Abel and Cain
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Uncle Helmuth too is innocent in his fashion—namely, in the fashion of the damned. He is condemned to hate himself. He doesn’t realize it, of course. He thinks he hates others.
Uncle Helmuth feels challenged day in, day out, from above and from below and from all sides. He sings the loudest part in the chorus of those who have been given a dirty deal. Above him stand the rich, the plutocrats, the undeserving happy, free, frivolous. For them he doesn’t count; they look down their noses at him. He wants to hate them, but actually he gazes up at them in worship. He nurtures a childlike admiration for his factory director, who, until March 1938, played not only a leading role in Austrian industry but an even greater one in preparing the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich of our compatriot Adolf Hitler, and then of course vanished from the scene. (John and Stella once met him somewhere and called him “a stupid arsehole.”) And as for a certain Countess Kannwitz, who was interested in spiritualism, Uncle Helmuth absolutely gushes about her, calling her “one of the most important women of the century, probably the reincarnation of a very high luminary of mankind, like Buddha, or Madame Blavatsky.” She was an old fool who used to run after girls in high heels, bang her umbrella on their shoes, and rant, “Don’t wear high heels, they’re only for whores!” Which regularly led to highly unpleasant scenes.
Uncle Helmuth’s hatred is even purer downward, toward the “undisciplined riffraff” of the “proletarians.” Granted, they are poor and ought really to be his allies against their mutual “exploiters” and “slave drivers.” But Uncle Helmuth feels separated from them by a class barrier. He is an “academic”; he attended university (making sacrifices that he talks about like his wounds in WWI). Uncle Helmuth wears a collar and tie; he has a doctorate in engineering and is married to the second daughter of the late Lieutenant Colonel Subicz and Frau Lieutenant Colonel Subicz née von Jaentsch. This separates him everlastingly from the ignorant and dirty rabble in the back courtyards. And yet he has to admit to himself that, unlike him, this ragtag mob have no prejudices, are not ruled by fictions, and thus in many respects live more freely, happily, frivolously than he.
Since it is basically the envy of the unredeemed that makes Uncle Helmuth hate both upward and downward, one might think that he would see redemption in America. The United States appears to be a society that has succeeded in making social envy the driving element of the national dynamic. In a land where every shoeshine boy is a potential millionaire, one had better not treat him scornfully. And if his road to riches is a little longer than Mr. Rockefeller’s, then the distance serves his self-respect as a measure, even if he breaks down en route.
But no: Uncle Helmuth does not feel challenged by American competitiveness. He says too many “values” are lost in it. Americans are “uncultured materialists” with no respect for the “spiritual side of life” and its values—so bitterly hard for him, the eleventh son of a destitute Thuringian pastor, to secure.
In reality, Uncle Helmuth embodies the spirit of “uncritical social criticism,” as John calls it—and in this respect, he is a potential Nazi. Criticism, says John, was the intrinsic forte of the Nazi movement. In criticizing, the Nazis were always right. But, like the criticism voiced by the German National Socialists of that time, Uncle Helmuth’s is too general, too universal, and thus ultimately not maneuverable, an overcanvased ship. His criticism comes not from sober analysis but from resentment, from a general sulkiness about life, an ill humor that only imagines most of the insults and injuries that nourish him, and thus has no solid goal, no concrete object. Uncle Helmuth reacts instinctively against any stimulus that he views as characteristic of something opposing him. It may be a lady in sable or a whistling tramp, a speeding car, a silly advertising slogan on a poster, a kiss on some woman’s hand, a certain way of donning a hat—particularly anything testifying to a way of life that strikes him as freer, lighter, cheerier than his own, thereby putting his own in doubt.
And because he feels like a victim of a worldwide conspiracy against him, he stuffs everything possible into this hate: blame for the whole dreary monotony of his existence; the probable disappointment in his thwarted professional ambitions (he really wanted to go into research and not industry); his concern about the state of the world, which his newspaper makes him worry about every morning, reminding him how helpless he is, how much at the mercy of the powers working their influence therein. Perhaps he also tosses into this garbage can of his choleric emotions the sexual frustration of a man who has Aunt Hertha for a wife and in adjacent rooms Aunt Selma on one side and Cousin Wolfgang and me on the other, all as possible eavesdroppers; and certainly he adds his spiritualist notion that there is a true, non-earthly hierarchy of nearness to God, or rather farness from God, in which he occupies a totally different, much loftier rank, roughly at the level of Buddha or Madame Blavatsky, with no one realizing this at all . . .
