Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire 9780226328492

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Edge of Irony

Edge of Irony Moder nis m i n th e Sha d ow of th e H a bsbu rg Empire

Marjorie Perloff

The U niver sit y of Chicago Pre ss Chicago an d L on d on

M arjorie Perl of f is professor of English emerita at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Office of the Dean of USC Dornsife College at the University of Southern California toward the publication of this book. “In Ägypten” by Paul Celan reprinted by permission of Suhrkamp Verlag AG. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “Avant-­Garde in a Different Key: Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 311–38. Copyright © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0 -­226-­05442-­1 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0 -­226-­32849-­2 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226328492.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Perloff, Marjorie, author. Title: Edge of irony : modernism in the shadow of the Habsburg Empire / Marjorie Perloff. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | “An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “Avant-Garde in a Different Key: Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 311–38.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015038642 | ISBN 9780226054421 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226328492 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Austrian literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)—Austria. | Kraus, Karl, 1874–1936. Letzten Tage Menschlichkeit. | Roth, Joseph, 1894–1939, Radetzkymarsch. | Musil, Robert, 1880– 1942. Mann ohne Eigenschaften. | Canetti, Elias, 1905–1994. Gerettete Zunge. | Canetti, Elias, 1905–1994. Fackel im Ohr. | Canetti, Elias, 1905–1994. Augenspiel. | Celan, Paul—Criticism and interpretation. | Vienna (Austria)—Intellectual life— 20th century. | Austria—History—1918–1938. Classification: LCC PT3818 .P44 2016 | DDC 830.9/9436—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038642 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memoriam Joseph K. Perloff (1924–2014)

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi I ntrodu c t i o n: Th e M a k i ng of Au stro -­M odernis m   1 1 : Th e M e di at e d Wa r  19 Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind 2 : Th e L o st Hy ph e n 41 Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March 3 : “ Th e Sub ju nc t i ve of P o ssi bil i ti es ”   71 Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities 4 : C o m i ng of Age i n K a k ani a   101 Mother Tongue and Identity Theft in Canetti’s Autobiography 5 : Th e L a st H a b sburg P oe t  125 Paul Celan’s Love Poetry and the Limits of Language C oda: Bec o m i ng a “Dif f ere nt ” Pers on   153 Wittgenstein’s “Gospels” Notes 171 Index 195

Illustrations

Pl ate s Plates follow page 48. 1: Map of Austro-­Hungarian Empire (1914) 2: Ethnic groups of Austria-­Hungary (1910) 3: Map of Europe (1922) 4: Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, issue 1 (1899) 5: Deborah Sengl, installation, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, act 1, scene 1 (2013) 6: Deborah Sengl, installation, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, act 1, scene 11 (2013) 7: House of Andrea Turio, Ruse, Bulgaria (ca. 1900) 8: Theater Square, Czernowitz (1905)

F ig u re s 1: Map: The Breakup of Austria-­Hungary (1918) 2 2: Postcard: “Jeder Tritt ein Britt” (1914) 21 3: Karl Kraus, Schlachtfelder-­Rundfahrten im Auto! (1921) 27 4: Theater poster, Vienna: Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (2012) 28 5: Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf (1914) 33 6: Rudolf Hermann, Das Gerücht (Rumor) (1913/14) 35 7: “Der Oberbombenwerfer” (ca. 1922) 38 8: Musikverein am Karlplatz, Vienna, main facade (1866–69) 42 9: Musikverein am Karlplatz, Vienna, Golden Hall (1866–69) 42 10: Franz Welser-­Möst conducts Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (2011) 43 11: Ringplatz, Brody, Galicia (ca. 1910) 49 12: Druckerei Feliks West, Brody, Galicia (ca. 1910) 49 13: Heiligengeistplatz, Lemberg (late nineteenth century) 50 14: Akademiestrasse, Lemberg (late nineteenth century) 50

15: Adam Albrecht, Fieldmarshal Radetzky during the Battle of Novara, March 23, 1849 (1853) 68 16: Stefansplatz, Vienna (ca. 1910) 73 17: Graben, Vienna (ca. 1900) 73 18: Graben, Vienna (ca. 1922) 74 19: World War I Red Cross ambulance (ca. 1922) 74 20: Elias Canetti’s birthplace, Ruse, Bulgaria (2009) 104 21: Main square, Ruse, Bulgaria (ca. 1900) 104 22: Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, Czernowitz (1864) 132 23: Czernowitz synagogue (1877) 132 24: Gruss aus Czernowitz, Ringplatz (2008) 134 25: Theater, Czernowitz (1905) 134 26: Classic Tyrolean loden wool jacket, 1930s 135

Preface

For a young child, even a Jewish child, brought up as I was in the shaky little Republic of Austria between the two world wars, nothing was more glamorous than the tales of the Habsburg emperors, from Rudolf I (1218– 91), to the bold Emperor Maximilian (1459–1519), immortalized in Dürer’s great portrait, who secured the Netherlands, Hungary, Bohemia, and Spain for the Habsburgs, and especially to Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80), that powerful sovereign who presided over her vast empire, orchestrating both the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War (both against Prussia), while bearing her husband Francis I sixteen children, one of whom was Marie Antoinette. Stories about Maria Theresa were the stuff of legend and fairytale. The child Mozart, for example, having performed for the empress, evidently jumped on her lap and kissed her; she rewarded him with a little suit decorated with gold braid. A devout Catholic, Maria Theresa was staunchly anti-­Protestant and even more virulently anti-­Semitic, but as Austrian children, we knew only the tuneful songs and happy anecdotes about the great empress. The year 1867 marked the official establishment of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire or Dual Monarchy; it was also the year that the long-­lived Emperor Franz Josef (1830–1916) decreed emancipation for the Jews. The empire, a collage of the most various ethnicities and cultures, was always fragile, but somehow it held together, producing what were generally considered the golden years that preceded the Great War—golden years at least for the upper classes and a rising bourgeoisie, if hardly for the masses. In June 1914, on a tour in the restless Serbian province of Sarajevo, the unpopular Austrian crown prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated by a Serb terrorist named Gavrilo Princip. Within little over a month, Austria-­Hungary and Germany were at war with Serbia and Russia to the east, England, France, and Italy to the west. In November 1918, with the final victory of the Western powers, now including the United States as well,

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the Habsburg Empire quite simply collapsed. It seemed to happen overnight: millions of the empire’s citizens—those that had survived the Great War—suddenly found themselves assigned to newly created nation-­states. I have always been interested in this terrible and poignant turn in European history, partly because it represents my own ancestry, partly because the last days of the empire had bred such brilliant composers as Gustav Mahler (from a large poor family in Bohemia), such novelists as Joseph Roth (from Galicia), and such poets as Paul Celan (Bukovina). Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein were children of the empire, as was Franz Kafka. And although the Weimar Republic always gets pride of place when German Modernism is discussed, the post-­empire Austrian world looks increasingly important for an understanding of our own artistic and cultural values a century later. In the Anglophone world, however, Austro-­Modernism remains almost wholly unknown. True, Freud is a household name, known especially in its adjectival form (Freudian). True, Mahler’s symphonies are regularly performed by the major orchestras, and the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele are owned and exhibited by leading museums. But the writers? Outside of German departments (a now shrinking—indeed often disappearing—entity in the United States), I find that as major a literary figure as Karl Kraus is virtually unknown. When I mention Roth to friends and colleagues, they assume I mean Philip Roth or perhaps Henry (Call It Sleep). But Joseph Roth, the author of The Radetzky March? Again, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities is known by name as a long and difficult novel, but in my circles—circles quite familiar with James Joyce or Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann—few people have actually read Musil. Wittgenstein, considered one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, is primarily known to his readers (most of whom are Anglophone) in English translation, although his aphoristic writings, from the Tractatus to On Certainty, were all composed in German. As for Elias Canetti, who did win the Nobel Prize in 1981 primarily for his famous sociological treatise Crowds and Power, The Tongue Set Free, and his subsequent memoirs, published in English in the late 1970s and early ’80s, at this writing these works are all out of print. The one exception to this rule of neglect is Kafka, who has given the English-­speaking world the adjective Kafkaesque and who, still widely read, is regularly quoted—or misquoted. Given the vast literature on Kafka, who is no doubt sui generis, I do not include him here, preferring to discuss those other Austrians who deserve wider dissemination. One of these is Paul Celan, who, celebrated as he is as the Holocaust poet, the author of “Death Fugue” and “Shibboleth,” is construed quite narrowly by his admirers. I

P r e f a c e   |   xiii

read him here against the grain, primarily as a love poet, whose lyrics, many of them dedicated to his fellow Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, can best be understood in the context of the lost empire. This, then, is a book about Austro-­Modernism aimed primarily at a non-­ Germanic audience. It tries to take a broader perspective than most studies of the subject so as to right the German-­Austrian balance, arguing that there was in the first decades of the twentieth century an extraordinary body of writings that provide an alternative not only to the French and Anglo-­ American Modernism that has been the source of our norms and paradigms for the early century but also to the Frankfurt School and its Weimar analogues, so remarkably influential on Anglo-­American literary studies. Edge of Irony makes no attempt to cover what is a large and various field; it is not a survey, nor does it aim to be inclusive. The poetry and fiction of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, central to my earlier Wittgenstein’s Ladder, are not discussed here. Rather, I focus on close readings of a limited set of texts in a variety of genres—drama (Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind), the “realistic” novel (The Radetzky March), the essay (as central to Musil’s The Man without Qualities), the memoir (Elias Canetti’s The Tongue Set Free), the lyric poem (Celan), and the philosophical notebook (Wittgenstein)—so as to give the nonspecialist reader a sense of the complexity, brilliance, and deep skepticism of the literary scene of the war years as it played out on the edges of the lost empire. The writers I discuss belong not only to the historical edge (the end of the Habsburg Monarchy brought on by the Great War) but also to its geographical edges: the distant provinces of Galicia (Roth), Bukovina (Celan and Gregor von Rezzori), what is now Bulgaria (Canetti), and so on. Kraus came from a large Jewish family in Bohemia (later Czechoslovakia); Musil grew up in the Czech city of Brno, Bachmann in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia. Edges: the only one of my authors born in Vienna itself was Wittgenstein, and he, like most of the others in my narrative, was Jewish and hence never a real insider in fin-­de-­ siècle Vienna and its aftermath. Indeed, Austro-­Modernism is largely an Austro-­Jewish phenomenon: my authors, mostly of Jewish as well as provincial descent, came of age in one of the most anti-­Semitic periods in modern European history, the paradox being that in their eagerness to be part of the larger cultural and artistic scene, they were themselves prone to anti-­Semitism. The drive to “pass,” to undergo such rituals as the Karrière-­Taufe (career baptism) common through the late 1920s, came to an abrupt end with Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938, just twenty years after the end of the First World War. Who counted as a Jew was now to be decided by the Nazi regime. In my earlier book The Futurist Moment: Avant Garde, Avant-­Guerre,

