Thomas Bernhard - Extinction

Only recently I told Gambetti that Austrians and Germans had no respect for human beings but respected only titles and diplomas, believing that a human being began to exist only when he had obtained a diploma or received a title and that until that point he was not a human being at all. Gambetti thought this a gross exaggeration, but in the course of our future lessons I shall prove to him that it is not, that these conditions prevail not only in German-speaking Europe but seemingly throughout Europe, and that in a frighteningly short time they will prevail throughout the world. But of course this addiction to diplomas and titles is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon: mankind has always suffered from it. Centuries ago human beings, having insufficient respect for themselves, decided to boost their self-esteem by presenting themselves in the form of diplomas and titles. Uncle Georg used to say, Whenever I go to Austria and sit in a train, I have the impression that the compartment is occupied solely by professorships and doctorates, not by human beings, that the streets are teeming not with young people or old people but with counselors. My father, having qualified at the forestry school, had his diploma framed and hung it over his desk like an altarpiece. My brother, Johannes, did the same after qualifying at the forestry school in Gmunden. They felt that their graduation from these undoubtedly necessary but quite ludicrous academies was the high point of their lives. And my sisters were always squawking about their high school without even being asked about it. The whole world surfers from this addiction to diplomas and titles, which makes it impossible to lead a natural life. But the extreme state of affairs that so depresses you in Austria and Germany has certainly not been reached in the Latin countries, said Uncle Georg. And I don’t think this Austro-German condition will ever prevail there. The Latin peoples are not so narrow-minded and never have been. Natural life still flourishes there, but here it has almost died out. In Germany and Austria natural life has not been possible for centuries, having been extinguished by the craving for diplomas and titles. In early childhood I had a good relationship with my brother, Johannes. He is — or rather was — only a year older than I. Until we started school and our sisters were born we were good friends. But while we were at school our ways diverged. At the age of six, I think, each of us set off in the direction that was to determine his whole life, and we went in precisely opposite directions. While Johannes took more and more to the fields and the woods, I moved with equal determination away from the fields and the woods, with the result that he became more and more bound up with Wolfsegg as I grew farther and farther away from it. In the end he was not just pervaded but dominated by Wolfsegg and, I believe, sucked in and devoured by it, as I was ultimately by the world outside it. Very soon my brother’s favorite words were grain, pigs, pines, and firs, while mine were Paris, London, Caucasus, Tolstoy, and Ibsen, and his repeated attempts to fire me with enthusiasm for his favorite words, like my attempts to inspire him with an interest in mine, soon became pointless. Emulating Uncle Georg, I spent most of my time in our libraries, while Johannes was usually to be found in the stables. He would wait in the cowshed for a cow to calve, while I was busy in the library decoding a sentence by Novalis; as he waited impatiently for the calf to be born in the cowshed, I waited with equal impatience for Novalis’s idea to be born in my head. On graduating from high school he bought himself a sailboat; I spent my graduation present on a trip to Anatolia with Uncle Georg. When Uncle Georg still lived at Wolfsegg I spent every spare minute with him, but my brother had scarcely any interest in Uncle Georg; he preferred to be with my father, whom he accompanied to the fields, the woods, and the mines, and to various offices in the neighboring towns. From the beginning I regarded Uncle Georg as my teacher, while Johannes saw Father as his. And unlike my brother, I did not hang around my mother. I detested the way he always clung to her skirts. I never clung to my mother’s skirts, and I always drew my head away when she made to kiss me. He was forever demanding to be kissed by her. At night, when he was asleep, I often left our shared bedroom and went to Uncle Georg to hear one of his stories; he invented hundreds of them to please me. My brother never dared to flout the rules at Wolfsegg, but I was always flouting them. I left the house whenever I wanted — he did not. I ran down to the village whenever I wanted, to observe the people who lived there — he did not. I talked to the villagers whenever I wanted — he did not talk to them unless he was given permission. Finally, when I had my own room I arranged it to suit my own taste; he would never have thought of doing such a thing. His school-books were always clean and his writing like copperplate; my school-books were always dirty, my writing careless and all but illegible. My brother was always punctual at mealtimes, but I had a problem with punctuality. I encouraged him to join in adventures, but he never encouraged me. The adventures usually ended with his getting hurt and crying, for he was always the clumsier of the two of us, often falling into a stream or a pond, tripping over a root, or grazing his face or his legs on bushes. Such things never happened to me. When I asked him whether he could see something or other in the distance, he never could because he was shortsighted, whereas I have always had good vision. I had no trouble learning