* Famous Austrian prison.
The Literary Prize of the Federal Chamber of Commerce
The literary prize of the Federal Chamber of Commerce was the last prize I received, together with Okopenko and Ilse Eichinger, for the book The Cellar in which I describe my time as an apprentice salesman in the Scherzhauserfeld estate on the edge of Salzburg, and from the beginning I associated this prize not with my activities as a writer but with my activities as an apprentice salesman and during the ceremony, which had no connection whatever to the city of Salzburg but which took place nonetheless in the old Schloss Klessheim on the Saalach, the only thing spoken of by the gentlemen of the Federal Chamber of Commerce who had given me the prize was Bernhard the apprentice salesman and never Bernhard the writer. I felt tremendously well among the worthy gentlemen of the merchant class and the whole time I spent with these gentlemen I had the impression I didn’t belong to literature, I belonged with the merchants. In singling me out and inviting me to the Schloss Klessheim they brought back vividly a time when I was an apprentice that had served me well my whole life, supplying the population of Scherzhauserfeld with groceries under the care of my master Karl Podhala. Walking up and down in front of the Schloss before the ceremony, the autumnal mood in the park was extremely conducive to my reconstruction of my life as an apprentice, I was once again the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old in a gray work coat pouring vinegar and oil into the narrowest of necks of bottles from a height of almost two feet without a funnel, like a virtuoso, something that nobody in the shop could imitate. I carried the hundred-and-seventy-five-pound and two-hundred-and-twenty-pound sacks from the storeroom into the shop in the cellar and at midday on Saturdays I knelt on the floor to wash it while my boss did the day’s accounts. I opened the concertina barrier in the morning and closed it at night and in between it was my constant wish to serve the people of Scherzhauserfeld and my master. A few weeks ago when I went into one of the hundreds of branches of Austria’s largest chain of shoe shops, in one of the neighboring villages, there hanging on the wall were the rules for the conduct of apprentices I’d formulated in The Cellar. The management had copied these rules from my book and had them printed up for their apprentices by the hundred. I stood in the shop, where I’d wanted to buy myself some gym shoes, and read my own rules on the walls and for the first time in my literary career I had the feeling that I was a useful writer. I read my rules several times without letting on who I was, and then I bought the pair of gym shoes I wanted and went out of the shop and felt the deepest satisfaction. The Cellar describes my about-turn in the Reichenhallerstrasse, the moment one morning when instead of going to high school I went to the employment office to look for a place as an apprentice, and what followed. Now in the park of Klessheim I had the time and the peace before the prize-giving ceremony to yield to the melancholy that had overtaken me here in this park and I gave myself over to it happily. First alone, then with friends, I walked along the familiar walls, these were the walls, I thought, I’d slipped along at the end of the war, to cross the heavily guarded, forbidden border in the twilight. That was thirty-five years ago. Hitler had wanted to create a residence for himself in this Schloss. But where is Hitler? In this Schloss Presidents Nixon and Ford spent the night more than once, as did the Queen of England. Now the Schloss was home to the Federal Chamber of Commerce’s hotel school, which is world famous. And the students at this hotel school had cooked an absolutely magnificent meal for all the participants in the ceremony, the prizewinners and everyone else, and laid a beautiful table. The prize-giving took place in the hall, opened by a quartet or a quintet. Merchants are economical with words and the President of the Federal Chamber of Commerce had accordingly kept himself brief. All three prizewinners were treated, one after the other, to a eulogy by a university professor, in which the attempt was made to base the awarding of the prize. I had, according to mine, found a totally new form of autobiography. When the checks were handed over, mine was for fifty thousand schillings. The group of musicians brought the morning celebrations to an end. As was appropriate in such a setting, everyone took their places at a table decorated with little handwritten place cards. And now, to my surprise, I was sitting right next to the President of the Salzburg Chamber of Commerce, Haidenthaller, who told me once I’d sat down that it was he who had tested me at my oral apprentice salesman’s exam. He could remember the event of more than thirty years ago exactly. Yes, I said, I remember too. President Haidenthaller had a soft voice and I liked his way of speaking. My aunt was seated opposite me and my Salzburg publisher on my left. While my neighbor on my right, President Haidenthaller, fell silent once for a long moment, my publisher whispered into my ear that Haidenthaller was terminally ill, and had only another two weeks to live, cancer, my publisher whispered into my ear. When Herr Haidenthaller turned back toward me, there was naturally a new dimension to the conversation. Now I was much more careful with the distinguished gentleman who came, as I knew, from one of the oldest families in Salzburg, a dynasty of mill owners, and it turned out later that he was even related to me. He had read The Cellar, he said, nothing else. He had asked me about several sorts of Chinese tea in my apprentice salesman’s exam and I had given the correct answers. That question was always the hardest, he said. The event was as relaxed as could be, it’s the way merchants are. Today the apprentices didn’t need to be able to specify so many kinds of tea at their exam, nor so many kinds of coffee, around a hundred kinds of tea and around a hundred kinds of coffee, a hundred kinds of tea