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and the Language of Rupture (1986), my aim was to shift attention from the usual suspects—James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht—to a different kind of modernism, one that included Russian and Italian avant-­garde practices central to the prewar period, and anticipating the Dada of the Cabaret Voltaire and the Surrealism of Paris. This book is a revisionary study of a slightly later phenomenon. If we are to understand Modernism, born, most critics would agree, in the Europe of the turn of the century, we have to read, more closely than we have, the deeply ironic war literature of the defunct, multicultural, and polyglot Austro-­Hungarian Empire. And now that Vienna is once again a very prosperous and elegant capital city, trading on its great musical tradition, its Baroque and Art Nouveau architectural wonders, and its unique literary heritage to draw a global population into its cultural sphere, it seems high time to consider the Austro-­modernist ethos of the post-­empire, which so strangely anticipates much of the darkness and cynicism—but also the intense humor—of our own disillusioned twenty-­first-­century culture. Ack no w l e d gme n ts In the fall of 2011 I was invited by Bookforum to review three novels by Gregor von Rezzori that had just appeared in the New York Review of Books reprint series. Reading Rezzori, especially his earlier Memoirs of an Anti-­ Semite, I realized for the first time how the aftermath of World War I affected the citizens of the once multiethnic, polyglot Austro-­Hungarian Empire, and how intense the new hatred, especially for the Jews of Austria, could be. I had recently read Karl Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: as an antiwar play, it struck me as in a class by itself. Fin-­de-­siècle Vienna was one thing, post–­World War I Vienna quite another. I am grateful to the many friends and colleagues, as well as journal editors and conference conveners, who gave good advice at various stages of this project: Charles Altieri, Mary Jo Bang, John Benfield, Charles Bernstein, Clare Cavanagh, Mary Ann Caws, James Campbell, Gordana Crnkovic, Craig Dworkin, Thomas Eder, Al Filreis, Eva Forgacs, Rubén Gallo, Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Harrison, Giles Havergal, Daniel Heller-­Roazen, Susan Howe, Judd Hubert, Doris Ingrisch, Roland Innerhofer, Pierre Joris, Mario Klarer, Uli Knoepflmacher, Herbert Lindenberger, Susan McCabe, Tyrus Miller, W. T. J. Mitchell, Albert Mobilio, Jann Pasler, Carrie Paterson, Vanessa Place, Herman Rapaport, Claude Rawson, Brian Reed, Radmila Schweitzer, Vincent Sherry, Robert von Hallberg, Sabine Zelger. A special debt is owed to Patrick Greaney, and Thomas Harrison, who read the manuscript word by word and made excellent suggestions. And my

P r e f a c e   |   xv

old friend and esteemed colleague Gerald Bruns read drafts of chapters as they were being formulated and was of inestimable help. As always, my daughters Nancy Perloff and Carey Perloff, who work on related material, were wonderfully helpful, as were my grandchildren Alexandra Perloff-­Giles, Nicholas Perloff-­Giles, and especially Benjamin Lempert, who majored in Eastern European history at Yale and who was a great sounding board, providing the perspective of the young. I have worked with Alan Thomas, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, since 1986; he knows only too well my foibles and weaknesses and works hard to keep me in line and improve my work. His colleague at the Press, Randolph Petilos, gave exemplary help on technical matters. I thank Ruth Goring, my suberb copy editor, and Marta Steele, who produced the index. A few months before I finished Edge of Irony, I lost my husband of sixty-­one years, my best friend, and my adviser par excellence to adult congenital heart disease. Joseph K. Perloff, himself a celebrated writer in his field, had an intense interest in the various authors and issues discussed here, and I reread Roth, Canetti, and Wittgenstein in copies he had profusely annotated. This book is dedicated to his memory. On dark days—and there have been many this last year—I try to remind myself of a Wittgenstein aphorism we both loved: “The world of the happy is a happy world.” A No t e o n Tr a nsl at i on When textual issues are central, I reproduce the texts both in German and in English translation; the German is usually, but not always, in the endnotes. The wording of the original text is especially important in the examples from the work of Musil and Celan. Where the name of the translator is not given, the translation is my own. I also indicate when I revise a given translator’s wording, as is often the case with Peter Winch’s translation of the notebook entries in Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value. The reader is urged to look at and listen to the YouTube recordings, usually in German, that are listed in the endnotes; these give even those who know no German a flavor of the original.

I n trod u c t i on

The Making of Austro-­Modernism

Vienna, in the years of exile between the two wars, was also a stage that witnessed the downfall of many ideological certainties and great revolutionary hopes. Cl audio Magris, Danube (1986)1

Wh at Re ma i ns My story begins with a series of maps displaying the Before and After. Before 1914, the Austro-­Hungarian Empire was a multiethnic and polyglot entity covering 240,000 square miles (plate 1). Its fifty million inhabitants included what are now Hungarians, Czechs, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Romanians, as well as the Poles of Galicia, the Russians of western Ukraine, and the Italians of the Southern Tyrol and Trieste (plate 2). Four years later, when World War I ended and the Dual Monarchy was dissolved, Vienna became the capital of a small and fragile republic that had only six million inhabitants and a territory of 32,000 miles—a nation the shape of a tadpole, whose eastern head (Vienna) sat uneasily on a body whose tail was in the Voralberg Mountains (figure 1). Indeed, the First Republic, born in 1918, was made up of the area that remained after the bulk of the empire was parcelled out to create new nations or to add to existing ones (plate 3). As the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau remarked, “L’Autriche, c’est ce qui reste” (Austria is what remains).2 From the hindsight of a century, Hitler’s annexation in 1938 of Austria— “the vague, gray and inert shadow,” as Stefan Zweig called it, “of the former Imperial monarchy”3—was probably inevitable, as was the coming of the Second World War just twenty years after the end of the First. Increasingly historians are referring to the events of 1914–45 as the Long War or the

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F ig u re 1 . The Breakup of Austria-­Hungary (1918). From H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (New York: Macmillan, 1921). Private collection of Roy Winkelman. Photograph: Maps Etc. / FCIT / USF.

Second Thirty-­Year War. In 1918 most Austrians, including the Jews, had wanted to become part of greater Germany, but Woodrow Wilson and his colleagues were convinced that Anschluss would make Germany too powerful, and so the merger was prohibited by the Treaty of St. Germain (September 1919). When it finally took place twenty years later, the Anschluss was carried out not by treaty but by Nazi force. In Anglophone critical discourse, Austria is more or less synonymous with Vienna. From Alan Janik’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973) and Carl Schorske’s Fin de siècle Vienna (1979) to the prominent celebrations of the art of Gustav Klimt and the music of Gustav Mahler in the United States of the 2010s, the importance of Vienna as a great art and cultural capital of the early twentieth century is hardly in dispute. But what has been less well understood is the astonishing impact that what I shall call Austro-­Modernism began to exercise in the post–­World War I years, when artists and writers from the far-­flung frontiers of the dismembered empire—writers, mostly Jewish, who had received a classical German education, as authorized by the centralized k. & k. (kaiserlich und königlich) government—came on the scene. Joseph Roth (1894–1939), the author of the now classic Radetzky March (1933), was a native of Brody in Galicia (after World War I incorporated into

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Poland, and later into the Ukraine), who made his living as a journalist, first in Frankfurt and Berlin, then in Paris. Elias Canetti (1905–94) came from the Danube city of Ruse (now in Bulgaria); was a schoolboy in Manchester, England; and grew up, studied, and launched his career in Vienna, only to have to flee, in 1938, to asylum in London. Paul Celan (1920–70) was born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina Province, a territory incorporated into Romania in 1918, occupied by the Russians in 1944, and now part of the Ukraine. After World War II, he lived briefly in Bucharest and then in Vienna, before marrying the French graphic artist Gisèle de Lestrange and settling in Paris. Brody, Ruse, Czernowitz: these multiethnic towns were hundreds of miles from Vienna (see plate 1), and their occupants inevitably spoke a number of languages, but the high culture of the Habsburg Empire provided their intellectual horizon. Current labels are thus rather misleading: Kafka (1883–1924), sometimes classified as a Czech writer, sometimes as a German, or again as a Jewish one, belonged, of course, to the empire. Celan is generally referred to as a Holocaust poet from Romania, Canetti as a Sephardic Jew raised in Bulgaria and turned cosmopolite. Or again, these writers are classified according to their written language as, quite simply, German. The Jewish link, moreover, has obscured the extent to which the decline and fall of the Dual Monarchy also transformed the lives of its non-­ Jewish writers. Gregor von Rezzori (1914–98), the later chronicler of the declining Habsburg empire, whose cruel but brilliant Confessions of an Anti-­ Semite (1979) has recently been reissued, spent his childhood in the same town as Paul Celan—Czernowitz—and studied in Vienna. Robert Musil (1889–1942), whose Man without Qualities (published in 1930) has long been considered the classic “German” dissection of the impending collapse of “Kakania,” as Musil called the kaiserlich und königlich empire, was born in Carinthia, received a classic Austrian education in Brno (Brünn), now in the Czech Republic, graduated from its Technical University, where his father was a leading professor, and continued his scientific studies in Berlin before settling, with his Jewish wife Martha, in Vienna. In 1938 the Musils had to flee Austria; they settled in Switzerland, where Musil died in great penury during the war. The list of these “provincial” Austrian writers goes on and on, culminating after World War II in the work of Thomas Bernhard and Ingeborg Bachmann, both from the Austrian provinces: he from the Wallersee near Salzburg, she from Klagenfurt about twenty-­five miles from the Slovenian (then Yugoslavian) border. What I shall here call Austro-­Modernist literature is thus characterized by its unique position vis-­à-­vis the First World War. No other national culture experienced the trauma of sudden rupture as fully as did the Austri-

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ans. Germany, after all, had been a unified nation less than fifty years when World War I broke out, as had Italy. And however terrible the war was for the English and French, their sense of national identity was not really called into question in 1918: that was to happen after World War II, with the loss of overseas empire. But consider Rezzori’s account of his native city: Czernowitz, where I was born, was the former capital of the former duchy of Bukovina, an easterly region of Carpathian forestland in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains. In 1775, ceded by the former Ottoman Empire to the former Imperial and Royal Austro-­Hungarian realm as compensation for the latter’s mediation the Russo-­Turkish War. . . . after 1848 it became one of the autonomous former crown lands of the House of Habsburg. One can readily see that everything in this quick summary . . . is designated as “former,” that is to say, not in the present, not truly existing—and this invests my birthplace with a kind of mythic aura, an irreal quality. It is of no use to try to elucidate this mythic twilight by means of historical analysis. That the Austro-­Hungarian monarchy has not existed since 1918 is well enough known, yet in Czernowitz people acted as if they didn’t quite believe it. German remained the everyday language of most people, Vienna was the closest metropolis, and no one thought of denying it the rank of capital.4

After 1940, the Bukovina was cut in two by a state treaty between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. The northern part, which included Czernowitz (Chernovitsky), became part of the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine. As such, it was no longer the capital of its province, because the capital of Ukraine is Kiev. At this writing, with Ukraine once again contested territory, the identity of Czernowitz is shakier than ever. The literary ethos of Austrian postwar writers, all of them displaying a love-­hate relationship to Vienna and opting for various forms of exile, is curiously distinct from that of its German counterpart. In the “research laboratory for world destruction,” as Karl Kraus, born in the Czech town of Jičín near the Polish border, called Austria in his monumental antiwar play The Last Days of Mankind (1922), the trauma of war followed by the sudden and radical dissolution of the geographical entities into which these writers were born created a deeply skeptical and resolutely individualistic modernism—one much less ideologically charged than its counterpart in Germany. Neither the intellectually rigorous and revolutionary Marxism of Weimar writers like Bertolt Brecht nor, on the right, Heidegger’s posttranscendental philosophy centering on the disclosure of “Being-­in-­the World” seems to