to ride a bicycle, but it was ages before he could balance on one. He was no match for me at running. If we had to swim across a river he usually found it too much and had to give up. The consequence of all this was that at a very early age he came not so much to hate me as to develop a strong sense of inferiority, from which he continued to suffer and which ultimately turned into a more or less unbridled hatred that at times revealed itself quite openly. I could, for instance, run down to the village in three minutes, but it took him five. At school he was the most attentive pupil, and when the teacher called out his name he would jump up at once, whereas I was the most inattentive and usually did not hear my name called out, which naturally led to my being punished. Neither of us had friends during our first year at school, as we were not allowed to bring our classmates home and had to go straight back to Wolfsegg after school. But in later years, when we were allowed to bring friends home, we each had friends who were suited to our temperaments and differed as we did. My brother always slept soundly and was fully rested in the morning, but I suffered from sleeplessness, even as a child. I had the wildest and most exciting dreams — he did not. He took a long time to find a particular location on a map — I did not. I loved maps more than anything. I used to spread them out in front of me and go on long imaginary journeys, visiting the most famous cities and traveling the seas in my dream ships. My brother had quite different interests: he would crouch in the corner of the stable and watch the animals. When the Medrano Circus put up its tent in the village — we were five and six at the time — I went down to watch the circus people whenever I had a chance. I was particularly fond of the trapeze artists. For hours I would sit in a hidden corner, watching in admiration as they rehearsed their exciting acts. My brother had no interest whatever in the circus. In winter I would watch the curlers on the ice until I was half frozen, longing to join in the game. At first I was strictly forbidden to, but I soon found a way around this prohibition and went down to the village on my own hook, as they say. I went down to the village whenever I could; as soon as I could walk I was fascinated by the village and by the new and quite different people I saw there. My brother did not share my interest and could never be persuaded to accompany me. This would have been a transgression, and at an early age he rejected the idea on principle, not daring to transgress. I thought nothing of calling at all the houses in the village, introducing myself and talking to the occupants. I made friends with them and observed how they spent their day, taking an interest in their work and their recreation. The more people I met on my forays into the village, which is more than two and a half miles long, the better it suited me. Above all I got to know the simple people and saw how they lived and worked and celebrated special occasions. Until my fourth or fifth year I had no idea that there were any other people outside Wolfsegg, but I soon discovered that there were hundreds, thousands, and millions of them. I visited the tradesmen and watched them at their work — the turner, the shoemaker, the butcher, the tailor. I visited poor people and was surprised to find how friendly they were to me, for I had always been led to believe they were intolerant — as my parents always described them — narrow-minded, unapproachable, stubborn, deceitful, and treacherous. But I discovered that they were kinder than we were up at Wolfsegg, that they were kind and approachable, unlike us, that they were cheerful, unlike us. And suddenly it seemed to me that it was we, not the village people, who were unapproachable, stubborn, deceitful, and treacherous. My parents had told me that the village was a dangerous place, but I discovered that it was not the least bit dangerous. I thought nothing of going in and out of all the doors and looking through all the windows. My curiosity knew no bounds. My brother never accompanied me on my expeditions. On the contrary, he reported them to my parents. He’s been down to the village again, he would say, and look on shamelessly, not batting an eyelid, as I was punished for my offense. My mother would beat me with a rawhide that she always kept in readiness, and my father would box my ears. I had many whippings, but I cannot remember my brother being whipped or having his ears boxed. I was interested in anything that was different, but my brother was not, I thought, examining the photo of him in his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee. I once told Gambetti that my brother was always an affection seeker, but I never was. I tried to explain what I meant by the term. At mealtimes my brother was always silent and never dared to ask a question; I constantly asked questions and was reprimanded by my parents for asking the most impossible questions. I wanted to know everything —no question must remain unanswered. My brother was a slow eater; I always ate hastily, and still do. I always walked fast, wanting to reach my destination as soon as possible; my brother had a slow, one might almost say a deliberate, gait. As for my handwriting, it was fast and careless and, as I have said, almost illegible, whereas he always wrote in a careful, regular hand. When we went to confession he always spent a long time in the confessional, whereas I was in and out in no time. It did not take me long to list the many sins I felt obliged to confess, while he took at least twice as long over the few he had committed. Until I was about twelve we shared the same room, and I recall that in the morning I always