and coffee all different in their look and smell, the trickiest question in the exam, said President Haidenthaller. Naturally all through the rest of the conversation with him I was thinking about what my publisher had said to me, about the imminent and inevitable death of my table companion. The whole time I was thinking what I might say to my former examiner in the apprentice salesman’s exam to make this lunch as enjoyable for him as possible. We exchanged some experiences we’d had in our common hometown of Salzburg, named a whole series of names we both knew, laughed a few times, and I noticed my table companion even guffawed once. Did he know he was about to die? Or was the whole thing a nasty rumor? Conversation with someone you know is about to die is not the easiest. Deep down I was glad when the table was cleared and all the participants said their good-byes. The prize-giving had begun so beautifully and ended so sadly. In the days following the ceremony in Klessheim I went daily to my coffeehouse in Gmunden to read the papers, and first of all always the column that contains the death announcements. Two weeks had already gone by and the name Haidenthaller had not appeared in print, neither in the deaths column nor on the obituaries page. But on the fifteenth or sixteenth day Haidenthaller’s name was in the paper, in large letters and bordered in black. My publisher had only been off by one or two days, he hadn’t been spreading a rumor. I sat in the coffeehouse and observed the seagulls in front of the window as they greedily pecked the old retired women’s chunks of bread out of the stormy waters of the lake and screeched off and suddenly I heard everything again that Herr Haidenthaller had said to me at the table in Klessheim, with the greatest reticence and distinction that he owed to his position and his ancient family. Without the Prize of the Federal Chamber of Commerce I would not have seen Herr Haidenthaller again and I wouldn’t know as much today as I know about my own forebears as I did after my meeting with him, he knew my people well.
The Georg Büchner Prize
I received the Büchner Prize in 1970, when the so-called Student Revolution of 1968, having subsided as a merely romantic and thus totally unsuccessful dilettantish revolt, had already entered history as an unfit attempt at a revolution, alas. The frivolousness of this protest had finally led to a result that was the opposite of what was intended and thus an intellectual catastrophe and a sad awakening. The people pushing this movement with one eye on the French did not, as they intended, bring back to Germany the good, the best, the spirit that feared no consequences, they only drove it out for a long time
with their dilettantism which had nothing revolutionary about it but was merely a fashion stolen from the French, as we can now see. The general attitudes now reigning in Germany are obviously more depressing than they were before the events of 1968. It was no movement in the sense of Büchner’s and his gang’s movement, only a perverse game with the intellectual boredom that has been a tradition in Germany for hundreds of years. The Büchner Prize is linked with a name I had conjured only with the deepest respect for decades. For my work in directing, at the end of my studies at the Mozarteum I chose, without needing much reflection, alongside Kleist’s The Broken Pitcher and Thomas Wolfe’s Mannerhouse, Büchner’s Leonce and Lena. But because I’ve never been able to be very articulate about any of the things I’ve loved most in my life, I’ve also almost never said anything about Büchner. The speech that the Germany Academy required of me for being awarded the Büchner Prize had to go against this inarticulacy and so it never took shape. On the contrary, I was certain that I had no right to express myself in any way about Büchner on the podium in Darmstadt, indeed, I was certain that the name Büchner should not even cross my lips if possible, and in this I was successful, for I only said a few sentences in Darmstadt and these had nothing to do with Büchner. We are not allowed to keep talking endlessly about those we consider great and to hitch our own pitiful existence and inadequacies to these great ones with all our efforts and our clamor. It is customary that people when they get a Kant plaque or a Dürer Prize give long speeches about Kant or Dürer, spinning dull threads that extend from the great ones to themselves and squeezing their brains over the audience. This way of proceeding doesn’t appeal to me. And so I only said a few sentences in Darmstadt which had nothing to do with Büchner, though everything to do with me. Finally I had no need to explain Büchner, who needs no explaining, at most I needed to make a short statement about myself and my relationship to my surrounding world, from the center of my own world which is also, of course, for as long as I live, the center of the world itself for me, and must be so, if what I say is going to be true. I’m not reciting a prayer, I thought, I’m taking a standpoint which can only be my standpoint, when I speak. In short, I spoke few sentences. The listeners thought that what I said was an introduction to my speech, but it was the whole thing. I gave a short bow and saw that my audience wasn’t pleased with me. But I hadn’t come to Darmstadt to make people happy, but only to collect the prize, which came with ten thousand marks and with which Büchner had nothing to do, since he knew nothing about it himself, having died so many decades before there was any idea of funding a Büchner Prize. The so-called German Academy of Language and Poetry had everything to do with the Büchner Prize, while Georg Büchner himself had nothing. And I thanked the German Academy of Language and Poetry for the prize, but in truth I was only thanking them for the prize money, for when I went to Darmstadt I no longer had any relationship to the so-called honor that such a prize was supposed to signify, this honor and all other honors had already become suspect to me. But I had no cause to share my views with the Academy, I packed my bag and went to Darmstadt