by Bruce Duffy
All the world was Max’s larder, property, for him, being another arbitrary and artificial barrier obstructing human commerce. Do you see up there? Max would say to Wittgenstein as they hiked along. The old lady who lives in that house makes good black honey bread and apple jam. Whereupon Max, with the powerful instincts of a bear, would walk straight up to the house to be fed by the old woman, who would be delighted by his company, and whom he’d repay by tearing down an old shed for firewood or fixing her roof.
Then there were Max’s stories — wild, convoluted stories, one leading to another, like jokes, like parables. And because Max feared no one and would talk to anybody, he heard everything until it all ran together as in a powerful dream. Only later, while retelling some preposterous tale, would he realize that too much didn’t fit, whereupon a scandalized look would crease his face and he would say, That man lied to me! unable to comprehend why anyone would do such a useless and despicable thing.
But had Max been more critical, had he been more discerning and cautious — or less gullible — people wouldn’t have felt the freedom to tell him the things they did. Max had none of his later harshness and inflexibility then. He was young and had a marvelous freshness and purity of insight, which Wittgenstein found immediately arresting. Max was really a philosopher, of sorts, a behemoth deeply submerged in the midst of life. He was so much a part of his surroundings, so deeply imbedded in life, that it was hard to imagine anything bad ever befalling him. And when something bad did happen, Max laughed it off — became it, sunny as the young grass, happy to be reaped for the fullness of sprouting again.
By all appearances, even the war had been this way for Max. It seemed to have passed right through him. Still, there was something distinctly martial in Max’s nature, no doubt about that. Standing before Max, one knew why men’s eyes were not fastened on either side like those of cattle. One could see why man’s predatory eyes were aimed squarely ahead like the wolf’s, seeking rather than avoiding — blind. For fifteen months, until he was badly wounded and captured during a German counterstrike near Thiepval, Max had served in a crack batallion of shock troops specializing in surprise night assaults using flame throwers and stick bombs. There would be no moon and no stars visible under the dark clouds, no bombardment and no covering fire — nothing but speed, surprise and their own youthful ferocity. With cork-blackened faces, they would come sprinting down on the first paralyzed sentries, who would hardly have cried out when rocketing jets of flame sucked the air from their lungs. The Black Death, the French called them. For Max, it was how the Angel of Death must have felt passing in a hot wind over the blood-smeared doors of the Pharaoh’s Egypt. It was the war which taught Max that men really had spirits: the boy could feel that turbulence as the souls of the dead took up in a greasy torrent of burning petrol. So exhilarating, how death liberates the mind. Fire cannot harm fire, and death is impervious to all harm. Max and his cohorts were a hot black wind chasing arcs of immolating liquid fire. To Max, the advancing sheets of fire felt like nothing, a summer wind. He was seventeen. In the enfilading darkness, he was a black death angel, invisible and invincible. Lost in his blackened face, his snarling open mouth looked disembodied, like a bite torn from an apple. Faced with the wobbling whites of his eyes, men gave in to the last panic of death, hearing their coshed skulls crumple as they sunk into the sulfurous fens of the Land of Lamentation. The Black Death broke the French lines. They did not stop, and they did not care, hurling stick bombs and hurling themselves in vengeance, hurling themselves to no purpose but to inflict death and terror, since ultimately they would be repulsed. Max was one of a new breed of specialized soldier, carefully selected and highly trained; he was that one man in a thousand ideally suited to this savage, cut-and-run fighting. In this reverse Darwinism, the strongest and fiercest tended to be the first killed, while those few who survived were propelled into a new consciousness. Older men — men over the age of about twenty-five, men who cared about life and knew themselves to be mortal — found the extreme stress and horror of this butchery intolerable. They broke down under it; their psyches were too well formed. But for the uncreated man, for the germinal man within the street youth from Nuremberg — for a big, sprawling, easygoing reform school boy, who, when pushed into a fight, would go berserk, heedless of any injury, severely beating bigger, older boys, beating two and three boys at a time even — for such a boy, this rough comradeship and terror seemed intensely natural, an ideal.
