Thomas Bernhard: Extinction

and more or less obliterating the landscape and the cities, they were simultaneously destroying the nation’s soul, its whole mentality. The souls of my compatriots have been depraved, I said, their characters vulgarized and debased. A malign atmosphere prevails everywhere. Wherever you go you come up against this malign and depraved mentality. You think you’re talking to a decent person — which he might have been once — only to discover that he’s the lowest of the low. There’s been a universal character switch, the effect of which is that anyone who once was decent has been corrupted and reveals his depravity in every way, making no attempt to suppress it, but displaying it quite openly. You go into a village that you remember as friendly and welcoming, but you very soon discover that it has become malign and hostile and that you meet only with sullen suspicion. The whole of Austria has been turned into an unscrupulous commercial concern in which everything is bargained for and everyone is defrauded. You think you’re visiting a beautiful country, but in reality you’re visiting a monstrous business enterprise. You think you’re entering a land of culture, but you’re dismayed by the primitive mentality you encounter everywhere. From the very beginning you find yourself in a brainless atmosphere in which you can hardly breathe, I told Gambetti. It’s as though all the monuments, including those that were set up as recently as the last century, were dismayed too as they surveyed the indescribable chaos created by our present rulers. You can’t imagine how repulsive it’s all become, Gambetti, I said, how charmless. Nothing so repulsive and charmless would be possible in Italy, I said, or in Spain. In no other country have they taken the brainless slogans of progress as seriously as in Austria, I said, and thereby ruined everything. Everything brainless is taken seriously in Austria, I told Gambetti, in deadly earnest — and you know what that means. Until now I always thought socialism was a temporary nervous disorder that was basically harmless, I told Gambetti, but in reality it’s a deadly disease. I mean the socialism that prevails today, which is just a sham, Gambetti, a spurious socialism that relies on shameless pretense. Today we don’t have real socialism anywhere in the world, only the mendacious, simulated variety, as you should know. Today’s socialists are not real socialists but devious dissemblers. This century has succeeded in dragging the honored name of socialism in the dirt to such an extent that you want to throw up. The inventors of true socialism, who actually believed in it and thought they’d established it for all time, would turn in their graves if they could see what their unspeakable successors have made of it. They’d turn in their graves if they could open their eyes again and see everything that’s peddled and purveyed to the peoples of the world under the honored name of socialism. They’d turn in their graves if they could see the dirty tricks that are played in Europe and the rest of the world under the cover of this honored name. They’d turn in their graves if they knew about this gigantic political misappropriation. They’d turn in their graves, turn in their graves, I repeated several times. I won’t go back to this country for a long time, not for a year at least, I had told Gambetti. And now I had to go back at once. In the photograph my brother has a rather depressed posture, almost cowering, I thought, although he makes quite an elegant impression. He’s a countryman, whereas I’m a townsman, a metropolitan, and always have been. He’s instantly recognizable as a countryman, however fashionably he’s dressed. Like his father, who usually wore city clothes but could at once be recognized as a countryman. From time to time, to please my mother, they go — or used to go — to Vienna, taking in an opera (at Easter it would be Parsifal ) and having supper at the Sacher. After breakfast the three of them would go for a walk across the Graben and along the Kärntnerstrasse as far as the Ring. If they were feeling generous they would take my aunt Elisabeth with them. They wore city clothes but were immediately recognizable as country folk. They would visit the most famous shops, and my mother would choose the very best dresses, which were at the same time the most tasteless — Milan and Paris designs that she would then wear to the theater in Linz or to concerts in Salzburg, for which they had had subscriptions for years. My brother looks healthier in the picture than he really was. He harbored all his father’s ailments, but they had not yet manifested themselves, as they had in Father’s case; they were biding their time and had not yet broken out. Yet in the photo I could already discern them in his face and his generally pathetic posture. I once said to Gambetti, They all have pathetic physical attitudes, which match their pathetic mental attitudes. Everything about them is pathetic, outwardly and inwardly, and I explained to Gambetti what the word pathetic meant. It has no equivalent in Italian and is not easy to translate. They went to the opera or the theater and were basically terribly bored, but at the end of the performance they always clapped enthusiastically and made no attempt to appear sophisticated, having paid so much money for their tickets. They always paid the standard price, which no Viennese would dream of doing. The Viennese never pay the full price for their tickets but at most pay half price, leaving the full price to foreigners and provincials, who always clap most because they’ve paid so much for their seats. We always had to stand with Mother in front of the famous shops, which were not always the best shops, and gaze at the window displays. She would then go in, head held high, and I never knew her to leave without having made a purchase. After visiting two or three shops we had to walk beside her, loaded with large parcels, and it was only when they became too heavy for us that she would relent and agree to take a rest at the Sacher or the Bristol, where we usually stayed. She would have loved to buy up everything and take it all home to Wolfsegg. What are you going to do with all these things? my father would ask. You won’t wear them. You can’t wear them at Wolfsegg because that would be ridiculous, and in Salzburg nobody will appreciate how expensive they are, or in Linz for that matter, let alone in Wels. They’ll all hang in the closet and go out of fashion, and then you’ll sell them or give them away. But Mother would have none of this. They always returned from Vienna with a dozen parcels, and at least half a dozen more would arrive subsequently, containing items that she had bought surreptitiously, without witnesses. Mother spent a fortune on clothes, but she never wore them, or wore them only two or three times, after which she would throw them away or hand them on. But heaven forbid that my sisters should ever fancy designer dresses like