Thomas Bernhard: Old Masters

think in accordance with his head, unless he is sitting on the Bordone Room settee. At the Ambassador I have some very good ideas, Reger keeps saying, but on the Bordone Room settee at the Kunsthistorisches Museum I have the best, unquestionably always the best ideas, while at the Ambassador it is scarcely possible to get any so-called philosophical thinking going, it is a matter of course on the Bordone Room settee. At the Ambassador I think the way everyone else thinks, everyday matters and everyday needs, but on the Bordone Room settee I think the unusual and the extraordinary. For instance, he would be unable at the Ambassador to explain the Tempest Sonata in the same concentrated manner as on the Bordone Room settee, and to give a lecture such as the one on the Art of the Fugue with all its profundity and all its particularities and peculiarities would be quite impossible for him at the Ambassador, for such a thing as that all the prerequisites are lacking at the Ambassador, Reger said. On the Bordone Room settee he was able to pick up the most complicated ideas and follow them through and eventually bring them together in an interesting result, but not at the Ambassador. But of course the Ambassador has a number of advantages which the Kunsthistorisches Museum lacks, Reger said, not to mention the fact that I am each time enchanted by the lavatory at the Ambassador since that lavatory was recently rebuilt; in Vienna, let me tell you, where all lavatories are in fact more neglected than in any major city in Europe, this is a rarity, to find a lavatory that does not turn your stomach, where one need not, while using it, hold one's eyes and nose firmly closed the whole time; Viennese lavatories are altogether a scandal, even in the lower Balkans you will not find a lavatory which is quite so neglected, Reger said. Vienna has no lavatory culture, he said, Vienna is one great lavatory scandal, even at the most famous hotels in the city there are scandalous lavatories, you find the most ghastly pissoirs in Vienna, more ghastly than in any other city, and if ever you have to pass water you get the shock of your life. Vienna is quite superficially famous for its opera, but in fact it is feared and detested for its scandalous lavatories. The Viennese, and the Austrians generally, have no lavatory culture, nowhere in the world would you find such filthy and smelly lavatories, Reger said. To have to go to the lavatory in Vienna is usually a disaster, unless you are an acrobat you get yourself filthy, and the stench there is such that it clings to your clothes, often for weeks. The Viennese are altogether dirty, Reger said, there are no city-dwellers in Europe who are dirtier, just as it is a well-known fact that the dirtiest flats in Europe are the Viennese flats; the Viennese flats are even dirtier, a lot dirtier, than the Viennese lavatories. The Viennese keep saying everything is so dirty in the Balkans, you hear this kind of talk everywhere, but Vienna is a hundred times dirtier than the Balkans, Reger said. When you accompany a Viennese to his flat your mind as a rule boggles at the dirt. Of course there are exceptions, but as a rule Viennese flats are the dirtiest flats in the world. I always wonder, what must those foreigners think when they have to go to the lavatory in Vienna, what must these people, who after all are used to clean lavatories, think when they have to use the dirtiest lavatories in the whole of Europe. The people only hurry to pass water and emerge from the pissoirs horrified at so much dirt. Everywhere also that horrible stench in every public lavatory, no matter whether you go to a lavatory at a railway station or whether you need to go in the Underground, you have to visit one of the dirtiest lavatories in Europe. In the Vienna cafés too, and especially there, the lavatories are so dirty you feel nauseated. On the one hand this megalomaniac cult of gigantic gateaux, and on the other these frightfully dirty lavatories, he said. With many of these lavatories you have the impression that they have not been cleaned for years. On the one hand the café proprietors protect their gateaux against even the slightest draught, which of course is of benefit to the gateaux, and on the other they attach not the slightest importance to the cleanliness of their lavatories. Just wait, Reger said, if you ever have to go to the lavatory at one of those, for the most part, rather famous cafés before you have started on your gateau, because when you return from the lavatory you will have lost all your appetite for eating even a mouthful of the gateau offered, or maybe even served, to you. And the Viennese restaurants, too, are dirty, I maintain that they are the dirtiest in the whole of Europe. Every other moment you are confronted with a totally bespattered tablecloth and when you draw a waiter's attention to the fact that the tablecloth is bespattered and that you do not intend to eat your meal off a tablecloth bespattered from one end to the other, that bespattered tablecloth is but reluctantly removed and replaced by a fresh one, by asking for a dirty tablecloth to be replaced then you merely attract furious and indeed dangerous glances. In most taverns you do not even get a tablecloth on your table and when you ask for at least the worst mess to be wiped off the dirty and very often even beer-wet table-top you invite an ill-mannered grumpy response, Reger said. The lavatory question and the tablecloth question are still unsolved in Vienna, Reger said. In every big city in the world, and I can say that I have visited nearly all of them and have come to know most of them more than just superficially, you get a clean tablecloth on your table as a matter of course before you start your meal. In Vienna a clean tablecloth or at least a clean table-top is anything but a matter of course. And it is the same with the lavatories, the Viennese lavatories are the most nauseating not only in Europe but in the whole world. What use to you is a superb meal if, even before you start eating, you lose your appetite in the lavatory, and what use to you is a superb meal if your stomach turns afterwards in the lavatory, he said. The Viennese, as indeed the Austrians, have no lavatory culture, an Austrian lavatory has always been a disaster, Reger said. Much as Vienna is famous for its mostly really excellent cuisine, at least as far as desserts are concerned, its renown with regard to its lavatories is inglorious. Until quite recently the Ambassador, too, had a lavatory which defied all description. But one day the management came to its senses and built a new one, an exceptionally well-planned one, in fact a perfect one not only architecturally but down to the last hygienically sociological detail. The Viennese are in fact the dirtiest people in Europe and it has been scientifically established that a Viennese uses a piece of soap only once a week, just as it has been scientifically established that he changes his underpants only once a week, just as he changes his shirt at most twice a week, and most Viennese change their bedlinen only once a month, Reger said. As for socks or stockings, a Viennese, on average, wears the same pair for twelve consecutive days, Reger said. In view of all this, manufacturers of soap and linen do worse business in Vienna, and of course throughout Austria, than anywhere else in Europe, Reger said. Instead the Viennese consume vast quantities of scent of the cheapest kind, Reger said, and they all reek from afar of violets or carnations or lilies of the valley or boxwood. And it is of course logical, from the external dirt of the Viennese, to draw conclusions about their inner dirt, Reger said, and the Viennese are in fact not much less dirty inside than outside and possibly, Reger said, I am saying possibly, that is not with complete certainty, he corrected himself, the Viennese are actually a lot dirtier inside than they are out. Everything suggests that they are a lot dirtier inside than out. But I do not feel like pursuing the subject, he then said, that would surely be a task for so-called sociologists, to do a study of the subject. Such a study would probably have to describe the dirtiest people in Europe, Reger suggested. You do not know how happy I am that there is this newly-built lavatory at the Ambassador; at the Kunsthistorisches Museum there is still the old one. As I am getting steadily older and not younger, I have lately also had to visit the lavatory at the Kunsthistorisches Museum with increasing frequency, Reger said, and this, under the conditions still prevailing here, is a nerve-racking unpleasant experience for me every day, because the lavatory at the Kunsthistorisches Museum is beneath contempt. Just as the lavatory at the Musikverein is beneath contempt. I even once permitted myself the joke of mentioning in one of my reviews for The Times that the lavatory at the Musikverein, that is in the supreme of all supreme Viennese temples of the Muses, defies description and that for this reason, for this scandalous lavatorial reason, Reger said, it always costs me some selfdenial to go to the Musikverein, and that I very often ask myself at home whether or not I should go to the Musikverein, since at my age and with my kidneys I have to go to the lavatory at least twice during an evening at the Musikverein. But each time I have in fact gone to the Musikverein, because of Mozart and Beethoven, because of Berg and Schoenberg, because of Bartók and Webern, overcoming my lavatory phobia. How exceptional the music played at the Musikverein must have been, Reger said, for me to go there even though I have to visit the Musikverein lavatory at least twice during the evening. Art is merciless, I tell myself each time I enter the Musikverein lavatory, and so I enter it, Reger said. With eyes closed and my nose pinched as far as possible I pass water at the Musikverein lavatory, he said, this is quite a special art of its own which I have mastered with virtuosity for quite a while. Apart from the fact that the Viennese lavatories and the Viennese pissoirs are altogether the dirtiest in the world, with the exception of the so-called developing countries, nothing in them actually works as far as the sanitary equipment is concerned, there is either no water coming out of the taps, or else the water does not drain away, or else it neither runs in nor drains away, often for months on end no one cares whether the lavatories and pissoirs are functioning or not, Reger said. Probably the only way to improve this appalling state of Viennese lavatories would be for the city or the state, or whoever, to enact the strictest lavatory and pissoir laws, such rigorously strict laws that hoteliers and innkeepers and café proprietors would really have to maintain their lavatories and pissoirs. The hoteliers and innkeepers and café proprietors will not by themselves change this state of affairs, they will perpetuate this whole lavatory and pissoir mess into all eternity unless they are compelled by the city or the state to put their lavatories and pissoirs in order. Vienna is the city of music, I once wrote in The Times, but it is also the city of the most nauseating lavatories and pissoirs. London by now is aware of this fact, but Vienna of course is not, because the Viennese do not read The Times, they content themselves with all the most primitive and most ghastly papers printed anywhere in the world for the purpose of stultification, in other words they content themselves with the papers ideally appropriate to the perverse emotional and intellectual state of the Viennese. The Russian group had gone. The settee in the Bordone Room was empty. Reger, as I had seen, had got up after Irrsigler had whispered something in his ear and had walked out, his black hat, which he had kept on all the time, on his head. There were now two minutes to go to half-past eleven. The Russian group was standing in the so-called Veronese Room, the Ukrainian interpreter was now talking about Veronese, but what she was saying about Veronese she had already said about Bordone and Tintoretto, the same trivialities, the same twaddle, in the same cadences in the same disagreeable voice, she was speaking not only the usual feminine Russian which basically always gets on my nerves, but she was moreover speaking in that, to me almost unbearable, piercing falsetto so that all that while I actually suffered an acute pain in my auditory canal. A hearing such as mine is sensitive and it scarcely tolerates especially disagreeable female voices in that certain falsetto pitch. Why Irrsigler had not been seen for some time, when normally, in accordance with regulations, he had to look into the Bordone Room every so often, I could not understand, it certainly seemed very odd to me that he had left the Bordone Room along with Reger and had not returned for such a long time. But as I have an appointment with Reger in just this Bordone Room at half-past eleven and as Reger is the most punctual and most reliable person I know, Reger will return to the Bordone Room at half-past eleven precisely, I reflected, and no sooner had I so reflected than Reger actually returned to the Bordone Room, though not, before finally sitting down again on the Bordone Room settee, without looking around him in all directions; anticipating this I had, as soon as I became aware of him returning to the Bordone Room, withdrawn back to the Sebastiano Room; I therefore once more posted myself in the corner of the Sebastiano Room into which I had been pushed by the uncouth Russian group and from where I was able to observe Reger who had now returned to the Bordone Room, that mistrustful Reger, as I was thinking, who was still looking around in all directions in order to feel quite safe and who, among other things, had suffered all his life from a positively fatal persecution mania, which of course had always been useful to him without being really dangerous to him or to anyone else. Reger was now again seated on the Bordone Room settee, studying the White-Bearded Man by Tintoretto. On the dot of half-past eleven he glanced at his pocket watch, which he had pulled from his jacket with lightning speed, and at the same moment I stepped out from the Sebastiano Room and into the Bordone Room and stopped in front of Reger. Terrible, those Russian groups, Reger said, terrible, I hate those Russian groups, he repeated. He commanded me formally to sit down on the Bordone Room settee, come on, sit down next to me, he said. I am happy with every punctual person, he said. The majority of people are unpunctual, that is terrible. But you have always been punctual, he said, that is one of your great qualities. If only you knew, he then said, what a bad night I had. I swallowed twice as many tablets as usual and still I slept badly. I constantly dreamt of my wife, I cannot get rid of those nightmares when I am dreaming of my wife. And I reflected about you, about how you have developed over these past few years. Strange how you have developed, he said. Basically you lead an unusual existence, a more or less totally independent one, allowing of course for the fact that there is no independent person on earth, let alone a totally independent one. If I did not have the Ambassador, he said, I would not survive the afternoons. Lately there have been so many Arabs going there it will soon be an Arab hotel when surely it has always been a Jewish hotel, Jews and Hungarians, especially Hungarian Jews, that is what has made the hotel so agreeable to me over the years, he said, I do not even mind the Persian carpet dealers who pursue their carpet trade at the Ambassador. But don't you also think that gradually it is becoming dangerous to sit at the Ambassador, could not a bomb explode there at any moment, seeing that the hotel is constantly populated by Israeli Jews and by Egyptian Arabs? Good Lord, I wouldn't mind being blown up, so long as it was instantaneous. Spending the morning at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the afternoon at the Ambassador, and having a good lunch at the Astoria or the Bristol, that is what I appreciate. Naturally I could not lead a life like this from The Times alone, he pretended, The Times more or less just sends me my pocket money to Austria. But the shares are not doing well, the stock market is a disaster. And life in Austria is getting more expensive every day. On the other hand I have calculated that, provided no so-called Third World War breaks out, I can without any problem easily live for another two decades on what I have. That is reassuring, even though it all shrinks from day to day. You are the typical private scholar, Atzbacher, he said to me, indeed you are the quintessence of the private scholar, you are altogether the quintessence of the private person, utterly out of step with our time, Reger said. That is what I was thinking again today as I climbed those frightful stairs up to the Bordone Room, that you are the genuine and typical private person, probably the only one I know and I know a lot of people who are all private persons but you are the typical, the genuine one. The way you can bear working for decades on a single book without publishing the least part of it, I could not do that. I must enjoy the publication of my work at least once a month, he said, this habit is an indispensable need and that is why I am happy with The Times for regularly meeting me in this habit and moreover paying me for it. After all, he said, I enjoy writing, those brief works of art which are never longer than two pages, which always means three and a half columns in The Times, he said. Have you never considered publishing at least a minor section of your work? he asked; some fragment, it all sounds so excellent, your hints about your work, on the other hand it is also a supreme joy not to publish, nothing at all, he said. But some time surely you will want to know what effect your work produces, he said, and you will publish at least part of your work. On the one hand it is magnificent to hold back, as it were, with the work of a lifetime and not to publish it, and on the other it is just as magnificent to publish. I am a congenital publishing person, while you are a congenital non-publishing person. Probably your work and yourself, and hence your work in relation to yourself and you in relation to your work, are condemned to non-publication, because surely you are suffering all the time by working on your subject without publishing your work, that is the truth, I think, you just will not admit it, not even to yourself, that you are suffering from this, as I call it, non-publication compulsion. Myself, I would suffer from not publishing my writing. But of course your writing cannot be compared to my writing. Admittedly I do not know any writer, or at least any writing person, who could, for any length of time, bear not to publish what he has written, who would not be curious to know the public's reaction to what he has written, I am always consumed with curiosity, Reger said, even though I always say I am not consumed with curiosity and it does not interest me. I do not care about the opinion of the public, I am in fact consumed by curiosity and I am lying when I say I am not consumed with curiosity when in fact I am consumed with curiosity, I admit it, I am always consumed with curiosity, ceaselessly, he said. I want to know what people are saying about what I have written, he said, I want to know all the time about everyone, even though I keep saying I am not interested in what people are saying, and that it does not interest me, that it leaves me cold, yet I am consumed with curiosity all the time and wait for it with the tensest expectation, he said. I am lying when I say I am not interested in public opinion, I am not interested in my readers, I am lying when I say I do not wish to know what people think about what I have written or that I do not read what is being written about it. I am lying when I say this, lying most shamelessly, he said, because I am ceaselessly consumed with curiosity to know what people are saying about what I have written, I want to know it always and at all times, and I am affected by it, by whatever people are saying about what I have written, that is the truth. Of course I only hear what The Times people say about it and what they say is not always only flattering, Reger said, but as far as you are concerned, as a philosophical writer, as it were, surely you should be just as much consumed with curiosity to know what people are saying about your philosophical writings, what they think about them, I just do not understand you not publishing your writings at least in excerpts, if only to discover for once what the public, or, as it were, the competent public, thinks about them, even though at the same time I have to admit that there is no such thing as a competent public, there is no such thing as competence, there never was and there never will be; but does it not depress you to write and write and to think and think and to write down what you think and write it down again, and the whole thing without an echo? he said. You are bound to miss a lot through your obstinate non-publishing, he said, maybe even something crucial. You have been working at your opus for decades now and you say you are writing this work solely for yourself, that is appalling, no one writes a work for himself, if someone says he is writing only for himself then that is a lie, but you know just as well as I