Frederick the Great, reined in the church and — surely without meaning to or knowing he was doing it — laid the moral and intellectual basis for the subsequent nationalist arrogance of German Austrians vis-à-vis the other Austrians (the “dictatorship” one might call it), one of the last refuges of universal Latinity was taken away, destroyed from above, even though the Catholic Emperor of course had none of the Protestant and Voltairean élan (the dynamism, as we say today) of Prussia. Grillparzer perhaps marks the beginning of the (political) Weltschmerz of the Austrian writer. At least, it was Grillparzer who gave it its classic expression: the anguish that understands that the Europe of the Middle Ages, Latin, universalist, suspending national differences — which in Austria still had force and being — was bound to be followed by the Europe of the Reformation and the French Revolution, the Europe of Napoleon and Bismarck. “From humanity through nationality to bestiality” means: from Erasmus through Luther, Frederick II, Napoleon, Bismarck, to the clutch of dictators we have today.

There were in those days few representatives of this (Catholic, political) Weltschmerz: liberalism was just beginning to convert the virtues of Austria into a stage set, lightness into flippancy; the actual “heuriger” is tart, but the poems and songs squeezed from it make a saccharine lemonade.∥ An acute conservative ear could discern the worldwide victory of the waltz and its offspring, the operettas of Lehár. From that “Grace” that takes its name from Greek antiquity and the Catholic gratia, was derived the export article: “Austrian cheer”; from etiquette, the stern daughter of Spain, any amount of bending-and-scraping compliancy. Can you blame Grillparzer!? He was surrounded by so much applause that he could only assert himself in lament. Empty laughter hurt him, privately as well as publicly. A minor transgression, the wrong word, even a clumsy gesture was enough to antagonize him. He reacted with extreme sensitivity — the most vengeful of all human weaknesses — with sometimes wounding arrogance (though never crossing the boundary into vulgarity). Such episodes only made him sadder. He suffered a hangover after wrath as others did after excess.

IV

Spain is Austria’s neighbour in history. The Counter-Reformation is a distant, calmer cousin to the Inquisition. The Habsburgs are Spaniards who took on the Austrian character and kept their Spanish ceremonials. These ceremonials, rigorous and assimilating at once, stand up to the rising tide of frivolity in Austria. The flag pairs black with yellow. The black watches over the yellow. The double eagle, golden, over both halves, watches over unity. Spain is Austria’s neighbour in history, and Grillparzer’s in literature.

He is the only German classic author of Spanish antecedents. Like the Habsburgs, he comes from Spain. He is Calderon’s descendant. It’s not just the form of the Ahnfrau.¶ It’s not the metre at all, more the cadence. It’s the attempt to couple the nervous clicking of the castanets with the steady iambs of German. A vain attempt, by the way. The Ahnfrau remains a classic oddity, mainstay of the Viennese Burgtheater and the school syllabus, but requiring the sanction of the k. and k. Ministry of Education and Culture.

Grillparzer subsequently gave up metre and rhythm, but not the melody of Spain. It flowed quite naturally into the native speech of Vienna. The grandezza of Spanish ceremonial was just as easily joined to the lightness of Austria. (If the percussion that opens the Radetzky March fails to remind you of castanets, then you have no ear for music.)

The melancholy of the narrative prose is not the golden Wehmut—the expression of Austrian sadness — but an expression of sternness. Picture a pleasant landscape in a black frame. The aphoristic prose is not satirical or campaigning as Grillparzer’s prose is, but furious. It is the aphoristic expression of a judge, a public prosecutor; or say it, an inquisitor, who is laying into his own people; sometimes with the resources of a card-carrying prophet. Never does bitterness turn into jeering. Never does a jibe become a pleasantry. Strict obedience to literary genre. Here too, here above all, the laws of the hierarchy. There is a Spanish anger when Grillparzer scolds. Austria knows no rage, it dwindles into a ticking-off: even rage finds its own tradesmen’s entrance.