Fire cannot harm spirit, and time holds no sway outside of time. For the boy, the horror was never quite real, or rather had quite gone past reality. In those frenzied minutes of killing, like a weasel ripping through a hen house, the boy told himself that it would soon all be past, and as something past would no longer be real and thus would no longer matter — which was to say, it had never happened in the first place. The reality of it was thus quite magical. He was decorated and it never touched him. He was wounded many times, several times seriously, but it touched him no more than did the death of his comrades, sewn in pits in one long black sleep. By the dozens, and in every attitude, even in slumber, he had slaughtered his enemies, English, French, territorials. He killed so much that at last it seemed he had entered a condition of nature, showing neither malice nor mercy, sorrow nor anger. And after a battle, he would immediately forget everything, the men he had murdered, the comrades he had lost. He would tolerate no killing of wounded or prisoners and treated captured enemies with all the courtesy he showed his comrades. Still, it was clear to him that his own life did not matter, and so, in the end, nobody’s life really mattered.
All men have stories that they tell themselves in order to account for their misfortunes, and Max was no different. Max had told Wittgenstein the general outlines of his story, which, like most stories, had developed into a kind of personal myth. Before God, the boy soldier told himself, no one mattered. Before God nothing else was real and so was all a dream; and since all was a dream, the man of reverence could only surrender to the dream’s perdurable power. First Max’s mother had died, and then his father; and then his shiftless uncle took him for a year until he too died, drinking himself to death as Max’s father had. From the age of seven the boy was raised by the city, in a pound for children. Max rarely spoke of his childhood, but he told Wittgenstein that with the death of his parents he had early lost his faith in life in the usual sense. And then, having lost all faith in the efficacy of life, he found his faith in God on the Western Front. With God, all made sense. Max realized that he was not made to live: clearly, the world had not massed all its powers of destruction in one place so that he and his comrades might live to a ripe age. One day in the lull before a battle this dawned on him, but instead of feeling betrayed, Max felt only stupid, like a boy who had just learned about sex, wondering why he had not seen it all sooner. With that, many things became immediately apparent. For one thing, the boy understood that this was not just any war. Of course, the boy had never then heard of divine right or anything like that, but he understood, in an almost teleological way, that it was not General Falkenhayn nor even the kaiser but God almighty who was sending down their battle orders. This, he supposed, was for the good. In the end, Max told himself, all would be raised and righted: the dead were not really dead and the living were only living provisionally, like beasts in a barnyard, waiting for the whistle that would carry them from their funk holes into Kingdom Come. Ultimately, all men, on all sides, were engaged in a common assault on a destiny not of their choosing and indeed quite beyond their comprehension. If God sacrificed the majority of mankind to save the few who were worthwhile, then this, by Max’s book, was to the good; if a nation did the same to perpetuate itself, then this, too, was to the good. Bees and ants and animals with their young did this thing, surrendering their lives for the good of the species. It was all part of the same process, the individual stoking the great engine of life which ran for no reason but God’s pleasure and aggrandizement. Whole forests that no human eye would
ever see would rise toward the light only to come crashing down; whole generations would joust their ascent, ramming and splattering up out of the thundering spume like salmon, thirsting for another element. Under the showering destruction of His own hard and unfathomable radiance, they would shield themselves, like fire in the midst of fire. This, for Max, was the mystical. And so it was one day some years later, when Wittgenstein and Max were walking at dusk in the mountains near Trattenbach. They had ascended out of a valley of darkened firs, climbing toward the buoyant light of the ridges, when Max reared back, then pointed in amazement to a misty teepee of light lodged in the cliffs. This was how he imagined God, he said. Like a hunter, Max did not move, his eye narrowing and his mouth half open to swish the sounds swirling through the cold, iron-tasting air. Till darkness shrouded his face, Max stared at this faintly pulsing triangle of yellow light, watching as it guttered into darkness. Straining to see what held his friend in thrall, Wittgenstein wondered if the blindness was his, the occlusion of his sophistication. Try as he might, he did not see the God who had shone His face over the water. All Wittgenstein saw was a crag scalloped with light — a blank and fearsome image vaguely like the vulgar but oddly apocalyptic etchings in Max’s cheap Bible.
