Andreas

by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

  After the letter: the Knight tries to bring reason to bear on in his inward tumult, to reduce to order (by Locke’s method) the associations unclaimed: he reveals in himself courtesy, grace, modesty. His inexhaustible inward powers—confident—hosts of angels which he summons. A man’s whole nature must come to light in such a struggle with inward disorganization: his wanted trains of thought, his favourite associations.—Subtle association with a memory of travel: pilgrimage with Japanese, perception of light. He had resolved to hail every day, the coming of the sun—why can he not always welcome it?—he tries now to marshal the associations towards a higher, purer order; he knows that only inadequacy opposes the Cosmos. He kneels, prays to the supreme being. Chaos and death breathe upon him: on the point of succumbing, he is like the delicate boy he was, with a fleeting colour on his cheeks.

  A MEETING BETWEEN ANDREAS and the Knight on a ship at anchor. Invitations from the captain, rather mysterious. Courtesans—one completely veiled (Mariquita). Sacramozo obviously embarrassed by the veiled woman: he certainly leads the conversation with assurance; he is deeply interested by an Indian, who takes part, but does not eat with them.—Everything has happened at Mariquita’s instigation: “I wanted to see you together for once.” This is the only time that Sacramozo and Mariquita meet. On the way home, they say nothing about the whole affair, nothing about the invitation. Andreas feels that the Knight believes it was the Countess. Their conversation turns on fate and death. That night, Sacramozo invites Andreas home for the first time.

  The masque: a solemn symbolic festival. Andreas’s initiation. What costume Sacramozo wore at the masque remains a secret. Echo of Hafiz’s relationship to the boy cupbearer, whom he makes happy out of the flames of his love for Suleika.—Culminating point of the masque, a kind of meeting between Maria and Mariquita, or transmutation of Maria, who is brought in in a state of hypnosis: it ends badly.

  The idea hovering before the Knight. The greatest magician is he who can work magic on himself. This his goal, since he is threatened by: confusion, the failure to understand those nearest to him, the loss of the world and himself—all this in his relationship to Maria.—At the same time, Maria unwittingly feeds his knowledge of that other aspect of the world—Mariquita having taken it on herself to entice the Knight away from Maria by letting him suspect the side of Maria that is turned towards Andreas. (She keeps this game quite hidden from Andreas.) For Mariquita fears the Knight as Maria’s strongest support in life.

  Knight: “In reality, we know only when we know little; doubt grows with knowledge” (Goethe)—“These are men who love and seek their like, and there are others who love and seek their opposite.” (Goethe)—But then are men like the Knight capable of having a like and an opposite?—That he no longer understands anyone—the less he understands, the more he feels how Andreas is growing in feeling, intuition and knowledge—is balanced by the arcanum: he has found one who will understand, loving. Thus his withdrawal becomes lovely, as one who passes into the mirror to be united with his brother. The circle comes to have profound meaning for him. The predominance of the circle in the works and notes of Leonardo.—When the sun is low, we live more in our shadow than in ourselves.

  The allomatic: the meagreness of earthly experience. He is drawn to the Countess because the other element in her means so much to her—he suspects that here is a soul far advanced on the way of transformation. What attracts him in Andreas: that he is open to influences from others; the life of others is present in him in the same purity and strength as when a drop of blood, or the breath exhaled by another, is exposed to powerful heat in a glass ball—even so the fates of others in Andreas. Andreas is, like the merchant’s son (in the Tale of the Six-Hundred-and-Seventy-Second Night), the geometrical locus of the destinies of others. (The lucerna, or lamp of life: a ball of alabaster, in which the blood of one far distant shows, as it moves and glows, how things are with him: in misfortune, it swells or gleams, at death it is extinguished, or the vessel bursts.)

  Sacramozo and Andreas: how each gradually set the other in his own place: this connected with Andreas’s repugnance of the continual recollection of his adventure with Gotthilff. Only he holds the past in horror who, remaining at an inferior stage, assumes that it might have been different. “Was I, when that being kissed me first, just anyone, everything turns stale; if I was singled out (with the anticipation of every hour till death) then all is sublime.” Love is the anticipation of the end in the beginning, and therefore the victory over decay, over time, over death—Novalis’s note on the mystic powers of self-creation with which we credit women, so that we expect them to love anyone (theme of Sobreide, also of Death and the Fool). Love is the attraction exercised on us by those animate objects with which we are called to operate. To operate means to lead an animate organism to perfection by transformation—in relation with Maria: to find, of oneself, the power to feel, the chain of experience as necessary—of a higher stage of the egocentric.

  The Knight no longer hopes to have children by Maria. Andreas might become his “son without a mother.”

  Sacramozo says of Maria: “The earthly possibility that she might be united with me existed, but not the higher one.” For him, Maria is his collaborator by virtue of the purity of her being. The element of union with him—he wishes to unite Andreas with Maria. Now that they shall be a couple—then, Maria reborn with Sacramozo reborn (in whom Andreas will also exist).—He must know the truth, hence he knows Maria’s life—but the only thing of value to him is the life-secret of every being. And since life is both on the surface and in the depths, the life-secret can only be grasped by the union of the two.