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have had much appeal to the ironic, satiric, darkly humorous, erotic—and often slightly mystical—world of postempire Austria. As Musil puts it in chapter 4 of The Man without Qualities in defining what he called “a sense of possibility”: Whoever has [this sense] does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. . . . The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or also make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists [Möglichkeitsmenschen] are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-­it-­alls, or troublemakers.5

Dreamers, troublemakers—and we could add imaginative writers and ­artists. Musil’s analysis echoes Wittgenstein’s proposition in the Tractatus that “everything we see could also be otherwise” (§5.634), and again, “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen” (§6.41).6 In these circumstances, change came to mean not political revolution, the change of the social or political order, but a change of consciousness. One must try, Wittgenstein repeatedly and stubbornly insisted, “to turn into a different person.”7 Ironically, the refusal of direct political engagement did not preclude what was an extraordinary prescience about politics among Austro-­ Modernist writers. Kraus and Canetti are notable examples, but so is Joseph Roth, who understood early on how dangerous the idea of Anschluss would prove to be. In August 1925, Roth, then a Paris correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, wrote to his editor Benno Reifenberg: I am desperate. I can’t even go to Vienna since the Jewish Socialists have started clamoring for their Anschluss. What are they after? They want Hindenburg? At the time that Emperor Franz Joseph died, I was already a “revolutionary,” but I shed tears for him. I was a one-­year volunteer in a Vienna regiment, a so-­called elite unit, that stood by the Kapuzinergruft as a guard of honor, and I tell you, I was crying. An epoch was buried. With the Anschluss, a culture will be put in the ground. Every European

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must be against the Anschluss. . . . Do they want to become a sort of nether Bavaria?8

Roth was often intemperate and irrational: he hated the Germans, veered between pro-­Jewish sentiment and anti-­Semitism, and was, like his own “hero of Solferino” in The Radetzky March, in love with the emperor, with the Habsburg dynasty, and, in certain moods, even with the Catholic Church. But he had an uncanny understanding of what was happening in Europe in the interwar years, and he also recognized that he himself was always and of necessity an outsider: “The feeling of not belonging anywhere, which has always been with me,” haunted him even in his beloved Paris. Yet being an outsider made it possible for him to write his brilliant dispatches about everyday life in post–­World War I Berlin and Paris. Such contradictions—and they are endemic to Austro-­Modernism— have been nicely pinpointed by Eric Hobsbawm: Of all the great multi-­lingual and multi-­territorial empires that collapsed in the course of the twentieth-­century, the decline and fall of the Emperor Franz Josef’s, being both long expected and observed by sophisticated minds, has left us by far the most powerful literary or narrative chronicle. Austrian minds had time to reflect on the death and disintegration of their empire, while it struck all the other empires suddenly, at least by the measure of the historical clock, even those in visibly declining health, like the Soviet Union. But perhaps the perceived and accepted multi-­linguality, multi-­confessionality and multiculturality of the monarchy helped them to a more complex sense of historical perspective. Its subjects lived simultaneously in different social universes and different historical epochs.9

It is interesting that Hobsbawm, whose own childhood in 1920s Vienna was one of misery and hardship, and who was soon to become a dedicated communist revolutionary, recognized that so far as literature was concerned, the most complex and powerful dissection of empire was that of the Austrians. How do we characterize this distinctive ethos? Austro-­Modernist literature is not “avant-­garde” in the usual sense: it is not, for example, characterized by collage and fragmentation, by intentional genre crossing or the use of mixed media. On the surface, it is more conventional: Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind, is written in what seems to be largely transparent language, whether simulating the dialect of workers’ cafés or citing state documents. Roth’s Radetzky March looks like a traditional novel, with an omniscient

The Making of Austro-Modernism  |   7

narrator and a beginning, middle, and end. In Musil’s The Man without Qualities, the essayistic mode seems to allow for authoritative ethical judgments, only to undermine these judgments at every turn in the novel’s hall of mirrors. Canetti’s The Tongue Set Free is an episodic memoir, seemingly casually structured and digressive. Even Celan’s poetry, however minimalist it becomes in its late phase, is aligned on the page as traditional lyric, often quite closural, using consistent lineation and stanzaic structure. But although Austro-­Modernist writing avoids the formal experimentation we associate with the avant-­garde, its absorption of other language registers into the authors’ native German, its troubling anti-­Semitism, its conviction, most memorably expressed by Wittgenstein, that argumentation called for not linear discourse but a series of aphorisms, its transvaluation of normative values, its fondness for paradox and contradiction as modes of understanding, and especially the hard edge of its savage and grotesquely comic irony—these may well be more lasting legacies of Modernism than the use of collage, the time shift, or the stream of consciousness. Then, too—and this is especially the case with Musil and Kraus—Austro-­ Modernism prefigures the use of documentation/appropriation, which I have discussed vis-­à-­vis contemporary poets in my Unoriginal Genius. “The most implausible conversations in this play,” notes Kraus in the preface to his Last Days of Mankind, “were spoken verbatim; its shrillest inventions are quotations. . . . A document is a character; reports rise up as living forms while the living die as editorials.”10 “Construct a person from nothing but quotations!” Musil writes in a 1920 notebook.11 Th e Re d a nd th e Bl ac k The transformation of monarchy into republic was perhaps uniquely difficult in the new Austria. For the First Republic, whose largely rural, provincial, and Catholic population was to be governed from the capital—a sophisticated metropolis, 10 percent of whose citizens were Jews—was almost guaranteed to flounder. Indeed, in a referendum of 1919 (later rescinded), the Voralberg (Austrian’s westernmost province) voted overwhelmingly for annexation to Switzerland as preferable to remaining part of the “Wiener Judenstaat.”12 Meanwhile, to the south, Innsbruck and the surrounding Tyrol looked to Berlin rather than Vienna to ward off annexation by Italy. In his memoir, my grandfather Richard Schüller, who had served in the pre–­World War I cabinet as Sektionschef for commerce, recalls returning to his ministry office in the Ballhausplatz on an October day in 1918, even as the armistice was being negotiated in Paris:

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I found my colleagues silently sitting in their offices, not knowing what to do and avoiding a discussion of the catastrophe. . . . I had worked with people of all nationalities for 20 years. Before the war I had worked under 2 Ministers of Commerce, Fort and Fiedler, who were Czechs, and [the] Under Secretary, Dr. Mueller, was a Czech, an assistant secretary a Pole, and in my own department 2 out of 5 officials were Czechs. They asked me if they should leave the office and I advised them to go to Prague, where they might be needed by the new government. . . . They now belonged to victorious Czechoslovakia and I to defeated Austria. My own mother was a citizen of Czechoslovakia where I had been born [in Brünn, later Brno]. The Secretary of State Victor Adler asked me to leave the Ministry of Commerce and to come to the Foreign Office.13

The resulting crisis had no parallel in Germany. The newly established state of Czechoslovakia cut off all coal supplies; the Hungarian and southern Slavic provinces cut off three-­quarters of the former food supply, and in the freezing winter that followed, England and France refused all loans and shipments of grain, flour, or oil.14 In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig gives a horrific account of his own train journey in 1918 from Feldkirch, the Swiss-­Austrian border station in the Vorarlberg, to Salzburg, where he owned property: The guards who showed us our seats were haggard, starved and ragamuffin; they crawled about with torn and shabby uniforms hanging loosely over their stooped shoulders. The leather straps for opening and closing windows had been cut off, for every piece of that material was precious. . . . The electric bulbs had either been smashed or stolen so that whoever searched for anything had to feel his way about with matches. . . . Everyone held on to his baggage anxiously and hugged his package of provisions close; no one dared separate himself from a possession for a single minute in the darkness. (289–90)

A journey that usually took seven hours took seventeen. And on arrival in Salzburg, there were no porters, no cabs—and later, no fuel and little food: “A young lad shot squirrels in our garden for his Sunday dinner and well-­ nourished dogs or cats returned only seldom from lengthy prowls” (293). Against this background, the first Austrian parliamentary elections were held in February 1919. There were, in effect, only two political parties: the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats. The Socialist Party primarily drew on Jewish Vienna. It won the first election by six seats (69 to 63), with

The Making of Austro-Modernism  |   9

twenty-­six votes for the small right-­wing Nationalist Party. Viktor Adler, the venerable socialist leader, died shortly after the armistice; Karl Renner, a German-­speaking Czech who had been librarian for the Reichsrat (imperial council), became the first chancellor of the new republic, and Otto Bauer, a leading Viennese Austro-­Marxist, his foreign minister. In less than two years the situation was reversed: in 1920, the Christian Socials won seventy-­ nine seats to the Socialists’ sixty-­three. During the next eighteen years, the Socialists won no national elections, although they succeeded in creating a remarkable welfare state in “Red Vienna.” Indeed Vienna became, as Lisa Silverman notes, “a lone ‘red’ city, surrounded by the ‘black’ Christian Social provinces and federal government. Anti-­Semitic rhetoric had linked socialism and Jews well before the interwar period, but the linkage became even stronger as Jews became more involved and visible in the movement after World War I” (Silverman, 22). In 1922 a Catholic priest, Ignaz Seipel, was elected chancellor. And Engelbert Dollfuss, the controversial chancellor of the early 1930s, who ruled autocratically without parliament, also came from the priesthood. In 1934, just two years into his chancellorship, Dollfuss, who, authoritarian as he was, dared to defy Hitler, was openly assassinated in his office by Nazi gunmen. Tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the war in Galicia and Bukovina, as well as Poland and western Russia, had been pouring into Vienna since the fall of 1914, and the anti-­Semitism that had long been latent in Catholic Austria flared up in response to the influx of so many new mouths to feed. Here some statistics are in order.15 Since the emperor’s granting of emancipation in 1867, the Jews of Austria, based mostly in Vienna, had multiplied and flourished. There were 40,000 Jews in Vienna in 1870, 72,000 in 1880, and over 118,000 (almost 10% of the population) in 1890. The newly built railways helped to speed up immigration from the east. By 1885 more than 60 percent of all doctors and over half the lawyers registered in the capital were Jews. More important, nearly all the major newspapers in Vienna were owned and staffed by Jews—a situation that gave them a great deal of power to shape public opinion.16 The editor of the leading newspaper Die Neue Freie Presse, Moritz Benedikt, a proponent of pan-­Germanism, became the special object of Karl Kraus’s scorn. Kraus, a Jewish convert to Catholicism (1899) who later renounced the church for its complicity in the war, is known for his troubling, arguably anti-­Semitic comments, but in the case of Benedikt, Kraus’s charges of corruption and mendacity proved to be correct. The overrepresentation of the Jews in the Social Democratic movements of the period led to open calls for ethnic cleansing. The Russian Revolution of 1905 had prompted a special wave of anti-­Semitism. Leon Trotsky, who