Grillparzer’s anger was the expression of a subtle implacability softened by Latin Austria, and then amended by Spanish. His indignation was limited, personal, not meant as incitement or contagion, on the contrary: a rebellion of high-mindedness within the boundaries of the individual. He was the classic instance of a rebel who is at the same time a true reactionary: a phenomenon which the recent fashion of labelling everything rebellious and indignant, everything consciously eccentric and apart, as “revolutionary” is incapable of understanding. When Grillparzer stands in opposition to the Emperor, he does so by being more imperial than the Emperor. He mutinies against the relaxing of the ceremonial from above. He watches over the supposed guardians of the hierarchy. He is, if you will allow the expression, a reactionary par excellence, an individual anarchist reactionary. A posterity impertinently, dictatorially occupying the past is pleased to claim Grillparzer as a victim of reactionary Austria, as if he was one of the helpless, common or garden victims of reaction. When all the time he was a rebel out of reaction, of free will. His anger against the rulers came — in today’s parlance — not from the left, but the right. He was as Spanish as the Habsburgs, and as Roman as the Pope: the only conservative revolutionary in the history of Austria.

V

Successes tasted bitter to him, almost like failures. Of course, Austria had its connived-at failures, its failures in spe, a sort of parallel to pre-censorship. Displeasure at court, not even spontaneous displeasure, but a factitious displeasure bred by snoops and tell-tales, fed by intrigue, slander, malice, could hinder even a failure, and took from the writer the possibility of hearing the voice of an audience. To be taken off the programme, to be scorned, rejected, whistled at by an audience, all that spells an honest, so to speak, earned failure. But to “meet with disfavour” before the writer is even allowed to throw down his challenge, to suffer a fate that is itself a challenge and that is too powerful for you to measure yourself against, is a difficult lot, an Austrian curse. It’s like being imprisoned without charge. Under these conditions success, honour even, could not bring satisfaction, much less pleasure. And so success and failure tasted equally bitter to him. It was even possible that success brought pain, and failure only a long-awaited, almost yearned-for melancholy. One may feel at home in misery, gradually begin to love it like a dear friend. There is a condition in which one fears joyful surprises, Christmas at the wrong time, presents that are like assaults, and at the sight of which one is even forced to smile. Success can be a torment.

He saw through hope, came to like doubt, but didn’t lose his faith. It’s not possible to lose faith: after all, it’s faith in God. Scepticism doesn’t hurt such faith: on the contrary, it accompanies it, sometimes even supports it. The unreliability of the world is a consequence of its inadequacy. You don’t oppose its pressure, its mood, its despotism, by open revolt, which can have no other outcome than catastrophic inadequacy, in other words: disorder, the greatest of all dangers to a human, but by a retreat into the depth, into the cave of the self. An association, impossible to dismiss, with the image of the gloomy Spanish monarch burying himself alive.** He doesn’t live off to the side, but in the depths. From below he sees more accurately, with a juster bitterness and a moral bitterness, the facility, the poverty of the high-ups, and more clearly the summit of heaven; by day the stars that populate it (even by day). The dead on all sides are nearer to him than the living can be above him. He hears their breathing, the silent sleep of the time-conquerors. They have conquered this era that is so antagonistic and so wrong. It is made up of darkness and a false dawn, hailed by clueless, optimistic, noble, revolutionary bowler hats, feared by bitter men of our sort, who are not colour blind and understand exactly how much human blood is needed to brew that “dawn’s fiery glow”. It is soaked full of the blood of the great revolution, of the wars of Napoleon, when for the first time the cry rang out: “Nations, awaken!” The response of our dour species is: “From humanity through nationality to bestiality.”

Oh, those times! The hierarchical institutions are still intact, but the men in charge of them are slothful, thoughtless, unprincipled. They embody the randomness and disorder they have been called in to oppose. They are not called, they are hired. They have the perplexing ability — the curse, more — of oppressing and retreating at one and the same time. The astringency of the ancestors and forefathers, put to the service of an implacable idea, is as different from the facile, illegitimate desire to press, the tyranny of the ruler, as dark is from black. Anarchy wears the mask of legitimacy. Meanwhile, a second anarchy, following on the heels of the first, makes ready to fight it. Lonely and timorous on the surface, protected in the depths. Charles V went to the grave alive; he felt the end was nigh, he too had no confederates.

VI

The end of the great but perceptibly shrinking empire still has one noble aspect, for all its inner cracks, flaws, pettinesses and rottennesses. A noble death. The victorious troops have something of the classic élan of Lipizzaner greys, the courtliest beasts in Europe, who have the symbolic nobility of heraldic animals. Austrian troops go to battle in snow-white tunics. Their victories are the classic successes of an outlived tradition. Their defeats carry symbolic weight. It’s the last hurrah of the old knightliness, losing out to plebeian technology; the unprotected advance of massed ranks against small, mobile, camouflaged units in broken field; the highly visible snow white, a noble target, against a blue that was invisible in fog (and called “Prussian blue” ever since); the cavalry charge against fortified artillery positions. It’s the end of feudalism: dying in the old armour, fighting a parvenu who is about to put on the false crown, a legal figment of an emperor. Seen from a higher angle, the Junker becomes an ignorant beneficiary of the great Revolution and the only genial arriviste of history: Napoleon.