do that there are no greater or worse liars that those who write, the world, as long as it exists, has not known any greater liars than those who write, none more vain and none more false, Reger said. If you knew what a frightful night I have had again, time and again I had to get up with frightful cramp from my toes upwards through my calves all the way to my thorax, from those diuretic tablets I have to take because of my heart. I find myself in a vicious circle, he said. Every night is a horror to me, whenever I think now I can go to sleep I get those cramps and have to get up and pace up and down my room. All night I have more or less paced up and down and when I have been able to go to sleep I was immediately wakened by those nightmares I mentioned to you. In these nightmares I dream of my wife, it is terrible. I have had these nightmares ever since her death, ceaselessly, I have them every night. Believe me, I always very nearly think that it might have been better if, with my wife's death, I had put an end to things myself. I cannot forgive myself for that cowardice. This continuous and by now pathological self-pity is unbearable to me, but I cannot shake myself out of it, he said. If at least there were a decent concert at the Musikverein, he said, but the winter programme is terrible, they are only doing stale and hackneyed things, forever those Mozart concertos and Brahms concertos and Beethoven concertos which by now get on my nerves, all those Mozart and Brahms and Beethoven cycles have become insufferable. And at the Opera dilettantism is rampant. If the Opera were at least interesting, but at the moment it is totally uninteresting, bad repertoire, bad singers and a miserable orchestra to boot. Think of the Philharmonic a mere two or three years ago, he said, and what are they today, a run-of-the-mill-orchestra. Just imagine, last week I heard the Winterreise sung by a Leipzig bass, I won't mention his name, it would not actually mean anything to you, after all you are not interested in theoretical music at all, you are lucky, he said, that bass was a disaster. Always inevitably The Crow, he said, it is insufferable. Such a recital is not worth dressing for, I regretted my clean shirt. I do not write in The Times about such rubbish, he said. Mahler, Mahler, Mahler, he said, that too is enervating. But the Mahler vogue has passed its peak, thank God, he said, Mahler really is the most overrated composer of the century. Mahler was an excellent conductor, but he is a mediocre composer, like all good conductors, like, for example, Hindemith, and like Klemperer. The Mahler vogue was something awful for me all these years, the whole world was in a positive Mahler delirium, it was unbearable. And did you know that my wife's grave, where I too will be buried, is right next to Mahler's grave? Oh well, at the cemetery it really is a matter of indifference whom one is lying next to, even to lie next to Mahler does not worry me. Das Lied von der Erde with Kathleen Ferrier, perhaps, Reger said, anything else by Mahler I reject, it is not worth anything, it does not stand up to closer examination. By comparison Webern is truly a genius, not to mention Schoenberg and Berg. No, Mahler was an aberration. Mahler is the typical art nouveau fashion composer, needless to say a lot worse than Bruckner, who has quite a few kitschy similarities with Mahler. At this time of year Vienna has nothing to offer to a person with intellectual interests, and unfortunately very little to one with musical interests, he said. But of course the foreigners who come to the city are easily satisfied, they go to the Opera regardless of what is on, even if it is the worst rubbish, and they attend the most ghastly concerts and clap their hands sore and, as you can see, they even stream into the Natural Science Museum and into the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Civilized humanity's hunger for culture is enormous, the perversity reflected by this state of affairs is worldwide. Vienna is a cultural concept, Reger said, even though there has virtually been no culture in Vienna for a long time, and one day there will really be no culture of any kind left in Vienna, but it will nevertheless be a cultural concept even then. Vienna will always be a cultural concept, it will the more stubbornly be a cultural concept the less culture there is in it. And soon there will really be no culture left in this city, he said. These progressively more stupid governments which we have here in Austria will gradually see to it that soon there is no culture of any kind left in Austria, only philistinism, Reger said. The atmosphere here in Austria is getting ever more anti-cultural and everything points to the fact that before very long Austria will be a totally culture-less country. But I shall not live to see that depressing end of the trend, you may, Reger said, you may live to see it, but I won't, I am too old now to live to see the final decline and actual culture-lessness in Austria. The light of culture will be extinguished in Austria, believe me, the dull-wittedness which has been at the helm in this country for so long will before long extinguish the light of Culture. Then it will be dark in Austria, Reger said. But you can say what you like in this respect, no one will listen to you, you will be regarded as a fool. What use is there in my writing in The Times what I think of Austria and what, sooner or later hut within the foreseeable future, is happening to Austria? No use, Reger said, not the least. A pity I won't live to see it, I mean the Austrians fumbling about in the dark because their light of culture has gone out. A pity I won't be able to participate, he said. You may wonder why I asked you to come here again today. There is a reason. But I won't tell you the reason until later. I do not know how to tell you the reason. I do not know. I think about it all the time and I do not know. I have been here for hours, thinking about it and I do not know. Irrsigler is my witness, Reger said, I have been sitting here on the settee for hours, wondering how to tell you why Ihave asked you to come to the Kunsthistorisches Museum again today. Later, later, Reger said, give me time. We commit a crime and are unable to report it quite simply without ado, Reger said. Give me time to calm down, he said, I have already told Irrsigler but I cannot tell you yet, he said, it really is disgraceful. By the way, what I said to you yesterday about the so-called Tempest Sonata is certainly interesting and I am also certain that what I said to you about that so-called Tempest Sonata is correct, but it is probably more interesting to me than it is to you. This is what always happens when we talk about a subject because the subject fascinates us, but it fascinates us more than the person on whom, when all is said and done, we force it with all the frantic ruthlessness we are capable of. I forced these views on the so-called Tempest Sonata upon you yesterday, that is a fact. In connection with my lecture on the Art of the Fugue, he said, I found it necessary also to examine the Tempest Sonata and yesterday I was feeling in a positively ideal state for it and I made you the victim of my musicological passion, as indeed I very frequently make you the victim of my musicological passion because I have no other person equally suitable for it. I very often think, you have come at just the right moment, what would I do without you, he said. Yesterday I troubled you with the Tempest Sonata, who knows what piece of music I may trouble you with the day after tomorrow, he said, there are so many musicological subjects in my head which I am most anxious to elucidate; but I need a listener, a victim as it were, for my compulsive musicological talking, he said, because my continuous talk about musicological topics is certainly a kind of musicological compulsive talk. Everybody has his own, his very own, compulsive talk, mine is musicological. I have had this musicological compulsive talk all my musicological life, because my life undoubtedly is nothing but musicological, just as yours is philosophical, that much is obvious. Of course I could say today that everything I said to you about the Tempest Sonata yesterday isnonsense today, since everything that is said is nonsense, but we do utter that nonsense convincingly, Reger said. Anything that is said sooner or later turns out to be nonsense, but if we utter it convincingly, with the most incredible vehemence we can muster, then it is no crime, he said. Anything we think we also wish to utter, Reger said, and basically we do not rest until we have uttered it, because if we keep silent about it we choke on it. Mankind would have choked long ago if it had kept silent about all the nonsense it thought throughout its history, any individual who keeps silent too long chokes, and mankind too cannot remain silent too long because it would otherwise choke, even though what the individual thinks or what mankind thinks and what every individual has ever thought and what mankind has ever thought is nothing but nonsense. Sometimes we are masters of speech and sometimes we are masters of silence and we perfect our mastery to the utmost, he said, our lives are interesting in exactly the measure to which we have succeeded in developing our mastery of speech and our mastery of silence. The Tempest Sonata is not really a great work, Reger said, on close consideration it is merely one of the many so-called secondary works, basically a piece of kitsch. The quality of the piece consists more in the fact that it lends itself to discussion than in itself. Beethoven was absolutely the monotonous cramped artist as a man of violence, not necessarily what I esteem most highly. To analyse the Tempest Sonata has always amused me, it is the most doom-laden piece by Beethoven, through the Tempest Sonata Beethoven can be clearly presented, his nature, his genius, his kitsch all emerge clearly, and his limitations are shown up. But I only spoke about the Tempest Sonata because yesterday I wanted to elucidate the Art of the Fugue to you more extensively and more intensively, and for that it was necessary to draw on the Tempest Sonata, Reger said. Incidentally, I hate such labels as Tempest Sonata or Eroica or Unfinished or Surprise, such labels are distasteful to me. Like saying The Magus of the North, that is utterly distasteful to me, Reger said. Just because you have really no theoretical interest whatever in music you are the ideal victim for my discussions on music, Reger said. You listen attentively and do not contradict, he said, you leave me to talk, that is what I need, never mind what it is worth, it smoothes my path through this dreadful musical existence, believe me, one that in fact very rarely provides happiness. What I think is enervating, destructive, he said, on the other hand it has been enervating me for so long and destroying me for so long that I need no longer fear it. I thought you would be punctual and you are punctual, he said, I do not expect you to be anything but punctual, and punctuality, as you know, is what I appreciate above all else, wherever there are human beings there must be punctuality and, making common cause with punctuality, reliability, he said. Half-past eleven and you stepped into the room, he said, I looked at my watch and it was half-past eleven and just then you stood before me. I have no other person more useful than you, he said. Probably survival has been possible for me only thanks to you. I should not have said this, Reger said, to say this is a piece of impertinence, he said, of unparalleled impertinence, but I have said it, you are the person who enables me to go on existing, I really have no one else. And did you know that my wife was very fond of you? She never told you but she told me, more than once. You have a clear head, Reger said, that is the most precious thing in the world. You are a loner and you have preserved your lonerdom, go on preserving it as long as you live, Reger said. I slipped into art to get away from life, that is how I might put it. I sneaked off into art, he said. I waited for the most favourable moment and I used that most favourable moment and sneaked off, out of the world into art, into music, he said. As others might sneak off into painting or sculpture or into acting. These people who, like myself, basically really hate the world, sneak off from one moment to the next from the world they hate, and into art which is totally apart from that hated world. I sneaked off into music, he said, all very surreptitiously. Because I had the opportunity, whereas most people do not have that opportunity. You sneaked off into philosophy and authorship, Reger said, but you are neither a philosopher nor an author, that is what is simultaneously so interesting and so unfortunate about you and in you, because you are not really a philosopher and not really an author either, because for a philosopher you lack everything that is characteristic of a philosopher, and for an author similarly everything, even though you are exactly what I call the philosophical writer, your philosophy is no real philosophy and your writing is no real writing, he repeated. And a writer who does not publish anything is, basically, not really a writer. You probably suffer from publication phobia, Reger said, a publishing trauma has caused you not to want to publish. At the Ambassador yesterday you were wearing such a well-cut sheepskin coat which surely came from Poland, he suddenly said, and I said, yes, you are right, I was wearing a Polish sheepskin coat, as you know I have been to Poland a number of times, Poland is one of my two favourite countries, I love Poland and I love Portugal, I said, but Poland probably more than Portugal, and on my last visit to Cracow, but it must be eight or nine years since I was in Cracow, I bought that sheepskin coat, I specially travelled to the Russian frontier in order to buy it, because only on the Polish-Russian frontier do these sheepskin coats have that cut. Yes, Reger said, it is indeed a pleasure to see a well-dressed person now and again, a well-dressed good-looking person, especially when the weather is so gloomy and one's head more or less in gloom and one's mood altogether at rock-bottom. Occasionally you can now see well-dressed and good-looking people even in this down-atheel Vienna, for many years you saw in Vienna nothing hut people in tasteless clothes, those depressing mass-produced goods. Now a touch of colour seems to have come into clothes again, he said, but there are so few well-built people , you walk for hours through this down-at-heel Vienna and see nothing but depressing faces and tasteless clothes, as if only crippled people were passing you all the time. The lack of taste and the monotony of the Viennese depressed me for decades. I used to think that only in Germany were they so monotonous and lacking in taste, but the Viennese are just as monotonous and lacking in taste. Only quite recently has the picture changed, people are generally looking better, they are again wearing individual clothes, he said, when you are wearing that sheepskin coat you cut an impressive figure, Reger said. One sees so few well-dressed and intelligent people, he said. For many years I only walked through this down-at-heel Vienna with my head sunk between my shoulders because I could not bear to see so much mass ugliness in the streets, those masses of tasteless people walking towards one were simply unbearable. Those hundreds of thousands of the industrially clothed who stifled me during my very first steps in the streets, he said. And not only in the so-called proletarian districts, also in the so-called Inner City, the city centre, those grey industrially clothed human masses stifled me, especially in the Inner City, he said. Young people nowadays, though still tasteless, go out into the streets in very cheerful colours, as if all these people had only just, forty years after its conclusion, overcome the war, the war trauma, Reger said, which had made people appear so grey and insignificant for nearly forty years. But of course you see a well-dressed person only, as the phrase goes, once in a blue moon in this down-at-heel Vienna. That of course makes you feel good, he said, and then: Only Gould ever played the Tempest Sonata really well and made it tolerable, no one else. Anyone else made it intolerable to me. It is, of course, very ponderous, the Tempest Sonata, Reger said, like a lot of Beethoven's work. But even Mozart did not escape kitsch, especially in the operas there is so much kitsch, the coy and the frisky often turn somersaults in the most unbearable way in those superficial operas. A turtle-dove here, a turtle-dove there, a raised forefinger here, a raised forefinger there, Reger said, that too isMozart. Mozart's music is also full of petticoat and frilly undies kitsch, he said. And the state composer Beethoven, as the Tempest Sonata above all demonstrates, is positively ridiculously serious. But where would it get us if we subjected everything to this deadly kind of examination, Reger said. Fussiness and kitsch, after all, are the two principal characteristics of so-called civilized man, highly stylized as he has become into a single human grotesque over hundreds and thousands of years, he said. Anything human is kitschy, he said, there can be no doubt about that. And so is high art and the highest art. Returning from London to Vienna, when in fact he had felt more at home in London than in Vienna, had been a real shock to him. But I could not have remained in London under any circumstances, if only because of my unstable health, which has always been close to flipping over into a dangerous disease, a fatal disease, Reger said. In London I had lived, in Vienna I have never truly lived, in London my head felt well, in Vienna my head never really felt well, in London I had my best ideas, he said. My time in London was my best time, he said. In London I always had all the opportunities I never had in Vienna, he said. After the death of my parents it was a matter of course for me to return to Vienna, to this grey wardepressed, spiritless city in which initially I existed for several years but only in a state of shock. But at the moment when I did no longer know which way to turn I met my wife, he said. My wife saved me; I had always been afraid of the female sex and in fact in a manner of speaking hated women body and soul and yet, he said, his wife had saved him. And do you know where I met my wife? he asked; have I ever told you? he asked, and I thought that he had often told me but did not say so and he said, I met my wife at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. And do you know where in the Kunsthistorisches Museum? he asked, and I thought of course I know where in the Kunsthistorisches Museum and he said, here in the Bordone Room, on this settee, he said this as if he really did not know that he had told me a hundred times that he had met his wife on the Bordone Room settee and I pretended, as he told me again, that I had never before heard it. It was a gloomy day, he said, I was in despair, I was studying Schopenhauer very thoroughly at the time, having lost all interest in Descartes, as indeed, then, inFrench thought generally, and I was sitting here on this settee, meditating over a particular sentence of Schopenhauer's, I cannot now tell you which sentence, he said. Suddenly some headstrong woman sat down on the settee next to me and remained there. I had made a signal to Irrsigler, but Irrsigler at first did not understand what my signal was intended to mean and subsequently proved unable to induce the woman sitting next to me to get up and leave, the woman was sitting there, staring at the White-Bearded Man, Reger said, and I believe she stared at the White-Bearded Man for an hour. Do you really like Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man that much? I asked the woman sitting next to me, Reger said, and at first I received no answer to my question. Only after a long while did the woman utter a No which truly fascinated me, a No such as I had never heard before this No, Reger said. So you do not like Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man at all? I asked the woman. No, I do not like him, the woman replied. A conversation, as I have said, then developed about art, in particular painting, about the old masters, Reger said, and suddenly I had no wish to cut the conversation short for a long time yet, throughout that conversation I was interested not in its content but in the way it was conducted. In the end, after prolonged reflection one way and another, I proposed to the woman that I take her to lunch at the Astoria and she accepted, and not very much later we were married. Then it turned out that she was also very wealthy, being the owner of several shops in the Inner City, also of blocks of flats on the Singerstrasse and on the Spiegelgasse, and indeed of one on the Kohlmarkt, he said. In addition to everything else. Suddenly I had a wife who was an intelligent, wealthy cosmopolitan, Reger said, who saved me with her intelligence and with her wealth, because my wife did save me, I was, as the saying goes, down and out when I met my wife, he said. As you see, I owe a lot to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, he said. Maybe it is actually gratitude that makes me go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day, he said with a laugh, but of course it is not that. Do