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Soon, I had uncoupled myself from the evening suburban homecomers on the Autobahn, dived beneath overpasses that hissed away above me, and plunged into the denser and denser texture of evening, which, after a few precarious minutes of sharply dividing sky and land, caught them both in its veil and let them blur into each other. The huge deep-sea eyes of my diving bell were switched on. In its interior, the lights on the instrument panel were already glowing. The speedometer needle had quickly scaled past the apex of the dial and scurried down its right half now; reeling slightly, it hung over the final marks. The tachometer needle hovered calmly beyond the border span that a red segment ordered it not to cross. To my right, in the scattered, powdery glow of my lights, fields and meadows flickered like the blue-gray checkered backs of cards fanned out in the hand of a nimble-fingered player, then were swiftly raked in by the edge of my side window. To my left, like bristles under a sharp stroke, the trunks of a forest bent toward me . . . All this broke off, changed, jumped back and forth and up to hilly terrain in cringing, hunchbacked leaps, and then out into uncertainty; came soaring down, leveled off again, smoothed out. The sagging darkness trussed up the scattered beams of my headlights, squeezed them into two intersecting cones in the hose of the road, ripped out a hollow space, at the end of which they were swallowed by the pent-up blackness. I was hurled into the dark space and toward that place of uncertain encounters dashing ahead of me. Its harbingers were the pale tracer bullets of the dividing line, sometimes the red-glowing rectal eyes of a truck, which I signaled to before the shadowy monster loomed and towered to my right and whooshed past me . . . I was warned. I was holding my destiny in my hand. I was sovereign.
But I was not alone. I had invited a friend in: Schwab, who was dead now. And I chatted with him, in the manner that had always irritated him the most: in the parodying patter of cultural chitchat, into which I could insert the barbs of my malice, which had to lodge in the matters he took seriously—“—for instance, European heritage. Can you tell me why you take it so seriously? It’s a sackful of fictions, that’s all. With some mental hygiene, one should be able to shake it off. Sentimental values at bargain prices. Nowadays, any self-respecting person has a Biedermeier dresser in his assembly-line bungalow. Even in America. There, it’s Colonial Style, of course. Very popular lately. Those fellows used to be way ahead of us, lacking a past as they did. But now they’re spending their advantage on dubious antique furniture. They too are discovering their history. Not as a lived myth, you understand, as a Western, but dragging the past into presence as a sentimental recapitulation. The Western is timeless. The eternal song of civilizing man facing off against nature. The Biedermeier dresser in a vacation bungalow is barbaric booty: a souvenir plucked out of Civilization’s refuse.
“The Western is life; the Biedermeier dresser a genre picture. The only use the hero in the Western has for the Biedermeier dresser is as something to block the bullets from the bad guy’s revolver—that kick of his boot heel that knocked the dresser on its side is what gave the American myth its strength, its persuasive strength. Could people like us do that? What would you do if bullets started flying? You would spread out your arms and throw yourself in front of the Biedermeier dresser. Shall I confess something to you? I disgust myself. I’m sickened by the evasive way I sneak out of cities at nightfall as if from the scene of a collective infamy which I have taken part in only as an observer. As an observer and occasional thief. For I carry off a small prize. I’ve spirited away something of the museum exhibit, and with it I slip into the black sack of night, which draws tighter and tighter around me. I steal away with a voluptuously tickling fear in the back of my neck, a fear that may drive the sentimental value away again. I carry the city along, virtually purged of artistic invalidity: for instance, a Munich consisting of nothing but spice-card cottages, gingerbread palaces, wax-dip churches, crowding around color-splotched squares on which mushroom-cultures of parasols proliferate, among which rustic market women peddle their tiny witch brooms of soup greens. A Munich of jovial, house-proud streets, which lead to the water-lily tangles of Schwabing’s art nouveau landscape garden jungle. A Munich, then, that doesn’t at all exist outside my imagination, which utilizes old postcards and fairy-tale illustrations as cutouts placed in front of a totally different reality. But I imagine I have taken along its soul, the soul of a bourgeois city aired by mountain breezes and set with Hellenistic serenity in pleasing farmland, which the yellowed autumnal pages of a fin-de-siècle calendar have lent the friendly spaciousness of time of a summer resort, in the not at all petty tranquility of which the arts abound in fruitful liberty. I envisage this under the glass bell of a delicately fleecy sky, powerfully blue, with the lace of snow-covered Alpine peaks along its brim. And I visualize it for solace, when I realize I am breathing a sigh of relief to leave Munich, the real, present one, which transmits entirely different, nightmarish impressions: an unreality confusedly spun into the steel-brace network of high-rises, the display-window unreality of department stores, an unreality that, from behind the reflections of swarms of contemporaries and torrents of traffic-lava—reflections insanely reiterated as in a fly’s faceted eye—offers the instrumentarium of a modern-day deification of nature: the tents, raincoats, hiking boots, sleeping bags, folding boats, snowshoes, loden coats, felt hats of the bawling backpackers:
Oh, just see the archer stride
Over hill and dale,
Bow and arrow at his side . . .
