Often, I would stand motionless in one of the tower rooms for hours at a time, listening into the silence. If I had claimed to be working, they would probably have interpreted my answer as insolent and rebuked me. But it was true: I was working my way into a man’s existence. I did it instinctively, in the fashion of mystics—by trying to become as one with the things around me; after all, these objects contained the spirit of virile existence and thus had to have something of its substance.
This was not difficult to do among the temperas that showed mounted skirmishes between Uhlans and Cossacks in Galicia during the early years of the Great War. Exciting events could be relived effortlessly. But how could one penetrate the mystery of what it was that made a piece of furniture—for instance, a full-length mirror, a so-called psyché—quite unmistakably masculine, while a similar piece in Aunt Sophie’s bedroom, made in the same severe Empire neoclassic style, was just as unmistakably feminine? Piercing to the essence, the entity, of this maleness demanded such intense spiritual activity, such subtle mobilizing of the senses, that I was often virtually numbed and so oddly frightened that I had to flee from myself, out into the open.
Something was now surprisingly revealed to me, namely Uncle Hubi’s bachelor days. These opened up to me as a new dimension not just of Uncle Hubi but of the whole world. What gave me most food for thought was the realization that this adolescence and early manhood of my uncle-by-marriage, this period whose mementos had found refuge here, was absolutely masculine, yet masculine in a girlishly sentimental and poetic way that did not fundamentally contradict the rough-tough tone of the “last heroes and warriors.” The symbol of that period was two student rapiers crisscrossed and entwined by a divided apple-green and peach-red ribbon. Above the point of intersection hung a “little keg,” a brimless cap of the same colors as the ribbon, with a fraternity cipher embroidered on it in gold; emphatically terminated by an exclamation point, the cipher contained the initials of the fraternity name as well as those of the motto Vivat, crescat, floreat! The letters twisted into an arabesque: the musical key signature for the atmospheric motif of the reality to which these objects bore symbolic witness.
I realized now the meaning of certain hints in the teasing, mocking tone that made the relationship between Uncle Hubi and his friends and kinfolk cozily amusing, allusions I had never especially heeded and of course never understood. As a former Austrian, Uncle Hubi openly hated Prussia and despised the states of the old Austro-Hungarian empire that had gone so far as to form a new and hybrid empire under the crown of the Hohenzollerns. Nonetheless, my uncle had attended the University of Tübingen, taking active part in a dueling fraternity there, and (presumably in concordance with his brothers, but counter to the prohibition of political activity among corpsmen) he had committed himself, in fraternal enthusiasm, to the notion of a Greater Germany—an anti-Semite and a Wagnerian, as well as an ardent disciple of his political idol Georg von Schönerer. The latter, having forced his way into the editorial office of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt (in March 1888, this “Jew gazette” had incorrectly spread the news of Kaiser Wilhelm I’s death), had received a prison sentence and forfeited his title of nobility. I had heard about the incident at home. My father never failed to remind Uncle Hubi of it in his occasional fits of caustic humor, which invariably hit the target: Uncle Hubi was still able to wax indignant about a harshness that had almost brought him to the barricades as a young man—and usually Aunt Sophie seconded him: “If there’s one thing Hubi just can’t bear, it’s injustice. You just have to understand!”
What I now understood—or rather re-created—was Uncle Hubi’s youth. I almost physically grasped the burning passion that a blast of the Zeitgeist had kindled in him, so fiery that it devoured everything to which he had been reared and educated—his highly civilized Old Austrian skepticism, its loathing of exuberance and impetuousness, the love of tradition and the respectful loyalty to the state—and devoured all this as thoroughly as it had the other elements that were in his blood, as it were, derived from the land where he had been born and bred: Balkan cunning and its all-defusing sense of humor, Oriental mellowness and its phlegm. I tried to track down the tinder of this passion, and I found it in a book with a simple—but no less demanding—title: The Bible. Needless to say, this was not the Holy Writ of the Old and the New Testaments. It was a “drinking book” for the student fraternities, a collection of lyrics from which, along with the spirit of the German nineteenth century, everything else leaped out at me: everything that was regarded as truly and essentially German by myself—and presumably by any other German-speaking person who was descended, like me and my family, from colonial settlers of the old empire and was living in a remote area of Eastern Europe. It all leaped out at me like a fiery wind.
