by Joseph Roth
III
The third book that seems to me worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the two foregoing are the thoughts of the well-known Berlin lawyer Dr. Alfred Apfel on the background of German justice (Les dessous de la justice Allemande, again from Gallimard.) These are revelations. Germans reading this book will recall with pain that Germany was all set to become a Third Reich long before Hitler was ever thought of. French readers will see what they were slow to learn, and perhaps have learned too late. (By their justice ye shall know them!) Apfel, himself imprisoned by the Hitler regime, has managed to escape to France, and it seems to me both indicative and correct that these revelations first appear in French. If one has escaped to France, then how else thank this country except by illuminating the French. It’s not just a thank you, it’s also meritorious, whatever our barbarians may say about “high treason”. Remember, our fatherland is not the one where we fare well! A country where bad things happen and more bad things are prepared than in any Hell’s kitchen, no longer deserves to be called a fatherland. We can’t love soil that puts forth such weeds.
Each chapter of Alfred Apfel’s book has an epigraph from Heinrich Heine, that prophetic and forever momentous Heinrich Heine whom Antonina Vallentin has illuminated.
Pariser Tageblatt, 14 July 1934
61. Grillparzer: A Portrait*
I
Peevish, cantankerous, grumpy, he concealed his shyness behind an aggressive humility, a modesty that was in point of fact haughtiness. He was no “sweet-natured Austrian”, more the opposite: a highly awkward, even gloomy one. It was as though, in consequence of his promise to be a classical representative of the monarchy, he felt primarily the need to go against the picture-postcard notions the other German peoples had of Austria (and this before the advent of the picture postcard). At the same time he went against the popular type of the prickly loyal subject that was so popular in the upper echelons of his own country. He never revolted, because he was in permanent rebellion. He rebelled out of conservatism, as a supporter of hierarchical order and a defender of traditional values, which he saw as under attack, neglected, offended against not from below, but from above. Devoted to the House of Habsburg and the pan-German and transnational ideas that it symbolized, he still viewed the Emperor with a degree of cool and irritation; embittered too by his experience, which had proved to him that those in power had no vocation for it, he set himself, a poor, weak, capriciously treated official, a playwright exposed to the favour, disfavour and indifference of others, to defend the inheritance, the great, misunderstood inheritance of the Roman Emperor. Yes, he enjoyed “the very highest approbation”, he sought and required it as a formal affirmation of his idealizing picture—not sloppily idealizing, more reconstructive—but this recognition was a cold sun. And he felt such a chill already! He was full of suspicion. His great, pale eyes seemed to have been made to listen as much as look, they were hearkening lights. They made enemies for him, and awakened further mistrust. In Austria, people with listening eyes were not popular. (Only Beethoven was an exception: he was deaf.)
Rarely was he seized by yearning to be away, the longing to leave the limits of his extensive, varied fatherland that could be home and abroad at one and the same time. Once, he set off to pay a visit to Goethe. Cultured readers will know the lamentable outcome of this encounter between the humble man who hid behind his modesty, and the great one who used his greatness to keep the world at arm’s length. It was the Kahlenberg’s encounter with Olympus: tragic, because it led to the underestimation of the Kahlenberg.† Grillparzer had hoped for a while to escape the peevishness of his constricting homeland, and to be allowed to breathe the atmosphere of global horizons for two days, no more than two wretched days. And he returned home more shaken than broken, more sad than disappointed, enriched by the experience that his Catholic faith affirmed: that no man can become a demigod and that even a genius is limited to the standard five senses, a few crumbs of intuition, and sometimes a degree of good fortune that is nothing compared to the grace of suffering.
He filed this experience away with the others. He actively provoked the disfavour of fate. Perhaps the reason he went to Goethe was to see with his own eyes the happiness of a fortunate man, his better and his opposite. It was like a Friday going out to see what a Sunday is like, and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday.
II
Love entails risk. One has a justifiable dread of risks. They are distantly related to revolts, uprisings and civil disturbances. The object of love is not responsible for the unpredictable character of the feeling that is called a “passion”—and passion of course in the original sense of “suffering”. For all this the object of love, the individual woman, is of course not responsible, but as a type, as “woman”, she represents unpredictability, danger, the potential for revolution and sin. In a world of few certainties, she makes commotion and drama more probable. She can splinter the steps of hierarchic order, in the way that a child might take it into its head to loosen and break the rungs of a ladder. Grillparzer is happily in love. He fears only the other sex. Bizarre descendant from Austrian troubadours, he turns the saying of the Minnesingers on its head and loves before he adores: a moralist, not a courtier—no more than he is a courtier in his attitude to the Emperor. He wasn’t a flatterer, he was silent: his silence was reproachful.