dressed very quickly. Hardly had I woken up than I was washed and dressed. Johannes took at least three times as long. Right from the beginning, in fact, he resembled Father more than Mother, at least when it came to quickness, restlessness, curiosity, and percipience. Naturally my essays were better than his, even at primary school, but this did not mean that I got better marks. On the contrary, my marks were always worse than his, even though my essays were undoubtedly better; this is not surprising, however, as our teachers thought the form of an essay more important than the content. I always chose interesting subjects — what I called exotic subjects — when essays were assigned. Johannes always chose the simplest subjects, which he developed and presented in a simple manner, a manner that was not just simple but tedious and pedestrian, while my essays were always composed in a complicated and interesting manner, as is attested by the exercise books lying around in cardboard boxes in our attics. My brother was less interested in widening his knowledge and improving his mind than in winning the teachers’ approval. This was never my aim, and I was never in the teachers’ good books, as they say. They disliked me because they always found me intractable, but they loved my brother because he was so uncomplicated. And instantly obedient. I was often impatient and recalcitrant, and never at a loss for words. He did whatever he was told and never rebelled, whereas I rebelled almost every day and so incurred the hostility of the teachers. Like my family, they were driven to distraction, as I now realize, by all the questions I asked and were nearly always out of their depth. I distrusted them, and my distrust was reciprocated. Unlike my brother, I had no respect for authority. Very early on, Uncle Georg had told me the truth about teachers: that they were moral cowards who took out on the pupils all the frustrations they could not take out on their wives. When I was very young Uncle Georg impressed on me that among the educated classes teachers were the basest and most dangerous people, on a par with judges, who were the lowest form of human life. Teachers and judges, he said, are the meanest slaves of the state — remember that. He was right, as I have discovered not just hundreds but thousands of times. No teacher and no judge can be trusted as far as you can throw him. Without scruple or compunction they daily destroy many of the existences that are thrown upon their mercy, being motivated by base caprice and a desire to avenge themselves for their miserable, twisted lives — and they are actually paid for doing so. The supposed objectivity of teachers and judges is a piece of shabby mendacity, Uncle Georg said — and he was right. Talking to a teacher, we soon discover that he is a destructive individual with whom no one and nothing is safe, and the same is true when we talk to a judge. My brother always began by trusting people and was hurt when they let him down, as they usually did. I, on the other hand, trusted hardly anybody on first acquaintance and was seldom let down. Having been let down so often, he became embittered at an early age and soon took on the embittered features of his father, whom life had generally let down — or rather he took them over, as one takes over a property — and he soon came to resemble his father in every way. How often have I thought to myself, Your brother walks like your father, sits like your father, stands like your father, eats like your father, and strings his words together like your father, in long, ponderous sentences; in thirty years he has become identical with your father. He adopted all the habits of his father, who was my father too. Like him, he very soon became an indolent person, who feigned activity, though in reality he was inactivity personified. He pretended to be constantly on the go, working nonstop and never allowing himself a moment’s rest — and all for the sake of the family, who wished to see him as he pretended to be. The family took this show seriously, not realizing — or not wanting to admit — that they were watching an actor, not the essentially indolent person behind the act. The truth is that my brother did as little work as my father and merely feigned the unremitting activity that they all admired, the dedication to work that satisfied them and in the end satisfied him too, for suddenly even he could no longer see it as a pretense. Throughout his life my father played the part of the immensely hardworking, even work-crazy, farmer who never let up for a moment because, as a good family man, he could not permit himself to. And the same applied to my brother, who naturally copied my father’s act: both of them soon realized that it was sufficient to play at work without actually doing any. Basically they did nothing all their lives but polish their act, and in this field — not to say this art — they became consummate performers. Most people feign work, especially in Central Europe. They constantly play at working and go on polishing their act right into old age, but the act has as little to do with real work as a play has to do with real life. Yet because human beings would rather see life as a play than as real life — which they regard as far too tedious and laborious, indeed as a gross indignity — they prefer playacting to life and, therefore, to work. Unlike the others, I never attached much importance to my father’s capacity for work, knowing that it was for the most part just playacting. So was my brother’s, who imitated and improved on my father’s act in order to show it off to an admiring public. But it is not just in the higher classes, so called, that work is simulated rather than performed; even among supposedly