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The Eternal Philistine

Page 5

by Odon Von Horvath


  The young wife of a businessman was standing on the platform among others. She was excitedly waving goodbye to her husband, who was in the front car, traveling abroad in order to cheat another businessman.

  Kobler nudged his way into the scene. He leaned out of the window and gave the young lady a condescending nod, but she merely grimaced and made a dismissive gesture with her hands. “Now she’s upset,” rejoiced Kobler, and thought of Fräulein Pollinger. “Anna’s probably also upset right now,” he continued this line of thought. “Right now it’s precisely eight and this is when her office opens up. I’d be upset too if my office opened up at this time. Nothing beats self-employment. What a disaster it’d be if everybody were an employee, like Marxism envisions it. As an employee, I would never have gone the extra mile to cheat Portschinger. If the convertible had been state property, I’d just have had it melted down as scrap metal, which would have been the right and proper thing to do anyway. But so many potentially exploitable objects of value would lie idle as a result of this menacing socialization. And that’s just how it’d be because the personal incentive would be eliminated.”

  He sat down mischievously at his window seat, riding proudly through the dismal suburban train stations and past the suburban travelers who stood motionlessly waiting for their suburban trains. And then the city gradually came to an end. The landscape became increasingly dreary; Kobler languidly observed the person sitting across from him, a gentleman with a vigorous demeanor who was absorbed in his newspaper. It was written underneath the newspaper’s headline, NOW MORE THAN EVER!, that any German who said he was proud to be a German because, were he not proud of being a German, he would still be a German all the same and would, therefore, naturally be proud to be a German—“such a German,” read the newspaper, “is no German, but rather an asphalt-German.”

  Kobler had also equipped himself with some reading material for the trip, namely a magazine. In it there were a dozen young girls who, in the shadow of mounted photographs of skyscrapers, were shouldering their legs as if they were rifles. The caption read THE MAGIC OF MILITARISM, and said that it actually came across as spooky that pin-up girls have heads as well. Then Kobler also saw a whole pack of feminine beauties, one of whom was smiling sensuously as she stood atop an enormous tortoise that had been tamed. Apart from that he had no other reading material with him.

  Just a number of dictionaries, each containing around twelve thousand words printed in an exceedingly tiny font: German-Italian, Français-Allemand, German-French, Español-Aleman, etc. He had also got himself a booklet with useful phrases for traveling in Spain (with the pronunciation clearly spelled out). It had been edited by a secondary-school teacher in Erfurt whose daughter still hoped to marry the rich German-Argentinian who had given her his promise during the period of hyperinflation. In the preface, the secondary-school teacher lamented the deeply distressing fact that Spanish was rarely learned in the German-speaking lands, even though the Spanish world supplied us Germans with myriad natural products while itself lacking in industry. These facts had not yet been adequately appreciated by the young world of commerce, not by a long shot. And then the secondary-school teacher enumerated the countries in which Spanish was spoken, for instance Spain and Latin America, minus Brazil.

  Kobler read further: I’m hungry, thirsty. Tengo hambre, sed. Pronunciation: tango ambray, said. How do you say that in Spanish? Como se llama eso en Castellano? Pronunciation: como say yama ay-so en casteyano. Could you please speak more slowly? Tenga ustay la bondahd day ablar mas despassio? Please repeat that word. You have to speak a little louder. He commands a proud language, but he expresses himself well. Porter, bring me my luggage. I have a large suitcase, valise, travel blanket, and a bunch of socks and umbrellas. Is that the train to Figueras? Give me dry bed linen. Onions, please. Now it is right. We have been missing your orders for some time now. What do I owe? Very good, my dear sir, I remain indebted to you for everything. What did you do? Nothing. Would you like the check? No. It appears that you have understood me correctly. Well, goodbye! Send your dear wife (dear husband) my regards! Thanks a million. Bon voyage! Godspeed!

  “What are you reading there?” he suddenly heard his neighbor ask. He looked like Herr Portschinger. He had been peering distrustfully into the secondary-school teacher’s work for some time now. His name was Thimoteus Bschorr.