hers! They were not allowed to buy a single dress in Vienna, even when they were forty. Even at forty they had to make do with one or two dresses from the sales in Wels, since our Lambach dressmaker was still the chief purveyor of their wardrobe, which consisted, as I have said, of the revolting dirndls that their mother had made for them twice a year. They were not even allowed to choose the cloth, because Mother did not trust their taste, though she herself had no taste whatever. The dirndls always turned out either too large or too small, or the colors clashed, or the collars were too wide or too narrow, or the sleeves too long or too short. The skirts were always at least eight inches too long, and the aprons never matched the dresses. Mother always dressed her daughters like dolls. She treated them as if they were dolls and never saw them as anything other than dolls. Like so many mothers, she regarded her daughters as dolls from the day each was born, and one could probably say without exaggeration that she gave birth to them not as human beings but as dolls. Even in adulthood she had to have one or more dolls to play with. Her daughters were never more than dolls and thus satisfied her passionate play instinct; as a result she would never let go of them. They always had to react like dolls. Every day she dressed them, fed them, and took them for walks like dolls, and at night she would put them to bed like dolls. Even at forty, it seems, these dolls, my sisters, are still subservient to my mother’s play instinct. And my brother was a puppet all his life — Punch, so to speak. She brought him up as a reserve puppet, in anticipation of the time when her premier puppet, her husband, would no longer be around. To my mother, with her craze for dolls, my sisters were actually talking dolls that could be made to laugh or cry when she wished and dressed and undressed when she wished, while her husband and son were puppets, whose strings she pulled whenever the mood took her. Mother was governed by a quite perverse play instinct. She turned Wolfsegg into a perfectly regimented dolls’ world in which everyone obeyed her orders to the letter. Wolfsegg was her dolls’ house, its surroundings her dolls’ world. Not wanting to be a doll in a dolls’ house, I soon removed myself from this dolls’ house and this dolls’ world, which seem even more oppressive and hideous when viewed from outside, from a distance. Wolfsegg is a dolls’ house, I told Gambetti, and its surroundings nothing more or less than a dolls’ world, ruled by my mother in the most ruthless and inhuman fashion. Gambetti laughed loudly, accusing me of monstrous overstatement and telling me that I was a typical Austrian pessimist with a grotesquely negative outlook. I replied that my over statements were in fact monstrous under statements and that the Wolfsegg I had described to him was idyllic by comparison with the real Wolfsegg. Gambetti, I said, you can’t imagine Wolfsegg; you’ve never had the opportunity to visit such a hideous dolls’ house. There’s no other such hideous dolls’ landscape in the world. My father, I said, is a puppet of well over seventy, with moribund limbs and a head that’s become dull and hard from being tugged at all its life. My brother is a puppet in its forties that similarly doesn’t resist the constant tugging at its head and has given up defending itself against its unspeakable puppet mother. The Germans have a mother fixation, I said, and so have the Austrians. Mothers are not to be questioned, mothers are sacred, but in fact most of them are perverse puppet mothers who tug at the heads of their families until they’ve tugged them to death. Germany and Austria don’t have mothers like those in the Latin countries, who are natural mothers, not puppet mothers, I said. In Germany and Austria there are only puppet mothers, who spend all their lives relentlessly tugging at their puppet husbands and puppet children until these puppet husbands and puppet children have been tugged to death. In Central Europe there are no longer any natural mothers, only artificial mothers, puppet mothers who bring artificial children into the world. Even in the remotest Alpine valleys you won’t find natural mothers any longer, only artificial mothers. And it’s self-evident that an artificial mother invariably gives birth to an artificial child, which goes on to procreate another. As a result we now have only artificial human beings, not natural human beings. It’s a fallacy to call human beings natural, for none of them is. What we have now is the artificial human being, and we’re alarmed when we come across a natural human being again, because it’s something we’re not prepared for, because for so long we’ve been confronted only with artificial human beings, who’ve been ruling the world for ages, a world that long ago ceased to be a natural world and is now thoroughly artificial, Gambetti, an artificial world. The artificial world produced the artificial human being, and conversely the artificial human being produced the artificial world. Nothing is natural any longer, I said. We start from the premise that everything is natural, but that’s a fallacy. Everything is artificial, everything is artifice. Nature no longer exists. We always start from the contemplation of nature, when for ages we should have been starting from the contemplation of artifice. That’s why everything’s so chaotic. So false. So desperately confused. Where there’s no nature there can be no contemplation of nature, Gambetti — that must be obvious. The photo of my brother getting into his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee shows him posing as a happy person, but in the photo he is the unhappiest person imaginable. In the photo taken in front of Uncle Georg’s villa in Cannes my sisters are frozen in an expression of happiness that makes them look far unhappier than they really are. My father and mother, pictured at Victoria Station in London, look as unhappy as they are, while trying to look happy. I wonder why it is that when people have themselves photographed they always want to look happy, or at any rate less unhappy than they are. Everybody wants to appear happy, never unhappy, to project a falsified image, never a true image of the unhappy person he is. Everyone wants to be portrayed as good-looking and happy, when they are in fact ugly and unhappy. They take refuge in the photograph, they deliberately shrink into the photograph, which produces a totally false image, showing them as happy and good-looking, or at least not as ugly and unhappy as they are. What they demand of the photograph is an ideal image of themselves, and they will agree to anything that produces this ideal image, even the most dreadful distortion. It never strikes them how appallingly they compromise themselves. The good-looking person in a photograph is invariably the ugliest, the happy one invariably the unhappiest. They have photographs taken of themselves and hang them on their walls as representations