simple people the simulation of work is widespread. Wherever we look, we see work being simulated and activity feigned by people who are in fact idling, doing nothing at all, and creating nothing but mischief instead of making themselves useful. Most workers today believe that all they have to do is put on their blue overalls and do nothing — certainly nothing useful. Having donned their costume, the ubiquitous blue overalls, they rush around all day in this costume and often even break out in a sweat, though it is a spurious sweat, generated not by work but by the simulation of work. Even ordinary people have realized that such simulated work is more profitable than real work, though certainly not healthier — far from it. Today they merely simulate work instead of actually working, and the result is that suddenly every state is on the verge of ruin, as we can see. The truth is that there are no longer any workers, only actors who put on a show of working. Everything is acted, nothing is done. Watching my father at work, I often told myself, He’s only acting, he’s not working at all, and the same applies to my brother. I don’t blame them for simulating work and hoodwinking the public, as the rest of humanity does, I told myself, but they really shouldn’t say at every turn that they’re working themselves to death, let alone that they’re doing it for the family and even, on occasion, for the country. I can honestly say that Father always took it easy at Wolfsegg, and so did my brother. They did not overtax themselves, and under their regime Wolfsegg became generally run-down. Uncle Georg was right when he said to me once, Your father and brother are pretty smart; they pretend to be the family robots, when in fact they’ve turned Wolfsegg into a cozy rural stage on which they make fools of us all. We don’t take advantage of them — they take advantage of us. And we fall for their hypocrisy. If a farmer wants to pass for honest and hardworking, all he has to do is open the farm gate, turn up the sound of grunting pigs, as one turns up the radio, and broadcast the sound from the world of bad conscience. People are actually foolish enough to fall for such tricks. Every morning millions of people slip on their overalls and are taken seriously as workers, though in fact they’re an army of highly skilled idlers who only make mischief and think of their bellies. But the intellectuals are too stupid to see this, said Uncle Georg. Even the feeblest performance by an idle worker or craftsman suffices to give them a bad conscience, provided that he appears in his theater workshop dressed in his blue costume. The intellectuals have only a minor role to play in this revolting workshop, where work and activity have been in the repertory for over half a century, performed with the most spine-chilling professionalism and panache. I’ve nothing against people not wanting to work, said Uncle Georg, but they ought to come clean and admit that they’re lazy, and so spare us this nauseating charade. Your father and your brother are both superb principals on this particular stage. And your mother directs the show, at any rate at Wolfsegg. My sisters, it occurs to me, have a habit of hopping, a hysterical condition acquired in early childhood, which became one of their most striking characteristics. They hop all day long — they don’t walk. They hop from the kitchen into the hall and back, into the drawing room and back. They really don’t walk — they hop. I always see them hopping, like the children they were thirty years ago. Although they now walk normally, they always seem to me to be hopping. I cannot see them walk without imagining that they are still hopping as hysterically as they did when they were little girls with long pigtails. They are now forty and graying, but I still see them hopping when they are actually walking. When I thought I had finally escaped them they would suddenly turn up, hopping and giggling; they never left me in peace but drove me half demented with their giggling. And all day they would sing songs that I hated and do everything possible to torment me. They were always dancing around me, encircling me and pouncing on me, even in my dreams. It was as though my parents had brought them into the world deliberately to spite me. I often woke from a dream in which they were about to kill me. They left my brother alone; they felt no urge to torment him, their greatest pleasure being to drive me to desperation. Their attitude to me was always malign, and they developed a routine for putting their malignity into effect. For a long time I was utterly at their mercy. They spied on me and informed on me, then gloated over the punishments that were meted out to me. They watched gleefully, unable to restrain their giggles, as my mother struck me over the head with the rawhide or my father boxed my ears. I cannot say which of my sisters was the more devilish, for Amalia would first be egged on by Caecilia, then Caecilia by Amalia. To me the so-called weaker sex was at that time the stronger, the more ruthless, as it took the greatest delight in tormenting me, more or less without compunction. My sisters were endlessly inventive and daily devised ever more subtle and diabolical torments. At an early age my sisters formed a conspiracy against me. They were believed, I was not; their word carried conviction, mine did not. And so I resolved to avenge myself. I locked them in the dark, airless larder, pushed them into the pond, or shoved them from behind so that they would fall full-length in their white Sunday-best dresses and get up dirty and bleeding from top to toe. The prospect of the terrible punishment that would ensue did not deter me from wreaking cruel vengeance, in various ways, for