Evangelist
WITTGENSTEIN called himself an evangelist during this time in Trattenbach. Father Haft was especially rankled by this term, and one day, during one of their weekly mutual criticism sessions, the priest demanded that Wittgenstein explain himself.
The priest charged that Wittgenstein was spiritually incoherent. He said he had heard Wittgenstein speak with awe of the Day of Judgment, but he had also heard the schoolmaster say that he did not believe in an afterlife, or rather that he found the notion of an afterlife unbelievable. So, too, Father Haft had heard Wittgenstein speak with awe of God — of the mind of God, above, and prior to, his own. But to speak of a personal, loving God, let alone to speak of God as part of some divine Trinity — this Wittgenstein said he found unintelligible. As for confession, Wittgenstein said he could appreciate it as a beautiful idea, like a kiss or a prayer. But he could not kiss or confess — unless, of course, one took the sacrament of confession to be a process akin to these criticism sessions, which were more inquisition than confession.
But how, asked Father Haft angrily, how can you possibly call yourself an evangelist? That the idea of God can inspire awe and fear in you but not belief; that you can thirst for the justice of a Day of Judgment but not for an afterlife; that you can pray while having no illusion that anything will come of it and while loathing, as you say, the materialistic view of prayer as asking — how am I to make any sense of this?
Wittgenstein chafed at Father Haft’s scorn, his face reddening. Then, as civilly as he could, he replied, I believe in the Gospels as stunning examples of human goodness — as expressing fundamental human truths. And I try to live by the example of the Gospels. But I don’t pretend to be officially sanctioned as, say, you are, Father.
Go to hell! cried Father Haft, smacking the table with the heel of his palm. Now you must insult my office, too! This is just your damned pride, Wittgenstein — stinking, delusionary pride! You’re much too clever for your own good but still stupid enough to think that if you were smarter you would be better off. Evangelist! An evangelist of one — or two, counting this one here, he said, pointing to Max.
I am my own church! protested Max.
A church! snapped Father Haft, leaning across the table. You’re another fool! I don’t know why I bother with you, either.
Fortunately for their nerves, Wittgenstein and Father Haft weren’t always fighting. While at the teachers' college, Wittgenstein had taken up the clarinet, and as an adjunct to these mutual criticism meetings he began playing waltzes and songs from Viennese operettas with the priest, who accompanied Wittgenstein on a beat-up hockshop violin — his sole luxury.
Later Wittgenstein and the priest formed a chamber group with two other men. Playing guitar and sometimes harmonica was the village shoemaker Halt, a bachelor and a vegetarian who collected matchboxes. On piano was Halt’s boon companion Epp, another eccentric, who carved manger scenes and the Stations of the Cross in walnuts and ran the cellar movie house, where they would practice after the Sunday matinee.
Epp joined only under the provision that they would admit neither Jews nor women to the group. Halt strongly seconded, and Father Haft, who didn’t much care for Jews either, readily went along. Well, then, Wittgenstein, asked Epp, how do you vote? Feeling the vestigial Jew pawing at his insides, Wittgenstein found himself wanting to object not so much on moral as on aesthetic grounds. It all seemed so distasteful, this Jewish business. And so beside the point.
Why are we even discussing this? Wittgenstein asked. Are there even any Jews in Trattenbach to exclude? We might as well concern ourselves with Eskimos.
Of course there are Jews, insisted Max. Are you blind?
At this Wittgenstein shot back, Who asked you? You’re not a member of this group.