of a happy and beautiful world, though in reality it is the unhappiest, ugliest, and falsest of all worlds. All their lives they stare at the happy pictures on their walls and are gratified by them, though they ought to be appalled. But because they don’t think, they are shielded from the awful knowledge that they are unhappy, ugly, and false. They even show visitors these pictures in which they think they are portrayed as happy and good-looking people, though the visitors can see at a glance how ugly, unhappy, and stupid their hosts really are. They are not even ashamed to show them to people who actually know them and can therefore recognize them on the photos as mendacious and totally false individuals, totally lost souls. We live in two worlds, I told Gambetti — the real world, which is mean, depressing, and ultimately deadly, and the world of the photograph, which is thoroughly false, though it is regarded by most people as the ideal world. If you deprived people of their photographs, if you ripped them off their walls and destroyed them, once and for all, you’d deprive them of more or less everything. Hence, there’s nothing people cling to so much, nothing they rely on so much, as the photograph. The photograph is their salvation, Gambetti. At this Gambetti laughed and called me a forenoon fantasist. I had never heard the expression before and it made me laugh. Gambetti joined in my laughter, and we both savored the joke. Without the art of exaggeration, I told him, we’d be condemned to an awfully tedious life, a life not worth living. And I’ve developed this art to an incredible pitch, I said. To explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear. Even the risk of being branded as fools ceases to worry us as we get older. In later years there’s nothing better than to be declared a fool. The greatest happiness I know, Gambetti, is that of the aging fool who is free to indulge his foolishness. Given the chance, we should proclaim ourselves fools by age forty at the latest and capitalize on our foolishness. It’s foolishness that makes us happy, I said. I put the photograph of my brother, Johannes, at the top and the one of my parents at Victoria Station at the bottom. The effect was amazing: my brother and my parents related quite differently to my sisters, who were now in the middle. My sisters were always defensive in their attitude to my brother, though not as obviously as in their attitude to me; their defensiveness toward him was more covert. They needed him, but they did not need me. He was their future provider, and so they always had to treat him quite differently from me, from whom they had nothing to fear. To their parents, their immediate providers and protectors, they owed respect and consideration, and therefore subservience. To Johannes too, their indirect provider and protector, they owed respect and consideration, but only when necessary, not all the time. To me they owed neither, because they never saw me as a potential provider and protector. I was easiest to deal with, the one to whom no respect was due. But they still had to consider me — for a quite different reason: they had to protect themselves against me, because I always appeared unpredictable and inscrutable, though they never regarded me as a vital person on whom they were dependent, or would be one day. One day they would be dependent on Johannes, but not on me. Their dependence on their parents automatically called for respect, consideration, subservience, and so forth. Though according me neither respect nor consideration, they were wary of me. The position of my brother’s photo, now at the top, signified that he was the most important member of the family, whereas my parents, now at the bottom, counted for much less. My sisters did not have an easy time with any of them — either with their present providers and protectors, due shortly to step down, or with their brother, due shortly to take over. I was accorded neither respect nor consideration; at first I was feared, but only until I left Wolfsegg more or less forever. I naturally posed no threat to them from Rome, or even from London or Vienna. I no longer counted, as they say. And now, I thought, looking at their two mocking faces, disaster has overtaken them, for now I am the one they depend on — there’s no doubt about that. With my parents and my brother dead, Wolfsegg has passed to me. This is a legal fact. Three weeks earlier I had said to Gambetti, When I get back from Caecilia’s wedding I won’t return to Wolfsegg for a long time. Wolfsegg is over for me. I no longer have any reason to go there; I no longer need Wolfsegg, and the people there don’t need me. What is the wine cork manufacturer like? he asked. I tried to tell him. I also told him what a dreadful place Freiburg was — petit bourgeois, Catholic, unbearable. But maybe this man’s a good match for Caecilia, I said. He could be her salvation. I never expected either of my sisters to marry. They had never shown any inclination, and their parents, especially their mother, did all they could to prevent their marrying. My aunt in Titisee engineered this marriage, I told Gambetti, this utterly ludicrous alliance. Just imagine: a wine cork manufacturer suddenly gains entrée to Wolfsegg! A Catholic petit bourgeois who had to be told by my mother that one didn’t turn up for dinner wearing suspenders! A German from the most German corner of the sticks, I told Gambetti, from the Black Forest, where the foxes say good night and German stolidity reigns supreme. I was not afraid of the wine cork manufacturer, or of my sisters. Yet although I was not afraid of them, it was clear that I would find them trying, desperately trying, in this dreadful situation. Occasionally it had occurred to me, as I once told Gambetti, that Amalia might marry one day, but never Caecilia. And now there they are, wholly reliant on me, with the intensest expectations and misgivings. Perhaps the grave has already been dug, I said to myself; perhaps the black banners are already draped from the windows at Wolfsegg. The last time the black banners were out was when Uncle Georg died. Half an hour after getting word of his death they were all running around in black. I wished Uncle Georg was still alive. He would have made everything much easier for me. The mocking faces of my sisters, captured on the photo, are doubly comic, I thought. The mockery comes from having been dominated by their mother for so many years, I told myself. These mocking faces were their only weapon. Amalia has withdrawn to the Gardeners’ House and now hates Caecilia, and Caecilia probably married the wine cork manufacturer just to spite her mother, who had always forbidden them to make overtures to men. Amalia must hate the one who got away. She at once made common cause with her mother in the hope of destroying Caecilia’s marriage. Knowing her as I do, she’s probably sitting on a stool in the Gardeners’ House, wondering how best to break up her sister’s unexpected