The spring was at its height when I came to Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie; melted water shot through the ditches, making the brooks overflow into the meadows; and it seems to me that I must have carried on in an equally effusive way. The title page of the “Bible” sported a colored emblem: a group of merry students boating down the Rhein, wearing a costume that corps members don even today on festive occasions—a braid-trimmed, black-velvet jacket, snug white trousers, and high boots, plus the “little keg,” the fraternity cap. One student lies stretched out in the stern; a second one stands in the bow, crooning; the others ply the oars. The hills on the opposite bank are crowned with the ruins of castles. I was so moved by this little picture and its gaily romantic mood that I yearned for nothing so much as to run around in that outfit myself. Aunt Sophie had always had a maternal sympathy for my childhood extravagances. A few years before, she had given me an unforgettably beautiful Christmas present: a lushly fringed Indian outfit, with moccasins imaginatively embroidered by her own hand. And now, kind Aunt Sophie rummaged through all the plunder boxes in the attic, looking for something similar enough to the braided velvet jacket to pass for a fraternity costume after a few alterations. Fortunately, Geib, the old butler, remembered that a deceased brother of his brother-in-law (the blacksmith at the brewery) had been a foreman in a manganese mine on the Bistriţa River, and perhaps the widow still had his miner’s jacket.
I was on good terms with this blacksmith, whose name was Haller. I liked hanging around his smithy, especially to melt out the lead core from old rifle bullets. I cast the lead into pellets for my slingshot and used the copper shells as tips for my arrows. Envious and admiring, I would watch Haller remove the white-hot bullets from the fire with his tongs, letting the lead run out and quickly rolling the empty shells over the horny calluses of his hand without getting burned. I tried to imitate him once, and wound up with some bad blisters. In any case, Haller liked me, and he spoke to his brother’s widow: the jacket became mine. It reeked of camphor and was much too large; but Aunt Sophie, who always had a couple of seamstresses working in a back room, had them take in the jacket at the seams so that it more or less fitted. It barely differed from the student getup and even had small epaulets in the bargain.
So far, so good. But it was harder to rig up the lower part of the gear: the snug white trousers and the black boots reaching way past the knees. I staunchly refused to pull on some cotton hunting drawers of Uncle Hubi’s; but—only after some inner reluctance—I did accept a silk leotard that Aunt Sophie had worn under her costume at some masquerade in long-past days of slender youthfulness. A pair of black rubber boots, forgotten by some hunting guest, only went up to my calves, spaciously wobbling around them. But to compensate, good Aunt Sophie dug up a black-velvet biretta, crowning it all by twisting a genuine red foxbrush around it, just like on the proud headgear of the “fox major,” who oversees the first-year pledges in a dueling corps. When, all tackled up at last, I faced the looking glass in Aunt Sophie’s boudoir (the psyché in Empire style), the Rumanian chambermaid Florica, who had helped my aunt and the old housekeeper Katharina with the preparations, was overcome by such a convulsive fit of the giggles that she had to be sent from the room.
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I viewed myself alone and thoroughly a few times more in the manlier full-length mirror in the tower. At thirteen, after all, it is easy to stand in front of a mirror with a sheaf of chicken feathers in your hair and see Chief Buffalo Horn, with the noble savage’s aquiline nose and his full war paint. It is easier still to project a few deft scars into a round boyish face, a long pipe into the energetically compressed childish mouth, and a foaming stein of beer into the small fist. But my goal was not the hale and hearty fraternity life. What I was trying to experience for myself, feel for myself—in this presumably highly comical imitation of a costume that was nothing so much as the fashionable expression of a sentiment—what I was after was the Germanhood of the corpsmen.