Such is the catastrophe billowing around Grillparzer. His contemporaries — even the most significant of them — are not able to stand up to it. They are too small for such a comprehensive defeat, which confirms the decline of Charles V, and anticipates that of Karl in 1918. They take refuge in the treasury of home, in Austria, which is still capacious and various enough and has enough breath, but is now only “folklore” not “world”. Its orientation has changed, too: now it is Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Tehran, Constantinople; no more towards Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Milan, Rome, Hanover — and the fraternal enemy Berlin. The great and important in Austria acquire the peripheral character of specialities — dialect dyes them all, even the cosmopolitan Viennese, not just the provincial “folk poets” and “local characters”. Only Grillparzer kept the world in view, because he was the only one who suffered the pain of the lost, great, dry world. But Calderon and the Spanish antecedents of the Habsburgs became ever more remote, that is: his moral and intellectual origins are still less present than his material home, Switzerland. Twenty years ago the past was still there, instinct with life. Now it’s shrouded in dimness and fog. Grillparzer alone remains, a monument, buried alive, a living monument, already crumbling. His face is like weathered stone, yellow-hued, as though there was something like stone parchment. His body, too, lean, knotty and stooped, is reminiscent of wood, root, rock. His statue is less stony than he is. His heart shines in his large eyes, loyal grey mirrors to a sunken world, large, bright lights that listened to the future, and picked up the terror of the final end. When he shut them for ever, not prematurely, not at the right moment, if anything too late, because death can sometimes be as cruel as life — Charon delayed — people only knew that a “classic”, one of the “greats”, “a Burgtheater dramatist”, an Austrian pendant to the Académie Française-member, a retired senior civil servant, had gone on. And one knows still less today than then about how widely spanned his life’s arc was, all the way from Alcázar to Königgrätz; from grandezza and ceremonial to vulgarity and the Prussians; from the Habsburgs to the Hohenzollerns: from humanity through nationality to bestiality.

Austria has no Pantheon, only its cemeteries and a Kapuzinergruft, and rightly so. They are all under the sward: Beethoven, Bruckner, Stifter, Raimund, Nestroy, Grillparzer. To represent Austria means to be misunderstood and maltreated in your lifetime; unappreciated after your death; and periodically, by the agency of anniversary celebrations, to be returned to obscurity.

Das Neue Tage-Buch (Paris), 4 December 1937

*Franz Seraphicus Grillparzer (1791–1872), Austrian dramatist and moralist.

† Kahlenberg: a hill outside Vienna, affording celebrated views of the city.

‡ Sadová, or Königgrätz: the decisive battle in 1866 of the Austro — Prussian War.

§ Lissa: sea-battle in the Adriatic in the same war.

∥ Heuriger: newly made white wine, drunk and celebrated in the hills around Vienna.

¶ Die Ahnfrau (The Ancestress), Grillparzer’s play of 1817.

** Burying himself alive: Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, (1500–1558), who retired to the monastery of St. Yuste where he died.

62. The Bitter Bread

Day breaks, and the poor man wishes he could prolong the night. It is December, admittedly, so the day begins late, but it is still too early for him. Mornings are bad, but with the passage of time the poor man has learned that they need to be withstood, because the day is waiting. Not all days are as bad as their advance guard, the morning. Some, a rare few, have been surprisingly favourable, others, most, have been decidedly bad. But you can’t judge the day from the morning.

It is a tiny fourth-floor hotel room, with scarlet wallpaper, patterned with yellow sunflowers. A nearby church clock strikes eight. There is a rushing in the pipes, because a tenant on the first or second floor is running a bath. Now the poor man taxes the running water himself. For two weeks the same towel has been hanging over the brass rail. The towel is soiled by the dirt of the past days, the bearable, the ordinary, and the decidedly bad days. The bedding too is four weeks old. But in the morning you don’t absolutely have to look at it, and at night you can’t see it, because the overhead light fixture lights only the middle of the ceiling, it is there mostly for the benefit of flies. The spiders lurk in dark corners, behind thick grey webs of their own making, probably waiting for the poor man to switch off the light and feel his way, barefooted from the door to bed. Then the flies will be trapped in the webs, and will be rolled up, sucked dry and eaten. Because there is no creature that does not rob, steal, kill, eat and live. Only the poor man needs money, otherwise he cannot live.