and wholly undesirable marriage. Mother and daughter hatched a plot against Caecilia’s marriage. No good will come of this marriage between my sister and a wine cork manufacturer from the Black Forest, I had told Gambetti before leaving for the wedding. Sooner or later it’ll come apart. They’re all against it, and Caecilia is no match for the wine cork manufacturer, stupid though he is. My sister’s triumph, the trick she’s brought off, will one day end in disaster, I told Gambetti. She won’t stick it out in the Black Forest. She suspects this already: that’s why she didn’t want to go to the Black Forest with her husband straight after the wedding. She thinks she can stay on at Wolfsegg without him, but that’s absurd. She’ll have to go with him, like it or not. He’ll force her to. You can’t enter into a marriage just for appearance’ sake and in order to punish your mother, and then refuse to make it a real marriage. This man must feel totally out of place at Wolfsegg, totally miserable, I told Gambetti, and if it’s money he’s after, I think he has completely miscalculated. He has nothing whatever to expect — Mother will see to that. She’s known and feared for her shrewdness in legal matters. If he isn’t a fortune hunter, I said, I wonder what made him marry Caecilia? Caecilia’s anything but attractive, anything but marriageable. And the same goes for Amalia. But of course we often wonder what couples find attractive in each other, what induces them to marry. How is it possible — why these two? we ask ourselves, and we find no answer. We may know somebody as a certain type of person and be convinced that he will under no circumstances marry this or that person whom we know equally well. We find it totally inconceivable, yet these very people do marry, and no one can say that the marriage will be unhappy — though quite often it turns out to be the unhappy marriage that we foresaw and warned against, without being listened to. Perhaps the wine cork manufacturer thinks he’s chosen the right moment, I told Gambetti, but I think he’s made an enormous mistake. You see, my sister Caecilia is as artful as a wagonload of monkeys, and so is Amalia. Stupidity doesn’t preclude cunning. And it’s a well-known fact that the stupidest people are the most dangerous — that is to say, when stupidity is allied with baseness, I told Gambetti, without feeling the least compunction. It occurred to me now that I had only ever told Gambetti disagreeable and distasteful things about my family, because I had always thought it quite natural to reveal my feelings, and in recent years I had had the most disagreeable and distasteful feelings for my family. There had been no occasion to tell him of any other feelings. Disagreeable things. Distasteful things. Absurd things at best. And I had never felt embarrassed about it. You must never dissemble with Gambetti, I always told myself, you mustn’t let him catch you in a lie or any kind of dishonesty. After all, you’re his teacher, and a teacher is expected to be truthful and honest — that goes without saying. Your relationship with Gambetti is one of absolute trust. You must never take refuge in prevarication, let alone lying, even if this makes you appear inconsiderate, even mean. And there is no doubt that I am at times inconsiderate and mean. It is a danger that no thinking person can avoid; he has to reckon with it, resign himself to it, and live with it. He must plead guilty and not try to deny his guilt. Wolfsegg has become absolutely impossible, I told Gambetti. The atmosphere there is stifling — it’s enough to drive you to distraction! On the other hand, Gambetti, if only you could see those magnificent rooms, those vaulted ceilings, those hallways, and the columned courtyard where as a child I used to keep deer in winter! In winter my brother Johannes and I used to keep two deer, one each, in the courtyard. These were deer that had been slightly injured, I explained. We used to feed them, talk to them, and nurse them back to health, and in the spring we set them loose. They wintered there and survived. My brother and I invented names for them, names like Sarabande and Locarnell. When we set them loose in the spring they had naturally become used to us and didn’t want to leave. We would then go through the woods and collect all the dead deer that hadn’t survived the winter and bury them, helped by the foresters. I always got along best with the foresters. They were my best friends, whom I loved more than anyone. I knew all their names, and they used to joke with me; I used to ask them to tell me about themselves, and they did so readily. I was always attracted to simple people, I told Gambetti. I felt good when I was with them, and only when I was with them. I was entirely at one with them. They always talked quietly and never too much. They had a simple, unaffected way of talking. They didn’t pretend, unlike other people, who are always pretending. There’s no doubt, I told Gambetti, that at one time, in my early childhood and for a long time while I was at school, Wolfsegg was paradise. And I knew that it was paradise. But this paradise soon darkened and turned gradually into limbo, and ultimately into hell. I wanted to get out of this hell, I wanted to leave it as quickly as possible. I couldn’t wait to go to boarding school and finally to Vienna, though I had no idea what was to become of me, what I could make of myself, where I ought to start in order to progress in the right direction. I loved the books I had read and those I still had to read, the infinite number of books in which I imagined more or less everything had been written. I can honestly say that even as a child I loved the life of the mind more than anything else, but I had no idea what I should do in order to be able to take part in it, to have a share in the life of the mind, which attracted me so much, and to lead such a life myself. I had no one to advise me until Uncle Georg got to see my grades and gave me the first hint on how I should proceed. In the first place you must free yourself entirely from your family, he said. You must make yourself completely independent, first inwardly and then outwardly. And I followed his advice: I made myself free, first inwardly, then outwardly. And of course you must get away from Wolfsegg, he said. You must ignore the views and opinions of your family at Wolfsegg and leave Wolfsegg despite them; you mustn’t follow their advice, which would be tantamount to chaining yourself to Wolfsegg for life, sacrificing yourself to Wolfsegg. You must do the precise opposite of what they advise; you must never share their views, because their views are contrary to yours and therefore harmful to your development. Their advice is no good, their opinion is no good, he told me. Of course they always say they want what is best for you, as you know, but they’re against you. They’ll do everything to chain you to themselves, and if you don’t let yourself be chained they’ll do everything they can to