Elfriede Jelinek - Wonderful Wonderful Times

There she is. Mother. Dealing the typewriter hammer-blows. Badmouthing the petite bourgeoisie, who cheered Hitler the loudest. Her son ought to stay away from them. Politically unaware, they enriched their petty profit-mongering egoism at the expense of minorities.

Hans tosses everything onto the kitchen bench in an untidy heap and flings off his shoes. The picture of his dead father goggles at the history-making power of the workers, with misplaced optimism and misplaced trust, from out of the frame where he will remain (as long as there is anyone at all to spare a thought for him), unable to go class-struggling. And serve him right. Morbid altruist. So he crumbled unto dust, with the flames helping along a little, and not even the whereabouts of the grave is known. And if report can be believed, millions of others crumbled along with him and vanished from the face of the earth, without trace, and still their places are being taken by new generations who will disappear in turn because their very existence is of no consequence. No one notes them down or counts them. Hans won't disappear. Hans will achieve his full status and potential at night school. Often Hans will pick up a tennis racket in his leisure time. Sport gives you a particularly strong sense of being alive, which his unknown Papa can no longer experience because he no longer is. Perhaps his Papa would have sent him to grammar school straight off, without approaching it in a roundabout way, if he'd been in a position to do so. Later on, Hans will be a big boss in the financial empire of Sophie's father. Because he'll be marrying the daughter. And he'll earn his advance laurels to the full, so that the father doesn't regret having taken him as a son-in-law. He will have to work hard, but then he will be accepted. Their initial sceptical attitude will have been forgiven once the first child is born, at the very latest.

Not to freeze underground with the millions who were exterminated. But to warm yourself at the fire of eager sportsmanship and bebop.

At irregular intervals, Hans tosses off articles of clothing, and tells his mother, who is holding forth about the War and the fact that a Wall Street company in America financed the SS, that jeans and every kind of hot music come from America, and that he is going to make a career for himself on the lines of an American-style manager. Still he won't deny his feelings and become an ice-cool careerist.

On the stove, something cheap and evil-smelling is cooking loudly away. The typewriter pauses in horror. Then comes to a full stop.

Hans tells Mother that Man has to achieve his liberation and rebel, and afterwards a life free of obligations can begin, as Rainer is forever saying. Some things he says are spot on, you've got to hand it to him. Then later, when you're older, business life starts exacting its obligations. In business you can discreetly lead the masses. All men are not equal, people differ in colour, shape and size.

Mother says that that concept of freedom is wishy-washy, nobody lives in a vacuum, we are determined by society. She ladles some indefinable slop that looks suspiciously like semolina into a bowl and accuses sundry Socialist Party men of treachery. Principally she accuses the notorious Socialist Home Secretary Helmer, who had shop-stewards arrested in the fifties and was responsible for other dirty deeds as well. The past of this shady character is obscured by a thick haze that not even the police could dispel. But Socialist functionaries Waldbrunner (Minister of Energy and informer), Tschadek (Minister of Justice and enemy of the workers) and many other leading trade unionists who dumped shit on their party and its tradition come in for Mother's violent abuse too, without any regard for their status, rank or personal qualities. Not to mention Olah, the secret agent.

Hans says that he is above the vacuum of the petite bourgeoisie, where you can suffocate if you don't watch out.

Mother saws off bread, wedges thick as doorstops, needless to say, nothing dainty about them, and tells her son, who has somehow or other not turned out quite right, to consider that that very attitude declares him one of the bourgeoisie. Even as you appear to adopt a position above their system of values, you recognise that system. It renders you blind to poverty. The mere fact that you speak of 'Man' is a crime. There is no such thing as the universal 'Man', never has been and never will be, there is the worker and there's the one who exploits the worker and those who abet him.

Hans says that Rainer says that it's appalling to imagine yourself a part of a whole. Because you must always remain an individual, completely on your own, and quite unmistakably distinctive. Which is a fortifying thought.

Mummy howls out loud. Not because she has cut herself but because her son is taking the wrong path. Turn back! You are trampling on the wishes and needs of your class, Hans. Nothing is universal. Instead of the unity and strength of your class, you want it split into individual molecules, every one of them isolated from the rest. Mother is like a hornet. Any moment she'll be sploshing semolina around the place and pointing for the fifty-thousandth time to murdered Papa, who did it better. You can see for yourself where it got him. And first he had to undergo inconceivable suffering, which is not to Hans's taste. After all, he wants to be inconceivably happy with Sophie.

Mother says it wasn't her that taught her son this egoism. Nor would his father have taught it him either. And out comes the motherfinger as usual, pointing to the well-loved but now almost forgotten features of that face. Hans says (it's all right if Papa hears this) that Love, to be exact: his love of Sophie, is a better way of tearing down barriers, whatever kind of barriers they may be, than fighting, no matter who the enemy may be, because his love knows no barriers or bounds.

Mother says she'd like to know why Love always crosses these famous barriers to go up and never to go down. Would he like a fruit yoghurt for afters? There's one left, standing all alone on the window sill, keeping its cool. No, Hans doesn't want a fruit yoghurt such as he ate in his early years, Hans wants a whisky or a cognac. Already he can hear the clink of ice, already he can see a white female hand, which is not a ghost's but quite specifically his Sophie's. It is specific yet unreal, like the concept of the working class. Unreal, like exploitation, which you can free yourself of at any time, after all, if you have the will to do so. It's all up to the individual.

Mother longs for the words, deeds and works of her dead husband, whom she'd still like to have with her in bed at times and whom she'd always like to have around, to help her get her bearings in bringing up her only son. Things aren't easy nowadays, Hansi (that was his name). Your poor maltreated bones have no idea that there are other crosses to bear besides the physical one. No doubt it hurt to die. You poor thing. I think such a lot about our cycling tours and all the things we shared. It was the last time you laughed. Those nights spent in barns, in the biting cold, squeezing up close together. Country milk and country butter from a farmer. Washing in the trough at the well. Discussions in backrooms of pubs with a tobacco haze in the air. And the ones who were going to continue the tradition but our son is not continuing anything, and what has become of the others? They are not in our old party any more. And then the shock, which must have been terrible. Having the life crushed out of your body, which wasn't ready for it. Though perhaps it had been prepared by the frightful pain beforehand, which one would rather endure dead than alive.

Sleep well, Hansi.

And Hansi, who is already a Hans, though he doesn't yet know what wee Hans ought to have learnt, removes a wad of addressed envelopes from their bed and stuffs them into the little kitchen stove behind his mother's back. Where the wad immediately goes up in flames. It's the second time he has done this.