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lived in Vienna between 1907 and 1914, became the symbol of the Jewish drive toward socialist revolution. Karl Lueger (“der schöne Karl”), the anti-­ Semitic mayor of Vienna, warned the Jews not to go as far as their Russian counterparts and not to get involved with Social Democratic revolutionaries: “Should the Jews threaten our fatherland, we will know no mercy either.” And the threat was not only from the Left: many of the leading Viennese financiers were Jews as well. “The Jews,” Lueger declared, “don’t want ‘equality’ but complete domination.” They were said to be planning “the establishment of an international alliance of banks with its seat in Washington” and would soon “publicly dictate its laws to the world.”17 During the war, with the influx of poor Galician Jews with black caftans, hats, and long beards, and “foreign” (Yiddish) speech—Jews who worked as peddlers (Handeleh), underselling their native counterparts and often becoming wealthy in the process—the anti-­Semitic temperature rose even further. After the war, unevenness of distribution of jobs became more marked. Few Jews, as Bernard Wasserstein points out in his seminal study On the Eve, worked in the majority occupations: agriculture, domestic service, mining, or public employment; again, at the other end of the scale, the Jews were underrepresented in the civil service, the army, and of course the church, which was powerful in Catholic Austria. On the other hand, the Jews were greatly overrepresented in finance, in the professions and arts, and in commerce, whether the commerce of small shopkeeping or the industrial cartel. The increasingly large role of Jews on the political Left didn’t help matters. “Simultaneously feared and despised . . . as subversive revolutionary and capitalist exploiter,” writes Wasserstein, “the Jew was widely regarded as an alien presence.”18 Assimilated Jews, many of whom like Wittgenstein and Viktor Adler came from families that had long been converted and had distanced themselves from their Jewish origin, were now in an especially difficult position.19 Members of the preceding generation—for example, Arthur Schnitzler and Gustav Mahler—had certainly experienced anti-­Semitism, but exile was not yet a necessity. On the contrary, these artists regarded Vienna as their home, their city. “Austria-­Hungary is no more,” declared Freud in 1918, “I do not want to live anywhere else. For me emigration is out of the question. I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole.”20 Twenty years later, when the Nazis occupied Vienna, the eighty-­two-­year-­old Freud was still so reluctant to leave that he had to be dragged out of his house by his friends and taken away. In the following generation, such unqualified allegiance to “our” Vienna was replaced by much more complex and conflicted feelings. Postwar Vienna, Timms reminds us, was the scene of an anti-­Semitic crusade. A

The Making of Austro-Modernism  |   11

campaign in Parliament to limit further immigration was “dominated by allegations that Christian-­German civilization was under threat from an alliance of Marxists and Jews.” The Bolshevik danger, as the future chancellor Ignaz Seipel declared in 1918 (see Timms, 30), was a “Jewish danger.” Austrian Jews, ironically enough, thus found themselves longing for the lost world of empire: The majority of the Jews of the Habsburg Empire had felt at ease with the concept of being Austrian in the pre-­1918 “cosmopolitan” sense of the word: they could be Austrian in Cracow speaking Polish, Austrian in Prague speaking Czech, or Austrian in Trieste speaking Italian, without feeling obliged to deny their Jewish origins. In 1918 this model of multiculturalism collapsed. . . . To be a German-­speaking Austrian Jew in an intensely anti-­Semitic society was to experience a fractured identity. (Timms, 32–33)

Thus exile became increasingly frequent, whether the self-­exile of Wittgenstein, who settled in Cambridge in 1930, or of Joseph Roth, whose home as a journalist became Paris, or the forced departure in 1938 of Canetti and Musil. The much younger Paul Celan, who was studying literature in Czernowitz, officially part of Romania when World War II broke out, witnessed the Holocaust (in which his parents were killed), becoming a prisoner first of the Nazis, then of the Communists, before taking up permanent residence in France in 1948. What unites these Austro-­Modernist writers is the German language— more specifically, the Austro-­German language—into which they were born. Children of a polyglot empire, they all spoke (and often wrote) more than one language. Canetti’s street language, for example, was Bulgarian, and he learned English as a child in Manchester; Musil spoke Czech, and Roth Yiddish (a language he later disavowed). But the scene of writing, for all of the above, was emphatically German. Take Wittgenstein, whose career as a philosopher had its inception in the prewar Cambridge of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. As his letters and transcribed lectures testify, his English remained to the end somewhat awkward and stilted: he never mastered the “ordinary language” to which he was so wedded in German. As a journalist, Joseph Roth wrote many of the essays of his last decade in French, but for his fiction there was no question of writing in anything but German. Again, Paul Celan insisted, in a much-­cited lecture, that the poet had no choice but to write in his native language, that with the incorporation of a “foreign language” poetic truth “goes to the dogs.”21 As the native but also chosen language, the German of the Austro-­

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Modernists became unusually self-­conscious—the object of contemplation rather than a means of communication. “Language,” as Karl Kraus put it in his Fackel essay “Die Sprache,” “is the only chimera whose deceptive power is infinite, the exhaustible resource in which life is not impoverished.”22 Th e C uri o u s S tru g gl e f or th e “ N erv e s ” Walter Benjamin, who was a great admirer of Karl Kraus, had one serious reservation about his Austrian contemporary: Kraus, he argued, believed in the agency of the individual: It is entirely logical that the impoverished, reduced human being of our day, the contemporary, can seek sanctuary in the temple of living things only in that most withered form: the form of a private individual. How much renunciation and how much irony lie in the curious struggle for the “nerves”—the last root fibers of the Viennese to which Kraus could still find Mother Earth clinging. . . . Here, if anywhere, is manifest the strange interplay between reactionary theory and revolutionary practice that we find everywhere in Kraus.23

The “revolutionary practice” to which Benjamin refers is the use of quotation, of a new documentary art made entirely of cited passages. “In citation, the two realms—of origin and destruction—justify themselves before language. And conversely, only where they interpenetrate—in citation—is language consummated” (“Karl Kraus,” 454). But this radical practice, as Benjamin saw it, was at odds with what he took to be Kraus’s regressive politics. In the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility, there could be no room for the bourgeois individualism Kraus seemed to be advocating; social practice had to become communal. For Kraus, on the other hand, as Edward Timms notes, “it is militarism—not capitalism—that is the great adversary, and he condemns the bourgeois world for social injustice rather than economic exploitation. For him, Bolshevism is less a political than a moral problem, and he was shocked by the spectacle of intelligent young men, many from Jewish backgrounds, embracing a creed of violence” (Timms, 48). Indeed, in his July 1919 entries for Die Fackel, Kraus predicted an anti-­Semitic backlash, remarking that before “world revolution” would take place, there might just be a “world pogrom” (Weltpogrom).24 Such comments can and have been interpreted as unfortunate expressions of Jewish self-­hatred, but it bears saying that in this case Kraus turned out to be right. The disagreement between Kraus and Benjamin, in any case, is best understood as the difference between the pragmatism of those involved

The Making of Austro-Modernism  |   13

in the daily political life of a shaky and small new republic and the much more abstract analysis of history, literature, and social thought produced by a group of progressive intellectuals, deeply rooted in their nation’s philosophical tradition. In the introduction to a 2013 study called Weimar Thought, the editors can barely contain their enthusiasm for “the astonishing cultural and intellectual ferment of interwar Germany circa 1919–33”: The era of the Weimar Republic was arguably the foremost crucible of intellectual innovation in political theory and sociology, cultural criticism, film theory, psychology and legal theory, physics and biology, and modernism in all of its diverse forms. Its brief lifespan saw the emergence of intellectuals, scholars, and critics who rank among the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. A representative list would no doubt include philosophical radicals such as Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Max Scheler; theorists of political crisis such as Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Hannah Arendt, Hans Kelsen, and Oswald Spengler; innovators in theology such as Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Ernst Bloch; and exponents of aesthetic rebellion in literature, film, drama, music, and the fine arts, including Alfred Döblin and Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Krenek, Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters.25

It is indeed an impressive list—but a list heavily weighted toward political and social theory rather than to literature. Weimar was the workshop for radical ideas, from Marxist theory to Heidegger’s ontological exploration of being-­in-­the-­world to the film theory of Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, and Benjamin himself. But this is not to say that Austro-­Modernism, from Freud and Wittgenstein and Kraus, to Musil and Roth, to Celan and Bachmann, is to be understood as a weaker version of the strong intellectual formation of the Weimar Republic. It was merely different. Given the particular situation of the Habsburg Empire and its dissolution, given the eastern (and largely Jewish) origin of its writers, it developed in another direction, its hallmark being a profound skepticism about the power of government—any government or, for that matter, economic system—to reform human life. In Austro-­Modernist fiction and poetry, irony—an irony less linked to satire (which posits the possibility for reform) than to a sense of the absurd—is thus the dominant mode. The writer’s situation is perceived not as a mandate for change—change that is always, for the Austrians, under suspicion— but as an urgent opportunity for probing analysis of fundamental desires and principles. Consider the exchange between the German Einstein and the Austrian

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Freud on the question “why war?” (“Warum Krieg?”) in 1932. The occasion is a proposal, on behalf of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris, that Einstein invite a person “to a frank exchange of views” on any problem of the interlocutor’s choice. The problem Einstein chooses, “the most insistent,” he believes, “of all the problems civilization has to face,” is the question “Is there any way of delivering humanity from the menace of war?” “With the advance of modern science,” writes Einstein, “this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for civilization as we know it.”26 Einstein admits that, unlike Freud, he “has no insight into the dark places of human will and feeling,” but suggests “a simple way of dealing with the superficial (i.e., administrative) aspect of the problem: the setting up, by international consent, of a legislative and judicial body to settle every conflict arising between nations. Each nation would undertake to abide by the orders issued by this legislative body, to invoke its decision in every dispute, to accept its judgments unreservedly and to carry out every measure the tribunal deems necessary for the execution of its decrees” (“Why War?,” 26). Such a proposal, Einstein recognizes, goes against human nature, against the “strong psychological factors” that “paralyze these efforts,” especially “the craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation.” But surely, he argues, if we begin with the premise that “people have within them the lust for hatred and destruction,” we can begin to find “ways and means to render all armed conflicts impossible” (27). Freud, so Einstein hopes, is just the person to take up “the problem of world peace in the light of [his] most recent discoveries, for such a presentation well might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of action” (27). The irony is that this debate took place in July 1932, just six months before Hitler became chancellor. Freud responds by putting violence in its setting, pointing out that from time immemorial, conflicts have been solved by violence, resulting in death or subjugation of the enemy. In time, he argues, “a path was traced that led away from violence to law,” but only because men realized that “one strong man can be overborne by an alliance of many weaklings,” that union makes for force. “Thus we may define ‘right’ (i.e., law) as the might of the community. Yet it, too, is nothing else than violence, quick to attack whatever individual stands in its path, and it employs the self-­same methods, follows like ends, with but one difference; it is the communal, not individual violence that has its way” (28). And as Freud now deduces, since there are bound to be inequalities even within the ruling power, “the exercise of violence cannot be avoided” (29). What, then, can be done? The larger the community of people with common needs and habits, Freud suggests, the greater the hope for peaceful