you know that in my wife's so-called Himmelstrasse house in Grinzing there was a safe large enough for several people to walk into without difficulty? he said. In this safe she kept the most valuable Stradivarius, Guarneri and Maggini, he said. In addition to everything else. Like me, my wife had spent the war in London and it is most astonishing that I did not make her acquaintance in London, because my wife was then, that is at the same time, moving in the same London circles as I was. For years we had passed one another in London, Reger said. Incidentally, before we were married, my wife donated several paintings to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Reger said, including a very valuable and not at all unsuccessful Furini, which by the way you will find right next to the Cigoli and the Empoli, which incidentally I do not care for at all. After our marriage my wife donated no more pictures, he said, I made her see that there was no point in making presents, making presents is altogether distasteful, he said. Just imagine, before we were married my wife made a present of a Biedermeier town panorama of Vienna, I think by Gauermann, to one of her nieces. A year later, when, more by accident than out of interest, merely, as it were, to kill time between two meals, she walked round the Museum der Stadt Wien, the Museum of the City of Vienna, she discovered in that Museum of the City of Vienna, which, in my opinion, is absolutely worthless, the Gauermann she had given to her niece. You can imagine the shock this was to her. She went straight to the management of the museum and learned that her niece had sold the picture, within a few weeks if not a few days of receiving it as a present from her aunt, my future wife, to the Museum of the City of Vienna for two hundred thousand schillings. Giving presents is one of the worst kinds of foolishness, Reger said. I very soon made my wife see that this is so and she never gave any presents of any kind afterwards. We tear an object which is dear to us, an object to which, as the phrase goes, our heart is attached, we tear a work of art out of our life, and the recipient goes along and sells it for a shameless, for a horrendous sum, Reger said. Giving presents is a terrible habit, motivated of course by a guilty conscience and very often also by a widespread fear of loneliness, Reger said, a wicked malpractice, and the present, the gift received, is not appreciated because it should have been more, and more still, and it ultimately only creates hatred, he said. I have never in my life given presents, he said, but I have also always declined to accept presents, indeed I have all my life been afraid of being given presents. And do you know that Irrsigler too had a part in my marriage? Irrsigler, as it subsequently turned out, had suggested to my wife, who was suddenly leaning, utterly exhausted, against the wall in the Sebastiano Room, that she should sit down for a while in the Bordone Room on the Bordone Room settee, Irrsigler had led her from the Sebastiano Room into the Bordone Room, and on his advice she had sat down on the Bordone Room settee, Reger said. If Irrsigler had not led her into the Bordone Room I probably would have never met her, Reger said. You know that I do not believe in chance, he said. Seen in this light, Irrsigler was our match-maker, Reger said. For a long time my wife and I never realized that basically Irrsigler had been our matchmaker, until one day, during a reconstruction of our relationship, we discovered it. Irrsigler once said that he had observed my future wife for quite a while that time in the Sebastiano Room, he had not quite realized the reason for her, to him at first, odd behaviour, it had even occurred to him that she might be about to photograph one of the paintings hanging in the Sebastiano Room, which is strictly forbidden, that in her exceptionally large handbag, a handbag forbidden in the museum, she might have a camera, that is what he thought at first, only later did he realize that she was simply utterly exhausted. People always make the mistake in museums of embarking on too much, of wishing to see everything, so they walk and walk and look and look and then suddenly, because they have devoured a surfeit of art, they collapse. That is what happened to my future wife when Irrsigler took her by the arm and led her to the Bordone Room, as we subsequently established, in the most courteous manner, Reger said. The layman in matters of art goes to a museum and makes it nauseous for himself through excess, Reger said. But of course no advice is possible where visiting a museum is concerned. The expert goes to a museum in order to view at most one picture, Reger said, one statue, one object, Reger said, he goes to the museum to look at, to study, one Veronese, one Velazquez. But these art experts are all utterly distasteful to me, Reger said, they make a bee-line for a single work of art and examine it in their shameless unscrupulous way and walk out of the museum again, I hate those people, Reger said. On the other hand my stomach also turns when I see the layman in the museum, the way he devours everything uncritically, maybe the whole of occidental painting in one morning, as we can witness here day after day. My wife had what is known as a crise de conscience the day I made her acquaintance, chasing through the Inner City for several hours she did not know whether to buy a coat from the firm of Braun or a suit from the firm of Knize. Thus torn between the firm of Braun and the firm of Knize she eventually decided to buy neither a coat from the firm of Braun nor a suit from the firm of Knize but instead to go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where until that day she had been only once, in her early childhood, holding on to her father, who was very keen on art. Irrsigler of course is aware of his role of match-maker, Reger said. If Irrsigler had brought some other woman into the Bordone Room, I often reflect, Reger said, an entirely different woman, Reger repeated, an Englishwoman or a Frenchwoman, it does not bear thinking about, he said. We sit on this settee, utterly desolate, Reger said, more or less depression personified, hopelessness, Reger suggested, and a woman is placed next to us and we marry her and are saved. Millions of married couples have met on a seat, Reger said, indeed this is one of the most fatuous situations imaginable, and yet it is to this fatuous ludicrous situation that I owe my existence, because without meeting my wife I could not have continued to exist, as I now realize more clearly than ever before. For years I had sat on this settee in more or less the deepest despair and suddenly I was saved. I therefore owe to Irrsigler virtually everything that I am, for without Irrsigler I would have long ceased to be here, Reger said at the moment when Irrsigler looked into the Bordone Room from the Sebastiano Room. Towards twelve o'clock the Kunsthistorisches Museum is usually fairly empty, and on this day too there were not many people to be seen about any more and in the so-called Italian Department there was no one left except us. Irrsigler took one step from the Sebastiano Room into the Bordone Room as if to give Reger a chance to voice a request, but Reger had no request and so Irrsigler immediately withdrew again into the Sebastiano Room, he actually backed out of the Bordone Room into the Sebastiano Room. Irrsigler was closer to him than any close relative had ever been, Reger remarked, there is more linking me to that man than ever linked me to one of my relatives, he said. We have always managed to keep our relationship in an ideal equilibrium, Reger said, in this ideal equilibrium for decades. Irrsigler always feels protected by me, even though he has no clear idea in what respect he is being protected by me, just as I in turn always feel protected by Irrsigler, naturally also without any idea of the actual connection, Reger said. I am linked to Irrsigler in the most ideal way, Reger said, it is a positively ideal remote relationship, he remarked. Of course Irrsigler knows nothing about me, Reger said next, and it would be utter nonsense to tell him more about myself, it is just because he knows nothing about me that our relationship is so ideal, just because I myself know as good as nothing about him, Reger said, because all I know about Irrsigler is outward banalities, just as in turn he only knows me from outside in the most banal manner. We should not penetrate into a person with whom we have an ideal relationship more than we have already penetrated, otherwise we destroy that ideal relationship, Reger said. Here Irrsigler calls the tune, Reger said, and I am entirely in his hands, if Irrsigler today said to me, Herr Reger, from today you will no longer sit on this settee there is nothing I can do about it, Reger said, because after all it is madness to come to the Kunsthistorisches Museum for thirty years and to occupy the Bordone Room settee. I do not believe that Irrsigler has ever informed his superiors of the fact that I have been coming to the Kunsthistorisches Museum for thirty years and have been sitting on the Bordone Room settee every other day, I am sure he has not, from what I know of him he realizes that he must not do so, that the administration must not know about it. People are always very ready to send a person like me to the lunatic asylum, that is to Steinhof, when they learn that a person has been going to the Kunsthistorisches Museum for thirty years in order to sit on the Bordone Room settee every other day. That would be a real gift to the psychiatrists, Reger said. To get into a lunatic asylum a person has no need to sit on the Bordone Room settee every other day for thirty years, in front of Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man, it would be quite enough for a person to have this habit for a mere two or three weeks, yet I have had this habit for over thirty years, Reger said. And I never gave up the habit when I got married, on the contrary, with my wife I even intensified this habit of going to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day and sitting on the Bordone Room settee. I would be a welcome gift, a real gold mine, as the saying goes, for the psychiatrists, but the psychiatrists will not be given an opportunity to have me as a welcome gift and a gold mine, Reger said. After all, there are thousands of people in psychiatric hospitals who, so to speak, have committed some crazy act which is not nearly as crazy as mine, Reger said. There are people detained in psychiatric hospitals who just once failed to raise their hand when they should have raised it, Reger said, who just once said White instead of Black, Reger said, just try to imagine that. But I am not really crazy, he said, I am just a person of extraordinary habits, a person with one extraordinary habit, to wit the extraordinary habit of going to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day for the past thirty years and of sitting on the Bordone Room settee. Whereas to my wife it was at first a frightful habit, over the last years it eventually became an agreeable habit to her, whenever I asked her about it, she always said it was an agreeable habit for her to go with me to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, to our White-Bearded Man by Tintoretto and to sit on the Bordone Room settee, Reger said. I do in fact believe that the Kunsthistorisches Museum is the only refuge left to me, Reger said, I have to go to the old masters to be able to continue to exist, precisely to these so-called old masters, who have long, that is for decades, been abhorrent to me, because basically nothing is more abhorrent to me than these so-called old masters here at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and old masters generally, all old masters, no matter what their names are, no matter what they have painted, Reger said, and yet it is they who keep me alive. I walk through the city and I think that I cannot bear living in this city any longer and that I not only cannot bear the city any longer but that I cannot bear the whole world and in consequence the whole of mankind any longer, because the world and all mankind have meanwhile become so ghastly that soon they will no longer be bearable, at least not for a person such as me. For a man of intellect just as for a man of sensitivity like me the world and mankind will soon no longer be bearable, believe me, Atzbacher. I no longer find in this world and among these people anything that I appreciate, he said, everything in this world is dull-witted and everything in this mankind is just as dull-witted. This world and our mankind have now reached a degree of dull-wittedness which a person like myself can no longer afford, he said, such a person can no longer live in such a world, such a person can no longer coexist with such a mankind, Reger said. Everything in this world and in our mankind has been dulled down to the lowest level, Reger said, everything in this world has reached such a degree of public danger and base brutality that I am finding it well-nigh impossible to go on living even for a single day at a time in this world and in our mankind. Such a degree of low dullwittedness had not been thought possible even by the most clear-sighted thinkers in history, Reger said, not by Schopenhauer, not by Nietzsche, not to mention Montaigne, Reger said, and as for our outstanding world poets, our poets of mankind, what they have predicted for the world and for mankind in terms of horror and decline is nothing compared to the actual state at present. Even Dostoyevsky, one of our greatest clairvoyants, described the future merely as a ludicrous idyll, just as Diderot only described a ludicrous idyll of the future. Dostoyevsky's terrible hell is so harmless compared with the one in which we find ourselves today that we only feel a cold shiver running down our spines when we think of it, and the same applies to the hell predicted and pre-described by Diderot. The one, from his Russian and West-Eastern point of view, no more foresaw or predicted or pre-described this absolute hell than his Western counter-thinker and counterwriter Diderot, Reger said. The world and mankind have arrived at a state of hell, such as the world and mankind have never before arrived at throughout history, that is the truth, Reger said. What these great thinkers and these great writers have pre-described is a positive idyll, Reger said, all of them, while believing that they were describing hell, merely described an idyll, a positively idyllic idyll compared to the hell in which we now exist, Reger said. Everything today is full of baseness and full of malice, lies and betrayal, Reger said, mankind has never been as shameless and perfidious as today. We may look at whatever we please, we may go wherever we please, we only look at malice and infamy and at betrayal and lies and hypocrisy and forever only at nothing but absolute baseness, no matter where we look, no matter where we go we are confronted with malice and with lies and with hypocrisy. What else do we see but lies and malice, hypocrisy and betrayal, the meanest baseness, whenever we walk out into the street, when we dare to walk out into the street, Reger said. We go out into the street and we walk into baseness, he said, into baseness and shamelessness, into hypocrisy and malice. We say that there is no country more mendacious and none more hypocritical and none more malicious than this country, yet when we leave this country, or even look beyond it, we see that outside our country too there reigns nothing but malice and hypocrisy and lies and baseness. We have the most distasteful government imaginable, the most hypocritical, the most malicious, the meanest and, at the same time, the stupidest, that is what we say and of course what we believe is true, and we say so at every other moment, Reger said, but when we look out from this mean, hypocritical and malicious and mendacious and stupid country we find that other countries are just as mendacious and hypocritical and altogether just as mean, said Reger. But those other countries are not really our concern, Reger said, we are concerned with our country alone and that is why we are so stunned each day that we have long come to exist actually stunned in a country whose government is mean and dull-witted and hypocritical and mendacious and utterly stupid to boot. Every day, if we think, we are aware of nothing so much as that we are governed by a hypocritical and mendacious and mean government, which moreover is the stupidest government imaginable, Reger said, and we think that we can do nothing about it, that really is the most terrible thing, that we can do nothing about it, that we simply have to watch impotently as this government is getting ever more mendacious and more hypocritical and meaner and baser every day, that we have to watch in a more or less permanent state of dismay as this government is getting progressively worse and progressively more unbearable. But not only the government is mendacious and hypocritical and mean and base, parliament is so too, Reger said, and sometimes it seems to me that parliament is yet a lot more hypocritical and mendacious than the government, and think how mendacious and how mean the judiciary is in this country and the press in this country and eventually culture in this country and eventually everything in this country; nothing but mendaciousness and hypocrisy and meanness and baseness have reigned in this country for decades, Reger said. This country has in fact now reached an absolute low, Reger said, and before long it will have given up its meaning and purpose and its ghost. And everywhere that nauseating twaddle of democracy! You walk out into the street, he remarked, and you constantly have to shut your eyes and ears and even hold your nose pinched in order to be able to survive in this country which has eventually become a positively dangerous state, Reger said. Any day you can scarcely believe your eyes and you can scarcely believe your ears, he said, any day you experience the decline of this ruined country and of this corrupt state and of this stultified people with an ever greater shock. And the people in this country and in this state are doing nothing about it, Reger said, that is what torments someone like me every day. Of course the people see or feel how this state is debasing itself every day and becoming meaner every day, but they are not doing anything about it. The politicians are the murderers, indeed the mass murderers of every country and of every state, Reger said, the politicians have been murdering the countries and the states for centuries and there is no one to stop them. And we Austrians have the most cunning and at the same time most brainless politicians as murderers of our country and state, Reger said. Politicians as state murderers are at the head of our state, politicians as state murderers sit in our parliament, he said, that is the truth. Every chancellor and every minister is a state murderer and hence also a national murderer, Reger said, and when one of them departs another arrives, Reger said, when one murderer departs as chancellor, another chancellor arrives as a murderer, when one minister departs as a state murderer another arrives at once. The people are always a people murdered by politicians, Reger said, but the people do not see it, admittedly they feel that this is how things are but they do not see any of it, that is the tragedy, Reger said. No sooner do we rejoice that one state murderer has gone as chancellor than another arrives, Reger said, it is horrible. The politicians are state murderers and national murderers, and they murder while they are in power, unabashed, and the state judiciary supports their vile and infamous murdering, their vile and infamous abuse. But of course every people and every society deserves the state they have, and they therefore deserve also its murderers as politicians, Reger said. Those mean and dull-witted state abusers and mean and perfidious abusers of democracy, he exclaimed. The politicians dominate the Austrian scene absolutely, Reger then said, the state murderers dominate the Austrian scene absolutely. Political conditions in this country are at present so depressing that one might expect them to give one nothing but sleepless nights, but then all other Austrian conditions are nowadays just as depressing. If by any chance you come into contact with the judiciary you will find that it is nothing but a corrupt and vile and mean judiciary, not to mention the fact that so-called miscarriages of justice have been piling up on an alarming scale over the past few years, hardly a week passes without some long-closed proceedings being reopened because of serious procedural errors or of so-called original decisions being quashed, a very high percentage of the judgements typical of this perfidious judiciary, passed by the Austrian judiciary in recent years were so-called political mistrials, Reger said. We are faced in Austria today not only with an utterly rotten and demoniacal state but also with an utterly rotten and demoniacal judiciary, Reger said. The Austrian judiciary has had no credibility for many years now, it operates in a despicable political manner, not independently, as it should. To speak of an independent judiciary in Austria is to mock truth to its face, Reger said. Justice in Austria today is political justice, not independent justice. Today's