Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “But believe me, dearest friend, that was not what I saw burning down in the year of Our Lord 1944, aside from a few remnants not worth mentioning. What I saw was a dried-up, parched-up, silted-up training ground for the populace. A barren metropolis of perioecians, a steppe city that was already, in essence, half Russian and half American long before its division. Hence, the other, legendary Berlin must have died quite a bit earlier, silently. And not in slow, rattling final breaths but from one day to the next, like my Vienna in March 1938 . . . When a city dies, it does so from one moment to the next, while the people keep treading in their tiny ruts of destiny, life in the streets goes on teeming, the traffic keeps moving with no visible break or jam, the buildings still stand with windowpanes glittering in the sun—and all at once, it’s happened: an incomprehensible alteration in the feeling of the world, the quality of life, an indefinable but all the more decisive change of the hour, the beginning of a new phase of life for everyone . . . It is a planetary if not a cosmic event. There is nothing more anguishing than the death of a city before it vanishes from the face of the earth. This perishing of its spiritus loci is a metaphysical process, and not even a Hitler can take credit for initiating it. For all the undeniable merits that this minion of nature acquired in nature’s game, I do not truly regard him as directly responsible for the death of Berlin. But rather as an executive organ: the leader of the swarms of maggots that beset a corpse. Supreme functionary of the decomposition, if you will, the most furious enzyme of disintegration, but not the murderer. After all, he marched into Vienna only after the city breathed out its soul in the ecstatic “Siegheil!” of the flower woman (one of the city’s root spirits, no doubt) . . .

  “But let’s stay awhile in perished Berlin. Just look: the young man I encountered there in 1944 on a smoldering and sizzling Kurfürstendamm—his stumbling and reeling, the way he kept walking, mechanically drunk, and yet that unswerving gaze into nothingness, that blind seer’s gaze that made me realize something extraordinary had happened—that young man was already a citizen of a city of the dead. A walking corpse. He had no living reflexes left. What kept him upright on two legs, and even caught him when he almost fell, was, so to speak, life in a different environment; that was, at best, the reflexes of the teeming maggots inside him—movement, true, but no longer his: a certain sense of balance still, but no longer his. A condition that we perhaps do not sufficiently take into account, we who intend to tell stories about the living. And this, you see, was the extraordinary thing I realized through him. An enormously simple truth: merely marching upright on two legs is not enough to live. You aren’t living if you live as if life doesn’t concern you. As a biological process, life is eternal, right? It merely changes form. The maggots that will teem in our cadavers after we die are even, biologically speaking, life to a higher degree—though not our life, alas. In order to preserve what we call our life, the mind must, they say, be preserved. But our mind—is this not our life dream? . . . I know I am telling you very trite things—do forgive me!—the world consists of such trite things, and their phenomenal wealth often confuses us so thoroughly that we lose sight of it—and that is the very point I am trying to express in my awkward fashion. It took a walking corpse to show me that in 1944 I was not witnessing the death of a city, I was attending the cremation of its cadaver: and that the city had died because it no longer dreamed itself . . . The very genus of city died out because its mind, its dream, its myth died out: because the dream of ANTHROPOLIS, the City of Mankind, had died. We had all died with it, because we no longer dreamed ourselves.

  “It doesn’t mean very much if a city goes up in flames. Very many cities have gone up in flames—ancient Rome, for example, a good dozen times before Emperor Nero let it go up in flames again. However, its mind, its dream, its myth, have remained alive for one and a half millennia. And especially in regard to the year of our LORD 1944, dozens of cities were going up in flames; there was an epidemic of burning cities. The burning of a city was nothing out of the ordinary; the fiery heavens of the apocalypse threatened to burst open over Germany at any moment so that a powerful angel might appear and blow his trumpet, announcing the end of a city. . . However, the end had long since come to many cities. In Vienna, the angel had already appeared in 1938 in the guise of a Viennese flower woman, and his trumpet had blared out a brassy ‘Siegheil!’