their atrocious behavior. I would lead them into the wood, then run away, leaving them in mortal terror and ignoring their cries. But their cruelty to me came first and was from the beginning much worse than any I inflicted on them. In the photo I can see all this cruelty quite plainly; their story and their character are written in their faces. These cruel children grew up into equally cruel adults. As children they might have been called beautiful, but as adults they are downright ugly. It is hard to say which of them is more like her father and which more like her mother. Of course they both inherit everything from their parents, but in a coarsened form. At table they sit like dolls, talking the same twaddle they have talked for decades. They sit down together and jump up together, and if one of them runs to the bathroom the other goes with her. These women are incapable of being alone, even in the bathroom. In winter they used to spend most of their time sitting on the sofa in their room, knitting sweaters that fitted no one and were always a disaster, the ugliest sweaters I have ever seen. Either the sleeves were unequal in length, the back was too wide, or the waist and the neck were too narrow. The garments were sloppily knitted, with excessively large stitches, because my sisters were of course incapable of concentration. And they chose the most tasteless colors. My brother and I had to try on the half-finished sweaters; they would force us into them, pulling and stretching them in all directions, and finally pronounce them a success, though it was obvious from the start that their knitting was indescribably amateurish. At Christmas their hideous knitwear was placed under the tree, and we had to perform the most incredible contortions to get into it, and then we had to admire it. At Wolfsegg on Christmas Eve the whole family sat around in my sisters’ knitwear like a bunch of cripples. It is as though my sisters, with their craze for knitting, were determined to make us look ridiculous in their knitwear, after spending weeks and months locked in a kind of unnatural intercourse with the wool. For months before Christmas Wolfsegg was dominated by wool. Then on Christmas Eve our sisters dressed us all up in their hideous woolen garments and we had to thank them. I have always detested home-knitted garments, just as I detest home cooking and anything else homemade. Canning jars I find a nightmare, and we had hundreds of them at Wolfsegg, not just in the larders but on the cupboards in the other rooms. At an early age the prospect of having to spend the next few decades consuming all the jam that was stored in these jars, carefully labeled by my mother and sisters, filled me with a permanent loathing for everything jarred, especially jam. The larders also contained hundreds of jars full of preserved chicken thighs, pheasant thighs, and pigeon thighs, which were of a dull yellow color that never failed to nauseate me. Although we ate gradually less and less jam and less and less jarred fruit at Wolfsegg, my mother and sisters jammed and jarred increasing quantities; having been obsessed with jamming and jarring for as long as I could remember, they could no longer be cured of this obsession. And every week they made bread crumbs from the stale bread, so that we had whole galleries of jars full of bread crumbs, which were never used, as we no longer had schnitzels, Viennese cooking having gone out of favor. We went in mostly for Parisian-style cooking, which was to my mother’s taste, and at Wolfsegg her taste prevailed in all things. Looking at Wolfsegg, one could see quite plainly that hers was the predominant taste. As soon as she moved in she got rid of all the things my father liked and replaced them with whatever she liked. My father’s house, I have to say, became my mother’s house, and not to its advantage, as is testified by the countless aberrations in the furnishing of the rooms. And not only the rooms: everything at Wolfsegg, even the gardens, gradually came under my mother’s influence and has consequently been deteriorating for a long time. For centuries the gardens at Wolfsegg had formed a park, cultivated in accordance with certain strictly observed principles, until my mother transformed it radically. At one time, as I know from old prints, the grounds consisted of a great tract of natural landscape, but they have since been converted into a more or less conventional and excruciatingly dreary park that could almost be described as suburban. Everything bears Mother’s imprint, so to speak. I have to say that her big ideas have gradually diminished everything. A woman who comes up from nowhere is not necessarily a disaster for an estate like Wolfsegg, but my mother was. My father was weak and lacked the force of character to call a halt to his wife’s megalomaniac idiocies. Indeed, he approved of everything his wife wanted and considered it the sum of all wisdom, welcoming all her errors of taste and extolling them as something good, outstanding, and even magnificent, with the result that she felt increasingly entitled to regard herself as the savior of Wolfsegg and to act accordingly. Yet all the time she was in fact its greatest despoiler. And she soon turned my sisters into obedient and unquestioning assistants, who propagated and promoted her tasteless ideas whenever they could and in time became her two most dangerous mouthpieces. These mouthpieces were always standing, sitting, or lying in wait. Sisters like these are capable of darkening an inherently happy scene, I once told Gambetti. On an estate like Wolfsegg such a mother and such characterless sisters can turn day into night whenever they choose. And they’ve darkened so many days, even years, at Wolfsegg. They’ve