And I’m telling you there are Jews! Max insisted. Don’t tell me there aren’t. I’ll show you some.
This was Max’s unpleasant side, when his face blurted up like a blood sausage and his eyes got hot and squinty. Recognizing that he himself was a difficult and opinionated man, Wittgenstein was inclined to overlook this side of his friend. Everyone has his shortcomings, and this was as yet a minor part of Max’s character. Besides, it was hard to entirely blame a person when one knew what had shaped him. Nuremberg was a Jew-hating burg, and for one whose childhood memories included beating up Jew boys and snowballing families going to synagogue, these views were the precipitate of a far deeper process; they had simply become part of his lore. Only periodically, when Max would produce Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Master Types of the Nordic Race or some other greasy pamphlet on the Jewish conspiracy or miscegenation (one of Father Haft’s hobbyhorses), would Wittgenstein take his friend to task for his gullibility.
Still, it was easy to overlook these foibles in the overall scheme of Max’s evolving character. And Max was so unformed: there seemed no way to auger what he would become, nor did Wittgenstein want to unduly pinch his still pliant character. What’s more, Wittgenstein was optimistic, tending to think that as Max evolved as a man these concerns would shrink in comparison to weightier matters.
Yet in another sense, Wittgenstein felt a queasiness and ambivalence that was uncharacteristic of him. Many times Wittgenstein considered telling Max — if only so he might put his prejudices in better perspective — that he was of Jewish lineage. Yet he hung back, afraid of what his friend’s reaction might be. Wittgenstein inwardly berated himself for this, telling himself that he was not Jewish enough to make such an admission worthwhile, but reproaching himself for being Jewish enough to keep silent about it. And, at bottom, Wittgenstein couldn’t entirely disagree with Max’s assessment of Jews. Prompted by Max and others, in fact, he was beginning to do some thinking himself about the Jewish character, though perhaps less how it applied to a people than to how it applied to himself as an example — or a symptom — of that people.
This was part of the radical surgery that Wittgenstein mentioned when Ramsey visited him in Trattenbach around this time. He thought that by looking at his racial origins, he might find in himself the flaw that had knocked him off his star. Several times, during this period he found himself looking in the mirror, examining the prominent nose, the faint but telltale weakness in the jaw and the epicene smoothness in his prowlike forehead, a morphology realized out of a heredity that was itself a vast system of ancestral composites that were at once advancing and declining. To Wittgenstein, it seemed that the only antidote was the resolve of character, even if that character was a basically Jewish one. It is hard to stand above one’s own height, but he felt that by a monumental act of will — say, in the way that Freud had succeeded in psychoanalyzing himself — one might be able to amputate a dead or ill-formed limb and grow a better one. Sex was an instance
of this. If thy eye offend thee, then hie thee to Trattenbach, where one will not be so tempted. But Jewishness, it seemed to him, was more slippery and ambiguous, less susceptible to such radical surgery. Kraus had the idea, exhorting fellow Jews to resist their Jewish tendencies. Wittgenstein saw that it required constant vigilance, not only from himself but from external agents like Max and Father Haft, who effectively kept the Jew in him bottled up and aware.
But race was hardly a constant concern with him and Max. Rather, it was a kind of leitmotif. In fact, with all the paradoxicalness of prejudice, Max was quite civil to Jews and stood as ready to help one in genuine need as he did a Christian. By the same token, if there was intolerance, there was also music, of a sort, during these Sunday sessions of Trattenbach’s own Meister Players. Such playing! Wittgenstein hated Epp’s banging, melodramatic piano style, which better suited shoot-’em-up cowboy pictures than a dreamy waltz. Epp, on the other hand, thought Wittgenstein, as the leader, was too hot-headed and opinionated. As for poor Halt, the guitarist, he tended to wander and miss his cues, while pent-up Father Haft hacked at his violin and Wittgenstein struggled to keep them together while blowing his lamentable clarinet.