  “Admittedly, in a burning city, it is hard to distinguish between true events and mere spectacles. But in the Berlin of 1944 it took no Brahman’s eye to realize that the incineration of this city was merely the completion of an enormous but compelling causality that had begun a great deal earlier. This was being shouted from the rooftops—insofar as any rooftops still existed and anyone was left to shout from them. However, in March 1938, it took an especially fine nose to sense that time had taken a leap—a spinning leap, so that it was now facing away from its normal direction and would henceforth be zooming backward faster and faster to where it had come from. The Twelfth of March 1938 was the cusp in the swing of time’s pendulum—or, if this is more up your alley: the instant of turning between two breaths of God. For the LORD breathes while HE dreams HIMSELF in an enormous game of creating and annihilating myriad worlds. And whenever HE inhales in order to exhale again or exhales in order to inhale again, time changes, the dreams of human beings change—and somewhere, I don’t know where, the style, the epoch changes—I’m talking nonsense, I know. I know that any newspaper reader can refute me. There are solid causes and reasons for everything and anything; they are delivered to you with the daily paper. Had I read my newspaper carefully, I would not dare make such flimsy claims. One could just as arbitrarily assume that time changed in 1933, illuminated by the oriflamme of the Reichstag fire, which, so to speak, was the match struck for many subsequent conflagrations—an incident, by the way, that I learned about quite by chance and only many months later—please excuse me, but Vienna was so far away in its own past, so distant from all reality, it had so fundamentally betrayed its dream of itself that its people, already back then, five years before it died for good, were living in a kind of limbo—or better yet: were sleepwalking . . . I, at any rate, arrived one evening at the location of what I had been taught to view as home back then: the apartment of my Viennese relatives, stuffed with horrible furniture: petit bourgeois Biedermeier, plus crocheted doilies, Colonel Subicz’s swords of honor—you’ve probably found analogous things in Potsdam: sword-knot-proletariat; have-nots entitled to starvation pensions and with the most slavishly obedient class arrogance . . . There they sat in a family grouplet around the radio, my uncle Helmuth as usual, mental substance in his steeple head: A Manual for Engineers (a small three-volume edition for domestic use), the Veda and the Upanishads, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Madame Helena Blavatsky (née Halm von Rottenstein-Hahn) and Fräulein Fränzel’s Prophecies. His spouse, Hertha: a gruel of stupidity and misunderstood femininity. My cousin Wolfgang (whom you often resemble: very intelligent, precociously accomplished even then), having almost furiously outgrown, mentally as well as physically, his boyhood clothes—now staring with his bespectacled eyes and bending slightly, like someone who’s got constipation—the better to hear, of course) . . . And my aunt Selma: the old broken-down cart nag, her bony hands in her barren lap, the bewitched nixie-gaze into emptiness (need I tell you I loved her? She taught me how to live tenaciously with despair) . . . and from the radio the broadcast of a recording of the Reichstag fire trial welled brassily. A historic event, if you please. When I entered unsuspectingly, hence loud and unabashed, they glared at me indignantly, dressed me down with dirty looks and shushes. You could hear Göring’s voice, and then that of the presiding magistrate (do you recall the guy’s name?). He was very solemnly saying “Defendant van der Lubbe—” And because, at that time, there were no electronic tape recordings, just Stone Age resin disks into which sound waves were scratched in order to be scraped out by a needle, and that record evidently had a crack or a notch, which made the needle
keep jumping into the same groove, the presiding magistrate of the historic court of law kept saying “Defendant van der Lubbe—van der Lubbe—van der Lubbe vander-LubbevanderLubbevander-Lubbe . . .” It didn’t sound world-historical, God in heaven be my witness. It sounded quite extraordinarily funny, like a fart in the bathtub . . . And that is the only reason that the event lodged in my memory—if you would be so kind as to forgive me, an exceedingly ridiculous matter even today, your Reichstag fire, an extremely silly oriflamme, and I could never believe that this was the torch that lit ANTHROPOLIS aflame and destroyed it.