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solutions. “Paradoxical as it sounds, we must admit that warfare well might serve to pave the way to that unbroken peace we so desire, for it is war that brings vast empires into being, within whose frontiers all warfare is proscribed by a strong central power.” Here Freud seems to be thinking of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, whose centralized power, at least in the post-­ Napoleonic era, prevented large-­scale war, although there were plenty of smaller wars on the empire’s borders. But in practice, he admits, newly created large units “fall asunder once again, generally because there can be no true cohesion between the parts that violence has welded” (30). Again large-­scale war looms. The rest of Freud’s essay takes the larger perspective of eros and thanatos—creation and destruction—which he sees as always necessarily intertwined. “There is no likelihood,” he insists, “of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies. . . . The Bolsheviks aspire to do away with human aggressiveness by ensuring the satisfaction of material needs and enforcing equality between people. To me this hope seems vain. Meanwhile they busily perfect their armaments, and their hatred of outsiders is not the least of the factors of cohesion amongst themselves” (32). The ideal conditions for the elimination of war, Freud suggests, would be found in a community where everyone subordinates instinctive life (eros versus thanatos) to the dictates of reason. “But surely,” he concludes, “such a hope is utterly utopian.” And indeed, from Freud’s perspective the “excessive introversion of the aggressive impulse,” which is a tendency of modern society, has its own “consequent benefits and perils.” Perhaps, he ponders, we have to accept war “as another of life’s odious importunities” (33). Both Wittgenstein and Kraus had their differences with Freud, but I think they would have agreed that the wholesale elimination of war was a utopian dream and that a communist society, itself built on the violence of revolution, would sooner or later be itself prey to violence. From the perspective of Austro-­Modernism, Frankfurt School theory, with its demand for a new economic and political order, thus remained alien. Indeed, the new ethos could only be a kind of negative theology. In the face of war, in the face of the twin evils of Fascism and Communism and of the corruption that seemed to threaten democracy at every turn, one could expose the follies and evils of one’s world, but meaningful change could only be personal. The aim, as Wittgenstein put it—and Musil and Roth concurred—could only be “to become a different person.”27 Diagnosis thus replaces the application of a particular set of ideas: in The Radetzky March as in Musil’s Man without Qualities or in Celan’s strange love poetry, the aim is to pre­sent, to show How It Is. In this Austro-­Modernist literature there are no titles like The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah

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Arendt), because such a title assumes that one can establish what those origins were. Rather, the texts in question—whether novels, essays, poems, plays, or memoirs—are written, consciously or not, under the sign of Wittgenstein, whose concern as a philosopher was the process of inquiry, not the product, and for whom certainty was the enemy. Witness those tentative titles—Philosophical Investigations or Remarks on Colour—and the reliance on aphorisms or at least short pithy formulations. Diagnosis, as in Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind, can make for painful reading. Gregor von Rezzori’s sardonic Memoirs of an Anti-­Semite (1979), for example, gives us a cruel glimpse into the world of the author’s own anti-­ Semitic family—part of the decadent and decaying aristocracy living in heavily Jewish Czernowitz, who mourn the replacement of “the flag of the Empire, with the two-­headed eagle in the golden field,” by “the vulgar flag of the new republic, with which, fortunately, we had nothing to do.” As for the Jews, “For our kind it was impossible to fall in love with a Jewish girl. It meant being unfaithful to our flag.”28 But the narrator of the finest story (“Troth”) in the Memoirs does fall in love with just such a girl. As a young university student staying with his strict (and proudly anti-­Semitic) grandmother in a Vienna apartment, he meets Minka Raubitschek, the charming Jewish girl upstairs, whose cultured parents have recently died of Spanish flu, leaving her plenty of money. Minka is a party girl—a kind of Viennese version of Isherwood’s Sally Bowles, surrounded by lovers and yet curiously innocent. The eighteen-­year-­old narrator becomes her cavalier, accompanying her to parties and concerts, plays, and even a lecture by Karl Kraus. This idyll of the late 1920s ends when the young man must return to Romania to do his military service. When he comes back to Vienna in 1937, the party is about to end. Citing a journalist friend, Gregor (Rezzori here uses his real name) thinks that “if, as Poldi said, the Germans wanted to conquer Austria, so much the better. The German-­speaking peoples would be united again, as they had been in the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne” (Memoirs, 226). But when he accompanies Minka and her friends to a beer cellar, where “a huge, rather shabby-­looking young man roared in our faces, ‘Juden raus!’ ” things become tense. “I felt frightfully sorry,” the narrator notes, “for Minka and all our friends, but it was not my fault that they happened to be Jews, and in the event that they got into serious trouble I could use my connections with the SS to help them out again” (234). Minka herself seems to have no notion of what being Jewish means. One of the most horrific scenes in this or any Anschluss story I have read is the account of an evening at the butlers’ school on the Praterstrasse, where Jew-

The Making of Austro-Modernism  |   17

ish bankers and intellectuals, waiting for their affidavits to go to England (as Minka herself is soon forced to do), are taught “how to wait on the British”: I once went there with Minka, and we laughed our heads off. Old stockbrokers were waddling around with aprons about their hips, balancing trays and opening bottles of champagne. My talent for imitating Jews made me invent a sketch in which a Scottish laird, reading in the newspapers about the sad destiny of the Viennese Jews, decides to dismiss all his wonderful Highland servants and replace them with Dr. Pisko-­ Bettelheim, Jacques Pallinker, Yehudo Nagoschiner, and such. Minka’s house had become a sort of center for the few Jews left in Vienna and some Aryans unfaithful to their new flag, like myself. My sketch was a great success. During that summer and autumn of 1938, most of the Jews I knew went away. (236)

This, according to Rezzori’s horrifically flat account, is the way it was. Minka manages to escape to England and by 1947 is about to emigrate to America. Now it is Gregor, whose father “had fired his last shot into his temple when the Russians took the Bukovina in 1940” (241), who is penniless and starving. There is, it seems, “nobody left to hate” (237). Does Rezzori suggest that his narrator has come to recognize his own complicity with the Nazis? It’s hard to say, and there are surely readers who will find “Troth” too cruel. Throughout this and his other stories, Rezzori is unsparing in his account of Austrian anti-­Semitism as the pathology of a defeated and humiliated people in need of a scapegoat. After the Anschluss in 1938, the Austrian writers of the interwar period found themselves in limbo. Wittgenstein, who had been living and teaching in Cambridge since 1930, wrote in his diary, “I am now in an extraordinarily difficult situation. Through the incorporation of Austria into the German Reich I have become a German citizen. That is for me a frightful circumstance, for I am now subject to a power that I do not in any sense recognize.”29 The venom here is directed of course at the Third Reich rather than at Germany per se, but it is also the case that Wittgenstein had never considered himself a German. In the current situation, his choice was obvious: he must become a British citizen. To John Maynard Keynes he wrote: The thought of acquiring British citizenship had occurred to me before; but I have always rejected it on the ground that I do not wish to become a sham-­English-­man (I think you will understand what I mean). The situa-

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tion has however entirely changed for me now. For now I have to choose between two new nationalities, one of which deprives me of everything, while the other, at least, would allow me to work in a country in which I have spent on and off the greater part of my adult life, have made my greatest friends and have done my best work. (cited in Monk, Wittgenstein, 395)

Wittgenstein was more fortunate than most: he was able to become a British citizen and carry on his life’s work. Canetti, who also escaped to England, remained a more embattled—and alienated—figure. Kraus, whose last major satire, Third Walpurgisnacht (1933), begins with the dismissive sentence “Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein” (I have nothing to say about Hitler),30 came to recognize by the time of his death in 1936 that he had grossly underestimated Nazi power. Roth, in Paris, regarded 1939 as the endgame and turned to drink even more; he was soon dead. Musil was forced to take his family to Zurich, where he had no financial prospects whatsoever. And the eighteen-­ year-­old Celan, at home with his family in Bukovina, then part of Romania and hence “protected” by the Soviets when war first began, did not anticipate the Nazi takeover in 1940, much less the Holocaust. His is the saddest Habsburg story of all. From Kraus to Celan, in any case, Austrian literature had its own particular identity. The nostalgia for an empire within which it had flourished and the ever-­impending threat of war and expulsion cast a long shadow on its particular scene of writing—a scene in which the High German acquired in childhood and youth by students of Goethe and Heine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (as well as of Grillparzer, Nestroy, and Raimund), was tempered by the fact that the writers in question were regularly in contact with the languages of the empire’s Others. Austro-­Modernist literature of the long war years was, quite literally, a literature on the edge.

CHAPTER ONE

The Mediated War Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind

My business is to pin down the Age between quotation marks. What has been proposed here is nothing less than a drainage system for the huge swamps of phraseology. Kar l Kr au s, Die Fackel 1

Act 1, scene 1. The stage directions read, “Vienna. Ringstrasse at Sirk Corner. Flags wave from the buildings. Loud acclamation for soldiers marching by universal excitement. The crowd breaks up into small groups.” The newsboys with their “Extra, Extra,” announcing the outbreak of war, are interrupted by a drunk demonstrator who shouts, “Down with Serbia! Hurrah for the Habsburgs! Hurrah! For S-­e-­r-­bia!” and is immediately kicked in the pants for his mistake. A crook and a prostitute exchange insults, as two army contractors, talking of possible bribes the rich will use to avoid the draft, cite Bismarck’s words, in the Neue Freie Presse (Vienna’s major newspaper at the time of the assassination of the archduke in Serbia), to the effect that the Austrians deserve kissing. One officer tells another that war is “unanwendbar” (of no use) when he really means, as his friend points out, “unabwendbar” (unavoidable). A patriotic citizen praises the coming conflict as a holy war of defense against “encirclement” by hostile forces, and the crowd responds by making up rhymes (in Viennese dialect), denigrating the enemy: stimmen aus der menge: Serbien muß sterbien . . . A jeder muß Sterbien! einer aus der menge: Und a jeder Ruß— ein anderer (brülend):—ein Genuß! ein dritter: An Stuß! (Gelächter) ein vierter: An Schuß!