destroy you. It will require the greatest effort, a supreme effort, to escape from them, to pit your implacability against theirs. You’re capable of asserting yourself against them and making yourself independent, Uncle Georg said, but I must tell you that you’ll pay the very highest price. You must pay this price. I paid a very high price to become independent of Wolfsegg, it seems to me. Uncle Georg was right. I pitted my implacability against theirs, and it proved the stronger, because it was the more uncompromising. What it cost me to escape to Vienna, that useless city, as they called it! What it cost me to go to England and finally to Paris! What it cost me to gain my inner freedom, which was the prerequisite for my outward freedom! I owe my independence to my uncle Georg, I told Gambetti on the Pincio as I handed over Kafka’s Trial, which had excited me even more on a second reading than it had on the first. There are some writers, I told Gambetti, who excite the reader much more the second time he reads them than they did the first time. With me this always happens when I read Kafka. I remember Kafka as a great writer, I told Gambetti, but when I reread him I’m absolutely convinced that I’ve read an even greater writer. Not many writers become more important, more impressive, on a second reading. Most of them, on a second reading, make us feel ashamed of having read them even once. This is an experience we have with hundreds of writers, but not with Kafka, not with the great Russians — Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Lermontov — and not with Proust, Flaubert, and Sartre, whom I rate among the very greatest. It’s not at all a bad method, I think, to reread the writers who impressed us when we first read them, as we then discover that they’re either far greater than we thought, far more significant, or else not worth talking about. In this way we avoid having to carry around an enormous literary ballast in our minds all our lives, a ballast that ultimately makes us sick, mortally sick, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. Uncle Georg taught me more or less everything that’s been important to me in later life. He was my teacher, no one else. It was he who brought me up, no one else. My parents didn’t bring me up, they dragged me up, until the age of eight or nine, and Uncle Georg had to step in and gradually undo the almost total havoc they had wrought. He went to immense pains, I told Gambetti, to turn my totally chaotic mind into one that was acceptable and receptive. My parents believed that they were bringing me up, but they actually destroyed me, just as they destroyed my brother and my sisters. Instead of talking about bringing me up, they should have talked about bringing me down. Thanks to their upbringing, which was purely and simply a process of destruction, as I have said, everything in my mind was mutilated beyond recognition, to borrow a phrase that is normally used in a different context. In their brutal Catholic National Socialist way they had stirred things around in my young mind and created total confusion, so that it took Uncle Georg just as long to raise order out of my mental chaos as it had taken them to create the chaos. Instead of educating us, our parents actually mutilated our minds. Being Catholics first and foremost, I told Gambetti, they ruined our minds with their appalling Catholic methods. The Catholic Church can do unimaginable harm to a child’s mind if the parents are Catholic and adhere more or less automatically to the Catholic religion. To say that we had a Catholic upbringing amounts to saying that we were utterly destroyed, Gambetti. Catholicism is the supreme annihilator of the child’s soul, the supreme inspirer of terror, the supreme destroyer of character. That’s the truth. Untold millions owe it to the Catholic Church that they have been utterly destroyed, that their lives have been ruined, their nature denaturized. The Catholic Church has the destruction of the human personality on its conscience — that’s the truth. For the Catholic Church won’t tolerate any human being other than the Catholic human being. Its unswerving aim is to turn human beings into Catholics, mindless creatures who’ve forgotten how to think for themselves and betrayed independence of thought to the Catholic religion — that’s the truth, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. We country children always delighted in Catholic ritual, which at first seemed like a fairy tale, Gambetti, undoubtedly the most beautiful we knew. And for the grown-ups it was a lifelong spectacle, the only one they knew. But the fairy tale and the spectacle have between them perverted and destroyed all that’s natural in human beings. Using the fairy tale for children and the spectacle for adults, the Catholic Church pursues a single aim, the total seduction of all who fall into its clutches. It uses the fairy tale and the spectacle to bend them to its will, to extinguish them as human beings, to turn them into unthinking Catholics who have no will of their own and whom it insolently calls the faithful. The Catholic faith, like all faiths, is a perversion of nature, a sickness to which millions succumb quite deliberately because it’s their only salvation, the salvation of the weak, who are quite incapable of independent thought and, having no minds of their own, need a higher mind to think for them. Catholics allow the Church to think for them and consequently act for them, because this makes their lives easier and they’re convinced they can’t do otherwise. And the Catholic mind of the Catholic Church has a terrible way of thinking, I told Gambetti, wholly self-serving and inimical to human nature, conducive only to its own ends and its own glory. No other state in Europe calls itself a Catholic state, I told Gambetti, or allows the Catholic mind to do its thinking, and the results are plain to see. In Austria there are only Catholics, no human beings with free and independent minds. In Austria the Catholic mind does all the thinking. Nothing has been changed by the various political turnarounds of recent years: in Austria even the socialists allow the Catholic mind to do their thinking for them, as they haven’t developed a socialist mind. Everywhere we’re confronted by the Catholic spirit, which has admittedly given us hundreds and thousands of Catholic works of art but destroyed the spirit of freedom and independence, the only natural spirit. What use are these works of art, these Catholic churches and palaces, when for centuries we’ve had no minds of our own? I asked Gambetti. Our nation suffers from chronic mental debility, I told Gambetti, which the Church has exploited more than in any other European country, even more than in Germany, where a degree of intellectual freedom and self-sufficiency still survives. In our country the Catholic Church has never had any difficulty in bringing the necessary pressure to bear and forcing the Austrian people, and hence the Austrian