The way he was, and the way he portrayed himself, he should have demanded to be loved: not just as a man of sorrows, but as a grump, uncomfortable and pedantic, knowing that such qualities are antipathetic to a woman’s heart. There was arrogance in him, uncertainty and the pleasure of self-denial. He fulfilled, nourished, fed his desire by denying it.
So he didn’t “know” woman in the Biblical sense. Nor did he find friends among men either. Love nuzzled him, trustfully, with interest. He could have reached out to stroke it, but instead he pushed it away; like a traveller in the desert who persists in taking an oasis for a mirage, and in his mind pushed it back to the unattainable blue horizon. He didn’t trample on happiness where it offered itself to him, but he did push it away with both hands, declined it, avoided it, looked the other way.
III
He had the gift of intuition, and he dived into the future like others into the past. None of his professionally clairvoyant political contemporaries could see the future as well as he, who wrote: “From humanity through nationality to bestiality”. Not a bon mot, but a cry of fear in view of the looming disintegration of the monarchy, the final victory of awakening national barbarism. A cry of fear, palpable even in his victory cry to Radetzky: “All Austria is in your camp!” Actually, the hinterland was by no means still intact, the army alone represented it. Sadová cast an enormous shadow.‡ Austria triumphed at sea, against the Italians, at Lissa, not in the north, on land, against Germany.§ Not only the Austrian army, but the idea of the cosmopolitan German was smashed by his step-brother, the nationalist German, whose watchwords were: centralize, vanquish, oppress, rule—the opposite of the unfairly taken against Latin motto (because misunderstood and misapplied for domestic politics): Divide et impera! A subtle translation would be: decentralize and exercise influence! Not: divide and rule!
But how many—even then—had a proper understanding of Latin? Since Joseph II, aping Prussian centralism and enlightenment à la Frederick the Great, reined in the church and—surely without meaning to or knowing he was doing it—laid the moral and intellectual basis for the subsequent nationalist arrogance of German Austrians vis-à-vis the other Austrians (the “dictatorship” one might call it), one of the last refuges of universal Latinity was taken away, destroyed from above, even though the Catholic Emperor of course had none of the Protestant and Voltairean élan (the dynamism, as we say today) of Prussia. Grillparzer perhaps marks the beginning of the (political) Weltschmerz of the Austrian writer. At least, it was Grillparzer who gave it its classic expression: the anguish that understands that the Europe
of the Middle Ages, Latin, universalist, suspending national differences—which in Austria still had force and being—was bound to be followed by the Europe of the Reformation and the French Revolution, the Europe of Napoleon and Bismarck. “From humanity through nationality to bestiality” means: from Erasmus through Luther, Frederick II, Napoleon, Bismarck, to the clutch of dictators we have today.
There were in those days few representatives of this (Catholic, political) Weltschmerz: liberalism was just beginning to convert the virtues of Austria into a stage set, lightness into flippancy; the actual “heuriger” is tart, but the poems and songs squeezed from it make a saccharine lemonade.∥ An acute conservative ear could discern the worldwide victory of the waltz and its offspring, the operettas of Lehár. From that “Grace” that takes its name from Greek antiquity and the Catholic gratia, was derived the export article: “Austrian cheer”; from etiquette, the stern daughter of Spain, any amount of bending-and-scraping compliancy. Can you blame Grillparzer!? He was surrounded by so much applause that he could only assert himself in lament. Empty laughter hurt him, privately as well as publicly. A minor transgression, the wrong word, even a clumsy gesture was enough to antagonize him. He reacted with extreme sensitivity—the most vengeful of all human weaknesses—with sometimes wounding arrogance (though never crossing the boundary into vulgarity). Such episodes only made him sadder. He suffered a hangover after wrath as others did after excess.
IV
Spain is Austria’s neighbour in history. The Counter-Reformation is a distant, calmer cousin to the Inquisition. The Habsburgs are Spaniards who took on the Austrian character and kept their Spanish ceremonials. These ceremonials, rigorous and assimilating at once, stand up to the rising tide of frivolity in Austria. The flag pairs black with yellow. The black watches over the yellow. The double eagle, golden, over both halves, watches over unity. Spain is Austria’s neighbour in history, and Grillparzer’s in literature.