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der zweite: Und a jeder Franzos? der dritte: A Roß! (Gelächter) der vierte: An Stoß! alle: Bravo! An Stoß! So is! der dritte: Und a jeder Tritt—na, jeder Britt! der vierte: An Tritt! alle: Sehr guat! An Britt für jeden Tritt! Bravo! voices in the crowd: Serbia must die. . . . Each one must die. man in the crowd: And every Rusky another: (shouting): Fun for usky! a third: What a hoot! (laughter) a fourth: In with the boot! the second: And every Frog? the third: Dies like a dog. (laughter) the fourth: Kick him! all: BRAVO! Kick him! the third: Kick after kick—for every Britt! the fourth: Attention! all: Terr-­ific! A Britt for every kick! Bravo!2

If this dialogue, written in 1915, strikes us as cleverly mimetic of street slang, think again. For the rhymed insults of the Russians, French, and British were actually taken from a German cartoon postcard (August 25, 1914), in which two soldiers wearing spiked helmets (here designated as Willi and Karl) are attacking the enemy (figure 2).3 Reframed, the verses appear in what is probably the first—and perhaps the most remarkable—documentary drama written: Karl Kraus’s devastating Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind). Kraus’s dialogue, as in the scene above, sounds colloquial and nothing if not “natural,” representing as it does a variety of linguistic registers based on social class, ethnicity, geographical origin, and profession. But a large part of the play is drawn from actual documents, whether newspaper dispatches, editorials, public proclamations, minutes of political meetings, or manifestos, letters, picture postcards, and interviews—indeed, whatever constituted the written record of the World War I years. “The most improbable deeds reported here,” writes Kraus in his preface, “actually took place. . . . The most implausible conversations in this play were spoken verbatim; the shrillest inventions are quotations” (Russell, 20; LTM, 9). The technique is montage: quotations from Shakespeare and Goethe are interspersed with cabaret song, patriotic ode, tableau vivant, vaudeville, puppet play, and, in the later acts,

The Mediated War: Kraus  |   21

F ig u re 2 . “Jeder Tritt ein Britt.” Postcard featuring a drawing by A. H. “Feldpostbrief,” Crefeld, August 25, 1914.

even photomontage so as to create a strange hybrid—part tragedy, part operetta, part carnival, part political tract—in which “high” and “low” come together in a new blend. “A document,” as Kraus puts it, “is a character; reports rise up as living forms while the living die as editorials; the feuilleton gains a mouth and delivers its own monologue; clichés stand on two legs— some men are left with only one” (Russell, 20–21; LTM, 9). And throughout, the comic, the hilarious, the grotesque, the surreal dominate. “In Berlin,” as Kraus had famously quipped, “things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.”4 In his analysis of the role the media play in disseminating the case for war, Kraus is startlingly contemporary: turn on CNN at this moment and you find yourself witnessing the spin familiar to readers of Kraus’s devastating exposures of mediaspeak in his own famous paper Die Fackel (plate 4) as well as in Last Days of Mankind—a spin made possible, as Kraus knew only too well, by the simple fact that journalists are never held responsible for the accuracy of their reports, much less their predictions. When, for example, CNN’s Anderson Cooper was covering the Egyptian uprising of January 2011, he couldn’t say enough about the marvels of the Arab Spring with its “Facebook Revolution” and ostensible thirst for “democracy.” Today, with the el-­Sisi military dictatorship in full command, Cooper’s evening dispatches almost wholly ignore the Egyptian situation (there’s now ISIS and Syria to cover!), as if the CNN anchor had always known the Arab Spring

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was doomed. How information is disseminated in a world where truth is subject to the daily news cycle: this is the condition Kraus tackled with uncanny prescience. The large-­scale reliance on citation and documentary “evidence” distinguishes The Last Days of Mankind from its avant-­garde counterparts in Russia, Italy, and France. Unlike the zaum (beyond-­sense) poetry of the Russian avant-­garde, unlike the parole in libertà and “destruction of syntax” of Italian Futurism, or the fragmentation, hyperbolic “non-­sense,” and elaborate verbal play of Dada, in both its French and German incarnations,5 Kraus’s writing opts for the seeming transparency of coherent sentences and “normal” paragraphs. His political manifestos in Die Fackel are written in straightforward prose rather than experimenting with innovative typographical page design as do F. T. Marinetti and Tristan Tzara. But Kraus’s satiric vision depends as much as theirs upon the technology and dissemination of printed matter only recently made available to poets and artists of his moment, and he made the most of it so as to convey what Karl Kraus called the unimaginable—a world of war whose purpose was never really defined and yet which literally shattered the lives of the empire’s citizenry. Indeed, rupture for the citizens of the Dual Monarchy was much more extreme than for Germany, which did not, after all, forfeit its basic identity: its geographic and ethnic prewar contours, like those of France and Great Britain, remained essentially intact. The unimaginable had been anticipated by Kraus as soon as the war broke out in August 1914. In Die Fackel for December 5, 1914, the lead article was called “In dieser großen Zeit” and begins as follows: In this great Time which I still remember when it was so small; which will become small again if there is enough time, and which, because in the realm of organic growth no such transformation is possible, we prefer to address as a fat time and also a hard time; in this time where the very thing happens that one could not imagine, and in which that must happen which one can no longer imagine, and could one imagine it, it wouldn’t happen—; in this serious time which died laughing at the possibility that it could become serious: which, surprised by its tragedy, longed for distraction, and which, catching itself engaging in some new action, searches for words; in this loud time, which threatens to disclose the horrible symphony of deeds, to bring forward reports—reports that lead to action: in this time you should not expect a single word from me. . . . Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.6

The Mediated War: Kraus  |   23

The unimaginable war is not mentioned once in this anti-­manifesto, which generates mutations on the word time (Zeit), repeated here eight times—a time that from Kraus’s particular perspective was entirely out of joint. His, it should be noted, was a wholly atypical reaction to the Great War: from Rainer Marie Rilke’s patriotic “Fünf Gesange” (“Five Songs”), which begins with the words “Zum ersten Mal seh ich dich aufstehn / hörengesagter fernster unglaublicher Krieger-­Gott” (For the first time I see you stand up / you legendary most distant unbelievable Warrior-­God), to Hugo von Hoffmansthal’s “Österreich’s Antwort” (Austria’s Reply), the initial response of Austrian writers to the outbreak of war was enthusiastic support. Even Robert Musil, later to take such a different stance, wrote in 1914, A new feeling was born. . . . A stunning sense of belonging tore our hearts from our hands. . . . Now we feel gathered into a ball, fused together by an inexpressible humility, in which the individual suddenly counts for nothing besides his elementary task of defending the tribe. This feeling must always have been present: it has now awakened . . . a bliss; and over and above its earnestness, a huge security and joy.7

Here and elsewhere Austrian writers echoed their German counterparts, the most famous (or perhaps infamous) example being Thomas Mann, whose 1914 essay “Thoughts in Wartime” (“Gedanken im Kriege”) argued that the resort to war was entirely justified, a tremendous creative event that would bring about national unity, moral elevation, and the values of genuine “culture,” as represented by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner, vis-­ à-­vis the shallow “civilization” of a corrupt France and England.8 When, in the late war years, artists and writers began to understand the very real horror of the Great War, they turned their attention from politics and culture to the ordeal of those who had actually fought in the trenches. Here the most striking German work was Ernst Jünger’s The Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) of 1920, with its graphic account of frontline combat. By the time Eric Maria Remarque’s pacifist All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues) was published in 1928, the mood had shifted completely. “This book,” says Remarque in a headnote to what was to become an international best seller and later a celebrated film, “is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”9 But—and here things get complicated—Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind

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has no more in common with All Quiet on the Western Front than with the odes or cartoons in praise of war of 1914. For whereas Jünger or Remarque or, for that matter, the English war poets (Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, among others) wrote highly subjective and graphic accounts of warfare itself, bearing sympathetic witness to the ostensibly innocent young soldiers who were its victims, Kraus’s documentary drama uses every device in its poetic arsenal to dramatize the complicity, cravenness, and often inadvertent cruelty, not only of those who make war but also of those who carry it out or remain behind. From the first shrill cry of the newsboy announcing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to the petty controversies between waiters and diners in the local cafés, to the dispatches from the Ballhausplatz (the offices of the ministry) and the sermons preached in Vienna’s churches, few, if any, are seen as exempt from the fevers and follies of war. What often begins as accident rapidly turns into status quo, revealing a latent viciousness that seems to permeate not only public discourse but the entire social fabric. High Culture versus mere “civilization”: the dichotomy counts for little to the hungry children in the schoolroom, forced to recite patriotic pieties, or to the new recruits at military headquarters, trying to bribe the petty bureaucrats in charge to give them a few hours of leave. Kraus’s cruel apocalyptic vision may well have struck Modernist readers as excessive: unlike, say, Bertolt Brecht, he saw no political alternative to the capitalist competition that drove the war engine. If anyone was to blame for the cult of war, it was, in Kraus’s view, the press corps of which he was himself a member. Such obsession with the media will strike many readers as misconceived or at least excessive. Walter Benjamin, a great admirer of Kraus’s, reminded readers that “the newspaper is an instrument of power. It can derive its value only from the character of the power it serves.”10 This was in 1931, shortly before the Nazis came to power. But by 1939 Benjamin is less sure about the source of press power: If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate events from the realm in which they could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (newness, brevity, clarity, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as the layout of the pages and the style of writing. (Karl Kraus never tired of demonstrating the extent to which the linguistic habitus of newspapers paralyzes the imagination of their readers.)11

The Mediated War: Kraus  |   25

This assumes, of course, that there is in fact an individual imagination to undergo paralysis. But what happens when the media take on a life of their own as they have today, when the “imagination” is itself the product of mediation? The Last Days of Mankind is extraordinarily prescient about this situation, but until recently critics had been slow to give the drama its due. Stanley Corngold’s acute survey of World War I German literature, for example, mentions the play only in passing in discussing the theme of war profiteering as dramatized in some of its nasty satirical scenes. And even here, Corngold distances himself from Kraus (indeed he cites him from a secondary source), referring to the author as a “Jewish anti-­Semite.”12 The designation is not inaccurate, but it ignores the context of Kraus’s invective. His argument about the making of World War I is that the public media, in their inevitable reliance on headlines, captions, and sound bytes, create an atmosphere in which citizens no longer understand how barbaric and pointless a given policy may turn out to be. Patriotic prowar Jewish editors and publishers—the signal example was Moritz Benedikt of the Neue Freie Presse—thus came in for the same scathing critique as did their non-­Jewish counterparts.13 After the war—Last Days of Mankind was not completed until 1922—such intramural battles gave way to more urgent problems. In the face of the violent anti-­Semitism and conspiracy theories brought on by military defeat in 1918, Kraus turned his attention to the rise of National Socialism. Germany, he wrote in Die Fackel (22, nos. 557–60 [January 1921]: 59) as early as 1921, is the country “where the swastika rises above the ruins of the global conflagration.” Indeed, the Hakenkreuzler (swastiklers) were soon gaining steady ground,14 but then, as Timms points out, Kraus had predicted the postwar mood (whether Fascist or Communist) as early as 1915: The returning soldier will nevertheless not readily allow himself to be reintegrated into civilian life. He will break through into the home front and start the real war there. He will grab for himself the successes that have been denied him, and the war will be mere child’s play by comparison with the peace that will break out there. May God protect us from the offensive that awaits us then. A terrible activity, no longer constrained by any system of command, will start wielding weapons and pursuing pleasures in every sphere of life, and more death and disease will come into the world than could ever have been contrived by the war itself.15

Whereas British World War I poetry is written from the perspective of the trenches themselves, and hence foregrounds the victimhood of the hapless soldier, Kraus focused more broadly on the home front. Modern warfare, he