state, into total submission. Only in recent decades have there been hints of emancipation from Catholic dominion, from the monstrous pressure of the Church, from the age-old stranglehold of Catholicism. Only recently has it become possible to discern, here and there, the tentative emergence of a kind of thinking and philosophizing that owes nothing to Catholicism, I told Gambetti. Only in recent decades have a few Austrian minds begun to think independently, to use their Austrian heads, not just their Catholic heads. Catholicism is to blame for the fact that for so many centuries Austria had no philosophers, no philosophical thought, no philosophy. It’s fair to say that in the last thousand years all thought has been ruthlessly suppressed by the Catholic Church. And the nation has made life easy for itself under the aegis of the Catholic mind, which has always done its thinking for it, on a proxy basis and in its own way, I told Gambetti. In the last thousand years Catholicism and the Habsburgs have had a devastating effect, a lethal effect, on the nation’s spirit, as all the evidence shows. In these thousand years, one can say, Catholicism extirpated thought and ushered in an efflorescence of music. The mind having been suppressed for centuries, Austria became the land of music. Having become a thoroughly mindless people during the centuries of Catholicism, I told Gambetti, we are now a thoroughly musical people. Having been driven out of our minds by Catholicism, we have allowed music to flourish. True, this has given us Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert, I said, yet I can’t applaud the fact that we have Mozart but have lost our minds, that we have Haydn but have forgotten how to think and given up trying, that we have Schubert but have become more or less brainless. No other country, I told Gambetti, has allowed the Catholic Church to rob it so unscrupulously of the faculty of thought, no other country has allowed itself to be decapitated, as it were, by Catholicism. We have no Montaigne, no Descartes, no Voltaire, I told Gambetti, only monkish and aristocratic poetasters with their Catholic inanities. In recent years, I told Gambetti, we’ve seen the beginnings of a change, but it’ll take centuries, not just decades, to repair the intellectual depredations of Catholicism. If they can be repaired. Our nation has allowed itself to be exploited more than any other by the Catholic Church. For nearly a thousand years! It will be hard put to break free from the Catholic stranglehold, from the talons of the Church. Superficial and amateurish revolutions won’t do any good, I told Gambetti, as we see from the experience of other European countries. We can be saved only by a fundamental and radical revolution, starting with the total destruction and demolition of everything, literally everything. But at present we’re too feeble to mount such a fundamental and radical revolution. We’re not ready for it and daren’t even contemplate it. We Austrians are so enfeebled, so witless, that anything fundamental and radical is impossible. We Austrians have been utterly enfeebled for well over a century. My parents naturally didn’t think of giving me anything but a Catholic upbringing; they couldn’t have imagined any other, I told Gambetti. From time immemorial every generation at Wolfsegg has had a Catholic upbringing. Until Uncle Georg appeared on the scene. He was against Catholicism, and this meant that he was against everything. Uncle Georg prepared the way for me, pointing me first to the idea, then to the way to realize it, the alternative way, I told Gambetti. Just imagine, I said: in our libraries the secular books, as one might call them, were kept under lock and key, unlike the Catholic books. The bookcases containing the secular books had been locked for decades, if not for centuries. Only the Catholic books were accessible, while the secular books were locked up, inaccessible, not to be read. It was as if they’d locked up the free spirit in the bookcases reserved for non-Catholic books, for Voltaire and Montaigne but not for the hundreds and thousands of leather-bound volumes containing the collected inanities of numerous monks and counts. Voltaire, Montaigne, Descartes, and the like were to be sealed up in these bookcases in perpetuity — just imagine! These bookcases had never been opened, until one day Uncle Georg insisted on it. To my family it seemed as if he had opened a canister that had been sealed for centuries and would emit a dire poison as soon as it was opened, a poison from which they instantly fled, believing it to be lethal. They never forgave Uncle Georg for opening this canister and releasing the spiritual poison. They always thought that Uncle Georg had poisoned Wolfsegg by breaking the ancient seal imposed on the spirit and opening the bookcases that had been locked tight for centuries. Wolfsegg suddenly caught a whiff of the free spirit, not just the odor of Catholic imbecility; Descartes and Voltaire were now in the air, not just Catholicism and National Socialism. My family never forgave Uncle Georg. They believed they had confined the evil spirit in these locked bookcases, and Uncle Georg had released it. But it was not long before they reconfined it, when Uncle Georg left Wolfsegg, turning his back on them and settling in Cannes. Just imagine; on the Riviera, the coast inhabited by the devil and equated by my family with hell. The moment Uncle Georg left Wolfsegg with his two suitcases, their most pressing concern was to recapture the evil spirit that polluted Wolfsegg and confine it once more in their bookcases, which this time were not just double-locked but treble-locked. They obdurately refused to let me reopen them, and as I now recall, I was too scared to insist. Even at the age of over twenty I wasn’t allowed to open them. In the end I gave up trying because I dreaded the recurrent quarrels. In Vienna I began to assemble a library of my own, I told Gambetti, which would contain everything that Uncle Georg had identified as essential reading for a so-called intellectual. Before long I had spent almost all my disposable funds on collecting the most important books and assembling my own library of the evil spirit, as it were, and naturally I started with Montaigne and Descartes, Voltaire and Kant. Finally I had assembled what Uncle Georg called the essential nutriment of the mind, and of course the centerpiece was none other than Schopenhauer. I had acquired what I called a portable library of the most important works of the evil spirit, which I could easily take with me wherever I went, so that I need never be without these important works. My first acquisitions were the philosophers I had been denied at Wolfsegg, the deadly poison, in other words, to which I gradually added the works of our most important writers. In all this I followed a plan outlined by Uncle Georg. The first book I bought was Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The next, as I