  “I’m going to Barcelona,” replied Kobler laconically, eagerly awaiting the effect of his words. The person sitting opposite him with the vigorous demeanor looked up with a jerk and, seething with hatred, glared at him, only then to continue reading the definition of an asphalt-German for the twentieth time.

  A third gentleman was also sitting in the corner, though Kobler’s travel plans did not seem to have made the slightest impression on him. He merely gave a weary smile, as though he had already traveled around the world several times. His collar was too loose for his neck.

  “So, then, Italy it is,” stated Herr Bschorr phlegmatically.

  “Barcelona is, as you well know, situated in Spain,” said Kobler superciliously.

  “That ain’t so well known.” Bschorr got worked up. “As you well know, I could’ve sworn that Barcelona was, as you well know, in Italy!”

  “I am merely solely passing through Italy,” said Kobler, making an effort to speak very properly so as to provoke Thimoteus Bschorr. Only he would not let himself be provoked.

  “Barcelona sure is a ways away,” he said dully. “A real ways away. I don’t envy you one bit. Spain—the whole place has got to be real filthy. And a torrid zone. What you going to do in Madrid?”

  “I shall ignore it altogether,” explained Kobler. “I’m merely interested in seeing the world abroad just once.”

  The person sitting across from him winced visibly at these words and butted into the conversation, speaking clearly and concisely: “Under no circumstances should a German send his honestly earned money abroad in these economically depressed times.” All the while he had a censorious gaze fixed on Kobler. He owned a hotel in Partenkirchen that was generally avoided because of its insanely high prices and so was always vacant.

  “But Spain was neutral during the war!” said the third gentleman in the corner, coming to Kobler’s aid. He was still smiling.

  “Whatever!” snapped the hotelier.

  “As a matter of fact, Spain is even well disposed towards us,” said the guy in the corner, refusing to let up.

  “Nobody out there is well disposed towards us!” countered Thimoteus excitedly. “It’d be a real miracle if somebody was. It’d be a real miracle, huh, folks?!”

  The hotelier nodded. “I repeat: a German should keep his honestly earned money in the fatherland!”

  Kobler gradually became furious. “What business is Portschinger’s convertible of yours, you bastard!” he thought and then put the hotelier in his place: “You are mistaken! We, the young German tradespeople, must establish even more meaningfully intimate connections with the part of the world abroad that is well disposed to us. Last but not least, we must of course uphold our national honor.”

  “All that stuff about upholding honor is just empty talk,” the hotelier interrupted him in a surly manner. “We Germans are just simply not capable of establishing commercial relations abroad in an honest way!”

  “But what about the nations?” said the third man, suddenly no longer smiling. “Nations all depend on each other, just like Prussia depends on Bavaria and Bavaria on Prussia.”

  “What’s that, you trying to talk down Bavaria?” roared Thimoteus. “Who’s dependent on who? What’s dependent on what? Those lousy Prussians can all take a hike to Switzerland! What the heck do I need tourism for? Tourists don’t buy nothing from me. Got me a brick factory, used to be a butcher!”

  “Ho-ho!” the hotelier flared up. “Ho-ho, my dear sir! If it weren’t for tourism, Bavaria’s sovereignty would be in dire straits. We need the Northern-German spa guests; we need the foreign spa guests, especially the A
nglo-Saxon spa guests; but what we are sadly still frequently lacking is a more accommodating approach to the influx of foreigners. We have to adapt ourselves even more keenly to the foreign psyche. Though of course, when the dear Minister of Finance declares …”

  And here is where Thimoteus exploded.

  “Those ain’t ministers—just a bunch of Prussians!” he raged. “Scoundrels, the whole lot of ’em, no exceptions. Who’s sucking wind here? The middle-class! And who’s making a killing? The workers! The workers are smoking cigarettes at six pfennigs a pop … My dear sirs, like I always say: Berlin!”

  “Bravo!” said the hotelier, and continued memorizing the sentence about the asphalt-German.