That a poor man — of all things — needs money is no longer new. A poor man needs at least a small amount of money, it’s the rich man who needs a lot. But it’s easier for a rich man to get a lot of money than for a poor man to get a little; and it may be the same with spiders. The ones that are in advantageous corners with large densely woven nets will catch more flies. But even that is of little comfort to the poor man.

Least of all on Thursdays, and today is a Thursday. Because on this day the hotel presents its bill. If he had been able to pay a month in advance, then he wouldn’t have to be in weekly dread of the landlord, and even Thursday might be bearable. As it is, though, it is very bad; and the worst aspect of it is the morning. And today, as already stated, is a Thursday.

Even so, the poor man washes, as he did on Tuesday and Wednesday before, and tries to find an unsoiled corner of the towel to dry himself on. But a towel has only four corners, and all are dirty. Not to speak of the middle.

His coat hangs on the doorknob, because the coat hook is so loosely anchored in the plaster that it can only manage to support his hat. The poor man puts his hat on, and only gets into his coat on the way down. He doesn’t lock his room. He takes the key out, though, because he has to hand it in downstairs. He doesn’t lock the room, out of rebellion against poverty, and as if someone on the stairs or anywhere would say to him: You really should be careful, you know. And as if he, the poor man, would get a chance to reply: There’s no reason to. I’ve nothing to steal. But it doesn’t occur to anyone to warn a poor man of thieves.

Everything the poor man has by way of possessions, he takes with him. It fits into a little suitcase, and one can’t even claim that everything in the suitcase belongs to him: the pencils, the shirt-patterns, the collar studs, the rolls of thread, the rayon stockings, the soaps, the flacons of perfume: everything is his “on commission”. First he has to sell the wares, hand over what they fetch, and only then will he get a little money. The poor man checks his wallet, where he keeps his notebook. That contains his most important “recommendations”, which is to say, names and addresses of people who are rumoured to have more money than a poor man, and at least enough for them to lock their rooms. These people have been recommended to the poor man. But people don’t want to risk making themselves unpopular with their friends. They think it will do less harm to the poor man if he makes himself unpopular.

Without these “recommendations”, one really wouldn’t know where to bend one’s steps on leaving the hotel. As it is, one has at least a direction, and it’s probably better to go a little higher, because hope lasts longer the higher up the recommendations live. On the first floor, so thinks the poor man, he will encounter only disappointment.

He sets himself to sell a dozen pencils. One wouldn’t believe that pencils fetch more than collar studs for instance, or how hard they are to sell. If the poor man had ever been able to say he had sold a dozen pencils, then he could say he had clinched a deal. As it is though, selling only one pencil at a time, he tells himself he can rely on retail customers. And he adds: nowadays. The times are bad, no question. For rich people, perhaps. The poor man moves into their area by saying: nowadays.

This Thursday though seems to want to herald a better phase. One “recommendation” buys eighteen pencils and six shirt buttons and tells the poor man not to come again for two months. Two months is a very long time for a well-off person, licking his finger and flipping the pages of his pocket calendar. That’s all. But for a poor man, two months are two eternities. If someone wanted him to come back the day after tomorrow, even tomorrow, he wouldn’t be able to promise. You never know from where you’ll be coming home at the end of a day. The poor man doesn’t even know whether he’ll be coming home at all. He walks into a bistro, drinks a cup of coffee, dunks a croissant. He doesn’t quite give in to the pleasure of it, as he knows it’s a Thursday.

But it’s a good Thursday. Because before the onset of evening — and in December the days are so short, they’re over almost before they’ve begun — the poor man has sold three pairs of ladies’ stockings and has an order for three shirts (with attached collars). Who knows what he could sell, if only it wasn’t Thursday, and also December 29th. Because on that day the poor man has to go round to the police. He has a document that has his name on it and where he comes from and where he lives. But what it doesn’t say is how long he can stay there, and where he’s allowed to go.