It had to be something corresponding to my own state, my own mood: a sensation composed of the same sentimental elements that kept me tense and restless, a similar urgent yearning with no goal. No, there was a goal: a German skushno, in a word. The songs in the drinking book stemmed from many different eras, but they all shared the same restlessness, the same mood of departure no matter where to, and the same bitterness of anticipated futility.
I got Aunt Sophie to play the “Bible” songs I liked most for their purest utterance of this mood. She was a fine musician; in her youth, she had dreamed of becoming a concert pianist. Poor Uncle Hubi had a tin ear, but his help was indispensable when we did not know some melody, for he claimed to have them all fresh in his memory from his fraternity days. As is often the case with people who cannot carry a melody, he himself could not hear how tunelessly he sang; nonetheless, he deployed bombast and volume to replace whatever struck him subconsciously as being off key. For even the simplest ditty, he would blow up his chest like a Wagnerian singer, gesticulating as he bellowed to the four winds, not even pausing when Aunt Sophie threw her hands over her ears and shouted, “For heaven’s sake, Hubi, stop! You sound like a bull being slaughtered!” Nor would he stop if she and I, shaking with mirth, collapsed in each other’s arms, our eyes flooding with tears, our lungs gasping for air. He was too kindhearted, had too great a sense of humor, to resent this.
And so our “musical archaeology,” as he dubbed it, became a sort of rite. Every evening before dinner—at which I was allowed to appear in my improvised uniform—the three of us swooped upon the “Bible” and picked out the songs we liked best, or tried to re-create in their presumed original form the songs that Uncle Hubi’s resuscitation had only inadequately resurrected. Thus arose a family intimacy I had never known in my parental home. I was very happy, and I believe that Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie were likewise happy in their way: they had found, albeit belatedly, the son who had been denied to them.
Such harmony with my surroundings, which I promptly took for an ultimate harmony with the entire world, contributed to the enthusiasm that glowed through me for our newly discovered Germanhood. Hitherto, I had lived in the Old Austrian skepticism, to which, after the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, resignation had been added. I was still surrounded by much older and old-born people. The high civilization of my milieu (especially here, at its outermost fringes, where it was being ground down by another culture) was not in keeping with my age. The ever-polite tempering, the “after you” for anybody at any time, the ironic reflection, the mournful certainty that one lived in a decaying world, the shoulder-shrugging resignation—these were all in physiological contradiction to my age, so to speak. The contradiction was simply unbearable. I experienced this in my repugnance toward a man named Stiassny, who had been a permanent guest in my uncle’s home for decades.
Stiassny was a kind of genius manqué, encyclopedically educated, a doctor in all sorts of occult sciences, a ruins-rummager and fragment-gatherer, “an heir to decay,” as he styled himself. He came from Prague, and his family had once been extremely rich. If you visited him in his room, which was crammed with bizarre objects and rare books, you could inspect the catalogue of the auction at which, shortly after 1919, the family’s entire property had gone under the gavel—not only all the household effects, furnishings, coaches, servant liveries, but also his father’s important art collection. The most interesting pieces were doubtless an early Raphael Madonna and the parlor car in which the Stiassnys had traveled. One brother had shot himself after the auction.
Stiassny did not regard this family misfortune as a stroke of personal fate. “Why, it’s merely one part of the universal dissolution,” he would say with an ashy smile. And it struck him as both natural and logical that he was thus reduced to total poverty and compelled to find refuge “wherever this dissolution has not yet been achieved—or at least not in visible form.” Besides, in our area of the world, in homes of some prosperity it was not unusual for someone to remain as a guest for years and ultimately decades if some unhappy twist of luck had left him in circumstances forcing him to lay claim to unrestricted hospitality.
