intently and ever more intently and you will suddenly be seized by a fit of laughter, he said. Strictly speaking, every original is a forgery in itself, he said. You follow my meaning. Of course there are phenomena in the world, in nature, if you like, which we
cannot make look ridiculous, but in art
anything can be made to look
ridiculous, any person can be made to look ridiculous, can be made into a caricature whenever we like, whenever we feel the need, he said. Provided we are in a position to make something look ridiculous. We are not always in that position, and then we are seized by despair and next by the devil, he said. No matter which work of art, it can be made to look ridiculous, he said, it seems to you great and yet from one moment to the next you make it seem ridiculous, just as a person whom you have to make to look ridiculous because you cannot do otherwise. But then most people
are ridiculous and most works of art
are ridiculous, Reger said, and you can save yourself the trouble of making them look ridiculous or caricaturing them. Most people, on the other hand, are incapable of caricaturing, they observe everything to the bitter end with their terrible seriousness, he said, it never even occurs to them to caricature them, he said. You go to an audience of the Pope, he said, and you take the Pope and the audience seriously, moreover for the rest of your life; ridiculous, the history of the papacy is full of nothing but caricatures, he said. Of course, Saint Peter's is great, he said, but it is still ridiculous. Just step into Saint Peter's and free yourself completely of those hundreds and thousands and millions of Catholic lies about history, you do not have to wait long before the whole of Saint Peter's seems ridiculous to you. Go to a private audience and wait for the Pope, even before he arrives he will seem ridiculous to you, and of course he is ridiculous when he enters in his kitschy white pure silk robes. You can look around wherever you like, everything in the Vatican is ridiculous once you have freed yourself of the Catholic lies about history and of the Catholic sentimentality about history, of the Catholic officiousness about world history. Think of it, the Catholic Pope as a shrewd globetrotting puppet, wearing make-up, sitting under his bullet-proof glass dome, surrounded by his make-up-wearing and shrewd super-puppets and under-puppets, how revoltingly ridiculous. Talk to one of our last and still-lamented kings, how ridiculous, talk to one of our blinkered communist leaders, how ridiculous. Go to the New Year's reception of our garrulous Federal President who, with his senile father-of-the-state babbling, makes a hash of everything he talks about, it is ridiculous enough to make you sick. The Capuchin Tomb, the
Hofburg, what revolting ridiculousness. Go to the Maltese Church and look at those Maltese Knights in their black Maltese robes and their white pseudo-aristocratic numskulls glistening under the church lamps, and you will feel nothing except its ridiculousness. Go to a lecture by the Catholic cardinal, attend an inauguration at the university, how ridiculous. Wherever we look today in this country, we look into a sump of ridiculousness, Reger said. Every morning we blush at so much ridiculousness, my dear Atzbacher, that is the truth. Go to the presentation of a prize, Atzbacher, how ridiculous; ridiculous figures; the more bombastically they act the more ridiculous they are, he said, nothing but caricature, he said, simply everything. You call a good man your friend, and the next thing you know he lets himself be made an honorary professor and from then on calls himself professor and has
Professor printed on his notepaper and his wife suddenly turns up at her butcher's as
Frau Professor so she does not have to queue as long as the others who are not married to professors. How ridiculous, he said. Golden staircases, golden chairs, golden settees in the
Hofburg, he said, and nothing but pseudodemocratic idiots on them, how ridiculous. You walk down Kärntnerstrasse and everything seems to you ridiculous, all the people are just ridiculous, nothing else. You walk right across Vienna, this way and that, and all Vienna seems suddenly ridiculous to you, all the people coming towards you are ridiculous people, everything that comes towards you is ridiculous, you live in an utterly ridiculous and in reality debased world. You suddenly have to turn the whole world into a caricature. You have the strength to turn the world into a caricature, he said, the supreme strength of the spirit which is necessary for it, this one strength for survival, he said. We only control what we ultimately find ridiculous, only if we find the world and life upon it ridiculous can we get any further, there is no other, no better, method, he said. We cannot endure a state of admiration for long, and we perish if we do not break it off in time, he said. I have all my life been far from being an admirer, admiration is alien to me, as there are no miracles admiration has always been alien to me and nothing repels me more than observing people in the act of admiration, people infected with some admiration. You enter a church and the people there admire, you enter a museum and the people admire. You go to a concert and the people admire, that is distasteful. Real intellect does not know admiration: it acknowledges, it respects, it esteems, that is all, he said. People enter every church and every museum as though with a rucksack full of admiration, and for that reason they always have that revolting stooping way of walking which they all have in churches and in museums, he said. I have never yet seen a person enter a church or a museum entirely normally, and the most distasteful thing is to watch those people in Knossos or in Agrigento, when they have arrived at the destination of their admiration journey, because the journeys these people undertake are nothing but admiration journeys, he said. Admiration makes a person blind, Reger said yesterday, it makes the admirers dull-witted. Most people, once they have got into admiration never get out of admiration again, and that makes them dull-witted. Most people are dull-witted all their lives solely because they keep admiring. There is nothing to admire, Reger said yesterday, nothing, nothing at all. But because people find respect and esteem too difficult for them they admire, that comes cheaper for them, Reger said. Admiration is easier than respect, admiration is the characteristic of the dimwit, Reger said. Only a dimwit admires, the intelligent person does not admire but respects, esteems, understands, that is it. But respect and esteem and understanding require a mind, and a mind is what people do not have, without a mind and in fact totally mindlessly they travel to the pyramids and to the Sicilian columns and to the Persian temples and sprinkle themselves and their dull-wittedness with admiration, he said. The state of admiration is a state of feeble-mindedness, Reger said yesterday, nearly all of them live in this state of feeblemindedness. And in that state of feeble-mindedness they all enter the Kunsthistorisches Museum, he said. The people are weighed down by their admiration, they do not have the courage to deposit their admiration in the cloakroom along with their overcoats. So they drag themselves, laboriously crammed full of admiration, through all these rooms, Reger said, so much so it turns your stomach. Admiration, however, is not just the characteristic of the so-called uneducated, quite the opposite, it is also to a quite frightful, yes, literally a frightening degree, a characteristic of the so-called educated, which is a lot more revolting still. The uneducated person admires because quite simply he is too stupid not to admire; the educated person, however, is actually perverse, Reger said. The admiration of the so-called uneducated is entirely natural, the admiration of the so-called educated, on the other hand, is a positively perverse perverseness, Reger said. Take Beethoven, the permanently depressive, the state artist, the total state composer: the people admire him, but basically Beethoven is an utterly repulsive phenomenon, everything about Beethoven is more or less comical, a comical helplessness is what we continually hear when we are listening to Beethoven: the rancour, the titanic, the marching-tune dull-wittedness even in his chamber music. When we hear Beethoven's music we hear more noise than music, the state-dulled march of the notes, Reger said. I listen to Beethoven for a time, for instance to the
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