He has a collective name for everything he hates. The species that he imagines as enjoying a more carefree way of life than his own (and thus ruining it—and this comprises proletarians as well as plutocrats, also “society people,” and “snobs” like John and Stella) is summarily known as “they.” “They” are the people responsible for (or rather guilty of) the fate of mankind—the powerful (oppressors), the rich (exploiters), the undisciplined uneducated (anarchists)—and are pilloried in sentences beginning “They’ve got us in another mess . . .” or “They’re grabbing the lion’s share, of course . . .” or “They can’t bear seeing something in order . . .” The obvious flippancy, frivolity, unscrupulousness, inconsiderateness of these plainly well known but unnameable anonymouses inspire such rhetoric as “They’re amused. . . they skim off the cream and relish it . . . they laugh up their sleeves, of course. . . they just let you kick the bucket . . .”
And this they is elastic enough to cover whole strata; nay, whole peoples: the British, for instance (“They imagine they’re superior”). It extends to writers of popular songs (“They give people highfalutin ideas”) and to Jews (“They’ve known how to cheat our kind for two thousand years now”). In addition, there is room for the traditional whipping-boys of middle-class resentment: they (aristocrats), they (Reds), they (priests), they (Freemasons), they (journalists) . . .
Thus, we can hardly assume that Uncle Helmuth has Uncle Ferdinand’s Middle Kingdom in mind in particular when he says, with specific emphasis and an indignation-bloated ring in his voice, “They”—meaning “plutocrats,” “society people,” “snobs.” I remember when I first moved into his home. In those days, the smart set of the upper ten thousand did not have the publicity they enjoy today as the so-called Jet Set (or Café Society)—an unwanted publicity that was to be so prophetically foreseen by Uncle Ferdinand. Uncle Helmuth could at best get some impression of it from my childish blather. (Incidentally, I soon stopped the blathering once I noticed the frosty rejection concealed beneath the artificial irony with which my stories were received.) Perhaps Uncle Helmuth’s imagination was assisted by the fashion magazines and society gazettes that Aunt Selma sometimes bought on the sly; she dreamed whole afternoons away with them in her darkened room, but somehow or other they came to light and were then devoured by Aunt Hertha and Uncle Helmuth (albeit more hastily, more sketchily, more nervously). This wholly inadequate re-portage presented yearning eyes with the dream life of the happy rich at the North Sea, Mediterranean, and Alpine resorts of high-society geography—a life lived in the chandelier brilliance of casinos, at racetracks, on the decks of huge white yachts, on the lawns of birthday-cake-like country villas and bougainvillea-flooded terraces on sepia-blue, pine-shielded shores—yet could only give a hint that this was where the true focus of his social hatred might be found: the nucleus, the axial pole of that other, blissful way of life that was so sneeringly opposed to his own, which made his own seem less worth living.
The images that Uncle Helmuth saw in those smart-set periodicals traitorously smuggled into his four-room household wer
e, at worst, the listing sails of an oceangoing regatta and, mounted like medallions in the sky overhead, the not very informative portraits of the ship owners in breezy skipper’s caps, white turtlenecks, and stylish navy-blue blazers; racetrack bleachers crowded with ladies in flimsy frocks and enormous heron-feather hats, and gentlemen in gray toppers and polished leather binocular cases hanging sprucely from narrow straps on their chests; or else a snapshot series of men and women standing in the same cataleptic convulsion, the right leg twisted and the knee turned in, the left knee bent, toes pointed inward, the arms yanked over the right shoulder, head stretched to the left, eyes peering down toward the feet at a small white ball that is to be struck by a golf club that is swung against the backdrop of a cascading weeping-willow branch; or else a saber-legged grouplet of four, each man wearing spurred boots and a cork helmet that casts a shadow like a mask over his suntanned face, in the sportily gloved left hand the grip of a casually shouldered polo stick, and in the right a silver cup—Messrs. Bully Olivera, Putzi Cottolenghi-Strazza, Bruce Spencer-Fox, and Jean de Fegonzac (grandson of the beauty-loving vicomtesse)—and below, perhaps, a close-up of Sir Agop Garabetian, who donated the cup and whose monocle, in his Arabian Nights face with its twirling black beard, flashes sheer benevolence toward all mankind.