  He may have been mistaken in all he did, his attitude justifies him.—Self-enjoyment, the highest, purest—Sacramozo seeks it: the union with himself, complete identity, harmony of the idea of self with the knowledge of self. He tries to impart this condition to Andreas, who is helped by love. The Countess participates in that condition, though for pathological reasons: every impulse which issues from Mariquita is saturated for Maria with the atmosphere of selfhood elevated to the state of mystery—in the same way, Maria is for Mariquita the only thing worth experiencing (she loves and hates her). Maria’s confession of the rapture she feels in merging into the “other,” the mere foreboding of that state (the first is a rapture mingled with horror)—that that is for her the life of life; that every sweetness, every anticipation even, of the union with God, threatens to plunge her into it. (Conversation with the Spanish confessor about this, her self-reproaches. She feels responsible for more than herself. The Jesuit sets her mind at rest.)

  Ad Sacramozo: Quod petis in te est, ne quaesiveris extra (That which thou seekest is within thee; seek it not outside)—To be master of our own self would mean to be aware of everything, even the subliminal.

  A being of supreme awareness can never feel fear, except in actual danger, because all other forms of fear in all presupposes some element obtruded, not with awareness.

  Magician who thinks he moves an invisible limb. What else is this but to feel one’s will, to look on and feel oneself as one exercising his will, not in the material world (like Napoleon), but in the spirit.

  Sacramozo: “The most sacred relationship is that between the appearance and the essence—and how constantly it is outraged! One might think that God had hidden it among thorns and thistles.—We possess an arsenal of truth which would have power to change the world back into a stellar nebula, but every arcanym is enclosed in an iron matrix—by our inflexibility and our stupidity, our prejudices, our powerlessness to understand the unique.”

  The Knight and the world: to think that everything, everything, is veiled. The veiled image of Saïs stands everywhere. His ardent craving for the purity of all things.

  His other aspect, which he alone sees: so childish, so weak, inadequate. Would like to wipe himself out of existence. Feels that Maria puts him to the test, sees through him. Her inhibition—in that he sees his own inadequacy. Loneline
ss and mingling with men are the same thing.

  The antinomy of being and having: for him, in the spiritual world, where the important thing for him is leadership, election, as for Andreas in the human world. His great love for one of the most beautiful women he possessed.

  In Sacramozo, more and more the belief that his fictitious existence (as Sacramozo) prevents the ultimate unfolding of Andreas into the manly lover, of Maria (round whom he sees another element hovering like an aura) into the happy beloved.

  Knight: “Kneel?—as one kneels to receive teaching from a master revered like a god—this gesture I shall have died without finding it on my way. Will this youth be he who is capable of kneeling?” (he leads the figure through all the vicissitudes which for him exhaust the content of the world). “And shall I find the way to be he?—Not by circumventing his inadequacy, but by absorbing it into myself?”

  On death: “To have to leave the theatre before the curtain has even risen.”

  Dissolution, striven for, means peace as to one’s own being, great or small, limited or the powerful, accepted or rejected, about one’s own lifetime and the epochs of time and the symbolic vision of things, and about the poor and needy.

  The Knight great in his total defeat—a being struggling for his fate: In Andreas’s union with the transformed Maria, he finds all in one, faith, love, fulfilment.

  Andreas, beside the bed on which Sacramozo’s body lies, must feel that, in a supreme sense, he may have been right.

  Andreas: Outcome of tour to Venice: he feels with horror that he can never return to the narrow life of Vienna, he has grown out of it. But the state he has achieved brings him more distress than joy, it seems to him a state in which nothing is conditioned, nothing made difficult, and by that very fact nothing exists. Everything merely reminds him of things, they are not really there. Everything tastes stale, there is nothing to seek, but because of that nothing can be found.—Question: whether these fragments in the kaleidoscope could discover a new arrangement. Envious recollection of his grandfather’s journey down the Danube, his first places, success by health and courage, piety and loyalty, and, with it all, a certain robust selfishness and cunning.

  Andreas’s return.—He was what he might be, yet never, hardly ever, was.—He sees the sky, small clouds over a forest, sees the beauty, is moved—but without that self-confidence on which the whole world must rest as on an emerald;—with Romana, he says to himself, it might be mine.

  AFTERWORD

  Andreas was found, unfinished, among Hofmannsthal’s papers after his death. It consisted of a finished chapter and a collection of notes in the form of brief dialogues, aphorisms and quotations. The main fragment first appeared in the magazine Corona in 1930. Two years later, Andreas was published in book form with an afterword by Jacob Wassermann—only to be suppressed by Nazi censure. Thus, Andreas was not available in the German speaking world until Herbert Steiner’s postwar edition.