Austrian judiciary has in fact become political and a public danger, Reger said, I know what I am talking about, he said. Justice today makes common cause with politics, Reger said, you only need to take a closer look some day at this Catholic National Socialist judiciary and study it with an open mind, Reger said. Austria today is, not only in Europe but worldwide, the country with the most so-called miscarriages of justice, that is what is so disastrous. You need only come into contact with the judiciary, and myself, as you know, have very often come into contact with the judiciary, and you will find that the Austrian judiciary is a dangerous Catholic National Socialist human grinding mill, kept in operation not by justice, as one would expect, but by injustice, and in which the most chaotic conditions prevail; there is no judiciary in Europe that is more chaotic than the Austrian, none that is more corrupt, none that is more of a public danger or more perfidious, Reger said, it is not the accidents of stupidity but the deliberate intentions of political baseness that govern the Catholic National Socialist Austrian judiciary today, Reger said. If you are taken to court in Austria you are at the mercy of a through and through chaotic Catholic National Socialist judiciary which turns the truth and facts upside down, Reger said. Austrian justice is not just arbitrariness but a perfidious machine for grinding human beings, Reger said, a machine in which justice is crushed between the absurd millstones of injustice. And as for culture in this country, all it does is turn our stomachs. As far as so-called old art is concerned, it is stale and washed out and sold out and has long forfeited any claim to our attention, you know that as well as I do, and as far as so-called contemporary art is concerned, it is not worth a rap, as the saying goes. Austrian contemporary art is so cheap it does not even deserve our blushes, Reger said. For decades now Austrian artists have produced nothing but kitschy rubbish, which indeed, if I had my way, would end up on the rubbish heap. The painters paint rubbish, the composers compose rubbish, the writers write rubbish, he said. The greatest rubbish is produced by the Austrian sculptors, Reger said. The Austrian sculptors produce the greatest rubbish and earn recognition for it, Reger said, that is typical of this stupid age. Today's Austrian composers are altogether only petit-bourgeois tone idiots whose concert-hall rubbish stinks to high heaven. And the Austrian writers have altogether nothing to say and cannot even write down that nothing they have to say. None of these present-day Austrian writers can write, they fill their pockets with a revoltingly sentimental epigone literature, Reger said, wherever they write they only write rubbish, they write Styrian and Salzburgian and Carinthian and Burgenlandish and Lower Austrian and Upper Austrian and Tyrolian and Vorarlbergian rubbish and they shovel that rubbish shamelessly and fame-hungrily between the covers of their books, Reger said. They sit in Viennese municipal flats or on Carinthian converted deserted smallholdings or in Styrian backyards, writing rubbish, that epigone, stinking, mindless and brainless Austrian writers' rubbish, Reger said, in which the pathetic stupidity of these people stinks to high heaven, Reger said. Their books are nothing but the rubbish of two or even three generations who never learned how to write because they never learned how to think, all these writers write totally brainless and shamphilosophical and sham-homeland epigone rubbish, Reger said. All these books by these more or less nauseatingly state-opportunist writers are nothing but cribbed books, Reger said, every line in them is stolen, every word is pilfered. For decades these people have written nothing; but mindless literature written only out of a craving for admiration and likewise only published out of a craving for admiration, Reger said. They type their abysmal stupidity into their machines and for that abysmal insipid stupidity they collect all kinds of prizes, Reger said. Why, even Stifter was a great figure, Reger said, if I compare Stifter to all those Austrian dimwits who write today. Sham philosophy and sham homeland, at present greatly in vogue, is what the rubbish of those people is all about, Reger said, people incapable of a single idea of their own. The proper place for these people's books is not the bookshops but straight away the rubbish heap, Reger said. Just as the proper place for all present-day Austrian art is the rubbish heap. For what else is given at the Opera but rubbish, what else at the Musikverein but rubbish, and what else are the products of those brutal common proletarian men of violence with their chisels, who with positively overbearing impertinence call themselves sculptors, but marble and granite rubbish! It is frightful, for half a century nothing but this depressing mediocrity, Reger said. If Austria at least were a madhouse, but it is an infirmary, he said. The old have nothing to say, Reger said, but the young have even less to say, that is today's state of affairs. And of course all these art-producing people are too well off, he said. All these people are stuffed full of scholarships and of prizes and every other moment there is an honorary doctorate here and an honorary doctorate there and a pin of honour here and a pin of honour there and every other moment they sit next to one minister and shortly afterwards next to another and today they are with the Federal Chancellor and tomorrow with the Speaker of Parliament and today they sit in the socialist trade union hall and tomorrow in the Catholic working man's educational centre and let themselves be fêted and kept. These present artists are not only so mendacious in their so-called works, they are just as mendacious in their lives, Reger said. Mendacious work continually alternates for them with mendacious living, what they write is lies and what they live is lies, Reger said. And then these writers go on so-called reading tours, travelling in one way and another through the whole of Germany and through the whole of Austria and through the whole of Switzerland and they do not miss out even the most dull-witted backwoods dump for reading their rubbish and getting themselves fêted and they allow their pockets to be stuffed full of marks and of schillings and of francs, Reger said. There is nothing more distasteful than a so-called poet's reading, Reger said, there is hardly anything I detest more, but none of these people see anything wrong in reading their rubbish everywhere. Not a single person is basically interested in what these people have scavenged on their literary marauding expeditions, but they read it all the same, they get up on the stage and read it and they bow to every half-witted town councillor and to every dull-witted village mayor and to every jackanapes of a professor of German, Reger said. They read their rubbish from Flensburg down to Bolzano and let themselves be kept in the most brazen manner. There is nothing more intolerable for me than a so-called poet's reading, Reger said, it is repulsive to sit down and read one's own rubbish, because that is all those people do read — just rubbish. While they are still fairly young you can stretch a point, but once they are older, once they are in their fifties and beyond, it is just nauseating. But it is mainly these older writers, Reger said, who read everywhere and who climb up on every platform and who sit down at every table in order to present their poetic rubbish or their dull-witted senile prose, Reger said. Even if their dentures can no longer retain any of their mendacious words in their oral cavity, they still mount the platform of never mind what municipal hall and read their charlatanist nonsense, Reger said. A singer singing songs is insufferable enough, but a writer reciting his own products is a lot more insufferable still, Reger said. A writer stepping on to a public platform in order to read his opportunist rubbish, even if it is in Saint Paul's Church in Frankfurt, is a pitiful fairground ham, Reger said. Germany and Austria are swarming with such opportunist fairground hams, Reger said. Oh yes, he said, the logical conclusion would invariably be total despair about everything. But I am resisting this total despair about everything, Reger said. I am now eighty-two and I am resisting this total despair about everything tooth and nail, Reger said. In this world and inthis age, he said, where anything is possible nothing will soon be possible. Irrsigler appeared and Reger nodded to him as if to say, you are better off than I am, and Irrsigler turned and disappeared again. Reger was supporting himself on his stick locked between his knees when he said: just reflect, Atzbacher, what it means to have the ambition to compose the longestplaying symphony in the history of music. No one else would have conceived such a nonsensical idea except Mahler. Some people say Mahler was the last great Austrian composer, that is ridiculous. A man who, in full control of his mind, has fifty strings fiddling away only to outdo Wagner is ridiculous. Austrian music reached its absolute low with Mahler, Reger said. Purest kitsch, generating mass hysteria, just as Klimt, he said. Schiele is the more important painter. Nowadays even a poor Klimt kitsch painting costs several million pounds, Reger said, that is distasteful. Schiele is not kitsch, but of course Schiele is not a really great painter either. In this century there have been several Austrian painters of Schiele's quality, but, with the exception of Kokoschka, not a single really important one, a really great one, as it were. On the other hand, we have to admit that we cannot know what really great painting is. After all, here at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, we have instances of so-called great painting by the hundred, Reger said, but as time goes on they no longer seem to us to be great, no longer so important, because we have studied them too thoroughly. Anything we study thoroughly loses value for us, Reger said. We should therefore avoid studying anything thoroughly. But we cannot help studying everything thoroughly, that is our misfortune, by doing so we dissolve everything and ruin everything for us, indeed we have very nearly ruined everything for us already. A line of Goethe, Reger said; it is studied for so long by us that in the end it no longer seems quite as magnificent as at first, it gradually loses its value for us and what initially may have seemed to us the most magnificent line altogether ends up as an elemental disappointment. Anything we study thoroughly ultimately disappoints us. A mechanism of dissection and disintegration, Reger said, that is a habit I acquired in my early years, without realizing that this was my misfortune. Even Shakespeare crumbles totally if we concern ourselves with him and study him for any length of time, his sentences get on your nerves, his characters disintegrate before the drama and ruin everything for us, he said. In the end we no longer take any pleasure in art, any more than in life, no matter how natural this may be, as progressively we have lost our naiveté and with it our stupidity. Yet in exchange we have only gained unhappiness. By now it has become absolutely impossible for me to read Goethe, Reger said, to listen to Mozart, to look at Leonardo or Giotto, I no longer have any prerequisites for that. Next week I shall again take Irrsigler to lunch at the Astoria, Reger said, while my wife was alive I used to go to the Astoria for lunch with her and with Irrsigler at least three times a year, I owe it to Irrsigler to continue those Astoria lunches, he said. We should not only use people like Irrsigler, we should also show them a kindness now and again. And the best way is for me to take Irrsigler to the Astoria for lunch. Of course I could take his family to the Prater from time to time, but I do not feel up to that, the Irrsigler children hang on to me like burrs and well-nigh tear the clothes off me with their effusiveness, he said. And the Prater is so distasteful to me, you know, the sight of all those drunken men and women cracking their cheap jokes in front of the shooting galleries and giving free rein to their horrid primitiveness, I feel soiled all over whenever I have gone to the Prater. But then the Prater today is no longer the Prater as it was in my childhood, the turbulent amusement park; the Prater today is a distasteful assembly of vulgar people, an assembly of criminal types. The whole Prater reeks of beer and crime and we encounter in it nothing but the brutality and the brazen feeble-mindedness of vulgar snotty Viennesedom. Not a day passes without a murder in the Prater being in the papers, every day at least one, usually several, rapes in the Prater. In my childhood the Prater always was a joyous day out and in spring there really was a perfume of lilac and chestnuts there. Today proletarian perversity stinks to high heaven. The Prater, this most charming of all inventions for amusement, is now nothing but a common fairground of vulgarity. Ah, if the Prater were still as it was in my childhood, Reger said, I would go there with the Irrsigler family, but as it is I do not go there, I cannot afford to; if I went to the Prater with the Irrsigler family I should be wrecked for weeks to come. My mother was still driven to the Prater with her parents in the carriage and would run along the Prater Avenue in a floating silk dress. Such pictures are history, Reger said, all that is long past. Today you are lucky if you are not shot in the back in the Prater, Reger said, or stabbed in the heart, or at the least have your wallet lifted from your jacket. The present age is an utterly brutalized age. Taking the Irrsigler children to the Prater is something I have done only once, never again. They hung on me like burrs and tore the clothes off me and demanded every other moment that I took them on the ghost train or on the automatic merry-go-round. It made me feel quite sick, Reger said. Needless to say, I have nothing against the Irrsigler children, Reger said, but they are too much for me. Irrsigler on his own is all right, but the whole Irrsigler family, that is impossible. With Irrsigler at the Astoria, at my corner table looking out at the deserted Maysedergasse, that is all right, but with the Irrsigler family to the Prater, that is impossible. Each time I invent a new excuse in order not to have to go to the Prater with the Irrsigler family. A visit to the Prater with the Irrsigler family seems to me like a visit to hell. I also cannot bear the voice of Frau Irrsigler, Reger said, I cannot bear that voice. The Irrsigler children also have basically frightful voices, it does not bear thinking about those voices growing up, he said. Such a quiet pleasant person as Irrsigler and such a loud-voiced woman as the Irrsigler woman and such loud-voiced children as the Irrsigler children. On one occasion Irrsigler suggested that I should make a trip into the countryside with him and his family. That, too, I declined and I have been writhing for years to escape just such a rural excursion with the Irrsigler family. Imagine me hiking through the countryside with the Irrsigler family, quite possibly the Irrsigler children would even start singing. That I could not stand: the Irrsigler children expecting me to march through the woods of the surroundings of Vienna with them, the Irrsigler woman in front and Irrsigler at the rear and alongside me, holding hands if they had their way, the Irrsigler children. And then the Irrsigler family might possibly expect me to join in their singsong. Simple people have this urge towards nature, an urge towards the open spaces, I have never had that urge, Reger said. There is nothing more ghastly that could happen to me than hiking with the Irrsigler family through the surroundings of Vienna and then perhaps even to stop at an inn garden. I was nauseated at the thought of the Irrsigler family eating fried schnitzels in my presence and filling their bellies with wine and beer and apple juice at my expense. Lunching with Irrsigler at the Astoria is something I enjoy too, I do not need any pretence for that, lunching with Irrsigler at the Astoria, three times a year, a glass of wine with it, Reger said, that is all right, anything else is not. The Prater is absolutely impossible and the surroundings of Vienna are absolutely impossible. If Irrsigler had even a spark of musicality in him, Reger said, I would take him along to a concert now and again or I would simply let him have my press tickets, but Irrsigler has not the slightest feeling for music, he suffers agonies when he has to listen to music. Anybody else, even if it is agony to him, will take his seat in the Musikverein in the third or fourth row to listen to Beethoven's Fifth, because there, more than anywhere else, everything favours human vanity; not so Irrsigler, he has always declined to go to the Musikverein and always with the simple statement: I don't like music, Herr Reger, Reger said. For three years the Irrsigler family has been waiting for me to go to the Prater with them, Reger said, and one time I have a headache and another time I have a sore throat and yet another time I am snowed under with work and another still I have to catch up on my correspondence and each time I find it distasteful to have to say these things. Irrsigler knows perfectly well why I do not go to the Prater with his family, I have not told him why but then Irrsigler is no fool, Reger said. At the Astoria he always orders the same silverside of beef because I always order the same silverside of beef. He waits until I have ordered my silverside of beef and then orders silverside of beef for himself, Reger said. But whereas I only drink mineral water, Irrsigler takes a glass of wine with his silverside of beef. The silverside at the Astoria is not always first-class, but I quite simply prefer it to anything else at the Astoria. Irrsigler eats slowly, that is the unusual thing about him. I myself eat my silverside of beef so slowly that I think I must be eating even more slowly than Irrsigler, but Irrsigler, even though I eat my silverside of beef as slowly as possible, eats his a lot more slowly still. Irrsigler, I said to him at the Astoria last time, I owe you so much, probably everything, naturally he did not understand. After the death of my wife I 'was suddenly all alone, true I had a lot of people but not really any individual and I certainly did not wish to bother you in my dreadful state. For six months I avoided all contact with people, if only because I wished to escape from their frightful enquiries, people always ask those dreadful questions about someone's death insuch an unashamed manner and at every opportunity; that is what I wished to escape, and so I only had Irrsigler. And for nearly six months after my wife's death I did not come to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, it is only for the past six months that I have been coming here again, and initially of course not every other day as had been my habit but once a week at the most. But now, for the past six months I have again come to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day. Irrsigler, because he never asked anything, was the only possible person, Reger said. I always reflect, should I take Irrsigler to the Astoria or to the Imperial, anyway to one of the very top restaurants, but at the Imperial he does not feel as comfortable as at the Astoria, a person like Irrsigler cannot bear the absolute magnificence of the Imperial, Reger said. And the Astoria is also a lot more discreet. In this way I hope, from time to time, to discharge my gratitude to Irrsigler, who is so important to me, Reger said. Irrsigler has the agreeable quality of being a good listener, moreover of being a good listener in an entirely unpresuming way. Whereas Irrsigler is the most pleasant person to me, the Irrsigler family as a whole are the most unpleasant. How does a person like Irrsigler, Reger asked, come to have a wife as the Irrsigler woman with her shrill voice and her hen-like walk? We often ask ourselves how people who are such complete opposites come together, Reger said. A woman with a hysterical animal voice and with a hen-like walk and a man like Irrsigler who is so balanced and so agreeable. And the Irrsigler children, of course, in virtually everything are taking after their mother and in virtually nothing after their father. Each more mal-réussi than the other, Reger said. The Irrsigler children are all mal-réussis, Reger said, but of course the parents believe they have réussis children, all parents believe that. It is a positively frightening thought what may become of these Irrsigler children one day, Reger said, when I see these Irrsigler children then I see, even today, by no means at least average but far below-average human beings with, at best, a dichotomous character. I am always reminded, Reger said, of the concept of the stupid brood, that is what is so unpleasant about the Irrsigler family. Such an excellent man and such a fine character and such an ill-bred family. All this is quite commonplace, 'Reger said. The Austrians, being congenital opportunists, are cringers, he now said, and they live by coverups and forgetting. There is no political atrocity, no matter how great, that is not forgotten after a week, no crime, no matter how great. The Austrians are