“We suffer, we sensitive people, because our history runs counter to our culture . . . Do you see the difference between us and the Americans? I mean the difference in rank, which gave any gum-chewing GI the right to kick us in the ass with the heel of his boot when we bent over to pick up his cigarette butt? Not because we were beaten but because we had given ourselves up. Because we betrayed our dream of ANTHROPOLIS. We slip like marauders from the cities, where bulldozers are still digging out the last bombs of WWII. With full camping gear, we throw ourselves on the bosom of Mother Nature. The hero of the Western rides toward the city—the city he wants to help build, to cleanse of all evil, to turn into ANTHROPOLIS, city of mankind. These are two entirely different attitudes in the world. No wonder our city gnaws at our hearts like a black bug . . . We woeful heirs! We need nature in order to recover from the horror of a geometry withdrawn from life that surrounds our cultural rubble heaps. If we have sighed with relief in her bosom, if we have so rightly thrived there in the blackest night in which she has made a small feast of a few million dead, then we think again on our ancestral inheritance, on our old-fashioned heritage, on the wonders of our history. Slightly irritated because such and such of lesser artistic value has been handed down along with them. Come now: What would you think of a small act of cleansing in this regard as well: the wealth of culture straitified into art-historical eras and cleansed of all that is stylistically alien, purged of all that is stylistically held over. Thus correcting nature as well, making her developmental tendencies clearly visible, and perfecting them.
“Just think, for instance, what incredible clumsiness it took for life to alter, diminish, or add even the slightest thing in Tuscany after the blessed moment of two and a half centuries from the birth of Cimabue (c. 1240) to the death of Piero della Francesca (1492: also the year of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s death). The very idea! What was historical development thinking in continuing to concern itself with it? Here, it had produced a masterpiece. Couldn’t it leave it alone and turn to another region that had not yet fully flourished? Michelangelo—fine. But in Florence, he was already stylistically out of place. Far too baroque, that man, far too lush, too un-Tuscan. Rome, all right. That’s his home. That was his true hometown. There he could go wild. Even at the risk of depriving Florence and the world of a wonderful tomb, he should have limited himself to Rome. It would have spared us some of the worst horrors of the nineteenth century. But certainly after him: from the seicento to the settecento (which had quite delight
ful results elsewhere, for example in the Veneto) they should have simply prohibited any artistic attempt in Florence. Just imagine if we had gotten control of the matter in time. What a Disneyland of cultural history Europe would have become! An Italy without the Risorgimento. The Netherlands, where after Vermeer anyone who touches a brush has his right hand chopped off. In Germany, the natural development would have been halted shortly before the Thirty Years’ War (although I have to admit: Grimmelshausen was worth it). And of course, without this barbarity, all those highly gifted pastors’ sons would never have turned up, those to whom your Fatherland owes such an intellectual debt—as I do my Uncle Helmuth. True, the private tutor trade would have blossomed, flourished even, it might even have produced important pupils and not just poetry and philosophy. But I am speaking of the truly plastic arts, the formative arts, pleasant to our senses and therefore truly civilizing, arts that, unlike literature, do not stir up our brains. Intellect is a precarious thing, after all. It testifies to a high aesthetic sensibility, that the old aristocracy had domestics to do their thinking for them. Be that as it may: you would know how to present this Wonderland of Europe, varnished like the color prints in the Propyläen History of Art, neatly cleared of the refuse of cultural decline here and there, the corners swept clean of the feces of epigoni. In short, an Americanly perfected Europe: a gigantic museum, splendidly lucid in its arrangement, its inscriptions intelligible even to the semiliterate, purged of the stylistic anachronisms committed by those who are behind the times, the latecomers. Just think of the treasures of Europe’s landscapes as designed here by Lorenzetti, there by Altdorfer, there again by Breughel, there by Le Lorrain, here by Caspar David Friedrich, there by Constable and Turner, here by Courbet, Corot, and Cézanne! Imagine this pleasure adorned with Piranesi ruins and crowned with hilltop towns à la Matthäus Merian, towns by Paolo Ucello, by Dürer, by Canaletto, on