clearly recall, was Johann Peter Hebel’s Calendar Stories. It was a long way from these to Kropotkin and Bakunin, I told Gambetti, to Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Lermontov, whom I prize above all other writers. My first task, I now told myself, is to release the evil spirit that my parents condemned to life imprisonment at Wolfsegg. Not only will I never lock the bookcases — I’ll leave them open forever. I’ll throw the keys down the well shaft so that nobody can ever lock them again. My sole reason for going to Wolfsegg will be to open the windows one after another and let in the fresh air. Just imagine, I once said to Gambetti, many of the windows at Wolfsegg haven’t been opened for decades. It’s appalling. Then I’ll come back to Rome and be able to say to Gambetti, Gambetti, I’ve opened all the windows at Wolfsegg and let in the fresh air. I’ll open all the windows and doors, I told myself. As I looked at the photo of my parents at Victoria Station, I told myself that in their foolish Catholic way they had tried to gag me all my life. Just as they wanted to confine the evil spirit in the bookcases, so they wanted to confine me, an equally evil spirit, at Wolfsegg. To confine the contradictor, the recusant. The deserter. I do not remember my parents ever leaving me in peace to pursue my own interests or ever praising me for doing something I enjoyed. I would not have ignored their praise, but it was never forthcoming. When I was a small child, I think, they already regarded me with grave distrust, even in my earliest years, when they had to bend down almost to the ground to see me lying in my cot or taking my first steps. Even then they found everything about me suspicious and disquieting, as though they might have produced a child that would one day outgrow them and call them to account, and then even destroy and annihilate them. In my earliest years they treated me with the suspicion that has dogged me all my life, perhaps even with a subliminal hatred that later came into the open. At first I did not know why it should be directed at me, for what purpose, to what end. Was it directed against some innate depravity or wickedness that I harbored? To my brother, Johannes, they were always well disposed, but to me they were only ever ill disposed. It’s time to spell out the truth, I told myself as I looked at the photo. My father begot me, and my mother gave birth to me, but right from the start she didn’t want me; had it been possible, she’d have gladly stuffed me back into her belly, I told myself. At first we always tell ourselves that our parents naturally love us, but suddenly we realize that, equally naturally, they hate us for some reason — that is to say, if we appear to them as I appeared to mine, as a child that didn’t conform with their notion of what a child should be, a child that had gone wrong. They had not reckoned with my eyes, which probably saw everything I was not meant to see when I first opened them. First I looked at them in disbelief, as they say, then I stared at them, and finally, one day, I saw through them, and they never forgave me, could not forgive me. I had seen through them and formed an honest assessment that could not possibly be to their liking. To put it baldly: by bringing me into the world they had landed themselves with someone who would dissect them and take them apart. I have to say that I was implacably opposed to them from the first moment. Once, on a fine, mild day in the fall, I tried to describe Wolfsegg to Gambetti. We had returned from Rocca di Papa to the Piazza del Popolo, which was virtually our home, and were sitting on the terrace in front of the café. It was well after nine in the evening, and the sun still radiated a pleasant warmth. I’ll try to give you a precise description of Wolfsegg, I said to Gambetti. In Rocca that day I had made what now strike me as some quite inept comments on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. I always had the utmost difficulty with Nietzsche, and on this occasion I had been unable to say anything apposite about him. Look, Gambetti, I said, I’ve been wrestling with Nietzsche for decades, but I haven’t gotten any further with him. Nietzsche has always fascinated me, but I’ve never understood him properly. To be honest, it’s the same with all the other philosophers, I told Gambetti, with Schopenhauer and Pascal, to name just two. All my life I’ve found them difficult and done no more than begin to understand them. They’ve always been Greek to me, though I’ve always been attracted and excited by them. The more I study these men’s writings, I told Gambetti, the more helpless I become. It’s only in moments of megalomania that I can claim to have understood them, just as it’s only at such moments that I can claim to have understood myself, though to this day I’ve never been able to understand myself. The more I study myself, the farther I get from the truth about myself, the more obscure everything about me becomes, I told Gambetti, and it’s the same with these philosophers. When I think I’ve understood them I’ve actually understood nothing. This is probably true of everything I’ve studied. But now and then, in moments of megalomania, I venture to say that I’ve understood something about these philosophers and their writings. None of these men or their works can be understood, not Pascal, not Descartes, not Kant, not Schopenhauer, not Schleiermacher, to name only those who preoccupy me at present, those I’m working on at the moment. With the greatest ruthlessness toward them and toward myself, I added. With the greatest audacity and the greatest impudence. For when we work on one of these philosophers, Gambetti, it’s impudent and presumptuous to take hold of them and, as it were, tear the philosophical guts out of the living body. It’s always impudent to set about a work of philosophy, but without such impudence we can’t approach it and get anywhere philosophically. We actually have to attack these philosophical writings as roughly and toughly as possible — and the writers themselves, whom we must always think of as enemies, as our most formidable opponents, Gambetti. I have to pit myself against Schopenhauer if I want to understand him, against Kant, against Montaigne, against Descartes, against Schleiermacher — you understand. I have to be against Voltaire if I want to get to grips with him properly and have some prospect of success. But so far I’ve been pretty unsuccessful at getting to grips with the philosophers and their works. Life will soon be over; my existence will be extinguished, I told Gambetti, and I’ll have achieved nothing. Everything will have remained firmly closed to me. In the same way I’ve been pretty unsuccessful up to now at getting to grips with myself. I treat myself as an enemy and go into philosophical action against myself, I told Gambetti. I approach myself with every possible doubt, and I fail. I achieve absolutely nothing. I have to regard the mind as an enemy and