“yes, but” is it worth the price of a destroyed civilization? I don’t give a damn for the future! Fuck the future! I live for today and will not live long enough to see those liberated rats produce a civilization of what they think to be social justice …
and that’s why the man in the half-ruined house in the icy Munich of winter 1947 does not give a fuck whether his wife (whom he has married the year before, whom he has promised to take in his arms and carry from the misery of postwar Germany into the dream world of Argentina or some such place of sparkling, starlit nights, of whispering palm trees, of mild air pulsating with cha-cha-cha and tango rhythms) slowly but steadily starves herself to death while her blue frozen fingers stuff a pipe with tobacco extracted from butts of cigarettes already made of cigarette butts, while he, her husband, just lies there on their bed, sleeping or pretending to sleep: isn’t that a shameful, cowardly, self-pitying attitude from someone brought up to be a good knight? … “yes, but” even the very best knight has moments of despair, think of Perceval or Tristan the fool; you are likely to lose faith in yourself and in mankind when you see the survivors of the cataclysm trying to build up a new world by building into it all the same structures that have led to the decomposition of the old; he, at least, would have no part in it, he was not guilty of helping bourgeois capitalism to revive and find its most fertile soil in bomb-cratered Germany; his hands were clean: his son—had he survived, the poor little thing—could nowadays consider papa a pioneer, an evangelist of dropouts, long before the idea of criticising the consumer society was dreamed of …
anyhow, what counts is not the moments, the days, perhaps the weeks and months when you are downhearted or defeated and want to give in for good (those moments of cowardice that did count for his first, East Prussian wife, that so shattered her confidence in him that he could never, never regain it); what really counts is what you salvage from your defeats ….
What, indeed? the career of a screenwriter for the most mediocre directors on the tattiest productions of Cinecittà? … “yes, but” a writer who dreams himself a genius of motion pictures, someone who would use images as the greatest writers use words—for words are no longer adequate for today’s reality, words are for awe, for beauty and veneration, for noble and refined feelings, for precise and differentiated thought, for minds sensitive like seismographs, for ears used to silence; today’s barbarians can’t cope with words, in their mouths words seem too big, they choke on them with too many pretentions; yet on the other hand they are too small, too narrow to hold the rapidly increasing, hybrid growth of their meaning: try to put the horror of a discothèque into words—a glimpse of a rock’n’roll-drunk teenager’s face does it; try to describe a concentration camp—how many thousand words would you need?—the photograph of a man hanging electrocuted in the barbed wire needs no comment; or try to explain the possibility of the various metamorphoses of a man’s character, the changes of his beliefs, convictions, points of view the while he feels no loss of identity—well, take his pictures as a boy, a young man, a grownup, a man shortly before and shortly after his midlife crises and have a close look at them, you’ll see it all there clear enough to give you goose bumps ….
in short, with all his yes, buts, he told himself, he did not lie to himself more than anyone else. Parallel to the way he was dreaming himself ran his feeling of guilt—and that was what made him feel I through all the changes. It was no personal guilt but a sort of collective guilt, a guilt shared by everyone belonging to so-called Western Civilization, a guilt that was immanent in the epoch, in this civilization’s present, particular state and shape. To be conscious of it, as if it were a personal guilt, was his dark privilege. I could not possibly act in a way other than to become guilty by it—yet I was responsible for it. That was his heavy keel. With that it didn’t matter what sails he set to what winds. The others believed in being strong characters, formed once and forever. Their identities (assuming they believed they had them) had, at best, grown over their faces like iron masks. He shed his own identity at will, studied it, put it away, put on another one, in which he studied himself again, as watchful as ever, always finding himself guilty in one way or other. His identities were forged not from the iron of a steadfast lifetime but from extremely light, virtually experimental and interchangeable materials, and they had not become second nature to him; although they were merely hypothetical, like molecular models scientists construct, he would find himself in each of them. Every one was undeniably I to him. In other words, with all his yes, buts, he knew he was lying to himself. But he also knew why he was lying to himself. And by knowing it, the better he knew it, he lied to himself no more.