He is told nothing. He waits. Then he puts down his suitcase, and stands at a counter, and an official stamps his paper immediately; so quickly that the poor man is tempted to ask the official if he could use a couple of pencils. Luckily the poor man thinks twice about that, and he walks off. What else does he need? He can pay the rent. He can stay another fortnight. He can afford a sausage, a piece of cheese, a bottle of beer. The poor man is full of optimism. And on a Thursday.

He goes home, pays his bill, goes up to his room, and lies down in his bed. Today he doesn’t even turn the light on: that’s how contented the poor man is.

Parisier Tageszeitung, 3 January 1939

63. Furlough in Jablonovka

The village of Jablonovka nestles in my memory like a jewel. Sometimes I am able to produce it, its thatched huts painted a pale blue wash, its one dwelling that was almost town-like because it had a shingle roof and a brown wooden door and two shallow steps leading up to it: just two. The white church with its tin dome stood on the little hill, in the middle of its fenced-in graveyard, a short way beyond the last of the dwellings — or a short way before the first of them, depending on where you were coming from. Left of the church gate was the bell tower, with its one big bell flanked by two junior bells. Behind the huts that stood on the twice-round village street, there was a slight incline, and a few of the huts seemed to be slowly scrambling up the hill. I was last in Jablonovka three months ago. It was 10 October, on a silvery morning that couldn’t make up its mind whether to be warm or cold. Spots of thin mist lay over the stubble fields.

It was in the War. But Jablonovka, away from the main roads, had only been required to house an alternation of Austrian and Russian reserve troops and their general staffs. The women and children and the old men and the old priest had not come under any immediate threat for three years.

There were not many horses or vehicles, the animals looked ill-nourished, the geese and ducks as well, only the pigs looked respectable, but their numbers were down after many requisitions.

A few hours after we moved into Jablonovka we left it again. We have been through plenty of shelled villages. But this one — strange — was spared. If we stayed here, perhaps we would share in the miracle. Why not? Why shouldn’t we stay here? Isn’t a soldier worth as much as a duck, a soldier in the Twenty-First, or the Thirty-Fifth? You see — the village says — things can be peaceful too. Huts don’t have to be on fire, shells don’t have to go off. I don’t mind if the odd aeroplane draws its circles. Then on Sundays my bells ring. Why not? High days and holy days can be celebrated. And — think about it — all those peasants born in me, grown up in me, they could have grown old, instead of dying. But I have plenty of peasant lads left. Sired by foreign soldiers maybe, but at least they did it here, in my fields and meadows, in my huts. I for one would like to continue to exist, with the help of God, away from the catastrophe.

Thus the village, but I wasn’t able to listen to it for long. Until mid-December we were twenty miles east of there, on a quiet sector of the front. It was as though the village extended its benedictions to the trenches.

We were already receiving early Christmas parcels, and of course not opening them. I should say: I didn’t receive any myself; I would certainly have opened them if I had, to be honest. I’ve always hated surprises. I neither wanted to give nor to get any. I was all alone amidst the expectant merriment of my comrades. Yes, our sector was quiet. But we had stood and continued to stand in the face of death. I was upset at the way men who had stared death in the face now collapsed into the tinsel and mawkishness that for the past hundred years or so had marked the birth of our Lord. To tell the truth, I was trembling at the thought of Christmas, or rather the things attending it. I fervently wished not to get any parcels from home — what was home anyway but a kind of glorified hinterland? — or consolatory surprises from my comrades. Nowhere had the manger at Bethlehem felt so near or the “parlour” with its “gifts” so far. “Christmas in the field” was something for war correspondents.

Then a miracle happened, not a postcard miracle, but a real one. We went into furlough on 19 December. We went to Jablonovka. You see, the village says, it can happen. It was deep in snow. Icicles dangled from the thatch over the tiny windows at the back. And when I wanted to look out onto the wintry street from the hut I’d been quartered in, I had to take a candle and melt a hole in the ice on the window. It closed up again in no time. The temperature was twenty below.

On Christmas Eve the peasants came into regimental HQ. They asked us for sixteen candles. Hanamak, our warrant officer, produced eight, and cut them in half. Boys carved faces in hollow pumpkins, lit the candles inside them, and each of them had three pumpkins, and those were their Three Kings. Five boys, all sons of Frau Olszewska, had a manger they had carved themselves. It was a tiny hut, no more than fifteen inches high, painted green, three walls, an open stage. There were little bundles of actual hay inside. And if you poked your finger through a ring on the gable of the house, the whole thing seemed to rock by itself, and inside Mary was rocking her infant, the grey donkey shook its long grey ears, and the miniature Three Kings, who came out dressed in scarlet and gold, moved their trembly sleeves that were looped onto their wrists with thread. The star of Bethlehem shone within, as though it had come crashing through the thatch, and it turned out not to be a star at all, but a gold rosette as worn by our k. & k. officers. The war had reached Jablonovka after all.