  Let us briefly retrace what is known of the genesis of the posthumous novel. While in Venice in the summer of 1907, Hofmannsthal wrote the first draft of The Venetian Travel-Diary of Herr von N (1779), followed by a series of notes under the headings “Ven. Diary”, “Ven. Adventure” and “Ven. Experience”. Hofmannsthal had just read Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of Personality: A study in Abnormal Psychology (New York 1906), which relates the case of an American female student who suffers from a split personality. From this unusual case he derived the double figure of Maria and Mariquita, also known as the “wunderbare Feundin”. At the time Hofmannsthal briefly considered writing the novel in the form of letters. The main fragment—roughly a quarter of the projected length of Andreas—was written between February 1912 and August 1913. (The title Andreas or the United was chosen later that year.) In 1918, Hofmannsthal described Andreas in a letter to his friend Hermann Bahr as a “novel, on a limited scale on the youth and life crisis of a young Austrian travelling to Venice and Tuscany”. He thought that three to four years would be needed to complete it. However, Andreas was put aside in favour of Nachspiel 1808, the story of Austria’s uprising against Napoleon.

  The finished fragment of Andreas, written in 1912-13, tells the story of the young knight’s voyage from Rococo Vienna to Venice. But Andreas is much more than a mere historical novel, a period piece. As a voyage of spiritual discovery it reaches beyond the specific experience of a vanished age; the hero, at first characterless and passive, encounters conflicting emotions that will ultimately lead to regeneration and love. These emotions are rooted in experience; as such they have the value of symbols without ever becoming intellectual abstractions.

  The initial episode takes Andreas to Carinthia, where he falls under the spell of the enchanted landscape. Magically enveloped in the landscape’s immortality, Andreas is enfolded in a wonderful vision of beauty; and he wishes he could espouse this timeless world untainted by corrupting forces. It is no coincidence that the encounter with Romana takes place in this region of loving simplicity and purity, for Andreas senses—if only fleetingly—that Romana comes from a region of the soul which is hidden but pure. Andreas understands that the path to love is akin to the feeling of sanctitude.

  Following an encounter with the evil Gotthilff (God-help), he escapes to Venice. The adventures of Andreas in Venice form the centre of events in which the hero is split, on the one hand towards the sensual, on the other towards the ideal. These conflicting attitudes of the soul are brought to light in his meeting with the woman alternatively described as Maria or Mariquita, which are only “the two faces of the same person”. Maria embodies the highest expression of the individual soul; she personifies love in its purest form, but fears contact with life itself. She lacks the ability to become flesh and blood: to lose herself in the sensual moment. Mariquita, on the other hand, belongs entirely to the world and succeeds in revealing the unique and external in sensual appearances. Hofmannsthal noted in the Book of Friends, a collection of aphorisms dating from 1922: “Every new acquaintance takes us apart and brings us back together. It is of utmost importance that we experience regeneration”. Torn between the extremes of duration and change, loyalty and betrayal, the physical and spiritual in life, Andreas realizes that he must allow himself to be transformed by both; for in this apparently simple contrast is enclosed the double possibility of the soul’s attitude to life: emotions, neither anchored at one extreme or another, but mysteriously drawn to each other.

  Ultimately, Andreas is brought back to himself by Sacramozo, the Knight of Malta. Sacramozo, the spiritual teacher, awakens a higher awareness of life in Andreas. But Sacramozo belongs to a world which does not open itself—he embodies a form of denial akin to destruction and isolation. To find a link to humankind, Andreas realizes that he must accept the impure, the fragmented in life. Only then will he succeed in uniting the two faces of life which he has glimpsed through his encounter with the mysterious double figure. He knows that he belongs to Romana; thus, in the last, unfinished chapter, Andreas leaves Venice behind and returns to the Finazzer farm.

  The novel as it lies, unfinished, before us, ends with a stream of notes, allusions to various situations, brief dialogues, epigrams and occasional aphorisms. These intuitions, dissolved in movement, are loosely woven into a fragmented fabric. Beyond its fragmentary form, Andreas is concerned with much that our world has lost touch with: timeless and ultimate experiences, moments of poetic ecstasy in which the wholeness of existence is perceived. The miraculous familiarity of things is revived; heightened sensations strive towards a kind of identification with nature and all things; language is wonderfully attuned to nature and human experience. Images of landscapes, towns and villages through which the young knight has wandered, sights which have delighted his eyes, everything is visually retained. Here perhaps lies part of the enigma of Andreas. Hofmannsthal started the novel around visual elements reminiscent of Stifter’s tales—but gradually shifted towards incorporating fragments rooted in personal experience. And perhaps that is
why Hofmannsthal’s novel was doomed. As he felt an increasing distaste for the spirit of the modern age intertwined with a sense of the tragedy awaiting his beloved Austria—he may have found himself reluctant to give shape to Andreas’s spiritual journey.

  OLIVIER BERGGRUEN

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  Pushkin Press,

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  Translated from the German by Marie D. Hottinger

  First published in Germany 1932 First published in this translation 1936

  First published by Pushkin Press in 1998

  This ebook edition published in 2013

  ISBN 978 1 908968 62 3

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