positively congenital coverers-up of crimes, Reger said, the Austrians will cover up any crime, even the vilest, because they are, as I have said, congenital opportunist cringers. For decades our ministers have committed ghastly crimes, yet these opportunist cringers cover up for them. For decades these ministers have committed murderous frauds, yet these cringers cover up for them. For decades these unscrupulous Austrian ministers have lied to the Austrians and cheated them and yet these cringers cover up for them. It is a real miracle if, now and again, one of those criminal and fraudulent ministers is kicked out, Reger said, because he is accused of serious crimes committed for decades, yet a week later the whole affair is forgotten because the cringers have forgotten the affair. A twenty-schilling thief is prosecuted by our justice and locked up, but a defrauder of millions and billions, when of ministerial rank, is at best chased out with a huge pension and instantly forgotten, Reger said. It really is a miracle, Reger continued, that a minister has just been booted out again, but, mind you, no sooner was he sacked and kicked out and no sooner had the papers called him a billion-schilling swindler and a major criminal who should be put on trial than he will be forgotten in perpetuity by those selfsame papers and hence also by the entire public. Although the minister should be charged and put on trial and locked up, in accordance with his crime, if I may say so for life, he enjoys his fat pension in his villa on the Kahlenberg and no one dreams any longer of interfering with him. He lives, as the saying goes, on the fat of the land as a retired minister and when one day he dies he is even given a state funeral and a grave of honour at the Central Cemetery, Reger said, alongside his predeceased ministerial colleagues who were the same kind of criminals as he. Austrians are congenital coverers-up and forgetters where the atrocities and crimes of ministers and other governing figures are concerned, Reger said. Austrians spend all their lives cringing and covering up the worst atrocities and crimes in order to survive themselves, that is the truth, Reger said. The papers merely record and accuse and of course magnify, but they immediately annul everything opportunistically and forget opportunistically. The papers are the discoverers and the agitators and at the same time the coverers-up and the whitewashers and oppressors where political atrocities and crimes are concerned, Reger said. Just recall how the papers execrated the now retired minister and levelled the most serious charges against him and, as the saying goes, finished him and forced the Federal Chancellor to dismiss him, and no sooner had the Federal Chancellor dismissed this minister than the papers forget all about the minister and with him the atrocities and crimes which he in fact committed, Reger said. Austrian justice is a justice made compliant by the Austrian politicians, Reger said, anything else is a lie. The fact that this affair was hushed up not only by the government but also by the papers preys on my mind, Reger said. But if you are an Austrian things would have been preying on your mind for years, because over these past few years not a day has passed without a political scandal and political corruption has assumed a scale that would have been inconceivable a few years ago, Reger said. Whatever my mind may be occupied with, these political scandals are continually on my mind, disturbing it. Do what I like, these political scandals are on my mind, Reger said, whatever I am engaged in, these political scandals are on my mind, Reger said. Whenever we open our paper we have another political scandal, Reger said, every day a new scandal involving politicians of this state, by now mutilated beyond recognition, politicians who abused their office, who made common cause with crime. When you open your paper you think you are living in a state where political atrocities and political criminality have become a daily occurrence. Initially I told myself I would not let myself get worked up because this state today is thoroughly and utterly beyond discussion, but all of a sudden I find it quite impossible not to get worked up in this horrid and daily more horrendous state; when you open your paper in the morning you quite automatically get worked up about the atrocities and the crimes of our politicians. Quite automatically you gain the impression that all politicians are criminal types and are fundamentally criminal and a pack of swine, Reger said. In consequence I have lately broken myself of the habit of reading the paper in the morning, as had been my custom for decades, it is enough for me to open it in the afternoon. If a newspaper reader opens his paper first thing in the morning he makes himself sick first thing in the morning and for the rest of the day and even for the subsequent night, Reger said, because he is confronted with an ever bigger political scandal, with ever bigger political corruption, Reger said. The newspaper reader in this country has for years read nothing but scandal in his paper, on the first three pages the political scandal and on the following pages the rest; but whatever he does all he reads about is scandal because the Austrian papers now write about nothing but scandal and corruption, about nothing else. The Austrian papers have reached such a low level that this too is a scandal, Reger said, there are no lower or baser or more repugnant papers in the world than the Austrian papers, but these Austrian papers are of necessity so hideous and so base because Austrian society, above all Austrian political society, and this state are all so hideous and so base. Never before has there been such a hideous or base society in this country with such a hideous and base state, Reger said, but no one in this state and in this country regards this as a disgrace, no one really rebels against it, Reger said. Austrians have always accepted everything, no matter what it was, even though it was the worst atrocity and the greatest infamy, even if it was the most monstrous of all monstrosities, Reger said. Austrians are anything but revolutionaries because they are no fanatics of truth at all, Austrians have for centuries lived with lies and got used to it, Reger said, Austrians have for centuries been wedded to lies, to every lie, Reger said, but most deeply and most of all to the lies of the state. Austrians live their common and base Austrian lives with the lies of the state, without giving them another thought, Reger said, that is what is so repulsive about them. Your so-called charming Austrian is an insidious and opportunist setter of traps, Reger said, who always and everywhere sets his opportunist traps, the so-called charming Austrian is a master of the most infamous infamy, beneath his so-called charm he is the most infamous and shameless and ruthless person and for this very reason the most mendacious, Reger said. Although I have been a fanatical reader of newspapers all my life, Reger said, I now find it well-nigh unbearable to open a paper because they are only full of scandals. But then the papers reflect the society they report on, Reger said. You may search for a whole year and you will not find a single intelligent sentence in any of these filthy rags, Reger said. But why am I telling you all this when you are just as familiar with everything Austrian, Reger said. I woke up this morning and thought of the ministerial scandal and I cannot get that ministerial scandal out of my mind, that is the tragedy of my mind, Reger said, that I cannot get these scandals, and above all these political scandals, out of my mind, these scandals are eating ever more deeply into my mind, that is the tragedy. I tell myself that I must get all these scandals and atrocities out of my mind and yet these atrocities and scandals are eating ever more deeply into my mind. But of course I find it soothing to talk to you about all these things and more especially about these political atrocities and scandals, every morning I think how fortunate for me to have the Ambassador in order to be able to talk to you and of course not only about the scandals and the atrocities, because naturally there are other things as well, more cheerful ones, such as music, Reger said. So long as I still feel like talking about the Tempest Sonata or about the Art of the Fugue I am not giving up, Reger said. Music saves me time and again, the fact that music is still alive within me, and it still is as alive in me as on the day I was born, Reger said. To be saved anew by music every morning, from all the atrocities and hideousnesses, he said, that is it; to be made once more into a thinking and feeling individual by music, you understand, he said. Ah yes, Reger said, even if we curse it at times, even if at times it seems to us entirely superfluous and even if we have to say it is not worth anything, this art, yet when we look on these pictures here, these so-called old masters, though they have very often, and increasingly s6 over the years, seemed pointless and useless, nothing but helpless attempts to establish themselves artistically on the surface of the earth, it is nothing else but just this cursed and damned and often (to the point of vomiting) revolting and embarrassing art that saves such as ourselves, Reger said. The Austrian has always been a clever person, Reger said, and he is profoundly aware of being that. That is the cause of all his distastefulness, of his weakness of character, because more than from any other distastefulness the Austrian suffers from a weak character. But that also makes him a lot more interesting than all others, Reger said. The Austrian is actually the most interesting type of all European types, because he has everything of every other European type plus his own weakness of character on top. That is what is so fascinating about the Austrian, Reger said, that all the qualities of all the others are present in him from birth and his own weakness of character on top. If we spend all our lives in Austria we do not see the Austrian as he really is, but if, after a prolonged absence such as mine in London, we return to Austria we see him clearly and he cannot pretend to us. The Austrian is a genius at pretending, the greatest genius at play-acting altogether, Reger said, he pretends to be everything without ever being any of it in fact, that is his most prominent characteristic. The Austrian is popular throughout the world, at least he is to this day, and the whole world has, so to speak, always been fooled simply because he is the most interesting European type, yet at the same time he is always also the most dangerous. The Austrian is very probably the most dangerous type altogether, more dangerous than the German, more dangerous than any other European, the Austrian is definitely the most dangerous political type, this has been demonstrated by history, and time and again this has brought the greatest misfortune upon Europe and indeed very often upon the whole world. No matter how interesting or unique we may find the Austrian, who invariably is a common Nazi or a stupid Catholic, we must not allow him to seize the political rudder, Reger said, because an Austrian at the rudder always and inescapably steers everything into a total abyss. A sleepless night and exasperation over these everlasting political scandals, Reger then said. Yes, I thought first thing in the morning, you will be meeting Atzbacher at the Kunsthistorisches Museum to put a proposal to him, and you know perfectly well that you will be putting a totally nonsensical proposal to him, but you will put the proposal to him. A ludicrous matter and nevertheless a monstrous one, Reger said. For two months after the death of his wife Reger did not leave his flat on the Singerstrasse and for six months after the death of his wife he did not meet a single person. For these six months he was being looked after by his vulgar and dreadful housekeeper and not once did he go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where for decades he had been every other day with his wife, I now reflect. His housekeeper cooked for him and washed his clothes, even though doing everything in an outrageously slovenly manner, Reger said time and again, but at least he did not go to seed completely. A person suddenly left alone goes to seed very rapidly, Reger himself said, for months I ate nothing but semolina pudding, Reger said, because with my unrepaired dentures I could no longer eat any meat or even any vegetables. The Singerstrasse flat has become silent as the grave and empty, this was Reger's own description of the state of affairs when I met him at the Ambassador for the first time after his wife's death, haggard, pale, supporting himself on his stick nearly all the time, his laces undone and his winter longjohns slipping out from his trouser legs. We do not wish to go on living when we have lost the person closest to us, he said to me at the Ambassador then, but we have to go on living, we do not kill ourselves because we are too cowardly for that, we promise by the open grave that we shall soon follow and then, six months later, we are still alive and we have a horror of ourselves, Reger said to me at the Ambassador then. His wife was eighty-seven, but she could certainly have lived well into her hundreds had she not had that fall, Reger said to me at the Ambassador then. The city of Vienna and the Austrian state and the Catholic Church, Reger said to me at the Ambassador then, are responsible for her death, because if the city of Vienna, which owns the approach to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, had gritted the approach to the Kunsthistorisches Museum my wife would not have had a fall, and if the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which belongs to the state, had notified the ambulance service at once and not half an hour later, my wife would have got to the Merciful Brethren Hospital sooner than an hour after her fall, or if the surgeons at the Merciful Brethren Hospital, which belongs to the Catholic Church, had not bungled the operation, my wife would not have died, Reger said to me at the Ambassador then. The city of Vienna and the Austrian state and the Catholic Church are responsible for the death of my wife, Reger said at the Ambassador, I now reflected while sitting next to him on the Bordone Room settee. The city of Vienna fails to grit the approach to the Kunsthistorisches Museum on a day when it is icy and the Kunsthistorisches Museum notifies the ambulance service only after repeated requests and finally the surgeons at the Merciful Brethren Hospital bungle the operation and in the end my wife is dead, Reger said at the Ambassador. We lose the person we have loved most devotedly of all people solely through the negligence of the city of Vienna and through the negligence of the Austrian state and through the negligence of the Catholic Church, Reger said at the Ambassador then. We lose the person most important to us because the city and the state and the Church have acted negligently, Reger said at the Ambassador then. The person with whom we have shared our life for nearly forty years, in the most natural way and with respect and love, dies because the city and the state and the Church have acted negligently and infamously, Reger said at the Ambassador then. We are suddenly left alone by the one person whom, basically, we had, because the city and the state and the Church have acted thoughtlessly and irresponsibly, Reger said at the Ambassador then. All of a sudden we are cut off from the person to whom we owe basically everything and who in fact gave us everything, Reger said at the Ambassador then. We are suddenly alone in our flat without the person who has kept us alive with the greatest care for some decades, simply because city and state and Catholic Church have committed the crime of negligence, Reger said at the Ambassador then. We stand by the open grave of the person whom we have never been able to imagine living without, Reger said at the Ambassador then. The city of Vienna and the Austrian state and the Catholic Church are responsible for my being alone now and for my having to be alone as long as I live, Reger said at the Ambassador then. The person who had always been in good health and who had every conceivable virtue of an intelligent and female person and who in fact had been the most loving person in my life dies and leaves me only because the city of Vienna does not grit the approach to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, only because the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which belongs to the state, does not notify the ambulance service in time and because the surgeons at the Merciful Brethren Hospital bungle the operation, Reger said at the Ambassador then. My wife might have lived into her hundreds, I am convinced of it, if the city of Vienna had gritted the approach to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Reger said at the Ambassador then. And she would certainly still be alive if the Kunsthistorisches Museum had notified the ambulance service in time and if the surgeons at the Merciful Brethren Hospital had not bungled the operation. Strictly speaking I should not have entered the Kunsthistorisches Museum again, Reger said, having entered it again seven months after the death of his wife. Now the approach to the Kunsthistorisches Museum is gritted, now that my wife is dead, Reger said. And why did they have to take my wife to the Merciful Brethren Hospital, of all places, to a hospital of which I have never heard a good word, Reger said. All these hospitals with the word merciful in their title are utterly distasteful to me, Reger said. The word merciful is abused more than almost any other word, Reger said. The merciful hospitals are the most merciless I know, Reger said, in them, as a rule, reigns only avarice and a lack of skill, quite apart from that utterly infamous and base sham-religiosity, Reger said at the Ambassador then. Now I have only the Ambassador left, Reger said at the Ambassador then, this corner to which I have become used over the decades. I have two locations to which I can escape when I no longer know where to turn, Reger said at the Ambassador then, this corner here at the Ambassador and the settee at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. But sitting all alone in this corner here at the Ambassador is also terrible, Reger said at the Ambassador then. Sitting here with my wife used to be one of my favourite occupations, not sitting here on my own, not here on my own, my dear Atzbacher, Reger said at the Ambassador then, and sitting on my own on the Bordone Room settee at the Kunsthistorisches Museum is also terrible, when I have sat on it with my wife for over three decades. When I walk through the city of Vienna I keep thinking that the city of Vienna is responsible for the death of my wife and that the Austrian state is responsible for her death and that the Catholic Church is responsible for her death, no matter where I go, I cannot get this idea out of my mind, Reger said. A crime has been committed against me, a municipal-governmental-Catholic-ecclesiastical atrocity that I can do nothing about, that is the worst of it, Reger said. Basically, Reger said at the Ambassador then, I also died at the moment my wife died. The truth is that I feel like a dead man, like a dead man who has to go on living. That is my problem, Reger said at the Ambassador then. The flat is empty and deserted, Reger said several times at the Ambassador then. In all those twenty years I have only twice been to the Regers' flat on the Singerstrasse, a ten- or twelveroom flat in a building of the turn of the century, which now, after the death of Reger's wife, belongs to Reger. Filled with the furniture of his wife's family, the Regers' flat on the Singerstrasse is a fine example of a so-called art nouveau flat, with actually masses of Klimts and Schieles and Gerstls and Kokoschkas hanging on the walls, all of them pictures my wife valued greatly, as Reger said on one occasion, but which always profoundly repelled me. Every single room in the Regers' Singerstrasse flat had been transformed into a real work of art about the turn of the century by a famous Slovak artist in wood, I do not really believe that there is another flat in Vienna, where Slovak woodwork art has been applied with such skill or with such very high demands of craftsmanship or so totally successfully, dear Atzbacher. Reger himself, as he keeps saying, does not in the least appreciate the so-called art nouveau style, he detests it, because the whole of the art nouveau style is nothing but kitsch but, as he kept saying, he enjoyed the cosiness of the Singerstrasse flat of his wife, the réussis proportions of all the rooms in it, above all the dimensions of his study, but since, as mentioned before, he had no taste whatever for the so-called art nouveau style, he always appreciated only the comfort of the Singerstrasse flat, which had always been ideal for the two of us, but not its furnishings. On my first visit to the Regers' Singerstrasse flat, when Reger received me because his wife had gone to Prague, he conducted me briefly through the whole flat, this then is where I exist, he said then, you see, here in these rooms, which suit me eminently, even though this hideous uncomfortable furniture is not to my taste at all. All this is my wife's taste, not mine, Reger said