  “Since then, I have been insisting on my mythology. It is based on my being an eyewitness. In March 1938, I was there. I directly witnessed a historic event—that is, of course, as close as people like us can get. In any case, fully conscious that it was a historic event. That alone was peculiar. Even back then, I did not read newspapers. I was nineteen years old. I had enjoyed a realschule education in the Federal Republic of Austria—that is, historically, not to mention politically, I was about as informed as a carp in a pond. And even though I had grabbed some of the crumbs falling from the richly laden humanist table of my cousin Wolfgang, my horizon of civic knowledge blurred away just behind the Lay of the Nibelungen, Emperor Max in the wall of St. Martin’s, and a few operetta stanzas rehashed in terms of current events. It would simply have been going too far to expect me to read the final end of Austria in the flower woman’s ecstatically bouncing ass—namely, an end of that amortization fund that had ridiculously posed as a sovereign state, a sinking fund of the Habsburg legacy of petit bourgeois staleness, Alpine folklore, and parliamentary fussbudgeting that was the Federal Republic of Austria at that time, and at the same time also the end of an epoch. And hence also the end, already twenty years prior at that point but lingering in awareness, of a geographic myth, by which the Ortler was still mirrored in the Adriatic, and behind Fischamend the world was still open far beyond the Carpathian forests, all the way to the mule paths of Macedonia and Bohemia and Moravia with their dark forests and sheaf-laden grain fields together with the hazy croaking of frogs over the ponds of Polish Galicia, still fenced in by the same black-and-yellow toll gates—it would, I tell you, have been asking too much of me to see the end of that notion of the Austrian Middle Kingdom as also the end of Europe, that multishaped, tensely dialectic Europe, which bade farewell to the Guermantes in the west while it wreaked bloody vengeance for a stolen sheep in the southeast, with the same Kalman tunes being fiddled in its ears from Brest to Braila and from Königsberg to Capua; despite the motley of costumes and patchwork of manners and mores, it was nevertheless a formation of the same culture, a world of the same life-dream, the same ideals, the same shalts and shalt-nots, the home landscape of a humanity that, for all the variety of creeds and cults, worshiped the same God, deceived HIM here there and everywhere in pretty much the same way and along with it let the Kalman tunes from the latest Viennese operetta be fiddled in their ears.

  “Please try to picture the background that the Vienna of the 1930s provided for this imperial myth: the feeling of imitation belonged in a certain respect to your proof of residence, whereby on top of that the image of the fathers was really everything other than unharmed: You see, the Kalman tunes were not only fiddled into your ears there by café musicians but also, and more often, cranked out of hurdygurdies by the medal-showered, stiffly saluting torsos of wounded WWI veterans with the black glasses of blind men under regimental caps, and not with their hands, but with prosthetic hooks . . . That was more or less what anything looked like if it was left over from the glory that was Old Austria and the old Europe. Vienna may still have been dispatching the Orient Express in three-quarter time, accompanied by the sobbing Gypsy violins and bedbugs of the puszta czardas and the marrow-devouring nostalgia of shepherds’ flutes and lice along the Ialomiţa, all the way to the Golden Horn. But nonetheless Vienna had long since become part of a different myth. It had long since been spiritually incorporated into the longed-for Greater German Reich. Even the Vienna of 1933, when the vanderLubbevander-LubbevanderLubbe of the Reichstag fire trial resounded through its philistine homes, had long since been placed as a bride next to your true-blue Prussian Berlin (alas, oh, alas, not the legendary Babylon of the 1920s). On the wall of the classroom, in which I had dozed away my youth, like an unhappy chained dog dozing away a summer afternoon laced with the buzzing of flies—there, amidst the pictures of Old Austrian President Hainisch’s prize cow Bella and the protected Alpine flora, hung an oleograph of the German School Association, very active with its political propaganda. Encircled by oak leaves and surrounded by black-red-and-gold flags, the oleograph showed a German-Austrian mountaineer, yodleeolay, in an Alpine jacket and with a blackcock feather on his toadstool hat: with his hobnailed shoe and vigorously bent goalkeeper knee, he was trampling down a border fence-pole and stretching his hand out to Germania, waiting on the other side in an imperial crown, blond hair, coat of mail, shield, and sword . . . For many, many, countlessly many hours of dull boyhood misery, while some teacher with a chain-smoker voice used the Mocznik-Zahradniczek method to derive the sine and cosine functions of a unit circle, my mind seized on the allegorical union between the Alpine country and the Brandenburgian sandbox under the imperial crown of Charlemagne. And my imagination thrust the border pole into the lederhosen fly of the costume-party mountaineer and wove the protected Alpine flora and oak leaves around it, the way Lady Chatterley plaited anemones in her lover’s pubic hair. And my fantasy inserted the pole into Germania, by way of unification, slitting through her exuberant coat of mail, while she forcefully farted out the entire