quite simply turned the light out on us all, for no other reason than that they felt like it. When a man like my father marries, I told Gambetti, he turns the light out on himself. He no longer lives as he did previously but gropes around more or less clumsily in the darkness, to the delight of those who created the darkness. Men like my father are at first reluctant to embark upon any liaison, let alone marriage, and they continue to put it off until suddenly, fearing that they will otherwise be lost and become a laughingstock, they run into a trap laid by some scheming woman. The trap immediately snaps shut and proves fatal, I told Gambetti. My father, unlike Uncle Georg, was naturally made for marriage, I said, but not to a woman like my mother. He married a woman who destroyed and betrayed him. Naturally I love my mother, I told Gambetti, but I am not blind to her meanness and destructiveness. Baseness comes into its own, I told Gambetti, and morality becomes a joke. Of course there are counterexamples, where a woman appears on the scene and actually saves everything. But this woman, our mother, was bent on destruction. On the other hand, I told Gambetti, this may just be the way I see it. It may be that the situation is really quite different and that without my mother the disaster that’s befallen Wolfsegg would be even greater. Uncle Georg often described the conditions that my mother introduced at Wolfsegg as his biggest stroke of luck. My calculations worked out, he often said. And I have to admit that my own calculations worked out too. It is probable that my development would have been quite different if Wolfsegg had developed differently and my father had married a different woman. I would not be the man I am if Wolfsegg had been different. On the whole I consider myself lucky, especially as I can live in Rome, I told Gambetti, so I’ve no reason to speak of Wolfsegg as a disaster all the time. Yet perhaps I have a sense of guilt, I said, to which I have to admit, over the rather inconsiderate manner in which I left Wolfsegg in its present state. As we know, we hate those who provide for us, and this is partly why I hate Wolfsegg, I told Gambetti, for Wolfsegg provides for me — whether rightly or wrongly is beside the point. We feel hatred only when we’re in the wrong and because we’re in the wrong. I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking — and saying! — that my mother is revolting, that my sisters are equally revolting, and stupid with it, that my father is a weakling and my brother a pathetic fool, that they’re all idiots. I use this way of thinking as a weapon; this is basically contemptible, but it’s probably the only way to assuage a bad conscience. They could just as well rail at me and pillory me for the same malevolence that I’ve discerned in them all these years. We very soon get used to hating and condemning people without ever asking ourselves whether this hatred and condemnation are in any way justified. All in all, we should have most sympathy with poor people, I told Gambetti, because we know ourselves and know that they, like us, lead a miserable existence, whether they want to or not, and have to come to terms with it. Why are we always more ready to dwell on the faults and foibles of others than on their virtues? I asked. But on examining the photos I was forced to revert to my earlier attitude, because they showed my sisters as the ridiculous women they really were. I no longer doubted that they were ridiculous. But do they deserve to be called repulsive? I asked myself. At this time? I felt ashamed but immediately told myself that we could not get outside our own heads, and so I persisted in the belief that my sisters were both ridiculous and repulsive. A so-called family tragedy, I told myself, doesn’t justify us in fundamentally falsifying the image of the family concerned, in yielding to an access of sentimentality and more or less giving up, out of selfishness. No tragedy, not even the most terrible, can justify us in falsifying our thoughts, falsifying the world, falsifying everything — in siding with hypocrisy, in other words. I have often observed that people who throughout their lives have been judged repulsive and distasteful are spoken of after their death as though they had never been repulsive and distasteful. This has always struck me as tasteless and embarrassing. When someone dies, his death does not make him a different person, a better character: it does not make him a genius if he was an idiot, or a saint if he was a monster. It is in the nature of things that we have to endure such a calamity and suffer all its attendant horrors, in the certain knowledge that the true image of the victims has not changed. It is said that we should not speak ill of the dead — but this is base hypocrisy. After the death of somebody who throughout his life was a dreadful person, a thoroughly low character, how can I suddenly maintain that he was not a dreadful person, not a low character, but a good person? We daily witness such tastelessness when someone has died. But just as we should not be afraid to say, when a good person dies, This good person is dead, so we should not be afraid to say, This base, despicable person is dead — with all his faults, we should say, and with all his wonderful and delightful qualities, if he had such qualities. A person’s death must in no way be allowed to distort our image of him. We should tell ourselves that for us he remains what he was, and let him rest in peace. I won’t return to Wolfsegg for a long time, I had told Gambetti, and now I have to return immediately, I thought. I can’t endure Wolfsegg any longer, I had said. I can’t stand the house, any more than I can stand the people, and I now