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wrote in Die Fackel (19, nos. 462–71 [October 1917]: 171) is no longer a matter of “the crossbow and the tyrant”—he is alluding to Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell—but rather of “technology and bureaucracy.” As such, its “principle of ghastly contrast” (“Schauerliche Kontrasthaftikeit”) demands a poetry characterized not by “mathematical” but by what Kraus calls “apocalyptic exactitude”—the exactitude, we might say, of hyper-­detail. It is a principle all too familiar to us in the age of information glut and social networking. Peli Gritzer, contemplating current Conceptualist writing, remarked in 2012, “What literature can’t do to our modern satisfaction by describing or evoking the things of our world, it can do by taking into itself a large part of the stuff that’s actually in the world: tax forms, chats, indexes, letters, daily speech, radio jabber, e-­mails: everything that’s ever been on the internet, even literature itself.”16 A century after its production, Kraus’s hypertextual Last Days of Mankind can best be understood as what I have called elsewhere a “differential text”—a text that is neither single nor autonomous but rather a set of variants.17 Begun in 1915, given readings by its author on numerous occasions throughout the war and excerpted in Die Fackel, heavily revised in 1918 but not completed until 1922, and then not published in its complete form until 1926, Last Days has posed endless challenges for those—editors and translators as well as theater directors—who have wanted to reproduce it exactly as its author wrote it.18 Kraus himself knew this was impossible. “The performance of this play,” he announced in the preface to the 1926 edition, “which according to terrestial measurement of time would encompass about ten evenings, is intended for theatre on Mars (Marstheater). Theatre-­ goers of this world would not be able to bear it; for it is the blood of their blood. The content is the narrative of those years, unreal, unthinkable, accessible to no waking sense or memory, only preserved in bloody dreams, when the tragedy of mankind was played out by characters in an operetta” (LTM, 9; Russell, 19–20). Kraus’s “unperformable” drama in five acts, plus prologue and epilogue, runs to eight hundred pages. An abridged “Bühnenfassung” (220 pages), made by Kraus himself, was produced in Vienna in 1928: this version eliminates prologue and epilogue, as well as the long debates between the Optimist and the Grumbler (Der Nörgler), and reorders the sequence of scenes in the interest of narrative coherence and dramatic immediacy. The result, to my mind, is that the multiplicity of registers that makes the original so striking has largely been lost.19 Not surprisingly, then, we have had to wait till 2015 for a complete English translation of Die letzten Tage.20 With the advent of digital reproduction and YouTube, however, we are beginning to see a spate of performances and adaptations.

The Mediated War: Kraus  |   27

Figure 3. Karl Kraus, Schlachtfelder-­Rundfahrten im Auto! From Die Fackel 23, no. 577–82 (November 1921).

From the recordings of Kraus’s own readings from Die letzten Tage and related texts (for example, his dramatic performance, figure 3) of the Reklamefahrten zur Hölle (Advertisements for a Trip to Hell),21 to Mario Hellinger’s brilliant reading of “Die Gerüchte” (“The Rumors”), to be considered below, we can now witness the extraordinary theatricality of Kraus’s play. In 2004, for example, La Mama Theatre in New York produced an hour-­ long “operetta” version of The Last Days, featuring the Austrian actor Justus Neumann, playing dozens of different roles.22 And recent years have witnessed numerous films, videos, readings, from the Free Theatre adaptation at Christ Church, New Zealand, in 200823 to the 2012 Viennese production at Amtshaus Währing (figure 4), all of them emphasizing the biting satire and black humor of this most devastating of antiwar plays. I have already mentioned (note 2) David Batchelor’s production for the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, aired at the Edinburgh Festival in 1999 and recorded for the BBC in December 1999—a four-­hour cabaret version set in a Viennese café, starring Giles Havergal as Giles the Grumbler.24 Robert MacDonald’s translation was used again in John Retallack’s production for the Bristol Old Vic in June 2013. And in the course of the centennial of 1914, there were two major adaptations of Die letzten Tage produced in Vienna, neither of them, evidently, as satisfactory as Deborah Sengl’s brilliant installation, initially held at the Sammlung Essl in Klosterneuburg near Vienna— a sequence of the drama’s scenes “performed” on small wooden platforms by 176 stuffed rats as actors (see plates 5 and 6).25

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F igu re 4 . Poster for the Viennese production of Die letzten Tage der Menschheit at Amtshaus Währing, November 2012.

Th e M e ta ph y si c of Sh a rk s How, then, does Krausian theater actually work? My examples here will be mostly from act 1, which begins with a great crowd scene on the eve of war and moves from weighty discussions among titled diplomats on to the hilarious scene in the Vienna suburbs (1, scene 8), in which a young construction crew is busy removing shop and restaurant signs bearing “foreign” names: the Café Westminster (evidently frequented, until the breakout of war, by many British tourists, including lords of the realm!) is saved only by becoming the Café Westmünster, and the French Adieu, along with Servus! (Latin: Your Servant!), the common Viennese idiom for “So long!” or “Goodbye,” must be expunged from the vocabulary. The scene ends with the following speech by the first man: Apropos, im Fall einer protestiert, legitimierts euch einfach als interim­ istische Volontäre der provisorischen Zentralkommission des Exekutivkomitees der Liga zum Generalboycott für Fremdwörter. Adio! (LTM, 101)

The Mediated War: Kraus  |   29

Apropos, in case someone protests, identify yourselves simply as interim­ ish volunteers of the provisional Central Commission of the Executive Committee of the League for the General Boycott of Foreign Words. Goodbye!

The joke here is that this cautionary speech is itself a tissue of foreign phrases: “apropos” (French) is followed by the Latinate protestiert and legimitiert, and then the mongrel-­Latin “interimistische” (e.g., interimish), which also contains the paragram mist (trash). The final salutation “Adio!” is a garbled version of the Spanish counterpart of “adieu” (adiós). But Kraus’s greatest irony is reserved for the compound Generalboykott, found in the ab‑ surdly pretentious title of the “provisional Central Commission of the Executive Committee.” Boycott: the English word was coined during the Irish Land War (1880) in response to the edict of Captain Charles C. Boycott (1832–97), an English land agent in County Mayo who refused to lower rents for his tenant farmers. So “General Boycott of Foreign Words” itself includes a foreign word—indeed a name derived from Austria’s most powerful enemy, England. And just as boycott originated in one war, so it is now a practice in another one. Kraus did not invent such absurdities: the Neue Freie Presse and other mainstream Viennese papers were full of them. In the next scene (1, 9), an absurdist dialogue between teacher and pupils in a typical schoolroom, the word Fremdenverkehr—literally, traffic with foreigners, more broadly, tourism, foreign exchange, foreign trade (whether commercial or sexual)— metamorphoses to take on the term’s opposite connotations: Verkehr (traffic) in the form of war traffic, the exchange of tanks, trucks, airplanes, and weapons. Thus the first stanza of the concluding alphabet song (five stanzas for A, E, I, O, U), sung by schoolboys and accompanied on the violin by their teacher, begins: A a a, der Fremde der ist da. Die stieren Zeiten sind vergangen, Der Fremdenverkehr hat angefangen, A a a, der Fremde der ist da. (LTM, 105) A A A, the foreigner’s on his way. The scrimping days have passed, There’s foreign trade at last, A A A, the foreigner’s on his way.

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In the context of the little ballad, that which is foreign, studied just a week earlier in the history, geography, and language classrooms of Vienna, has turned overnight into the enemy. And the rest of the song celebrates “Wiener Blut.”26 The transformation of language and defeat of “normal” expectations is carried out at every level in the play. The brief scene 12, for example, contains an exchange between a giant in civilian dress and a dwarf in uniform. The giant has been rejected for military service; he declares that he has slipped through the cracks—a delicious absurdity for a giant—whereas the dwarf is proud to have been called up: der zwerg: Ich aber bin zufrieden. Es wächst der Mensch mit seinen höhern Zwecken. Zuerst hab ich ja gezweifelt, ob ich in die große Zeit passen werde und imstande sein, Schulter an Schulter zu kämpfen. Aber im Zivil wird man nur verspottet und vom Militär komm ich as Held zurück, über den so manche Kugel hinweggeflogen sein wird. Wenn di andern sich zu Boden werfen— ich bleibe stehn! der riese: Sie Glücklicher! der zwerg: Trösten Sie sich. Sie können ja nichts dafür. Es kommt auf die Kommission an. der riese: Ich bin durchgerutscht. der zwerg: Ich bin dem Artzt aufgefallen. der riese: Gehn wir essen, ich habe einen Riesenhunger. der zwerg: Ich werde eine Kleinigkeit zu mir nehmen. (LTM, 130) the dwarf: Well, I’m satisfied. A man who has a higher purpose grows taller. At first, I feared I wouldn’t fit into this Great Time and be capable of fighting, shoulder to shoulder. But if you wear civilian clothes, you’re made fun of, whereas now that I’m in the military, I’ll come back a hero, one over whose head many a cannon ball has whizzed by. When the others throw themselves on the ground—I’ll remain standing. the giant: You lucky one! the dwarf: Cheer up. It’s not your fault. It all depends on the commission. the giant: I’ve slipped through the cracks. the dwarf: The physician noticed me! the giant: Let’s go eat. I have a gigantic appetite. the dwarf: Yes, I could eat a little something.

The Mediated War: Kraus  |   31

Indeed, the lucky dwarf, chosen for his ability not to be seen from a distance, has won the right to die. War, the great equalizer, allows for such shifts in status. But the most dramatic of the early scenes (1, scene 14) is based on the actual case of a leading Viennese actress,27 who, according to newspaper dispatches in 1916, happened to be performing in Riga when war broke out and was put under surveillance for possible spying by the Russian police. According to the Fremdenblatt, the police were suspicious because they found in the actress’s possession a postcard from her brother, a young soldier, who expressed how enthusiastic he was to be going to war against Serbia.28 Kraus evidently found this whole story suspect: in his version, the actress Elfriede Ritter is in the midst of unpacking in her Vienna apartment when three aggressive reporters, named Füchsl (little fox), Feigl (little fig, metaphorically little coward), and Halberstam (half a root or stem),29 turn up to interview her: elfriede ritter [spricht norddeutsch, lächelnd]: Meine Herren, ich danke für Ihr teilnahmsvolles Interesse, es ist wirklich rührend, daß mir meine lieben Wiener ihre Sympathien bewahrten. . . . Ich wollte ja auch gern mit Kofferauspacken warten, aber ich kann Ihnen beim besten Willen, meine Herren, nichts anderes sagen, als daß es sehr, sehr interessant war, daß mir gar nichts geschehen ist, na was denn noch, daß die Rückfahrt zwar langwierig, aber nicht im mindesten beschwerlich war und [schalkhaft] daß ich mich freue, wieder in meinem lieben Wien zu sein. (LTM, 132–33) elfriede ritter [with a North German accent, smiling]: Gentlemen, I am most grateful for your heartfelt concern; it is really touching that my beloved Viennese still have such regard for me. . . . Yes, I would be glad to put off unpacking my suitcases, but, with the best will in the world, gentlemen, I can’t say anything except that it was very, very interesting, that nothing at all happened to me—let’s see, what else?—that the journey home was certainly tedious but in no way a hardship and [coyly] that I am delighted to be back in my beloved Vienna.30

Immediately, the reporters pounce on this account, and Füchsl, who had already written the article’s lead paragraph before the interview, declaims, “Freed from the horrors of Russian imprisonment and having finally reached the end of her tedious and difficult journey, one of Vienna’s

