Thomas Bernhard - Old Masters

addicted to veneration and love, without ever having been great. In the disillusionment we experience upon discovering that the greatness of the one we have venerated and loved is no greatness at all and never was such greatness, but only an imagined greatness and is in fact pettiness, and indeed baseness, we experience the merciless pangs of the deceived. We quite simply pay the price, Reger said, for having lent ourselves to blindly accepting an object, moreover for years and decades and possibly for a lifetime, and even to venerating and loving it, without time and again putting it to the test. If only, let us say, thirty or even twenty years ago, or fifteen years ago, I had put Stifter to the test I should have saved myself this late disappointment. Altogether we should never say this or that person is the thing, and will then remain the thing for all time, we should again and again put all artists to the test, because we keep developing our art scholarship and our artistic taste, that is unquestionable. The only good thing by Stifter are his letters, Reger said, everything else is worthless. But literary scholarship will no doubt continue to concern itself with Stifter for a long time to come, after all it is obsessed by such literary idols as Adalbert Stifter who, even if they do not go down into eternal prose, will long help these scholars to earn their crust of bread in the most agreeable way. Once or twice I took the trouble of giving various people, very clever and less clever people, very perceptive ones and less perceptive ones, a book by Stifter to read, such as Colourful Stones, The Condor or Brigitta, or those Papers of My Great-grandfather, and then questioned those people as to whether they had liked what they had read, demanding an honest answer. And all these people, compelled by me to give an honest answer, told me they had not liked it, that they had been infinitely disappointed, that basically it had said nothing, but absolutely nothing, to them, they were all simply amazed that a person who wrote such brainless works, and moreover had nothing to communicate, could become so famous. That Stifter experiment amused me again and again for some time, he said, the fact that I conducted this Stifter test, as I called it. In exactly the same way I sometimes ask people if they really like Titian, for instance the Madonna with the Cherries. Not a single person I asked ever liked the picture, they all admired it solely because of its fame, it did not really say anything to any of them. But I do not wish to say that I am likening Stifter to Titian, that would be quite absurd, Reger said. The literary scholars are not only infatuated with Stifter, they are crazy about Stifter. I think the literary scholars apply an absolutely inadequate yardstick where Stifter is concerned. They write more about Stifter than about any other author of his period, and when we read what they write about Stifter we have to assume that they have either read nothing of Stifter or else have read everything only quite superficially. Nature is now enjoying a boom, Reger said yesterday, that is why Stifter is now enjoying a boom. Anything to do with nature is now very much in vogue, Reger said yesterday, that is why Sri fter is now greatly, or more than greatly, in vogue. The forest is now greatly in vogue, mountain streams are now greatly in vogue. Stifter bores everybody to death yet in some fatal manner is now greatly in vogue, Reger said. Sentimentality altogether, that is the terrible thing, is now greatly in vogue, just as everything else that is kitsch is now greatly in vogue; from the mid-seventies to this day in the mid-eighties sentimentality and kitsch have been greatly in vogue — greatly in vogue in literature, in painting, and also in music. Never before has so much sentimental kitsch been written as now in the eighties, never before has there been so much kitschy and sentimental painting, and the composers are vying with each other in kitsch and sentimentality; you only need go to the theatre, where nothing is staged nowadays except dangerous kitsch, nothing except sentimentality, and even when there is brutality and savagery on the stage it is still nothing but common kitschy sentimentality. You need only go to an exhibition and all that is shown to you there is extreme kitsch and the most revolting sentimentality. You need only go to the concert halls, and there too you will hear nothing but kitsch and sentimentality. The books today are crammed full of kitsch and sentimentality, that is what made Stifter so fashionable in recent years. Stifter is a master of kitsch, Reger said. On any page of Stifter that you care to pick there is so much kitsch that several generations of poetry-hungry nuns and nurses can be satiated with it, he said. And in actual fact Bruckner too is nothing but sentimental and kitschy, nothing but stupid, monumental orchestrated sickly ear-wax. The young and the very young writers working today mostly write nothing but brainless and mindless kitsch and in their books they develop a positively unbearable bombastic sentimentality, it is therefore easy to understand why Stifter is the height of fashion for them too. Stifter, who introduced brainless and mindless kitsch into great and noble literature and who ended up committing a kitschy suicide, is now the height of fashion, Reger said. It is by no means incomprehensible that just now, when the word forest and the word forest death have so much come into vogue, and when altogether the notion of forest is the most used and the most misused notion of all, Stifter's Tall Forest is being bought in greater numbers than ever before. People today yearn for nature more than they have done ever before, and because everyone believes that Stifter has described nature they all run to Stifter. But Stifter has not described nature at all, he has only kitschified it. The whole stupidity of people is revealed in the fact that they are all now making pilgrimages to Stifter, in their hundreds of thousands, kneeling down before every one of his books as if every one of them were an altar. It is in this kind of pseudo-enthusiasm, more than in anything else, that I find humanity distasteful, Reger said, I find it absolutely repulsive. In the end everything eventually becomes a prey to ridicule or at least to triviality, no matter how great and important it may be. Stifter in fact always reminds me of Heidegger, of that ridiculous Nazi philistine in plus-fours. Just as Stifter has totally and in the most shameless manner kitschified great literature, so Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher Heidegger, has kitschified philosophy, Heidegger and Stifter, each one for himself and in his own way, have hopelessly kitschified philosophy and literature. Heidegger, after whom the wartime and postwar generations have been chasing, showering him with revolting and stupid doctoral theses even in his lifetime — I always visualize him sitting on his wooden bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife who, with her perverse knitting enthusiasm, ceaselessly knits winter socks for him from the wool she has herself shorn from their own Heidegger sheep. I cannot visualize Heidegger other than sitting on the bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife, who all her life totally dominated him and who knitted all his socks and crocheted all his caps and baked all his bread and wove all his bedlinen and who even cobbled up his sandals for him. Heidegger was a kitschy brain, Reger said, just as Stifter, but actually a lot more ridiculous than Stifter who in fact was a tragic figure unlike Heidegger, who was always merely comical, just as petit-bourgeois as Stifter, just as disastrously megalomanic, a feeble thinker from the Alpine foothills, as I believe, and just about right for the German philosophical hot-pot. For decades they ravenously spooned up that man Heidegger, more than anybody else, and overloaded their German philological and philosophical stomachs with his stuff. Heidegger had a common face, not a spiritual one, Reger said, he was through and through an unspiritual person, devoid of all fantasy, devoid of all sensibility, a genuine German philosophical ruminant, a ceaselessly gravid German philosophical cow, Reger said, which grazed upon German philosophy and thereupon for decades let its smart little cowpats drop on it. Heidegger, in a manner of speaking, was a philosophical con-man, Reger said, who succeeded in getting a whole generation of German philosophers to stand on their heads. Heidegger is a revolting episode in the history of German philosophy, Reger said yesterday, an episode in which all philosophical Germans participated andЧитать дальше