  The gentleman in the corner stood up and hastily left the compartment. He stood at the window, gazing out sadly at the beautiful Bavarian countryside. He felt sincerely sorry for that countryside.

  “He’s outside now. I guess I gave him the boot,” Thimoteus was pleased to declare.

  “I follow the homestead movement with great interest,” answered the hotelier.

  “You blockheads!” thought Kobler, and turned towards his window.

  There were people working in the fields, cattle at pasture and deer standing at the edge of the forest. If it were not for the apostolic patriarchal crosses of the overhead power cables, you might forget it was the twentieth century. The sky was blue and the clouds were white and molded in Bavarian-baroque.

  Meanwhile, the express train was approaching the southern border of the German Republic. At first it rolled past huge lakes where the mountains still appeared small on the horizon, but now the mountains kept getting larger and larger, the lakes smaller and smaller, and the horizon closer and closer. And then the lakes disappeared altogether; all around there were just more mountains. This was the Werdenfelser Land.

  The hotelier got off at Partenkirchen and did not even deign to look at Kobler. Herr Bschorr likewise got off and tripped over a four-year-old child in the process. “Jarghh!” he said. The child let out a terrible squeal because it had nearly been trampled by Herr Bschorr.

  The express train resumed its journey.

  Mittenwald-bound.

  The gentleman who had been sitting in the corner returned to the compartment because Kobler was now alone. He sat down across from him and said, “And there you can see the Zugspitze!”

  As is generally known, the Zugspitze is Germany’s tallest mountain, though sadly a third of it happens to belong to Austria. And so a few years ago they built a suspension railway up to the Zugspitze, even though for the last twenty years the Bavarians had been wanting to do just that. This, of course, really angered the Bavarians, as a consequence of which they finally managed to build a second train up to the Zugspitze, and a purely Bavarian one at that—not some aerial suspension railway, but a solid rack-and-pinion railway. Both trains up to the Zugspitze are undeniably grandiose achievements at the pinnacle of modern mountain railway structural engineering, and by mid-September 1929, the project had already claimed the lives of around four dozen workers. However, until the Bavarian train up to Zugspitze was operational, numerous workers would sadly just have to keep believing in the project, the management reassured.

  “I once told a lady this,” the gentleman said to Kobler, “but the lady said that the story had been concocted by the esteemed workers in order to extort a higher wage.”

  The gentleman was smiling so strangely that Kobler no longer knew what to make of him.

  “This lady,” continued the gentleman, “is the daughter of a man from Dusseldorf who sits on a supervisory board. She married somebody in Cuba as far back as 1913, so she spent the World War there.”

  And the gentleman once again smiled so strangely that it nearly confounded Kobler.

  “The war must’ve been more pleasant in Cuba,” he said, and this pleased the gentleman.

  “You’re going to see a nice little piece of the world,” he said, and gave him a friendly nod.

  “A little piece is fine,” thought Kobler, piqued, and then asked, “Are you also a businessman?”

  “No!” said the gentleman curtly as if he no longer wished to speak another word with him.

  “What could he be, then?” thought Kobler.

  “I used to be a teacher,” the gentleman said abruptly. “I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Weimar Constitution, but if you advocate your political convictions with the commitment of your entire person, with every fiber of your being, then its constitutional grounded civil rights and liberties will do you shit-all good. For instance, I married a Protestant woman and lost my job for it. I can thank the Bavarian Concordat for that. Now I’m a sales representative for a brand of toothpaste that nobody buys because it’s atrocious. My family has got to live with my in-laws in Mittenwald. The old lady reproaches the children for every little thing they eat—And there’s Mittenwald! Sure is a cozy spot, huh?

  CHAPTER 9

  MITTENWALD IS A GERMAN-AUSTRIAN BORDER station with passport inspection and customs control.

  This was the first border that Kobler had ever crossed in his entire life, and the official ceremonies tied up with crossing it touched him in a strangely solemn way. It was with an almost tremulous veneration that he watched as the gendarmes stood indolently around the platform.

  He was already holding his passport expectantly in his hand before he even reached Mittenwald. Now his suitcase, too, was lying wide-open on the bench. “Please don’t shoot—I’m an honest boy,” was the message here.