Nor did he lie to others. He had indifferently left it up to his (present, third, Italian) wife to fathom why he regularly visited her almost ninety-four-year-old Russian great-aunt every Wednesday afternoon. It was not pure pleasure. For years now, she had been bedridden, surrounded by dusty, tattered, worn-out junk. She was shapelessly, inordinately fat, with a tiny turban on her bald head—the ephemeral crown on a pear-shaped face with enormous jowls, the eyes of a bloodhound puppy and the thin white mustache of an old Mandarin. And he did not care to picture what was wobbling under the ruff of her nightgown, what was running riot and to seed. Ninety-four-year-olds have a more indisputable commitment to their bodies than younger oldsters, whose decay often seems almost unethical; beyond the biblical age the body becomes sovereign—after all, we are then dealing with a corpse that has been virtually whisked away from death, with all the paraphernalia, the fermenting, flatulence, wetness, degeneracy; a corpse is an object of reverence even in its putrefaction … nevertheless, her corpse still very clearly put forward the demands of living matter: there was something mystical about the greed with which she grabbed the box of marrons glacés, tore open the wrapping, snatched out the kidney-shaped, sugar-frosted balls, stuffing one after another into the munching mouth under the Chinese mustache, claiming while she munched that she had never had much of a sweet tooth—something mystical, the feeding of a primordial toad. Then, she usually drowsed off. Less and less often did she tell him about St. Petersburg and Tiflis or Paris and London before the turn of the century. But this did occur now and again, and that was the reason he visited her: she too had lived half a dozen lives, some of them in grand brilliance—as a girl, at the court of the tsar; as the wife of a diplomat at posts in the capitals of the picture-book-happy world before the Great War; as an impoverished émigré in Paris of the twenties; as an ironical observer of Roman society before and after Mussolini. She presented him with the colorful plunder of her memories, with which he could then garnish his own memories more vividly, like someone adding an imaginative touch to his home with objects purchased at the flea market.
Thus the memory of his childhood, his adolescence in Rumania, his isolation in Berlin, his misery in the ice-rubble cities after 1945, gained new dimensions. His biography gained historical perspective. Each phase of his metamorphoses was enriched by anecdotes, descriptions, observations, ways of thinking, and turns of expression which this model White Russian bequeathed him. Thanks to her, his own life story became more complete, livelier, more credible, more true—the biography of a model White European, so to say: moth-eaten survivor of a bygone splendid world.
When, in depicting an Easter celebration in the Bukovina or a ball in Vienna of the thirties, he used some decorative detail that his (present, third, Italian) wife recognized as usurped, it did not matter when she broke in: “You got that from my Aunt Olga!” Why not? He had a rightful claim to such details, for they belonged truly to his world, a world he shared with Aunt Olga, a world that had sunk into oblivion anyway: Imperial Russia and the folkloric gaudiness of the shepherd of the Carpathians both had long since passed into the twilight of myth and fairy tale. So if he was describing an Easter festival in a village in the Carpathians a half century ago (which had created a much larger historical distance than several earlier full centuries), then it was proper i
f this description took in something of the gold of Resurrection Masses and the floweriness of the spring mood at Tsarskoye Selo; the Opernball in Vienna 1937 (the first and only one he had attended) resembled a rout in an English peer’s house in 1911 that Aunt Olga had described to him. Details were metaphors anyhow—on the one hand ermine, diadems, braided uniforms, on the other embroidered blouses and lambskins, crocuses and primroses. After all, his aim was not to color in the preciousness of his personal background but rather to enhance the hallowed mood of an exotic religious act; here in a chapel, there in a ballroom. He borrowed a little pigment for his palette and, shoulder-shrugging, ignored anyone who regarded this as sheer embellishment or even flim-flam. Such a reaction struck him as not only seriously philistine but also quite simply stupid.
And that was it. That was one more thing—among several—that he could not forgive his former, second, Jewish wife. Already the previous, first, East Prussian wife had soon discerned his habit of incorporating other people’s memories into his own when they were suitable and colorful enough; but she had held her tongue, just as she had held her tongue about everything, especially about her contempt for him: for she had loved him and been disappointed; and to avoid sharing the guilt of this disappointment, she had to keep his defects in mind. But the second, Jewish wife (whom he viewed as a mere intermezzo between the first, East Prussian, and the third, Italian wife: the marriage had not even lasted a year, had been entered into only because she was pregnant and refused to abort the chance product; two days before the delivery, they had finally gone to the justice of the peace, an utterly ridiculous, disgraceful act; then they had spent another four years fighting over the divorce and the unfortunate child)—his Jewish wife attacked him from the very start for his heedless outlook on biographical property, and she was so rabid about it that he was offended. At first, he could not understand the vehemence with which she championed authenticity, documentary truth for every autobiographical detail. (“Even at the expense of vividness?” he had once asked her ironically, and she had answered fanatically, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”) This trait of hers clashed with her passion for art, her fanatical devotion to art, any kind of art: she would tiptoe up to a Pollock drip painting as worshipfully as to Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s; she would listen to an atonal tone poem with her forehead lowered as devoutly as to a symphony of Beethoven’s; she would follow a play of Beckett’s with the same breathless suspense as a deadly performance of Schiller’s Wallenstein; a poem of T. S. Eliot’s would throw her into the same ecstasies as the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake; and in between, she devoured any number of novels, Grass as greedily as Canetti, Bellow as ardently as Muriel Spark. “You get drunk on the stuff the way other people get drunk on beer,” he would say, to bait her, and she promptly fell for it and gave him, the lowbrow, a lecture on the novel from La Princesse de Clèves to Robbe-Grillet; and he listened to the end in order to say, “You consume all this: it is your drogue. I invent myself in my own novels: that’s my way of escaping an unbearable reality. And as for what you tell me about the necessity of identifying with the hero or, more recently, the antihero, I manage to do that effortlessly: I am my own protagonist from the very start.”