The peasant woman I was billeted with was called Josefova Gargas, and I will never forget her. Although many of the village women had been widowed over the course of the war, she was the only one who was referred to as the Widow. Because her husband had died a natural death six months before the war began. She had three-year-old twins, a couple of winning bundles of flax. Her bony face enjoined her to silence and severity. But if you came to know her better, it was nothing but a doomed effort to suppress the kindness and goodness within her.

Karl Greiser, ensign, and pork-butcher in civilian life, slaughtered a pig. The widow scrubbed the floor, the table, the three chairs. When evening came, she set out a great dish with red stripes and blue flowers round the rim in the middle of the table. Two immense stoneware plates flanked it like children. Three wooden spoons, pale yellow as the table they lay on, looked like its children: they were wood of its wood. Kindling laid crosswise waited on the open hearth. And the heads of the twins smelled of that mustardy wartime soap: a smell of lye, dirty washing and poverty, especially poverty.

The mercury neither rose nor fell — and that was fine. A nothing sort of day disappeared into a clear night. Who could say how long we would remain here on furlough? Who could say where we would be dispatched to next? I dislike atmospherics. The field-post is carried out. Two parcels, all of two parcels. We are summoned to the officers’ mess at eight, Rainacher and I. He dislikes atmospherics as well. We are both billeted with the widow Josefova. Because he has seniority, he sleeps in the bed, while I sleep on a straw mattress on the floor. We both excuse ourselves. We can’t make the mess. We walk up the hill to midnight mass instead.

The sky glitters overhead, the snow glitters under our feet. It’s as though the sky is a reflection of the snow. There’s no point following the village street, which is all trampled. The snow was so seductive that it would have been a sin not to walk there, where it lay crisp and deep, noble, virginal, crystal and singing. So as not to encounter our comrades and to enjoy the night and the stars and the snow, we walked up the lane behind the houses. It was peaceful, no war anywhere. Ten or twelve times a searchlight crossed the sky, but even that seemed to be a kind of strolling, a peaceable pedestrian, paler than its brothers whom I knew better in the luminous sky.

The boys came in with their pumpkin lanterns. They sang. Stable and manger and donkey were nearby, if you could follow the singing. If you could believe them, the Saviour was born in Jablonovka, not far from Josefova Gargas’s hut, and not two thousand years ago, but sixty at the most, and the oldsters still remembered the event. You could practically see the footprints of the Three Kings in the snow. The star was graspable. The Podolian plain was swaddled in faith, God was in Podolia, and Bethlehem was a hop and a skip away, much closer than the front.

Lights went out one after another, and the huts went dark. Only the sky and the snow were still gleaming as the village traipsed up the hill to the church. Its double doors were thrown open, and it was as though the altar was coming out to meet you, to welcome the visitors in its splendour. There were no pews. People stood and knelt. Although the doors were left open, it soon grew warm, it was as though the furs were warming me, and the candles, and the fervour and the Gloria after the Introitus: Dominus dixit ad me: filius meus es tu, ego hodie genui te. Quare fremuerunt gentes; et populi meditate sunt inania? What are the heathens purposing? What folly are the peoples pursuing? — Et pastores erant in regione eadem vigilantes. — And there were wakeful shepherds in that place — they were here next to us, next to Rainacher and me. We took the widow Josefova Gargas home between us. The door wasn’t locked, no door in the village was ever locked, even though strange troops, Hungarians and Bosnians were furloughed here. There were wakeful shepherds here.

We sat down at the table, and ate our borsch with wooden spoons. Then we cut up the meat with our bayonets. We drank slivovitz from tea-glasses and canteens. My atheistical friend Rainacher stretched comfortably on the chair, flung wide his arms and sang: Gloria in excelsis deo. He wasn’t blaspheming. At three in the morning, we kissed the widow and the twins, gave them our four parcels, and went off to sleep. You take the bed tonight, Rainacher told me, I’ll go on the floor. It’s my present to you. And that’s how it was. We were roused at six with marching orders.

Das Neue Tage-Buch (Paris), 23 September 1939