whose squares we are greeted by Praxiteles and Brancusi, and whose halls relieve us with frescoes by Giotto and Picasso. Gardens by Lenôtre, where we ensconce ourselves with Hanau porcelain and Gothic two-pronged forks to feast on nightingale tongues prepared according to Lucullan recipes, and to sip at our Mouton Rothschild from Cellini’s crystal goblets, while behind the ornamental shrubbery, following a libretto by Herr von Hofmannsthal, a Klimt-costumed lady of the Viennese haute volée surrenders to a Böcklin faun. Is this not precisely the conception of Europe that you carry within yourself? Admit it: cultural history—that’s as surprising, as frightening, as the garden of Bomarzo. No matter where you go, no matter where you turn, the monsters of arts and artists come toward you, insanely multifarious, and drive you from reality into nightmarish unreality. Perhaps you now understand what makes my film piglets so dear to me. Too much culture is harmful to mental health. Just think of the sad fate of Huysmans’s des Esseintes. I, for my modest part (born under the sign of the Ram, with the Archer in my ascendant and half a dozen sputniks in my first house)—I was not made to live à rebours. I cannot exist in a world that I might continue rebuilding from the models salvaged from the rubble. I would rather do without the models. Probably I’m not schizophrenic enough for my cultural level. Either way I agree with Wohlfahrt: one must be able to decide in life. I don’t want to sneak out of the cities of my ancestral homeland Yuropp like a marauder in a disaster zone. Nor do I want to enter them like someone who doesn’t want to see what he must be ashamed of. I don’t want to shut my eyes in the suburbs, in the residential districts and principal avenues, only to open them at the Renaissance town hall, the Gothic cathedral, and the cement-propped remnants of the Roman walls. Memory is sin, you understand! Our kind are already sufficiently afflicted as it is. There are things I haven’t told even you. For instance: the way the trauma of art worship was inflicted upon me at an early age, thanks to my beautiful mother, whose life was so brief, and to my aristocratic uncles, so well versed in many kinds of splendors. Starting with Uncle Ferdinand’s coin collection and the countless pilgrimages to historic monuments in the hinterland of the Côte d’Azur, which at the time got me excited mainly because I was allowed to sit next to the chauffeur in Uncle Agop’s Isotta Fraschini or in Uncle John’s Rolls-Royce (Mama herself drove a Stutz). I would wear a little raccoon coat, a leather auto helmet, and far too large, simply enormous goggles, in which my head looked like a horsefly. But then of course came the art books lying around everywhere—of which Gobineau’s Renaissance, in a deluxe folio edition with tissue-covered illustrations, has remained vivid in my memory. Then the magazines—including one named La gazette du bon ton and published by a M. de Brunhoff, the same man whose King Babar was to elicit my three-year-old son’s first aesthetic judgment twenty-seven years later: ‘It’s so pretty, Daddy!’. . .
“By the way, the volumes of the Gazette du bon ton I saw as a six-year-old must have been old issues. The magazine no longer appeared in the time I am speaking of—1926. It had ceased publication in Paris in 1916 and was continued, strangely enough, in Berlin until 1919 by Flechtheim. I once found an issue in Aunt Selma’s room. Thus does the cultural heritage intertwine generation with generation. It was only natural that I should fall in love with a Vogue fashion model . . .
“Last but not least, certain austere bell tones in Miss Fern’s voice transmitted culture, especially when she spoke of Florence, rolling her r in a way that sounded like a muted drumroll. Before the war, she had looked after a little girl ‘of a very noble family’ there, and she always held up her charge’s exemplary breeding to me. In a strange blend of desire, envy, and hatred, I was secretly and hopelessly in love with the little girl: my future anima, Dame Cultura personified.
“But things got dark after that, my friend. I spent the years of my Viennese upbringing in preparation for the raw power at the breast of Mother Nature. Twelve long years. The first four in a totally idiotic school in the Twelfth District, then eight in the dreadful obtuseness of a high school in the Thirteenth. Until Stella rescued me: taking me to the commencing summer-solstice festival of the year 1938.
“And you know: what kept me from going completely obtuse during the twelve bitter years of this apprenticeship in triviality, mere usefulness, or pure decoration (culture as a status symbol), what protected me from becoming a will-less instrument of the zeitgeist, chaff in the wind of time—it was the CITY. The city as a promise, you understand: the Jerusalem still to be built: ANTHROPOLIS . . .