He had loved her and been disappointed, and to avoid sharing the guilt of this disappointment, he had to keep her defects in mind: she was quite simply stupid. That was it. Beautiful and stupid. And a pseudointellectual in the bargain. He hated the Beckmesserish nitpicking, the fundamentalism, the blind obedience to rules in her “intellectual interests.” Needless to say, one of these interests was depth psychology; she had mastered its rules the way a convent schoolgirl learns catechism. Only her belief was more ardent, and never for a moment did she hesitate to form an everlasting judgment by means of the Freudian grid. He would not even listen to what she had to say about his loose relationship to “Truth”: “Leave me in peace. I’m my own best lunatic-keeper. And you can’t expect too much of me: a child of sleepwalkers—growing up in a dreamed world, sometimes nightmarish—I was predestined to lose every kind of reality by all the things that happened around me before and certainly during my lifetime; realities like the Viennese Opernball and Treblinka are incompatible with what you mean by ‘Truth’—they can only happen in a surrealistic dimension; you of all people ought to see that, as a Jew—but you are the most goyish Jew I know. Still, I’m not going to let you talk me into a psychosis like yours by abandoning my need for delusions and hallucinations about myself, even though that need is certainly libidinous in origin—I was a master masturbator before I met you to do the job—and marked by trauma, like meeting with idiots who believe in reality.”
His bile was in proportion to his disappointment, for he had loved her very much; there had been moments when he had knelt before her, for instance, when she told him about how she had been forced to hide during the war; this had not been possible in her small Thuringian home town, everyone knew her there, knew her background, her parents were already running around with the yellow star; and she would not have succeeded in going underground in one of the bigger cities, even if she had managed to cope with the problems of police registration and the necessary food-rationing card: she was too striking, too beautiful—people turned around to look at her in the street: she was splendidly tall and voluptuous, dazzling in the freedom of her laughter, in the radiance of her gray eyes, in the lush fall of her rust-red curls … wheedling a doctor to certify her as tubercular, she withdrew to a tiny sanatorium high up in the Allgäu mountains, the head doctor was in on the secret, for a few weeks she could rest from her pillar-to-post dashing from hideout to hideout—but only for a few weeks: one morning, she looked out of the window and saw a city of tents in the meadow, it was teeming with SS men, who had pitched camp there … panicking, she dashed down a back stairway, hoping to flee through the kitchen and the service entrance into the open, out to the forest, the mountains—but she was caught by a giant in a black uniform, the Kommandant of the echelon, he clutched her hand in an iron grip, pulled her out to his men, ordered them to fall in in a square, had a table placed in the center, lifted her upon it, and shouted, “Men. So you can see what a German girl should look like!”
he had worshiped her when she told him this—at such moments, he was ready to make any sacrifice for her. He understood how important it was to her for him to be “genuine” and “true.” But was what she meant indeed the truth of such reality?
When she finally overcame her resistance to marrying him (for the sake of the child whom she had not had the courage to abort), she had instantly done a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn: had expected the utmost spiritual rapport from their marriage, a total mutual devotion, an exclusive, unconditional dedication on both sides; the least misunder-standing, perhaps due simply to hearing something wrong, the slightest divergence in opinion, whether about the moral justification of the United States in the Korean War or the choice of curtain material, brought pain to her eyes as though he had hit her; once, she wept an entire day because he had failed to switch on the same evening radio concert when they were separated for two days—“But you promised me, and I thought of you at every note, I believed I could feel what you were feeling ….”—she set store by being able to trust him blindly, by relying on him no matter what; after what she had gone through during the twelve horrible years of her youth, now she could settle only for the absolute.
Naturally, she had had an affair with the SS man who had presented her to his men as the very model of a German girl, and when she then confessed to him that she was Jewish, he was crushed. He said he could not spend another minute with her, he must never see her again, never think of her again. His honor was troth, he had sworn total loyalty to his Führer, to his flag, to the Third Reich, allegiance to his Faith in the Purity of the German Race—it was his obvious duty to report her to the authorities, he said, but he could not, because of his hapless love for her—the tragedy, the catastrophe of this love—he writhed under it as under a disastrous stroke of fate, as
under a curse. He might overlook the fact that his flesh could be so mistaken as to desire her, a Jewess, but that he had to love her, “genuinely and truly,” that he had to see her as “his female counterpart,” that he was “in spiritual bondage” to her—this drove him to despair. He drew the inevitable conclusion: volunteering for the front that very day, he hurled himself into the thick of battle and was dead within a few hours—but he had saved her life, obtaining papers for her, food, a secure hiding-place ….
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Page 29