Russia was a short hike away, beyond the Dniester River; the Revolution of 1917 had washed swarms of refugees toward us; whole families had been taken in by relatives or magnanimous friends. Stiassny exacted this kind helpfulness as a privilege, however, and sometimes he was even rather insolent about it. He caviled at the housekeeping, inserting sarcastic remarks and clauses everywhere; he carped at the food, the service, indeed the behavior, the inadequate education, and the provinciality of his host and hostess and their less lingering guests; and he bawled out the domestics. Yet, he also felt obliged to deploy ironical servility, which garnered him the nickname of “Stiassny Who-am-I.” As though it were a self-tormenting pleasure to act innately humble, merely tolerated in this existence, he began every other sentence with the phrase “But then who am I to expect …” or “But then who am I to permit myself …” —all this merely to introduce some subtly perfidious malice, or some denunciation with a first gradual but ultimately all the more destructive aftereffect. “But then who am I to say that I do not love my fellowmen?” he would say. “I owe my existence in every respect to the generosity of others. It began with my conception—nicht wahr?—a highly unexpected act of mutual generosity between my parents, who quite explicitly despised one another and normally did not undertake such chores together, vigorously as they may have blessed outsiders.”
I must confess I was afraid of him—as one might secretly fear a conjuror with all-too-sinister grimaces. Yet I believe that my blend of repugnance and admiration was something he must have aroused in everyone—except, of course, Aunt Sophie, who had taken him under her care like any creature in need of protection: a jackdaw with a broken wing; a superannuated dray horse that was supposed to be driven to the slaughterhouse; the gardener’s feebleminded son, who could, after all, perform a few useful services, like peeling potatoes for the kitchen or carrying firewood. My father, in contrast, had no sympathy whatsoever for Stiassny’s dichotomous nature, and he bluntly despised him, mistreating him whenever he visited my uncle’s house; even though I felt it served Stiassny right, my father’s rudeness tormented me.
Withdrawn as Stiassny was in the household, he was pushy in that he was always around. Normally, he was not to be seen. He sat in his room over books and all kinds of weird studies. For instance, he cast the horoscopes of all the servants, explaining to Aunt Sophie that their character defects came from inauspicious constellations; or he tinkered on an apparatus for counterbalancing the harmful earth radiation under Aunt Sophie’s and Uncle Hubi’s marriage bed. Allegedly, he sometimes consulted ghosts or at least could conjure them up. All these activities took place in sensational secrecy, which made him generally present in an abstract way. But at mealtime, Stiassny appeared fully in person and with impressive punctuality. No matter how small or makeshift the meal—a quick snack before a long outing, a cup of tea and some sandwiches for someone coming home late—Stiassny was there waiting, as inevitably as if he belonged with edibles, as a knife and fork belong with eating and a glass with drinking.
He stood with eyes lowered and hands folded in clerical modesty, wearing his dark, well-tail
ored, but dreadfully stained suit, the shirt with frayed cuffs and collar, and the skew and sloppily knotted tie; yet his elegance was undeniable. His tall stature and well-proportioned frame, the distinguished head with the blazing white hair and the very beautiful red lips, were as attractive as the rest of him was repulsive—his terribly ruined teeth; his dark-brown fingers tanned by incessant smoking; the pale, decayed, and overfed flesh bloated from his stay-at-home existence. As long as his almost colorless light eyes between the half-closed lids scrutinized the all-too-familiar furniture in the dining room and the usually quite sumptuously laden table, they expressed scornful irony. But barely had they encountered the eyes of the host, the hostess, or one of the other guests when they faded; abruptly they seemed like a blind man’s eyes, even though they must have perceived as sharply as before; and Stiassny’s face resumed a look of the most servile self-denial, as though he were about to say, “But then who am I to be so forward as to venture even the least critique on what is so magnanimously offered us here? If, however, such an impression may have arisen, then I beg you not to take any notice of it.”
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 4