find the climate unbearable. I hadn’t thought it would become unbearable so soon, I had told him. I can’t stand my parents any longer, or my brother and my sisters, but it’s my sisters who get on my nerves most of all, I said. I’ve been in Rome too long, I’ve been abroad too long, I’ve become a foreigner. I find it unendurable to spend a single hour at Wolfsegg; I can’t imagine that I’ll ever go back for any length of time, I told him. Wolfsegg no longer means anything to me; I loathe everything connected with it; the history of Wolfsegg is a crushing burden that I won’t take up again. And now I have to return to Wolfsegg immediately. And under what circumstances, what awful circumstances! I said to myself. Less than four hours earlier I had told Gambetti I would rather not visit Wolfsegg again. It had become intolerable, I had told him. The whole place is a lie, Gambetti, I had said, dominated by an unendurable artificiality that you can’t imagine. These people are deaf to everything that means so much to me, to nature, to art, to anything of real importance. They don’t read, they don’t listen to music, and all day long they talk only about the most futile and banal things. One can’t have a worthwhile conversation with them — only the most depressing one. Whatever I say, they don’t understand me. If I try to explain something to them, they stare at me with a total lack of interest. They don’t have the slightest taste. If I talk about Rome, which is after all the center of the world, it bores them. And the effect is the same if I talk about Paris, or about literature or painting. I can’t mention a single name that’s important to me without being afraid that they’ve never heard it. Everything there is paralyzing, and somehow it’s cold even in summer, so that I always feel frozen. You don’t realize, Gambetti, that these people have nothing on their minds but the most basic concerns — money, hunting, vegetables, grain, potatoes, wood, coal, nothing else. My mother goes on about her stocks and is always saying that she’s made the most disastrous investments. The word warehouse is always on my father’s lips. My brother thinks the world revolves around his sailboat and his Jaguar. And just imagine: the people who visit them are always the most awful people — stupid, ridiculous, dreary people from those dreadful small towns, people with whom one can’t have the slightest conversation. One can’t broach a single topic without coming to an immediate halt. If possible I won’t go back to Wolfsegg for another year, I had told Gambetti, not even for Christmas. That’s another habit that has become repugnant to me, because it’s at Christmas that the mendacity at Wolfsegg reaches its peak. I won’t go to Wolfsegg for at least a year. If I go at all, it’ll be for my father’s birthday, I said, as we stood in front of the Hotel Hassler. This time too I took flight from Wolfsegg and hurt their feelings, I said, though it’s not really possible to hurt their feelings, as they don’t have any. The insensitivity that prevails there defies description, Gambetti. I now find everything Austrian unendurable, and everything German too. Rome has spoiled me for Wolfsegg, I said. Rome has made Wolfsegg impossible. My taste for Wolfsegg was ruined first by London, then by Oxford, then by Paris, and finally by Rome. I don’t know how I could ever have had a bad conscience when I refused to go to Wolfsegg just because they wanted me to, for they didn’t deserve that I should ever go there again — or fly there, I said — and thereby put myself at a disadvantage. I always put myself in the wrong just by turning up at Wolfsegg. I would turn up and immediately be in the wrong. No sooner had I arrived than I put myself at a disadvantage. Everything there is mean and vulgar, I said, if I exclude the few moments I can describe as endurable. Talking to Gambetti, I had worked myself into a state of immense indignation against Wolfsegg. This angry tirade suddenly struck me as utterly perverse and insupportable, but I could not call a halt to it; I had to give it free rein, as I was so overjoyed at being back in Rome. Never before had I been so elated. Unable to restrain myself, I made Gambetti the hapless victim of my tirade against Wolfsegg, which turned into a tirade against everything Austrian, then everything German, and finally everything Central European. I find that the north has become quite unbearable, Gambetti, I said. The farther north I go, the more unbearable it becomes, and to me Wolfsegg lies in the far north. It’s the ultimate dim Thule. Those endless boring evenings, I said, that tasteless food, those undrinkable wines, those labored conversations, which are so excruciating that I can’t describe them to you — I’m just not up to it, my dear Gambetti. You’ve no idea what it means to me to be back in Rome, to be on the Pincio again, to see the Borghese Gardens, to look down from here on my beloved Rome. My revered Rome. My wonderful Rome! Anyone who’s been in Rome as long as I have has simply blocked off all access to a place like Wolfsegg. He can’t go back — it’s become an impossibility. For days I walk around in the various buildings at Wolfsegg, trying to calm myself, and I can’t. For days I walk up and down in my rooms, hoping I’ll be able to endure it, and of course it becomes less and less endurable. For days I try to find ways of surviving at Wolfsegg without constantly feeling that I’ll go mad, but I find none. Five libraries, I said, and such hostility to the intellect! In the Latin countries even the simplest people have some taste, some culture, I said, but at Wolfsegg no one has even a modicum of taste. The Austrians don’t have the slightest taste, or haven’t had for a long time. Wherever you look, tastelessness