go into philosophical action against it if I am actually to enjoy it. But I probably don’t have enough time, just as none of them had enough time. Man’s greatest misfortune is that he never has enough time, and that’s what’s always made knowledge impossible. So all we have ever achieved is an approximation, a near miss. Anything else is nonsense. When we are thinking and don’t stop thinking, which is what we call philosophizing, we come to realize that our thinking has been wrong. Up to now all their thinking was wrong, whoever they were and whatever they wrote, yet they didn’t give up of their own volition, I told Gambetti; they gave up because nature forced them to, through sickness, madness, and finally death. They didn’t want to stop, however great the privations, however grievous the suffering; they carried on against all reason and despite all warnings. Yet they all committed themselves to false conclusions, I told Gambetti — ultimately to nothing, whatever this nothing might be, which, though we know it is nothing and therefore cannot exist, still dooms everything to failure, halts all progress, and finally brings everything to an end. On the Piazza del Popolo that evening I withheld the description of Wolfsegg that I had promised Gambetti on the Flaminia and launched instead into one of my disquisitions, which no one dreads more than I and which I have taken to calling my philosophizing disquisitions, because they have become more frequent in recent years and are as fluent as philosophy proper, as philosophical discourse in general, though all they have in common with philosophy is the motive behind them. Instead of the promised description of Wolfsegg, I delivered myself of a few words about Nietzsche that would have been better left unsaid, something quite nonsensical about Kant, something about Schopenhauer that seemed at first uncommonly apposite but then rather silly, and something about Montaigne that even I did not understand the moment I had said it. For no sooner had I uttered my observation about Montaigne than Gambetti asked me to explain it. I could not do so, as I no longer knew what I had said. We say something that seems quite clear at the time, then a moment later we don’t know what it was, I told Gambetti. I’ve just said something about Montaigne, but now, two or three seconds later, I don’t know what it was. We ought to be able to say something and then record it in our minds, I said, but we can’t. I’ve no idea why I spoke about Montaigne just now, and of course I’ve even less of an idea what I said. We imagine we’ve reached a stage where we’ve become a thinking machine, but we can’t rely on its thinking. This machine works unremittingly against the brain, I said. It generates thoughts, but we don’t know where they come from, why they were conceived, or what they relate to. The fact is that this nonstop thinking machine overtaxes us. The brain is overburdened but has no escape, as it’s inevitably linked up to the machine for the rest of our lives. Until we die. You say Montaigne, Gambetti, but right now I don’t know what that means. Descartes? I don’t know what that means, any more than I know what Schopenhauer means. You might just as well say buttercup: I wouldn’t know what that meant either. I once thought that if I went to Sils Maria and stayed near the Maloja Pass I’d understand Nietzsche better, that if I approached it from below, from Sondrio, I’d have a better understanding of him, maybe even a perfect understanding. But I was wrong. Having visited Sils Maria and approached it from below, from Sondrio, I understand even less about Nietzsche than I did before. I no longer understand him at all. I understand nothing about him. My visit to Sils Maria finished off Nietzsche. And Goethe was ruined for me when I committed the monumental folly of going to Weimar. And so was Kant when I visited Königsberg. There was a time when I was fired with a desire to travel the whole of Europe, seeking out the places where all these philosophers, poets, writers, or whatever had lived, but having done so I understand them far less than before. Take good care, Gambetti, not to visit the places associated with writers, poets, and philosophers, because if you do you won’t understand them at all. After visiting the places where they were born, lived, and died, you won’t be able to think about them. You must at all costs steer clear of the places associated with our great minds, I said. Don’t allow yourself to visit the places associated with Dante, Virgil, and Petrarch, because if you do you’ll destroy everything about them that you now have in your head. Nietzsche, I say, then I tap my head and find that it’s empty, quite empty. Schopenhauer, I say to myself, and tap my head — and again it’s empty. I tap my head and say Kant, only to find a complete void. It’s unutterably depressing, Gambetti. You think about some everyday notion, only to find that your mind’s a blank, that there’s nothing there. You want to grasp some quite ordinary notion, and there’s nothing whatever in your head. For days you go around with a total void in your head. You tap it and find that it’s quite empty. It drives you out of your mind and makes you desperately unhappy, utterly sick of life, my dear Gambetti. Although I’m your teacher, my mind’s a complete blank most of the time. Probably because I’ve overtaxed it, I said. By demanding too much of it. By quite simply overrating it. We overrate our minds and expect too much of them, and then we’re surprised when we tap our heads and find them entirely void, I told Gambetti. They don’t contain even the bare minimum, I said. And from time to time the philosophers who mean something to us — who may even mean a great deal to us, perhaps everything — completely withdraw from our minds, probably because we’ve misused them. They simply decamp and leave our minds vacant, so that instead of having ideas in our minds and doing something with them — sensible or otherwise, philosophical or otherwise — we’re left with an unbearable pain, a pain so terrible that we almost want to cry out. But of course we’re careful not to cry out and so reveal that our minds are quite empty, for that would inevitably be the end of us in a world that’s just waiting to hear us cry out and reveal the emptiness of our minds. Over time we’ve become accustomed to concealing everything, or at least everything we think, everything we venture to think, lest we be done to death, for we know that whoever fails to conceal his thoughts — his real thoughts, which only he is aware of — is done to death, I told Gambetti. The vital thoughts are those we keep secret, I told Gambetti, not those we express or publish, which have very little in common — usually nothing at all — with those we conceal and are always inferior to them. Our concealed thoughts encompass everything, while our published thoughts amount to next to nothing. But if we were to publish our secret thoughts, if we were once to express them, we’d be done for.