then, and when I looked at the paintings on the walls he would say time and again, ah yes, this I believe is a Schiele, ah yes, this I believe is a Klimt, ah yes, this I believe is a Kokoschka. Turn-of-the-century painting is nothing but kitsch and has no appeal for me, he said several times, whereas my wife has always been attracted by it, even if not actually fascinated, but attracted, that is the right expression, Reger said. Schiele perhaps, but not Klimt; Kokoschka yes, Gerstl no, these were his observations. Reputedly Loos, reputedly Hoffmann, he said, when I said surely this table was by Adolf Loos, surely this chair was by Josef Hoffmann. You know, Reger said, I have always been repelled by things which are fashionable at the moment, and Loos and Hoffmann are so fashionable now that quite naturally I am repelled by them. And Schiele and Klimt, those kitsch-mongers, are the height of fashion today, which is why Klimt and Schiele basically so repel me. People nowadays listen predominantly to Webern and Schoenberg and Berg and those who ape them, and also to Mahler, that repels me. Anything in fashion has always repelled me. Most probably I also suffer from what I call art selfishness: where art is concerned I wish to have everything for myself alone, I want to possess my Schopenhauer for myself, my Pascal, my Novalis and my fervently loved Gogol, I alone want to possess these art products, these inspired artistic eccentricities, I alone want to possess Michelangelo, Renoir, Goya, he said, I can scarcely bear the thought that someone else, apart from me, possesses and enjoys the products of these geniuses, the very idea is unbearable to me that, apart from me, another person even appreciates Janáček, or Martinů or Schopenhauer or Descartes, I find this almost unbearable, I want to be the only one, that of course is a dreadful attitude, Reger said then. I am a possessive thinker, Reger said then. I am a possessive thinker, Reger said in his flat then. I should like to think that Goya painted only for me, that Gogol and Goethe wrote only for me,that Bach composed only for me. As this is a fallacy and moreover a piece of abysmal meanness I am basically always unhappy, I am sure you understand, Reger said then. Even though this is nonsense, Reger said then, when I read a book I still have the feeling and the belief that the book was written for me alone, when I view a picture I have the feeling and the belief that it was painted only for me, or that the composition I hear was composed only for me. Naturally I read myself and listen and view myself into a great error, but I do so with very great enjoyment, Reger said then. Here in this chair, Reger said to me then, pointing to what he called a hideous Loos chair, which Loos incidentally designed in Brussels and had manufactured in Brussels, I introduced my wife to the Art of the Fugue thirty years ago. The hideous Loos chair still stands in the same spot. And here, on this hideous Loos settee — he had invited me to sit down on this hideous Loos settee which stood before a window looking out on to the Singerstrasse — I read Wieland to my wife for a whole year, Wieland, that great but underrated figure in German literature, Wieland whom Goethe winkled out of Weimar, with Schiller playing a distasteful part in it, Reger said; after a year my wife was a Wieland expert, after a single year! Reger exclaimed then. And here on this Loos footstool, which is as uncomfortable as it is hideous, reputedly this footstool was also designed by that unbearably grand-gesture man Loos, my wife would sit and between one and two every morning, during sixtysix and sixty-seven, read me the whole of Kant. To start with I had the greatest difficulty in introducing my wife to the world of literature and of philosophy and of music, Reger said then. It is obvious, surely, that literature is not conceivable without philosophy or the other way round, or philosophy without music or literature without music or the other way round, he said, it took years before my wife understood this, Reger said at the Singerstrasse flat then. I had to start from the very beginning with my wife, even though, if only through her origins, she was correspondingly highly educated when I met her. At first I thought that living together would be impossible, but then it was possible after all, Reger said, because my wife subordinated herself, naturally, because that was the prerequisite of our living together, which eventually I was able to describe as an ideal living together. A woman such as my wife only experiences difficulty in learning during the first few years of such a schooling, thereafter she learns ever more easily, Reger said. On this uncomfortable and hideous Loos footstool my wife, in a manner of speaking, saw the light of philosophy, Reger said at the Singerstrasse flat then. For years we pursue the wrong road of illuminating a person before, from one moment to the next, we perceive the correct one, from then on everything moves very quickly, from then on my wife comprehended everything very quickly, but of course I could have continued to work on her for certainly some years if not decades, Reger said at the Singerstrasse flat then. We take a wife and we do not know why we have taken her, surely not just so she should be a nuisance to us with her everlasting domestic fussing, in what is simply her feminine way, Reger said at the Singerstrasse flat then, surely we take her because we wish to acquaint her with the true value of life, to instruct her on what life can be if conducted intellectually. Of course we must not make the mistake of drilling intellectuality into the head of such a woman, as I had attempted initially and was naturally bound to fail, here too it is circumspection that leads to results, Reger said at the Singerstrasse flat then. Anything my wife had loved before we met she stopped loving once I had enlightened her, except for that art nouveau hysteria, this so-called artnouveau, this repulsive kitsch art, this nauseating art-nouveau aberration of taste: there I stood no chance. I did of course succeed in gradually curing her of false, which means worthless, literature and of false and worthless music, Reger said, and I introduced her to essential sections of world philosophy. The female head is the most obstinate, Reger said at the Singerstrasse flat then, we believe it to be accessible whereas in fact it is inaccessible. Before I married my wife she went on a lot of nonsensical journeys, Reger said then, which subsequently she no longer did, she simply had, as have most women nowadays, a travel mania, one place today, another tomorrow, that is their slogan yet basically they experience nothing, they see nothing, they bring back with them nothing but an empty purse. After our wedding my wife made no more journeys, Reger said, only those journeys of the mind, on which I accompanied her, we travelled through Schopenhauer and through Nietzsche and through Descartes and through Montaigne and through Pascal, and always for several years, Reger said. Here, you see, Reger said at the Singerstrasse flat then while sitting down on a chair, a hideous Otto Wagner chair, on this hideous Otto Wagner chair mywife confessed to me that, although I had instructed her in Schleiermacher for a whole year, she had not understood Schleiermacher. As, however, in the course of that instruction on Schleiermacher I had taken a dislike to Schleiermacher myself so that suddenly I no longer had the slightest interest in Schleiermacher myself, I quite simply took note that she had not understood Schleiermacher and no longer concerned myself with Schleiermacher; in such a situation we must quite simply and quite ruthlessly brush aside, as the saying goes, any philosopher whom our wife fails to understand, as for instance Schleiermacher, and move on. I immediately embarked on an instruction in Herder, this we both found to be a relaxation, Reger said at the Singerstrasse flat then. After the death of my wife I considered moving out of our joint flat, but then I did not move out, quite simply because I am too old for a move. A move would be beyond my strength. Naturally, two rooms would be sufficient, Reger said, but when one can no longer move out of a flat one has to make do with ten or twelve, as in the case of the Singerstrasse flat. Everything in this flat reminds me of my wife, Reger said, no matter where I look, she is always standing here, sitting there, coming towards me from this room or that, it is terrible even though, at the same time, it is heart-rending, it is in fact heart-rending, Reger said. That time, on my first visit to the Singerstrasse flat, while his wife was still alive, he said to me while gazing down on to the Singerstrasse, you know, Atzbacher, there is nothing I fear more than finding myself suddenly left by my wife and alone, the most frightful thing that could happen to me would be her dying and leaving me alone. But my wife is in good health and will survive me by many years, Reger said then. When we love a person as tenderly as I do my wife we cannot imagine their death, we cannot even bear the thought of it, Reger said then. When I was at the Singerstrasse flat for the second time it was to collect an old volume of Spinoza which he had obtained for me at a more favourable price than normal, that is not through an official bookshop but through an illegal dealer, and as soon as I stepped into the Singerstrasse flat he made me sit down in the nearest chair, also a hideous Loos chair, and disappeared into his library, from where shortly afterwards he reappeared with a volume of Novalis maxims. I shall now read you Novalis maxims for an hour, he said to me, and, while I had to remain seated on the hideous Loos chair, he remained standing and for an actual hour read Novalis maxims to me. I have loved Novalis from the start, he said, when he had closed the book with the Novalis maxims after an hour, and I still love him today. Novalis is the poet whom I have loved all my life always in the same way and always with the same intensity, more than any other. As time went on the lot of them, more or less, invariably, got on my nerves, profoundly disappointed me, revealed themselves as nonsensical or as pointless or, just as often, ultimately insignificant and useless, but there was none of this in the case of Novalis. I never believed I could love a poet who was at the same time a philosopher, but I love Novalis, I have always loved him and at all times and I shall love him in the future too with the same sincerity with which I have always loved him, Reger said then. All philosophers age with time, not so Novalis, Reger said then. But it is surely strange that my wife never even had a liking for Novalis, not even a liking, whereas I have always totally loved Novalis. There were a great many things I was able to convince my wife about, in time, but not about Novalis, although Novalis is the one author she would have gained from most, he said. At first she refused to go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum with me, Reger now said, she resisted, so to speak, tooth and nail, but eventually she came here with me after all, with the same regularity as myself, and I am convinced that, if she had survived me instead of me surviving her, as is the case now, she would have come to the Kunsthistorisches Museum on her own again, without me, just as I am doing now, alone, without her. Reger again looked at the White-Bearded Man and said: forty years after the end of the war conditions in Austria have again reached their darkest moral low, that is what is so depressing. Such a beautiful country and such an utterly brutal and vile and self-destructive society. What is so appalling about it is that one can only be a perplexed spectator of the catastrophe and is unable to do anything about it, Reger said. Reger gazed at the White-Bearded Man and said: every other day I visit my wife's grave and I stand there by her grave for half an hour and I feel nothing. That is the strange thing, that I think of nothing but my wife more or less the whole time and when I stand there by her grave I feel nothing relating to her. I stand there and actually do not feel anything relating to her. Only when I walk away from the grave again do I once more experience the horror of her having left me. I always think I visit her grave in order to be particularly close to her, but when I am standing there by her grave I do not even feel anything relating to her. But I have made it a habit to visit my wife's grave every other day, the grave which one day will also be my own, Reger said. When I recall the ghastly circumstances connected with her funeral I still feel sick today. Time and again the printer printed the In Memoriam sheet, which I had ordered, wrongly, first too boldly, then too faintly, first with too many commas, then with too few, he said, each time I got him to show me the proof everything was wrong, it was enough to drive me to despair. At the peak of my despair I said to the printer that surely I had given him a very precise copy, except that the proofs never followed my copy and that everything was always wrong in the proofs. Whereupon the printer said to me that he knew how such an In Memoriam notice should be printed, not I, he knew how the text should be set, not I, he knew where the commas belonged, not I. But I did not give in and eventually I held in my hands the In Memoriam notice I wanted; but I had to go to the printing shop five times, Reger said, in order to get an In Memoriam notice the way I wanted it. Printers are conceited people who claim to be right even when they have long realized that they are not right. You must not tangle with printers, Reger said, they get bolshie at once and threaten to chuck everything unless you bow to their blinkered ideas. But I have never bowed to printers, Reger said. There was only a single sentence on the In Memoriam, Reger said, only the place and date of my wife's death, yet I had to go to the print shop five times and actually had to argue with the printer. My wife did not really want to have an In Memoriam notice, we had agreed on that, but nevertheless I had an In Memoriam printed, Reger said; however, I never posted off a single In Memoriam because suddenly, just as I was about to post them, it seemed nonsense to me to post the In Memoriam notices. I merely put a single brief sentence into the papers, simply that my wife had died, Reger said. People are terribly extravagant when someone dies, I kept everything as simple as humanly possible, Reger said, although of course I am not sure today that I did the right thing, I have continual doubts in that respect, these doubts have been assailing me every day since my wife's death, not one day without these doubts, that wears you down in the long run, Reger said. As for the estate, there was not the slightest problem, as she had appointed me in her will as, so to speak, her sole heir, just as in turn I appointed her my sole heir in my will. Such a death, no matter how painful, even if one believes it would choke one, also has its ridiculous side. The terrible, after all; is always ridiculous, Reger said. Basically my wife's funeral was not only a simple funeral but also a depressing one, Reger said. We hope for a simple funeral, with as few people as possible, Reger said, and find we have merely arranged a depressing one. We say: no music, we say: no speeches, and we think that will be the simplest and the easiest way for us to survive, and yet it depresses us, profoundly, Reger said. Only seven or eight people, really only the very closest, if possible no relatives and only the very closest, that is what we think, and then what we get is just these very closest only, whom moreover we have told, no flowers, nothing, and then everything turns out very depressing. We walk behind the coffin and everything is depressing. Everything happens very quickly, it hardly takes three-quarters of an hour and it depresses us and we believe that it took an eternity, Reger said. I visit my wife's grave and I feel absolutely nothing. At home to this day I still feel like howling at least once every day, he said, believe it or not, but by my wife's grave I feel nothing at all. I stand there, tearing up blades of grass, making those nervous ridiculous tearing movements which I know are only a pathological gratification of the nerves and look about at the other tasteless graves everywhere, each grave is more tasteless than the next, Reger said. It is in the cemeteries that we see, quite brutally, the extreme tastelessness of humanity. Only grass grows on our grave and there is no name on our grave, Reger said, we agreed on that, my wife and I. No sentence, nothing. The stonemasons disfigure the cemeteries and the so-called sculptors put the crown of kitsch on them everywhere, Reger said. But you do get a marvelous view of Grinzing from my wife's grave, and of the Kahlenberg beyond. And of the Danube below. The grave is situated so high you can look down on Vienna from it. It certainly makes no difference where a person is buried, but if he happens to own a grave for the lifetime of the cemetery, as I and my wife do, then he should let himself be buried in his grave. I would rather be buried anywhere except the Central Cemetery, my wife often said, Reger said, and I myself would not like to be buried in the Central Cemetery either, even though, when all is said and done, it makes no difference where a person is buried. My nephew in Leoben, the only relative I still have, Reger said, knows that I do not wish to be buried in the Central Cemetery but in my own grave, which is my property for the lifetime of the cemetery, Reger said, but of course if I should die more than three hundred kilometres from Vienna, then on the spot; within a three-hundred-kilometre radius of Vienna, otherwise on the spot, I said to my Leoben nephew; he will stand by what I have told him because he is my heir, Reger said. Reger looked at the White-Bearded Man and said: only a year ago, shortly before my wife's death, I was quite fond of spending a couple of hours walking round Vienna, now I do not feel like it any longer. My wife's death has certainly weakened me a lot, I am not the man I was before her death. And besides, Vienna has become so ugly, he said. In winter I think spring will be my salvation, and in spring I think summer will be my salvation, and in summer I think autumn, and in autumn winter, it is always the same, I hope from one season to the next. But that of course is an unfortunate characteristic, this characteristic is congenital in me, I do not say, how nice, it is now winter, winter is just what you need, any more than I say spring is just what you need, or autumn is just what you need, or summer and so on. I keep blaming my misfortunes on the season I have to live in, that ismy misfortune. I am not one of those people who enjoy the present, that's what it is, I am one of those unfortunate ones who enjoy the past, that is the truth, those who always feel the present to be just an insult, that Is the truth, Reger said, I feel the present to be an insult and an imposition, that is my misfortune. But of course it is not quite like that, Reger said, because time and again I am able to see the present as it is and, naturally, it is not always unhappy, or causing unhappiness, I know that, just as the past, if one thinks back to it, does not always ake one happy, I know that. One great misfortune, of course, is the fact that I have no doctor in whom I have any confidence, I have had so many doctors in my life, but ultimately I had no confidence in any of those doctors, all of them ultimately let me down, Reger said. I feel utterly vulnerable and I feel that I might collapse at any moment. When I say, strike me down,I really believe that I might be struck down by a stroke, eve though I have said those words a thousand times, Reger said, i even gets on my own nerves now, every other moment I say, strike me down but I have not been struck down, Reger said. In your presence, too, I have often said strike me down but I ha e not been struck down, I do not say so just from habit but because I really feel that I might be struck down. As for my body nothing is functioning properly any longer, Reger said. If only I had a good doctor, but I do not have a good doctor. Of course I have four general practitioners and two specialist physicians in the Singerstrasse, but none of these doctors is any good. My eyes are so bad I soon will not be able to see anything any more, but I have no good eye man. And of course I avoid seeing a doctor because I am afraid the doctor might confirm what I suspect, that I am mortally ill . Ihave been mortally ill for years, I always said so to my wife, Reger said, and I assumed as a matter of certainty that I would die first, not she, but then it was she who, because of all those frightful circumstances, died before me after all; I have had a great fear of doctors all my life. A good doctor is the best thing we can have, Reger said, but hardly anyone has a good doctor, we are forever dealing with medical bunglers and charlatans, he said, and if, exceptionally, we believe we find a good doctor, hé is either too old or too young, he either knows something about the latest medicine and lacks experience or else he has experience and does not know anything about the latest medicine, that's how it is, Reger said. A person urgently needs a body healer and a soul healer and he does not find either, all his life he