with my aunt because I wanted to spoil myself and my aunt with a beautiful trip through Germany after a long barren period at home in the country. The gentlemen of the Academy couldn’t have been friendlier and I had several pleasant conversations with them which contained nothing dangerous, for I didn’t want anything to disrupt my trip through Germany. I had to take the prize ceremony upon myself as a curiosity and Werner Heisenberg, who was being honored in the same ceremony with a prize for scientific writing, had also said to me more than once how curious the ceremony was, what the famous critic from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Joachim Kaiser, who was also getting a prize then, thought, I can’t say, he was inscrutable. After the distribution of the prizes, when I said to Joachim Kaiser, who was sitting next to me in the front row, that my prize certificate was a third larger and thus also heavier than his, embodying the different relevant weights of the prizes, he made a face. But I have to say that afterward in a nearby cellar restaurant he impressed me with his knowledge of musicology, in the face of such astonishingly concentrated richness I had nothing to contribute. The city of Darmstadt gave me a lunch, to which some of my friends also came, I was allowed to provide names and they were all invited. During lunch when my aunt told her neighbor at the table, Minister Storz, that it wasn’t only Büchner who had his birthday that day, it was hers too, she was seventy-six, one of the gentlemen of the city got to his feet and went out. Somewhat later he returned carrying a bouquet of seventy-six roses. Here I have to say that the main reason I went to Darmstadt was to make a beautiful birthday for my aunt, for she was born, like Georg Büchner, on October eighteenth. Of course it wasn’t the only reason but it was the main reason. At the end of the meal my aunt and I signed our names in the Golden Book of Darmstadt. The newspapers covered the tripartite prize, albeit from different perspectives and with wildly different resources, in ways that pretty much matched my own opinions. The articles are there to be read. The jury of the German Academy, from which I have since resigned, because they elected me a member without my knowledge, and I couldn’t defend this, is answerable for my being voted the winner of the Büchner Prize, not me.
SPEECHES
Speech at the Award Ceremony for the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen
Honored Guests,
I cannot follow the fairy tale of your town musicians; I don’t want to tell a story; I don’t want to sing; I don’t want to preach; but it’s true: fairy tales are over, the fairy tales about cities and states and all the scientific fairy tales, and all the philosophical ones; there is no more world of the spirit; Europe, the most beautiful, is dead; this is the truth and the reality. Reality, like truth, is no fairy tale and truth has never been a fairy tale.
Fifty years ago Europe was a single fairy tale, the whole world a fairy-tale world. Today there are many who live in this fairy-tale world, but they’re living in a dead world and they themselves are dead. He who isn’t dead lives, and he doesn’t live in fairy tales; it’s no fairy tale.
I myself am no fairy tale and I do not come from a world of fairy tales; I had to live through a long war and I saw hundreds of thousands die, and others who went on right over them; everyone went on, in reality; everything changed, in truth; in the five decades during which everything turned to revolt and everything changed, during which a thousand-year-old fairy tale gave way to the reality and the truth, I felt myself getting colder and colder while a new world and a new nature arose from the old.
It is harder to live without fairy tales, that is why it is so hard to live in the twentieth century; it’s more that we exist, we don’t live, no one lives anymore; but it is a fine thing to exist in the twentieth century, to move, but to where? I know I did not emerge from any fairy tale and I will not enter any fairy tale, this is already progress and thus already a difference between then and now.
We are standing on the most frightening territory in all of history. We are in fear, in fear of this enormous material that is the new humanity, and of a new knowledge of our nature and the renewal of our nature; together we have been only a single mass of pain in the last half century; this pain today is us; this pain is now our spiritual condition.
We have a wholly new system, a wholly new way of seeing the world, and a wholly new, truly most outstanding view of the world’s own surroundings, and we have a new morality and we have new sciences and new arts. We feel dizzy and we feel cold. We believed that because we are human, we would lose our balance, but we haven’t lost our balance; we’ve also done everything to avoid freezing.
Everything has changed because it is we who have changed it, our external geography has changed as much as our internal one.
We make great demands now, we cannot make enough great demands; no era has made such great demands as ours; we are already megalomaniacal; because we know we cannot fall and we cannot freeze, we trust ourselves to do what we do.
Life i
s only science now. The science of the sciences. Now we are suddenly taken up with nature. We have become intimate with the elements. We have put reality to the test. Reality has put us to the test. We now know the laws of nature, the infinite High Laws of nature, and we can study them in reality and in truth. We no longer have to rely on assumptions. When we look into nature, we no longer see ghosts. We have written the boldest chapter in the book of world history, every one of us has written it for himself in fright and deathly fear and none of us of our own free will, nor according to his own taste, but following the laws of nature, and we have written this chapter behind the backs of our blind fathers and our foolish teachers, behind our own backs; after so much that has been endlessly long and dull, the shortest and the most important.
My Prizes: An Accounting Page 6