He is the only German classic author of Spanish antecedents. Like the Habsburgs, he comes from Spain. He is Calderon’s descendant. It’s not just the form of the Ahnfrau.¶ It’s not the metre at all, more the cadence. It’s the attempt to couple the nervous clicking of the castanets with the steady iambs of German. A vain attempt, by the way. The Ahnfrau remains a classic oddity, mainstay of the Viennese Burgtheater and the school syllabus, but requiring the sanction of the k. and k. Ministry of Education and Culture.
Grillparzer subsequently gave up metre and rhythm, but not the melody of Spain. It flowed quite naturally into the native speech of Vienna. The grandezza of Spanish ceremonial was just as easily joined to the lightness of Austria. (If the percussion that opens the Radetzky March fails to remind you of castanets, then you have no ear for music.)
The melancholy of the narrative prose is not the golden Wehmut—the expression of Austrian sadness—but an expression of sternness. Picture a pleasant landscape in a black frame. The aphoristic prose is not satirical or campaigning as Grillparzer’s prose is, but furious. It is the aphoristic expression of a judge, a public prosecutor; or say it, an inquisitor, who is laying into his own people; sometimes with the resources of a card-carrying prophet. Never does bitterness turn into jeering. Never does a jibe become a pleasantry. Strict obedience to literary genre. Here too, here above all, the laws of the hierarchy. There is a Spanish anger when Grillparzer scolds. Austria knows no rage, it dwindles into a ticking-off: even rage finds its own tradesmen’s entrance.
Grillparzer’s anger was the expression of a subtle implacability softened by Latin Austria, and then amended by Spanish. His indignation was limited, personal, not meant as incitement or contagion, on the contrary: a rebellion of high-mindedness within the boundaries of the individual. He was the classic instance of a rebel who is at the same time a true reactionary: a phenomenon which the recent fashion of labelling everything rebellious and indignant, everything consciously eccentric and apart, as “revolutionary” is incapable of understanding. When Grillparzer stands in opposition to the Emperor, he does so by being more imperial than the Emperor. He mutinies against the relaxing of the ceremonial from above. He watches over the supposed guardians of the hierarchy. He is, if you will allow the expression, a reactionary par excellence, an individual anarchist reactionary. A posterity impertinently, dictatorially occupying the past is pleased to claim Grillparzer as a victim of reactionary Austria, as if he was one of the helpless, common or garden victims of reaction. When all the time he was a rebel out of reaction, of free will. His anger against the rulers came—in today’s parlance—not from the left, but the right. He was as Spanish as the Habsburgs, and as Roman as the Pope: the only conservative revolutionary in the history of Austria.
V
Successes tasted bitter to him, almost like failures. Of course, Austria had its connived-at failures, its failures in spe, a sort of parallel to pre-censorship. Displeasure at court, not even spontaneous displeasure, but a factitious displeasure bred by snoops and tell-tales, fed by intrigue, slander, malice, could hinder even a failure, and took from the writer the possibility of hearing the voice of an audience. To be taken off the programme, to be scorned, rejected, whistled at by an audience, all that spells an honest, so to speak, earned failure. But to “meet with disfavour” before the writer is even allowed to throw down his challenge, to suffer a fate that is itself a challenge and that is too powerful for you to measure yourself against, is a difficult lot, an Austrian curse. It’s like being imprisoned without charge. Under these conditions success, honour even, could not bring satisfaction, much less pleasure. And so success and failure tasted equally bitter to him. It was even possible that success brought pain, and failure only a long-awaited, almost yearned-for melancholy. One may feel at home in misery, gradually begin to love it like a dear friend. There is a condition in which one fears joyful surprises, Christmas at the wrong time, presents that are like assaults, and at the sight of which one is even forced to smile. Success can be a torment.