searches for a good body healer and a good soul healer and he finds neither, that is the truth. Do you know what the doctors at the Merciful Brethren said to me when I confronted them with the fact that they were responsible for my wife's death and therefore should have her on their conscience? They said, her clock had run down, they said this banal sentence to me and not just the one who bungled the operation on my wife said this sentence to me, all the doctors at the Merciful Brethren Hospital said this banal sentence, her clock had run down, her clock had run down, her clock had run down, they kept saying, as though this sentence were their standard sentence, Reger said. If we have a doctor in whom we can have confidence and under whose care we feel safe, Reger said, then we have the most important thing in old age, but we do not have such a doctor. I do not even look for such a doctor any longer because it is a matter of supreme indifference to me when I die, any time would suit me, but like most people I want to have as quick and as painless a death as possible. My wife only suffered for a few days, Reger said, suffered for a few days then for a few days in a coma, he said. The people asked for a shroud but I had her wrapped simply in a clean sheet, Reger said. The man at the municipal office who handled the procedure of the funeral did his job quite superbly. It is a good idea to do everything connected with the funeral ourselves, then we do not have the time to sit at home and wait until we choke with despair. For eight days I chased about Vienna in connection with the funeral, one way and another, from one authority to another, and once again experienced the state in its entire bureaucratic brutality, Reger said. The authorities we have to seek out in Vienna in the event of a death are situated a long way away from one another and we need at least a whole week before we have completed all the business necessary for a funeral. Always and everywhere I said that I wanted only the simplest funeral for my wife, which they failed to understand, because everybody else, as I well know, always wants an extravagant one. The effort it cost me to insist on the simplest funeral in the end, Reger said. Only the man at the Währing municipal office understood me, he was the only one who understood that when I said a simple funeral I did not, as all the others believed, mean a cheap funeral but a simple one, they all thought I wanted a cheap one when l said a simple one, only the man at the Währing municipal office instantly understood me when I said a simple one, meaning a simple one and not a cheap one. Youwould not believe how stupid the people whom you have to deal with at the authorities can be, Reger said. I did not think I would live to see this winter, let alone survive it, he now said. The fact is that I just existed throughout the past year with a total lack of interest in anything, apart from my concert engagements, and apart from my little works of art for The Times nothing in fact interested me any more after my wife's death; not a single person, that is the truth, including yourself, Reger said, for months I was not interested even in you. I read virtually nothing and did not leave the house except to go to concerts, but for this past year none of those concerts was worth going to and, naturally, my little works of art for The Times were accordingly. Sometimes I ask myself why I keep reporting for The Times from Vienna, seeing that in this confused Vienna things have gone into an alarming decline also in the musical sphere, because nothing out of the ordinary is being offered here in Vienna either at the Konzerthaus or at the Musikverein, Viennese concerts have long lost their unique quality, the same works which you hear in Vienna you could have heard much earlier in Hamburg or in Zurich or in Dinkelsbühl, Reger said. My eagerness to write is at its peak, but what Viennese concerts have to offer is worth less and less. I have long ceased to be the concert fanatic I once was, he said, a music fanatic yes, but a concert fanatic no longer, it is also getting more and more troublesome for me to go to the Musikverein or to the Konzerthaus, neither is easily accessible to me on foot and I do not take taxis and there is no tram there from the Singerstrasse. And the Konzerthaus audiences, just as the Musikverein audiences, have lately become very common and provincial, I have to say they are dulled and for years have no longer been knowledgeable, which is regrettable. The days when that singer of singers George London sang Don Giovanni at the Opera or the butcher's daughter Lipp the Queen of the Night are gone for good, as are the days when a sixty-year-old Menuhin conducted at the Konzerthaus and a fifty-year-old Karajan at the Musikverein. We now only hear the mediocre ones, the worthless ones. The idols, the top artists, the most ideal and the most competent performers have grown old and incompetent, Reger said. The present generation, curiously enough, no longer makes the highest demands on music, those which were made on music a mere fifteen or twenty years ago. The reason is that listening to music has become a trivial everyday affair as a result of technical progress. Listening to music is nothing out of the ordinary any more, you can hear music wherever you go, you are practically forced to hear music, in every department store, in every doctor's surgery, on every street, indeed you cannot avoid music nowadays, you wish to escape from it but you cannot escape, this age is totally accompanied by background music, that is the catastrophe, Reger said. Our age has witnessed the eruption of total music, anywhere between the North Pole and the South Pole you are forced to hear music, in the city or out in the country, on the high seas or in the desert, Reger said. People have been stuffed full of music every day for so long that they have long lost all feeling for music. This monstrous situation of course has its effect on the concerts you hear nowadays, there is nothing out of the ordinary nowadays because all music all over the world is out of the ordinary, and where everything is out of the ordinary there, naturally, nothing out of the ordinary remains, indeed it is positively touching to see a few ridiculous virtuosi still taking pains to be out of the ordinary, but they are so no longer because they can be so no longer. The world is through and through pervaded by total music, Reger said, that is the misfortune, at every street corner you can hear extraordinary and perfect music on such a scale that you have probably blocked your ears long ago to stop yourself going out of your mind. People today, because they have nothing else left, suffer from a pathological music consumption, Reger said, this music consumption will be driven forward by the industry, which controls people today, to a point where everybody is destroyed; there is a lot of talk nowadays about waste and chemicals which have destroyed everything, but music destroys a lot more than waste and chemicals do, it is music that eventually will destroy absolutely everything totally, mark my words. The first thing to be destroyed by the music industry are people's auditory canals and next, as a logical consequence, the people themselves, that is the truth, Reger said. I can already see people totally destroyed by the music industry, Reger said, those masses of music-industry victims eventually populating the continents with their musical cadaverous stench, my dear Atzbacher, the music industry will one day have the population on its conscience, it will most probably ultimately have the whole of mankind on its conscience, not just chemicals and waste, believe me. The music industry is the murderer of human beings, the music industry is the real mass murderer of humanity which, if the music industry continues on its present lines, will have no hope whatever within a few decades, my dear Atzbacher, Reger said excitedly. A person with a sensitive ear will soon be unable to go out into the street; just go to a café, go to an inn, go to a department store, everywhere, whether you like it or not, you have to hear music; take a train or board a plane, music today pursues you everywhere. This ceaseless music is the most brutal thing present-day humanity has to suffer and to tolerate, Reger said. From early morning till late at night humanity is stuffed full of Mozart and Beethoven, Bach and Handel, Reger said. Go where you will, you cannot escape that torture. It is a downright miracle, Reger said, that ceaseless music is not yet to be heard at the Kunsthistorisches Museum as well, that would be the last straw. After the funeral of my wife I locked myself up in the Singerstrasse flat and did not even admit the housekeeper, Reger said. Immediately after the funeral he had gone to the nearby synagogue and lit a candle, without really knowing why, and the strangest thing was that from the synagogue he had gone straight into Saint Stephen's and lit a candle there too, again without really knowing why. Having a lit a candle in Saint Stephen's, he had walked down the Wollzeile for some way with the idea of killing himself. However, I had no clear idea of how I would kill myself and eventually I was able to dismiss the idea of killing myself from my head, at least for a short time. I had the choice between wandering criss-cross about the city for days and perhaps weeks, or staying locked up for weeks, Reger said to me, I decided in favour of staying locked up for weeks. After his wife's funeral he had not wished to see anybody at all ever again and at first not even to eat anything ever again, but nobody could stand drinking nothing but pure water for days on end for more than three or four days, and he had in fact lost weight very rapidly and in the morning, suddenly, had barely the strength to get up, that was a signal, Reger said to me, and I started eating again and next I started studying Schopenhauer again, it was Schopenhauer my wife and I had been studying when she had her fall behind me and broke the so-called neck of her femur, Reger said thoughtfully. During these six weeks of locked-up existence I merely conducted a few telephone calls with my lawyer and read Schopenhauer, that probably saved me, Reger said, even though I am not sure whether it was right for me to save myself, probably, Reger said, it would have been better not to have saved myself, to have killed myself. But the mere fact that I had so much running about in connection with the funeral did not leave me any time to kill myself. Unless we kill ourselves at once we do not kill ourselves at all, that is what is so frightful, he said. We have the wish to be just as dead as the person we loved, but still we do not kill ourselves, we think about it but we do not do it, Reger said. Curiously enough I could not bear any music during those six weeks, I did not once sit down at the piano, once in my mind I attempted a piece from the Well-Tempered Clavier, but immediately abandoned the attempt, it was not music that was my salvation during those six weeks, it was Schopenhauer, again and again a few lines of Schopenhauer, Reger said. It was not Nietzsche either, only Schopenhauer. Isat up in bed and read a few lines of Schopenhauer and reflected on them and again read a few Schopenhauer sentences and reflected on them, Reger said. After four days of nothing but drinking water and reading Schopenhauer I ate my first piece of bread, which was so hard I had to chop it off the loaf with a meat cleaver. I sat down on the window stool facing the Singerstrasse, that hideous Loos stool, and looked down on the Singerstrasse. Imagine, it was the end of May and there was a flurry of snow. I shrank away from people. From my flat on the Singerstrasse I watched them rushing about down below, one way and another, laden with clothes and foodstuffs, and I felt nauseated by them. I thought I do not wish to go back among these people, not among these people and there are no others, Reger said. Looking down on to the Singerstrasse I realized that there were no other people than those rushing about the Singerstrasse this way and that. I looked down on to the Singerstrasse and hated the people and I said to myself I do not wish to go back among these people, Reger said. I do not wish to go back to that infamy and that shabbiness, I said to myself, Reger said. I pulled out several drawers and several chests and looked into them and kept taking out pictures and writings and correspondence of my wife and put everything on the table, one item after another, and progressively inspected everything, and because I am an honest person, my dear Atzbacher, I have to admit that I wept while doing so. Suddenly I gave my tears free rein, I had not wept for decades and suddenly I gave my tears free rein, Reger said. I sat there, giving my tears free rein, and I wept and wept and wept and wept, Reger said. I had not wept for decades, Reger said to me at the Ambassador. I have no need to conceal anything or to hide anything, he said, with my eighty-two years I have no need to conceal or to hide anything at all, Reger said, and I therefore do not conceal the fact that suddenly I wept and wept again, that I wept again for days, Reger said. I sat there, looking at the letters which my wife had written to me over the years and read the notes she had made over the years and just wept. Of course we get used to a person over the decades and love them for decades and eventually love them more than anything else and cling to them and when we lose them it is truly as if we had lost everything. I have always thought that it was music that meant everything to me, and at times that it was philosophy, or great or greatest or the very greatest writing, or altogether that it was simply art, but none of it, the whole of art or whatever, is nothing compared to that one beloved person. The things we inflicted on that one beloved person, Reger said, the thousands and hundreds of thousands of pains we inflicted on this one person whom we loved more than anyone else, the torments we inflicted on that person, and yet we loved them more than anyone else, Reger said. When that person whom we loved more than anyone else is dead they leave us with a terribly guilty conscience, Reger said, with a terribly guilty conscience with which we have to live after that person's death and which will choke us one day, Reger said. None of those books or writings which I had collected in the course of my life and which I had brought to the Singerstrasse flat to cram full all these shelves were ultimately any use, I had been left alone by my wife and all those books and writings were ridiculous. We think we can cling to Shakespeare or to Kant, but that is a fallacy, Shakespeare and Kant and all the rest, whom during our life we built up as the so-called great ones, let us down at the very moment when we would so badly need them, Reger said, they are no solution for us and they are no consolation to us, they suddenly seem revolting and alien to us, everything which those so-called great and important figures have thought and moreover written leaves us cold, Reger said. We always think we can rely on those so-called important and great ones, whichever, at the crucial moment, at the moment crucial in our lives, but that is a mistake, precisely at the moment which is crucial in our lives we find ourselves left alone by all those important and great ones, by those, as the saying goes, immortal ones, they provide us with no more at such a crucial moment in our lives than the fact that even in their midst we are alone, on our own in an utterly horrible sense, Reger said. Only and solely Schopenhauer helped me, because quite simply I abused him for the purpose of my survival, Reger said to me at the Ambassador. With all the others, including Goethe, Shakespeare and Kant, nauseating me I simply threw myself into Schopenhauer in my despair and sat down with Schopenhauer on my Singerstrasse-side stool in order to survive, for suddenly I wanted to survive and not to die, not to follow my wife but to remain here, to remain in this world, you understand, Atzbacher, Reger said at the Ambassador. But of course I had a chance of survival with Schopenhauer only because I abused him for my purposes and in fact falsified him inthe vilest manner, Reger said, by quite simply turning him into a prescription for survival, which in fact he is not, any more than the others I have mentioned. All our lives we rely on the great minds and on the so-called old masters, Reger said, and then we are mortally disappointed by them because they do not fulfill their purpose at the crucial moment. We hoard the great minds and the old masters and we believe that at the crucial moment of survival we can use them for our purposes, which means nothing other than misusing them for our purposes, which turns out to be a fatal mistake. We fill our mental strong-room with these great minds and old masters and resort to them at the crucial moment in our lives; but when we unlock our mental strong-room it is empty, that is the truth, we stand before that empty mental strong-room and find that we are alone and in fact totally destitute, Reger said. A person hoards things all his life, in all fields, and in the end he stands there empty, Reger said, also where his mental possessions are concerned. Think of the colossal mental possessions I had hoarded, Reger said at the Ambassador, and in the end I am standing here totally empty. Only by dint of a vile trick did I succeed in misusing Schopenhauer for my purpose, for the purpose of my survival, Reger said. Suddenly you realize what emptiness is when you stand there amidst thousands and thousands of books and writings which have left you totally alone, which suddenly mean nothing to you except that terrible emptiness, Reger said. When you have lost your closest human being everything seems empty to you, look wherever you like, everything is empty, and you look and look and you see that everything is really empty and, what is more, for ever, Reger said. And you realize that it was not those great minds and not those old masters which kept you alive for decades but that it was this one single person whom you loved more than anyone else. And you stand alone in this realization and with this realization and there is nothing and no one to help you, Reger said. You lock yourself up in your flat in despair, Reger said, and from day to day your despair grows deeper and from week to week you get into ever more desperate despair, Reger said, yet suddenly you emerge from that despair. You get up and walk out of that mortal despair, you still have the strength to walk out of that deepest despair, Reger said, suddenly I got up from the Singerstrasse-side stool and walked out of my despair and down into the Singerstrasse, Reger said, and walked a few hundred yards into the Inner City; I got up from the Singerstrasse-side stool and walked out of my flat and into the Inner City with the idea of making just one single attempt, an attempt at survival, Reger said. I walked out of the Singerstrasse flat and I thought I will make one more, one single, attempt at survival and with this idea I walked into the Inner City, Reger said. And this attempt at survival was successful, I probably got up from the Singerstrasse-side stool at the crucial and probably the very last moment to walk down into the Singerstrasse and into the Inner City, Reger said. Naturally, back home in my flat I experienced one relapse after another, you will realize that this one single attempt at survival was not enough, I had to make several hundred such survival attempts, but I did make them, time and again, and I would get up, time and again, from my Singerstrasse-side stool and walk out into the street and actually back among people, among those people, and eventually saved myself, Reger said. Of course I ask myself whether it was right and not, after all, a mistake to save myself, but that is not the point, Reger said. We sincerely wish to follow someone into death and yet we do not then wish to go through with it, Reger said, that is the torment of despair in which I have existed, if you know what I mean, for over a year now. We hate people and yet we want to be with them because only with people and among people do we stand a chance of carrying on without going insane. We cannot in fact bear to be alone for very long, Reger said, we believe we can be alone, we believe we can be left on our own, we persuade ourselves that we can manage on our own, Reger said, but this is a chimera. Without people we have not the slightest hope of survival, Reger said, no matter how many great minds and old masters we have taken on as companions, they do not replace a human being, Reger said, in the end we are abandoned by all those so-called great minds and by all those so-called old masters and we realize that we are, on top of it, being mocked in the vilest manner by these great minds and old masters and we find that with all those great minds and with all those old masters we have always only had a mocking relationship. To begin with, he said, he had only lived on bread and water at the Singerstrasse flat, later, on about the eighth or ninth day, he had eaten a little tinned meat, which he had himself heated up in the kitchen, he had soaked some dried prunes and eaten them with noodles over which he had poured boiling water, after which however he had felt sick each time. On the eighth or ninth day eventually he had ordered his