German School Association with its gym squads and black-red-and-gold flags and Mocznik and Zahradniczek as first and second officers of a student corps, riding on Bella the prize cow and alternately singing “Watch on the Rhine” and “Oh thou, my Austria.” Sometimes I even did a detailed drawing of the scene on soft-blue graph paper in my mathematics notebook (I was regarded as artistically gifted), thus allowing my neighbors to partake of my lack of nationalistic conviction. And, although they enjoyed my vulgarities with the boyish taste for the trivial, they never left me in doubt that they despised me for this lack of a sense of belonging to the German Nation: I was a man without a father, a man without a country, and I did not share the intense feeling of the era: the collective urge to eliminate violently the particularistic old and strive toward some universalizing new, whatever it may be, so long as it promised the happy absorption of the individual into the community of the many, the most, the very most, everyone. At that time, dear friend, when a brotherly—permit me to say, a Brother Cain–like—Germany lit the torches that blazed over the twelve-year Third Reich of our Austrian compatriot Adolf Hitler and were even supposed to light the way home for us—at that time, in the world-historic, highly significant year 1933, when you were dwelling in that legendary Berlin, which I yearned for because of George Grosz’s drawings and Cousin Wolfgang yearned for because the Nietzschean superman was allegedly coming into being there—at that time, I say, the younger generation in Austria was afflicted by the collective urge to unite, to unify, to become one, all for one and one for all, above all with our brethren in the not-yet-achieved Reich; and it was indeed a beautiful, noble urge, based on an ancient dream of humanity: the dream of the New Jerusalem, the dream of building the city of mankind, ANTHROPOLIS . . . Nothing could have been further from the minds of the credulous youth than the realization that the cities would die precisely because, with all the striving toward one another, the uniting and the unifying of one and all, they had regrettably lost the individual. While spiritually building the city of mankind, ANTHROPOLIS, they had unfortunately lost Anthropos . . . and although a few know-it-all individuals had long seen this coming and feared it, their warning cries faded without echo: the roar of the wind of time drowned them out: the spirit of the time was more powerful than the minds of the time. In any case, my memory of those days is transfigured by an unnameable promise th
at was held in the breathable air: even gray Vienna was filled with it, the way a foggy day is filled with the gold of the sunshine in the blue sky above. You, with all your knowledge of cultural history, surely know what I mean: after all, even the short-lived style of the era contains the optimism of a humanity that is about to shape a new world: the futuristic elements in art deco, right? . . . Well, I don’t have to tell you, do I; you always knew it, and you certainly know it now: at that time, a new era was looming, everyone sensed it in the year of our LORD 1933. And in March of the year 1938, my schooldays were practically yesterday. I owe it to Stella’s generous hand that my clothing no longer had the bleak, fermenting stench of breakfast bread and pubescent urine and blackboard erasers from the classroom—a stench I had only just recently escaped with a high school diploma that bore the misleading title of “maturity certificate.” And hence, it would be quite wrong to assume that I could have discerned a sign of Satan in the devil’s tongue with the swastika poison-pill in the white circle (which, in those March days, would soon be dangling, fiery red, not only from the City Hall but also from the tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, from the Stick-in-Iron House, from Sickartburg’s and van der Nuell’s botched-up opera house, from the hotels on the Ring, from the Head of Cabbage Building of the Vienna Secession, from the Diana Bath and Main Post Office, and generally from every flagpole and lightning rod and every broomstick thrust out of a skylight and every window bolt and shutter hook of the city of Vienna . . . If there was anything devilish about it, then it was some delightfully Viennese diabolatry. The dangling red rag looked like the red tongue lolling out of the raisin-eyed, almond-croissant fig-skull of the prune Krampus, Santa’s hellish little helper, whom the Viennese give to one another as pre-Christmas presents on St. Nicholas’s day. And this was familiar and festive. Vienna in those ice cold late winter days was as festive as at St. Nicholas’s Feast, celebrating anachronistically a pre-Christmas festival going way back to pagan times . . . For you are not going to try to tell me that what made my flower woman dance across New Market like a whipped top was the thought of incorporating a few goitered peasants of Ötztal and a few Styrian cider-heads into a Germany already free of hoarders and Jews, waving its wheat and building its Autobahn, a Germany that could at last drink Alpine milk. Her engagement with the world and politics was about on my level . . . No, no. Something far more mystical, more atavistic, had transported this troll in tulip-bulb guise, making it whirl like a fat fly whose wings have been ripped out. Vienna was celebrating the empty festival of a new era . . . I’ve already told you: The sun had halted invisibly in the universe during those days. God took a new breath, and that which was happening happened.