He saw through hope, came to like doubt, but didn’t lose his faith. It’s not possible to lose faith: after all, it’s faith in God. Scepticism doesn’t hurt such faith: on the contrary, it accompanies it, sometimes even supports it. The unreliability of the world is a consequence of its inadequacy. You don’t oppose its pressure, its mood, its despotism, by open revolt, which can have no other outcome than catastrophic inadequacy, in other words: disorder, the greatest of all dangers to a human, but by a retreat into the depth, into the cave of the self. An association, impossible to dismiss, with the image of the gloomy Spanish monarch burying himself alive.** He doesn’t live off to the side, but in the depths. From below he sees more accurately, with a juster bitterness and a moral bitterness, the facility, the poverty of the high-ups, and more clearly the summit of heaven; by day the stars that populate it (even by day). The dead on all sides are nearer to him than the living can be above him. He hears their breathing, the silent sleep of the time-conquerors. They have conquered this era that is so antagonistic and so wrong. It is made up of darkness and a false dawn, hailed by clueless, optimistic, noble, revolutionary bowler hats, feared by bitter men of our sort, who are not colour blind and understand exactly how much human blood is needed to brew that “dawn’s fiery glow”. It is soaked full of the blood of the great revolution, of the wars of Napoleon, when for the first time the cry rang out: “Nations, awaken!” The response of our dour species is: “From humanity through nationality to bestiality.”
Oh, those times! The hierarchical institutions are still intact, but the men in charge of them are slothful, thoughtless, unprincipled. They embody the randomness and disorder they have been called in to oppose. They are not called, they are hired. They have the perplexing ability—the curse, more—of oppressing and retreating at one and the same time. The astringency of the ancestors and forefathers, put to the service of an implacable idea, is as different from the facile, illegitimate desire to press, the tyranny of the ruler, as dark is f
rom black. Anarchy wears the mask of legitimacy. Meanwhile, a second anarchy, following on the heels of the first, makes ready to fight it. Lonely and timorous on the surface, protected in the depths. Charles V went to the grave alive; he felt the end was nigh, he too had no confederates.
VI
The end of the great but perceptibly shrinking empire still has one noble aspect, for all its inner cracks, flaws, pettinesses and rottennesses. A noble death. The victorious troops have something of the classic élan of Lipizzaner greys, the courtliest beasts in Europe, who have the symbolic nobility of heraldic animals. Austrian troops go to battle in snow-white tunics. Their victories are the classic successes of an outlived tradition. Their defeats carry symbolic weight. It’s the last hurrah of the old knightliness, losing out to plebeian technology; the unprotected advance of massed ranks against small, mobile, camouflaged units in broken field; the highly visible snow white, a noble target, against a blue that was invisible in fog (and called “Prussian blue” ever since); the cavalry charge against fortified artillery positions. It’s the end of feudalism: dying in the old armour, fighting a parvenu who is about to put on the false crown, a legal figment of an emperor. Seen from a higher angle, the Junker becomes an ignorant beneficiary of the great Revolution and the only genial arriviste of history: Napoleon.
Such is the catastrophe billowing around Grillparzer. His contemporaries—even the most significant of them—are not able to stand up to it. They are too small for such a comprehensive defeat, which confirms the decline of Charles V, and anticipates that of Karl in 1918. They take refuge in the treasury of home, in Austria, which is still capacious and various enough and has enough breath, but is now only “folklore” not “world”. Its orientation has changed, too: now it is Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Tehran, Constantinople; no more towards Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Milan, Rome, Hanover—and the fraternal enemy Berlin. The great and important in Austria acquire the peripheral character of specialities—dialect dyes them all, even the cosmopolitan Viennese, not just the provincial “folk poets” and “local characters”. Only Grillparzer kept the world in view, because he was the only one who suffered the pain of the lost, great, dry world. But Calderon and the Spanish antecedents of the Habsburgs became ever more remote, that is: his moral and intellectual origins are still less present than his material home, Switzerland. Twenty years ago the past was still there, instinct with life. Now it’s shrouded in dimness and fog. Grillparzer alone remains, a monument, buried alive, a living monument, already crumbling. His face is like weathered stone, yellow-hued, as though there was something like stone parchment. His body, too, lean, knotty and stooped, is reminiscent of wood, root, rock. His statue is less stony than he is. His heart shines in his large eyes, loyal grey mirrors to a sunken world, large, bright lights that listened to the future, and picked up the terror of the final end. When he shut them for ever, not prematurely, not at the right moment, if anything too late, because death can sometimes be as cruel as life—Charon delayed—people only knew that a “classic”, one of the “greats”, “a Burgtheater dramatist”, an Austrian pendant to the Académie Française-member, a retired senior civil servant, had gone on. And one knows still less today than then about how widely spanned his life’s arc was, all the way from Alcázar to Königgrätz; from grandezza and ceremonial to vulgarity and the Prussians; from the Habsburgs to the Hohenzollerns: from humanity through nationality to bestiality.