reigns supreme. And a total lack of interest in everything — as though the stomach were all-important and the mind quite superfluous, I said. Such a stupid people, I said, and such a magnificent country — an incomparably beautiful country. Natural beauty such as you find nowhere else, and a people that has so little interest in it. Such a wonderful age-old culture, and such a barbarous absence of culture today, a devastating anticulture. To say nothing of the dire political conditions. What ghastly creatures rule Austria today! The lowest of the low are now on top. The basest, most revolting people are in power, busily engaged in destroying everything that means anything. Fanatical destroyers are at work, ruthless exploiters who have donned the mantle of socialism. The government operates a monstrous demolition plant that functions nonstop, destroying everything I hold dear. Our towns and cities have become unrecognizable, I said. Great tracts of our countryside have been despoiled. The most beautiful regions have fallen victim to the greed and power-lust of the new barbarians. Wherever there’s a beautiful tree it’s cut down, wherever there’s a fine old house it’s demolished, wherever a delightful brook runs down a hillside it’s ruined. Everything beautiful is trampled under foot. And all in the name of socialism, with the most appalling hypocrisy one can imagine. Anything even remotely connected with culture is suspect, called into question, and obliterated. The obliterators are at work — the killers. We’re up against obliterators and killers, who go about their murderous business everywhere. The obliterators and killers are killing and obliterating the towns, killing and obliterating the landscape. Sitting on their fat arses in thousands and hundreds of thousands of offices in every corner of the state, they think of nothing but obliteration and killing, of how to kill and obliterate everything between the Neusiedlersee and Lake Constance. Vienna has been almost done to death, and Salzburg — all these fine cities, Gambetti, which you don’t know but which are actually among the most beautiful in the world. The landscape we see as we drive through Austria from Vienna has been almost totally killed and obliterated. One eyesore succeeds another, one monstrosity after another forces itself on our eyes. It’s become a perverse lie to say that Austria is a beautiful country. The truth is that the country was destroyed long ago, deliberately devastated and disfigured as a result of perfidious business deals, so that one is hard put to find a single unspoiled spot. It’s a lie to say that Austria is a beautiful country, because the truth is that the country has been murdered. Was it necessary in this century, I asked Gambetti, for humanity to lay violent hands on this most beautiful of all worlds, to kill and obliterate it? The villages, Gambetti, are unrecognizable when we revisit them after a number of years, and so are the inhabitants. What were these people like just a few years ago, and what are they like now? A chronic lack of character has taken hold of them like a deadly disease — greed, ruthlessness, depravity, mendacity, hypocrisy, baseness. They’ll do anything to achieve their base ends, and they employ the utmost ruthlessness in pursuing them. You enter these villages, delighted at the prospect of seeing them again, but you soon turn your back on them, repelled by so much baseness. You visit these once beautiful towns and cities, but by the time you leave them you’re depressed by the crushing certainty that all these towns and cities are lost — disfigured and destroyed by the new barbarism. In order to find them you have to consult old books and engravings, for they have long since been obliterated by the reality of today. All those splendid houses in Upper Austria, in Salzburg, for instance, as well as in Lower Austria, have lost their faces. Their handsome, centuries-old faces have been disfigured by today’s insane fashions. Everything beautiful has been ripped out, so that now, utterly mutilated, they stare scornfully at the horrified visitor who remembers them as they once were. Nothing but ruined facades, I told Gambetti. It’s as if all these towns and cities had been visited by a hideous plague, a deadly disease unknown in earlier times. What’s more, I told Gambetti, whole sections of the towns have been eviscerated and mutilated. The surface of the earth has been disfigured by architects, egged on and abetted by cynical politicians. At first it seemed as though our towns and our countryside had been ravaged by war, but they have suffered far greater ravages during the perverse peace that followed, thanks to the unscrupulous deals done by our rulers and the activities of their henchmen, the architects, who were given unlimited license. And what havoc the architects have wrought in these decades! The destruction we suffered in the war is mild by comparison, I told Gambetti. And in no country has the work of destruction been carried out with such horrendous efficiency as in Austria. Or so unscrupulously. The nation has been hoodwinked; the country and its cities have been mutilated and virtually obliterated, I said. For decades the utmost tastelessness has been preached and propagated. Among our rulers we have had so many unscrupulous profiteers, so many obliterators of our state, and hence of our country, that it doesn’t bear thinking about; they all held on to their cabinet seats long enough to promote and carry through the destruction and annihilation of our landscape and our cities. But in a country where vulgarity and tastelessness prevail it’s no wonder that the results are so ubiquitously shattering. For while these people were in power, destroying, despoiling,