  Kobler really cringed when the Austrian customs officer appeared in his car. “Anybody got anything to declare?” yelled out the customs officer unsuspectingly.

  “Over here,” yelled Kobler, pointing to his honest suitcase. But the customs officer did not even look over at him.

  “Anybody got anything to declare!?” he called out in horror, and then dashed headlong out of the car. He was afraid that somebody would, by way of exception, really have something to declare, which would mean that he would, by way of exception, have something to do.

  The passport inspection, on the other hand, was conducted a little more rigorously because it was a better piece of business. That is, there was usually at least one person on every train whose passport had just expired. They could then be sold a border-crossing permit for a few marks or schillings, respectively. One such person once said to the passport official, “Excuse me, but I really am in favor of the Anschluss!” But the passport official vehemently refused to tolerate any insults directed at an official.

  The express train slowly left the German Republic, driving past two signs:

  KINGDOM OF BAVARIA: KEEP TO THE RIGHT! FEDERAL STATE OF AUSTRIA: KEEP TO THE LEFT!

  “So we keep to the left?” Kobler asked the Austrian conductor. “We’re all on the same track,” yawned the conductor. Kobler could not help but think of Greater Germany.

  They were now heading through the northern Limestone Alps, specifically alongside the old Roman road between the Wetterstein and Karwendel mountain ranges.

  The express train needed to climb 1,160 meters in order to reach the Inn Valley, which was situated around 600 meters lower. It was a complicated region for express trains.

  The Karwendel is one mighty massif. Its magnificent high valleys undoubtedly number among the most barren stretches in the Alps. Starting at the brittle ridges, magnificent heaps of scree often extend all the way down to the bottom of the valley and then converge with the debris from the other side. At the same time, there is almost no water anywhere and hence hardly any life. In 1928 it was declared a nature reserve so that it could remain unspoiled.

  And so the express train rolled past tremendous abysses and through many, many tunnels and over boldly constructed viaducts. Kobler now caught sight of a filthy cloud of haze hanging over the Inn Valley. Underneath this cloud of haze was Innsbruck, the capital of the holy land of Tyrol.

  Kobler did not know anything about the city except that it had a famous golden roof,
reasonably priced Tyrolean wine, and that travelers approaching the city from the west could see several large brothels on the left-hand side. Count Blanquez had once explained this to him.

  He had to change trains in Innsbruck, switching to the express train bound for Bologna. The express train was coming from Kufstein and was late. “The Austrians are just a very cozy people,” thought Kobler. The express train finally arrived.

  Until Steinach am Brenner—that is, almost right up to the new Italian border, that is, for scarcely fifteen minutes—Kobler shared a compartment with a Hofrat, a privy councilor from the Old Austrian empire, and a so-called man on the street, who really sucked up to him because he was seeking his patronage. This man was an unprincipled foreman who had joined the Heimwehr, an Austrian variant of the Italian fascist organization, so that he could cheat his colleagues more efficiently. His managing engineer was, you see, a Gauleiter of the Heimwehr.

  The Hofrat wore an old-fashioned golden pince-nez and had a deceitful look about him. He had a very smart appearance—and, indeed, he seemed to be an altogether very vain man because he chattered incessantly just so he could hear the other man’s approval.

  The express train had turned away from Innsbruck and was already heading through the Bergisel Tunnel.

  “It’s dark now,” said the Hofrat.

  “Very dark,” said the man.

  “It’s gotten so dark because we’re driving through the tunnel,” said the Hofrat.

  “Maybe it’ll get even darker,” said the man.

  “Gadzooks, it sure is dark!” yelled the Hofrat.

  “Gadzooks!” yelled the man.

  The Austrians are a very cozy people.

  “Hopefully the Lord will let me live to see the day when all the pinkos are hanged,” said the Hofrat.

  “Just put your faith in the man upstairs,” said the man.

  “Bergisel is right over us now,” said the Hofrat.

  “Andreas Hofer,” said the man, and then added, “The Jews are getting too uppity.”

 

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