“The promise of the city comforted me first for the loss of my mother and all the luxurious circumstances and happenstances of my previous life. Of course, I was despairing, disturbed, disoriented. But even as a child, I wasn’t exactly sentimental. Despite any disquiet, I did find the change extremely interesting. I lived in a twofold awareness, a dichotomy at least as exciting as the wonderfully scary and shivery moments at home in the evening before my leap into the crib: when I eerily imagined that the wolf would now come shooting out from underneath to grab my bare legs, even though I knew there was no wolf under there.
“This, of course, with effectively exchanged emotional values. I convinced myself that the things I was told were true, and that my mother really had just gone off on a long trip from which one fine day she would return and take me home again—yet I simultaneously knew that this was nonsense: that my mother had died and the truth of her death was merely lying in wait in order to shoot out from its hiding place and pounce on me, as the paralyzing terror of reality pure and simple. But in the meantime, there were so many new and exciting things to see and to experience.
“Incidentally, I must say to their credit that my Viennese relatives made an honest effort to ease my adjustment. Uncle Helmuth very plausibly explained to me the principle of the steam engine and (I suppose because he was taken in by my precocious powers of apprehension) recommended that I read Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. Unfortunately, the text was beyond me; aside from a few descriptions of occult phenomena that terrified me to the marrow of my bones, it left no trace in my mind. Aunt Selma, ranging hungrily about, sei
zed hold of my need for affection. Despite Aunt Hertha’s nagging, her sour philistine lectures (prompted by a certain insecurity towards me), the liberation from Miss Fern’s discipline was at first agreeable, even though I vaguely missed the support, however unjustly, like someone accustomed to a tight corset and now released from it. And Cousin Wolfgang was simply a gift from heaven: my first buddy and accomplice—also my first audience, breathlessly listening, in the dense blackness of the room we now shared; as we whispered from bed to bed, I would tell him of the glittering tumult of the carnival in Nice: the staggering, shaking, hopping, reeling, whirling dance of the giant puppets through flurries of confetti, explosions of paper streamers, and crazily screaming, teeming, frolicking masses around the slowly moving caterpillar procession of floats. Or else about the very gently swaying maze of sailboat masts in the harbor at Monte Carlo. Or the automobiles gliding along like state carriages, heavy and majestic, their wheels rolling over the Promenade des Anglais with the sound of a bandage being slowly pulled off your skin. The purple bougainvillea cascading over white terrace balustrades. The green, white, and red of the tennis court in Cap d’Antibes, feathered in palms and embedded deep in the intense blue of sky and sea, behind the magnolia boulevards and laurel hedges. And naturally also our park, in the distant land of Bessarabia (whose name sounded dappled, like a guinea hen) and the pond in the park . . .
“whereby I was already, if you please, animating my accounts with experiences that were not necessarily always mine (Typical! Christa would think). Besides, please do not forget: the dark bedroom that we shared for twelve years, Cousin Wolfgang and I, may have been uniformly murky at first, but on closer view, once the eyes had adjusted to the finer light values in the darkness, something shimmered through the narrow cracks between the blades of the window blinds, shimmered regularly, now brighter, now darker, now more reddish, now more bluish, casting a dim reflection on the linoleum-covered floor. This shimmer was Vienna, one of the legendary big cities (ineffably more adventurous, more variegated in its population, more confusingly tumultuous than a Mardi Gras with its frivolous fireworks), whose name had echoed in the conversations of my divers uncles whenever they brought my beautiful young mother all manner of splendors (returning conquistadors, laying gifts at the feet of their empress): dresses crustily embroidered in castle-garden-bed patterns and glittering with diamond clasps, gigantic circular boxes containing hats adorned with feathers (I believe they were called aigrettes) from ospreys and birds of paradise, diadems from Cartier, red-white-and-green eardrops (baked out of rubies, diamonds, and emeralds) from Buccellati, furs from Revillon, deliciously soft, tenderly flattering the cheeks, still dimly redolent of a sweet little animal through the hint of lily of the valley, greasily polished heavy leather bolsters from Brigg, filled with clattering, from whose throats (opened by a sensationally modern zipper) the steel-and-ivory heads of golf clubs stretched like starving nestlings, umbrellas from Hermès (their slender handles: a small forest of miniature totem poles with dog and parrot heads); simply all manner of cunning barbarities: crocodile-leather vanity case from Hies, for instance: marvelously space-efficient, filled with a multitude of objects (doubled by the mirror inside the open lid) fitting precisely into the furrows of the chamois lining and crowned with monogrammed ivory tops: perfume vials, powder boxes, cold-cream jars, soap dishes, ivory combs and brush handles, and the inevitable, never utilized manicure set, which could not lack the tiny obstetrical hook of a shoe-buttoner;
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