Such photographic documentation preceded detailed descriptions of the subsequent soirées, with exhaustive lists of names. But when it came to precise particulars of the ladies’ toilettes and jewels, the reporting was taken over by draftsmen who knew how to render the essential better than any writers or photographers. Now, it may be astonishing to realize how much (thanks to a perceptiveness that should be of interest to novelists) can be deduced from even the meagerest external signs of a human being’s condition, yet such vision-restricting peeps into the world of “the beautiful people” could not possibly have permitted the insights that empowered Uncle Helmuth to snort, “They are to blame for everything! They have all mankind on their consciences! People like us have to drudge for them!”
Or: “It’s for them that people like us had to risk our necks for four years! . . . Bu-u-u-t”—his voice trembling in the bombast of indignation, giving the ominously drawled vowel a wavy, swinging staccato—“bu-u-u-t, if the whole business starts up again, then it will go against them!”
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There is no denying that now, in February 1940, it looks as if Uncle Helmuth will turn out to be right. Of course, at first blush, such a positioning of fronts is not clear-cut. One has to see the situation with John’s eyes, too: agreeing on this point, as on so many, with Uncle Ferdinand, he regarded the First World War as a class war and views the Second as merely and certainly an intensified continuation of the First, with a more decisive focus on the true goal.
According to John, it is both a tragic and a grotesque (i.e., tragicomical) error that WWII is likewise being waged among nations, peoples, states, rather than, by unanimous international consent, between the representatives of a coming new world and those of a dying old world (among whose representatives John certainly counts himself). With incomparably fewer losses, he feels, they could achieve the same end that will ultimately come out of the slaughter and that (with the exception of Russia) did not emerge fully from WWI: namely, the extermination of the old upper crust and the takeover by the bloody fucking middle classes. Not by the proletarians, mind you, as the latter have always been promised, but by Uncle Helmuth and his kind.
This notion has been haunting me for some time now (namely, since the post-March days of 1938 in Vienna, in their abstract vacuum). The gray iron men who came to us down the Nibelungen river, pouring into a human sea that surged with enthusiasm, these young men with the heavy, stomping boots, the wonder-craving eyes under gray helmets, and the gentle names (Adolf Emil Wolfgang Helmuth), were soldiers in a civil war. And though it never came to a German civil war at that time, and for the moment brothers and sisters embraced jubilantly, people soon realized that once again an hour of vast collective bloodshed had come.
You didn’t have to hear the Führer’s speeches on the radio or to read the newspapers. You sensed it, the way animals whiff a storm, a flood, a fire. It surfaced when the intoxication, the delirium, the yowling, howling ecstasy of the first few days (or rather, the three-day-long day) subsided. The roar, in that steel blue Ice Age coldness, was followed by a sudden, huge silence. In this silence, you sensed it. You sensed it the way a murder victim senses his murderer’s breath on the back of his neck even though the murderer is still far away, not yet visible: when you turn your head, the street is empty, he is still skulking along somewhere far behind you, around a corner, hugging the walls, but he is coming, he is coming, he is drawing closer to you and closer . . . Thus, too, the hour of vast collective bloodshed. No drums were booming or trumpets blaring when the hour finally came on September 1, 1939; it came as if it had been sneaking up for a long time and had finally arrived. And no matter how hard you tried and how willing you were to find some historically meaningful necessity, you couldn’t come up with an obvious one. Unless you sensed that the Adolfs Emils Wolfgangs Helmuths had made up their minds to exterminate anything that was not of their kind. And, indeed, you sensed it. It was their turn.