housekeeper to return and had sent her across the road to the Hotel Royal to bring him back a meal. He had come to a convenient arrangement with the Hotel Royal, from the end of May onward they have supplied me every day, by way of the housekeeper whom we had always called Stella although her name was Rosa, Reger said, with soup and a main course in aluminium containers specially bought for the purpose. I pay for two helpings, Reger said to me at the Ambassador, I would eat half a helping and the housekeeper a helping and a half, Reger said. I ate the Royal food with certain reluctance, Reger said, but I ate it because I had no choice ce, I ate it because I had to eat it, Reger said, but then I would feel sick just at the sight of the housekeeper who, naturally, sat facing me during the meal, I could never stand the housekeeper, ut then she was my wife's housekeeper, I myself would have never engaged that person, Reger said, that stupid, lying person Reger said, who actually sat facing me, eating one and a half helpings of the Royal food while I only ate half a one. We accept housekeepers because otherwise we would choke in our dirt, Reger said at the Ambassador, but all in all they are always distasteful. We are dependent on housekeepers, that's what it is, Reger said. Besides, she would always bring over from the Royal the dishes she wanted to eat, the ones she had chosen for herself, and not the dishes which I would have liked. She preferred pork, so she always brought over pork, but I only eat beef if I am asked, Reger said, I have always been a beef eater, housekeepers are all pork eaters. After my wife's death, in fact immediately after the funeral, Reger said, the housekeeper drew my attention to the fact that my wife had bequeathed her this and that, Reger said, although I know that my wife never bequeathed anything to the housekeeper, since my wife never thought about dying and never spoke to anybody about things to be bequeathed or to be left, not even to me, let alone to the housekeeper. But the housekeeper came to me immediately after the funeral and told me my wife had left this and that to her, clothes, shoes, pots and pans, materials, and so on. Housekeepers never flinch from any embarrassment, Reger said at the Ambassador. They are utterly shameless in their demands. Everyone everywhere sings the praises of housekeepers, even though people know perfectly well that today's housekeepers do not deserve praise, today's housekeepers are distasteful in their demands and utterly slovenly in their work, but people are hypocrites and say that housekeepers deserve praise because they are dependent on them, Reger said at the Ambassador. My wife never even for an instant thought of leaving the housekeeper anything, even two days before her death my wife did not suspect that she would die, so how could she have promised anything to the housekeeper? Reger asked. She is lying, I thought, when the housekeeper drew my attention to the fact that my wife had promised her various articles, the funeral guests had not even left the cemetery when the housekeeper appeared before me to say that my wife had promised her this and that. Time and again we stand up for people because we cannot believe and do not want to believe that they can be so vile, until, over and over again, we discover that they are far more vile than we would credit. Several times, when I was still standing by the open grave, the housekeeper said the words frying pan, Reger said, imagine it, again and again the words frying pan while I was still standing by the open grave. For weeks the housekeeper kept pestering me with the infamous lie that my wife had promised her a lot. However, as the saying goes, I turned a deaf ear. Not until three months after my wife's death did I tell the housekeeper she should choose some of the clothes, which I had intended for my wife's nieces, and take whatever pots and pans she found useful. You cannot imagine how the housekeeper acted in response to this! Reger said, the person snatched whole armfuls of clothes to herself and stuffed them into large twohundred-pound bags which she had all ready, until nothing more would go into those bags. I stood there, flabbergasted, watching the scene. Like a lunatic the housekeeper ran through the flat, grabbing up whatever she could grab up. In the end she had filled five two-hundred-pound bags and crammed whatever would not go into the two-hundred-pound bags into three large cases. Eventually her daughter also appeared on the scene, and the two jointly lugged down the bags and the cases into the Singerstrasse, where the daughter had parked a borrowed van. When the two had carried all the bags and cases down to the Singerstrasse the housekeeper in addition ranged dozens of casseroles on the floor, without even asking if I minded her taking those casseroles as well. After all, she was letting me keep this casserole or that, she said, while tying up the casseroles with string threaded through the casserole handles in order to carry them down more easily to the Singerstrasse. I stood there, flabbergasted, watching the housekeeper and her daughter as, like lunatics, they dragged these casseroles down out of the flat as well. My wife had never even seen the housekeeper's daughter, Reger said, if she had seen her once at least in the many years the housekeeper was in service with us, she would have been aghast at the sight, Reger said. The more we invest in a person, in a manner of speaking, and the kinder we are to them, the worse they repay us, Reger said at the Ambassador. This experience with the housekeeper and her daughter once again demonstrated to me how abysmally hideous man can be, Reger said. The so-called lower orders, surely this is the truth, are every bit as vile and infamous and every bit as mendacious as the upper classes. This is actually one of the most repulsive characteristics of our age that it is always claimed that the so-called simple and the so-called oppressed people are good and the others bad, that is one of the most repulsive lies I know, Reger said. The so-called housekeeper is no better than the so-called mistress, and anyway things are really the other way round nowadays, as indeed everything nowadays is the other way round, Reger said, surely the housekeeper is the mistress nowadays, not the other way round. The so-called powerless are the powerful today, not the other way round, Reger said at the Ambassador. While he was now gazing at the White-Bearded Man I could still hear what he had said to me at the Ambassador, that everything today was the other way round, over and over again that everything today is the other way round. Iwas still standing by the open grave when the housekeeper buttonholed me, asserting that my wife had bequeathed her the green winter coat she had bought in Badgastein. That beautiful expensive coat, of all things, the idea that my wife would have bequeathed that to the housekeeper, Reger said angrily. These people exploit any situation and shrink from nothing, stupid though they are, these people turn anything, even the most distasteful things, to their advantage. And we fall for these people time and again, because in the distastefulness of everyday matters they are of course superior to us, Reger said. That hypocrisy about the people is another repulsive thing, those pledges to the people which are so typical of, for instance, our politicians. Whenever we have an idealistic notion it always turns out very soon that this notion is nothing but a nonsensical notion, Reger said; we all have to grow old, and there is nothing more repulsive than this currying of favour with the young, this has always profoundly repelled me, when an old person tries to curry favour with the young, my dear Atzbacher, and he said a person today is at everyone's mercy, unprotected, we are dealing today with a totally unprotected person, totally at everyone's mercy, a mere decade ago people still felt more or less protected but today they are exposed to total unprotectedness, Reger said at the Ambassador. They can no longer hide, there is no hiding place left, that is what is so terrible, Reger said, everything has become transparent and thereby unprotected; in other words there is no hope of escape left today, people, no matter where they are, are everywhere hustled and incited and flee and escape and no longer find a refuge to escape to, unless of course they choose death, that is a fact, Reger said, that is the sinister aspect, because the world today is no longer mysterious but only sinister. With this sinister world you have to come to terms, Atzbacher, whether you like it or not, you are completely and totally at the mercy of this sinister world and if someone tries to tell you otherwise then he is trying to tell you a lie, today's lie which is ceaselessly drummed into your ears, the lie on which the politicians and the political twaddlers have specialized, Reger said. The world is one big sinister place where no one can find shelter any more, no one, Reger said at the Ambassador. Reger was looking at the White-Bearded Man and said, the death of my wife has not only been my greatest misfortune, it has also set me free. With the death of my wife I have become free, he said, and when I say free I mean entirely free, wholly free, completely free, if you know, or if at least you surmise, what I mean. I am no longer waiting for death, it will come by itself, it will come without my thinking of it, it does not matter to me when. The death of a beloved person is also an enormous liberation of our whole system, Reger now said. I have lived for some time now with the feeling of being totally free. I can now let anything approach me, really anything, without having to resist, I no longer resist anything, that is it, Reger now said. Looking at the White-Bearded Man he said, I have always really loved the White-Bearded Man. I never loved Tintoretto, but I have loved Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man. I have looked at this painting for over thirty years and I still find it possible to look at it, there is no other painting I could have looked at for over thirty years. The old masters tire quickly if we study them scrupulously and they always disappoint us if we subject them to closer scrutiny, if, as it were, we make them the ruthless object of our critical intellect. Not one of these so-called old masters will stand up to such a truly critical scrutiny, Reger now said. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, all this dissolves in our eyes with incredible rapidity and ultimately reveals itself as paltry survival art, no matter how inspired, as a paltry attempt at survival. Now Goya is a tougher nut, Reger said, but even Goya ultimately is no use to us and means nothing to us. Everything here at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which incidentally does not even possess a Goya, Reger now said, ultimately means nothing to us, I mean at the crucial point in our existence, nothing at all. In all these pictures, if we study them intensively, we sooner or later discover an awkwardness, or indeed, even in the very greatest and the most important creations, a flaw, if we are uncompromising a serious flaw which gradually makes us dislike these pictures, probably because we pitched our expectations too high, Reger said. Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt — an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect — to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and selfdeception, Reger said. These pictures are full of lies and falsehoods and full of hypocrisy and self-deception, there is nothing else in them if we disregard their often inspired artistry. All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man's absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. That is what all these pictures express, this helplessness which, on the one hand, embarrasses the intellect and, on the other, bewilders the same intellect and moves it to tears, Reger said. The White-Bearded Man has stood up to my intellect and to my feelings for over thirty years, Reger said, to me it is therefore the most precious item on show here at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. As though I had realized this over thirty years ago, I sat down on this settee here for the first time over thirty years ago, directly facing the White-Bearded Man. All these so-called old masters are really failures, without exception they were all doomed to failure, and the viewer can establish this failure in every detail of their works, in every brush-stroke, Reger said, in the smallest and very smallest detail. Quite apart from the fact that of all these so-called old masters each one invariably only painted some detail of his pictures with real genius, not one of them painted a one-hundred-per-cent picture of genius, not one of those socalled old masters ever succeeded in doing that; either they failed with the chin or with the knee or with the eyelids, Reger said. Most of them failed with the hands, there is not a single painting to be seen in the Kunsthistorisches Museum on which there is a hand painted with genius, or even painted with extraordinary competence, always only those tragicomically unsuccessful hands, Reger said, that is what you see here in all these portraits, even the most celebrated ones. Nor did any of these so-called old masters succeed in painting even an exceptional chin or a truly successful knee. El Greco never managed to paint even a single hand, El Greco's hands all look like dirty wet face flannels, Reger now said, but then there is not a single El Greco in the Kunsthistorisches Museum anyway. And Goya, who is likewise not represented in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, carefully avoided painting even a single hand clearly, where Goya's hands are concerned even Goya got stuck in dilettantism, this terrifying monstrous Goya, whom I place above all painters who ever painted, Reger said. Besides, it is downright depressing, here in this Kunsthistorisches Museum, only ever to see an art which should be labelled state art, an anti-spiritual Habsburg-Catholic state art. It has been the same for decades, I come to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and think that the Kunsthistorisches Museum does not even have a Goya! That it does not have an El Greco is not, as far as I and my view of art are concerned, a tragedy, but that the Kunsthistorisches Museum should not have a Goya is truly a tragedy, Reger said. If we apply an international yardstick, Reger said, then we must admit that the Kunsthistorisches Museum, contrary to its reputation, is not really a first-class museum because it does not even have the great all-outclassing Goya. On top of this is the fact that the Kunsthistorisches Museum is entirely in line with the artistic taste of the Habsburgs, who, at least where painting is concerned, had a revolting, totally brainless Catholic artistic taste. The Catholic Habsburgs never cared much more for painting than they did for literature, because painting and literature always seemed to them dangerous arts, unlike music, which could never become dangerous to them and which the Catholic Habsburgs, just because they were so brainless, allowed to unfold to full flower, as I once read in a so-called art book. Habsburg falseness, Habsburg feeble-mindedness, Habsburg perversity in matters of faith, these are what you see hanging on all these walls, that is the truth, Reger said. And in all these pictures, even in the landscapes, that perverse Catholic infantilism in matters of faith. Vulgar ecclesiastical hypocrisy even in the paintings with the highest, the very highest, claim to pictorial perfection, that is what is so repulsive. Everything exhibited at the Kunsthistorisches Museum wears a Catholic halo, not even excepting Giotto, Reger said. These repulsive Venetians who, with every paw they ever painted, cling to the Catholic pre-Alp heaven, he now said. You cannot find a single natural painted face in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, always only a Catholic visage. Just look at any well-painted head here for some length of time, in the end it will be just a Catholic head, Reger said. Even the grass in these paintings grows as Catholic grass and the soup in the Dutch soup bowls is nothing but Catholic soup, Reger now said. Shameless painted Catholicism, that is what it is, Reger said. The reason why I have been coming to the Kunsthistorisches Museum these thirty-six years was only that an ideal temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius is maintained here all the year round, the best temperature not only for the canvas of these works of art but also for my skin and above all for my highly sensitive head, Reger said. Intensive study of art, suicidal method, achieved a certain senior-league championship, Reger now said. No customary law at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, he said, hatred of art basically, incurable art madness. Undoubtedly, my dear Atzbacher, we have nearly reached the peak of our age of chaos and kitsch, he said, adding: the whole of this Austria, when all is said and done, is nothing but a Kunsthistorisches Museum, a Catholic-National-Socialist one, an appalling one. Hypocritical display of democracy, he said. A chaotic rubbishheap, that is what today's Austria is, this ridiculous pygmy state which drips with self-overestimation and which, forty years after the so-called Second World War, has reached its absolute low only as a totally amputated state; this ridiculous pygmy state, where thought has died out and where for half a century now only base state-political dull-wittedness and state-adoring stupidity have reigned, Reger said. A confused brutal world, he said. Too old to disappear, he said, I am too old to make my exit, Atzbacher, eighty-two, you know! Always been alone! Now I am finally trapped, Atzbacher. Wherever we look in this country today, we look into a cesspit of ludicrousness, Reger said. Disastrous mass madness, he said. Everyone is more or less depressive, you know, and we share with Hungary the highest suicide rate in the whole of Europe. I have often thought I would go to Switzerland, but Switzerland would be a lot worse for me still. You have no idea how Ilove this country, Reger said, but I most profoundly hate this present state; I do not wish to have anything to do with this state in future, it gets more nauseating every day. All those acting and ruling in this state have nothing but horrible primitively brainless faces, all you see in this bankrupt country now is a gigantic heap of alarming physiognomic refuse, he said. The things we think and the things we say, believing that we are competent and yet we are not, that is the comedy, and when we ask how is it all to continue? that is the tragedy, mydear Atzbacher. Irrsigler appeared with The Times which Reger had asked him to get for him, he only had to cross the road from the Kunsthistorisches Museum to the newspaper stand opposite. Reger took The Times and got up and walked out of the Bordone Room and, as it seemed to me, with a brisker step, down the great central staircase and into the open, and I followed him. He stopped at the vulgar Maria Theresa Monument and said that I was probably rather astonished that he had still not told me the real reason why he had wished to meet me at the Kunsthistorisches Museum again today. I scarcely believed my ears when he said he had bought two tickets, excellent seats in the stalls, for the Broken Pitcher at the Burgtheater and the real reason why he had asked me to the Kunsthistorisches Museum again today was to invite me to see the Broken Pitcher at the Burgtheater with him. You realize that I have not been to the Burgtheater for decades and that I hate nothing more than the Burgtheater, in fact nothing more than dramatic art generally, he said, but I thought yesterday I will go to the Burgtheater tomorrow and see the Broken Pitcher. My dear Atzbacher, Reger said, I do not know what gave me the idea of going to the Burgtheater today and more particularly with you and with no other person in order to see the Broken Pitcher. Ido not mind if you think me crazy, Reger now said, my days are numbered anyway; I really thought you might go to the Burgtheater with me today, the Broken Pitcher, after all, is the best German comedy and the Burgtheater moreover is the foremost stage in the world. For three hours I was tormented by the thought that I would have to ask you to accompany me to the Broken Pitcher, because I will not see the Broken Pitcher on my own, Reger now said, Atzbacher records, for three tormenting hours I reflected how I could tell you that I have bought two tickets for the Broken Pitcher and in doing so thought only of myself and you, because for decades you have been hearing from me nothing but that the Burgtheater is the most hideous theatre in the world and now, all of a sudden, you are to go with me to see the Broken Pitcher at the Burgtheater, a fact which even Irrsigler cannot understand. Take the second ticket, he said, and come with me to the Burgtheater this evening, share my enjoyment of this perverse folly, my dear Atzbacher, Reger said, Atzbacher records. Very well, I said to Reger, Atzbacher records, if that is your express wish, and Reger said, yes, it is my express wish and handed me the second ticket. I actually went with Reger to the Burgtheater in the evening to see the Broken Pitcher, Atzbacher records. The performance was terrible.