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best-­loved actresses wept tears of joy at the knowledge of being once more in her beloved city” (LTM, 133). When the actress protests this interpretation, smiling and wagging her finger, the reporters insist she tell the “truth” so as to make clear that, unlike in Russia, here in Vienna there is freedom of speech. When Ritter counters that she is telling the truth, that she was allowed to go everywhere and do whatever she liked, the reporters shift to a new strategy, mentioning—seemingly quite casually—that her theater’s director, one Fuchs, has a special animus toward Russia, and reminding Fräulein Ritter of how well she had always been treated in the Vienna theater world. In the future, they suggest pointedly, choice acting parts may not so readily be offered to her. “Your whole career could be at stake.” Before we know it, the actress is backing down and telling her “dear” reporter friends (“liebe Doktorchen!”) that she can’t quite remember what happened and perhaps she is just blocking out certain painful memories. When Füchsl now suggests that the actress is too intimated to talk about what really happened to her, Ritter plays along. Having gotten their “story” of the abuse Ritter supposedly suffered, Füchsl, Feigl, and Halberstam prepare for a speedy departure. And now it is the actress who flatters them: “It was so lovely of you to come see me. Come again soon!” As the three reporters go out the door, Feigl tells his friends, “See, she went through all those terrible things and didn’t have the courage to tell anyone!” (LTM, 137). In the end, the journalists believe—or at least claim to believe—their own story. Fräulein Ritter did, after all, refer to her “most secret feelings” (“geheimsten Empfindungen”). All the truth that’s fit to print. Kraus’s vicious little story, perhaps based on the scene of Queen Anne’s transformation in Shakespeare’s Richard III, has become paradigmatic. We never see Elfriede Ritter again, but the metonymic structure of Last Days generates variation after variation on the power-­of-­the-­press theme. In 1, scene 24, for example, we witness the court photographer Skolik preparing to take a picture of the famed Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf, as the latter supposedly peruses the map of the Italian war theater. The photographer soon notes that the senile old fieldmarshal is confusing the map before him with that of the Balkans, where, ten years earlier in the Balkan Wars, von Hötzendorf had achieved a military triumph (figure 5).31 Or again, in act 1, scene 26, the well-­known super-­patriotic war correspondent Alice Schalek, called in the play by her real name, delivers her first eyewitness report from the front. “Up on the mountain pass,” she declares, “I felt something like satisfaction for the first time, a Dolomite hotel metamorphosed into military accommodation. Where are they now, those over-­

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F igu re 5 . Postcard showing Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf looking at a map of the Balkans (1914).

made-­up, lace-­bedecked signoras, that Italian hotelier? Vanished into thin air!” (Russell, http://​thelastdaysofmankind​.com; LTM, 188). And in 1, 28, the editor of the Neue Freie Presse, Moritz Benedikt (Kraus’s worst enemy), is seen dictating an article about Austria’s naval success in the Adriatic: “And the fish, lobsters and spider crabs of the Adriatic have not had such good times in a long while. In the southern Adriatic they dined on almost the entire crew of the Leon Gambetta. In the mid-­Adriatic they found sustenance in the Italians of the MV Turbine. In the northern Adriatic an even more bountiful table was laid for the denizens of the deep.”32 No folly, no mendacity is exempt from Kraus’s gaze: consider act 5, scene 34—a short scene in which a woman from the village of Postabitz is writing a letter to her husband at the front. I cite this scene because a superb reading of it by Peter J. Gnad has been filmed. Gnad takes the perspective of the soldier husband, reading his wife’s letter at the front.33 Here is the text (LTM, 627), followed by Ronald McDonald’s English translation:

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Inigsgelibter Gatte! Ich theile Dir mit, daß Ich mich verfelt habe. Ich kan nichs Dafür, lieber Gatte. Du verzeist mir schon alles, was ich Dir mittheile. Ich bin in Hoffnung gerathen, von einem Andern. Ich weis ja, das Du gut bist und mir alles verzeist. Er hat mich überredet and sagte, Du komst so nicht mehr zurück vom Felde und hatte dazu meine schwache Stunde. Du kennst ja die weibliche Schwäche und kanst nichts Besseres als verzeihen, es ist schon passiert. Ich dachte mir schon, Dir muß auch schon was passiert sein, weil Du schon 3 Monat nichts mehr geschrieben hast. Ich bin ganz verschrocken, als ich Deinen Brief erhalten habe und Du noch am Leben warst. Ich wünsche es dir aber verzeihe es mir, lieber Franz, vileicht stirbt das Kind und dan ist alles wieder gut. Ich mag diesen Kerl nicht mehr, weil ich weis, das Du noch am Leben bist. Bei uns ist alles sehr teuer, est ist gut, daß Du fort bist, im Feld kostet Dich wenigstens das Essen nichts. Das Geld, was Du mir geschickt hast, kan ich sehr notwendig gebrauchen. Es grüßt Dich nochmals Deine Dir unvergeßliche Frau Anna. Dearly beloved husband: I write to tell you that I’ve gone wrong. I can’t do nothing about it dearest husband. You must forgive me everything I’m writing to tell you. I am expecting—and by someone else. I know though you are a good man and will forgive me everything. He talked me into it and I said you would not be coming back from the Front, and that’s why I had a weak moment. You know women’s weakness and there’s nothing to be done except forgive me: it’s already happened. I thought to myself too something must have happened to you when you hadn’t written to me in three months already. I was frightened off my feet when I got your letter and you were still alive. I’m glad you are but, forgive me, dear Franz, maybe the kid will die and then everything will be alright again. I don’t like the guy any more because I know you are still alive. Here everything is very pricey, it is good you are away. At the Front at least you get your food for nothing. The money you sent me will come in very handy. Greetings again, your to you unforgettable wife Anna.34

This, Kraus suggests, is what the unnatural separation of war does to ordinary people: the final turn, with its hope that the baby might die and

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F igu re 6 . Rudolf Hermann, Das Gerücht: “Extra Ausgabe—vier Heller!”—Mit Dementi zehn Heller! Drawing originally printed in Die Muskete: Humoristische Wochenschrift (Vienna) 9, no. 465 (August 27, 1914).

its choice of Franz’s money over the other man’s “love” makes for painfully ironic reading. The individual is at the mercy of a chain of events, whose import, thanks to the daily news, is fueled by nothing so much as hearsay, false alarm, and especially rumor. One of the great moments in Last Days is the scene in act 5 (17) based on Kraus’s own piece for Die Fackel, illustrated by Rudolf Herrmann and reprinted in his Weltgericht (1919), called Die Gerüchte (“The Rumors”).35 Here (figure 6) Kraus takes a simple plural noun and repeats it with the most subtle variations so that the rumor of rumored rumors takes on a surreal quality. In the play, the dialogue is between the Subscriber and the Patriot: subscriber: What about the rumors? patriot: I’m worried. subscriber: The rumor going around in Vienna is that there are rumors going around in Austria. patriot: Nobody knows anything specific, but there must be something to it if even the government announces that there are rumors. subscriber: The government specifically warns against believing

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rumors or spreading them. Well, I do what I can, everywhere I go, I say, “Who pays any attention to rumors, hmm?” patriot: Well, it wouldn’t be so bad if it was just rumors about rumors being rumors. But the government is announcing it for a fact. subscriber: Well, then there must be something to it. But who pays any attention to rumor? patriot: Precisely. The government is saying that the rumors are part of an enemy attempt to shake our loyalty and sow the seed of confusion among us. subscriber: Well, of course. But that’s only a rumor. . . . Where is my train? (LTM, 588; BBC II, pt. 2, 9.18)36

And so it goes, modulating through some thirty repetitions of the word Gerüchte, the power of rumors to determine what happens becoming stronger and stronger the more each character denies their validity or even their very existence. In the scene that follows “Die Gerüchte,” the Optimist and the Grumbler, Kraus’s two choric characters, pick up the thread, the former asking the latter: “What do you say about the rumors, then?” Retrospectively, the entire play has dramatized the work of rumor, hearsay, tipoff, exposé, until there is nothing left outside it. I have left till last a consideration of the play’s two central characters, the Optimist and the Grumbler. Most readers have taken the Grumbler to be Kraus’s mouthpiece, the source of the drama’s key ideas about politics, history, culture, and war. But in his 1928 stage version, Kraus eliminated the two completely, evidently sensing that their dialogues, however interesting ideologically, were not sufficiently theatrical. Edward Timms contends that we must be cautious in equating the Grumbler with Kraus, given that the latter’s politics evolved, as he was writing the play, from an early allegiance to the monarchy to a later radical socialism. “The Grumbler,” Timms argues, “may be defined as a simplified version of Kraus’s satirical self. He is most significant as a character in a play, not as a mirror-­image of the author.” By the same token, the Optimist is less an allegorical figure than the naive interlocutor of Platonic dialogue, the interlocutor who feeds Socrates his cues—a type made familiar by Diderot in Rameau’s Nephew.37 That said, it is hard to deny that many of the long scenes between Optimist and Grumbler become tiresome and undercut the dramatic momentum of Kraus’s play.38 True, the Grumbler’s speeches contain some of Kraus’s best aphorisms. In response to the Optimist’s early hope that the war has inspired a spirit of self-­sacrifice, for example, in act 1, scene 22, the Grumbler quips: “If you have to set fire to a house just to find out whether two decent tenants will come to the rescue of ten tenants, while eighty-­eight

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shady tenants seize the opportunity to do something underhanded, then it would be a mistake to delay the work of the fire brigade and police with eulogies on the goodness of human nature” (LTM, 160). And further along in the same scene, when the Optimist proposes that modern medicine “has succeeded in preventing the spread of typhus, cholera, and the plague,” the Grumbler responds: “Is it an argument in favor of war that war has provided the opportunity of making some small progress in coping with its attendant phenomena? Shame on a science that takes pride in its ingenuity in making artificial arms and legs but lacks instead the power to prevent altogether and as a matter of principle the splintering of bones” (LTM, 161). Embedded as so many are in long speeches, Kraus’s aphorisms sometimes lose their punch. Indeed, in its eight-­hundred-­page version, The Last Days of Mankind inevitably has its tedious moments. But as diagnosis of the role the media played in the evolution of World War I—and by implication in later wars—Kraus’s dramatic satire is unique. “Journalism,” wrote Benjamin in his essay on Kraus, “is betrayal of the literary life, of mind, of the demon. Idle chatter is its true substance, and every feuilleton poses anew the insoluble question of the relationship between the forces of stupidity and malice, whose expression is gossip” (“Karl Kraus,” 446). The twins Gossip and Rumor, animating Kraus’s world, are ones we of the twenty-­first century know only too well. Say it on Twitter and it must be so, at least for ten seconds till the next message comes in. “If human beings had no clichés,” Kraus remarked in his 1921 essay “On the Theory of Language,” “they wouldn’t need any weapons.”39 Let me conclude with a remarkable dialogue that illustrates this point nicely. In act 1, scene 25, we meet two soldiers, one German and one Austrian (figure 7).40 The German is Wachmeister (Master Sentinel) Wagenknecht (a typical Prussian surname meaning “driver”); the Austrian is Feldwebel (Sergeant) Sedlatschek (diminutive of Sedlak, Czech for “peasant”).41 Wagenknecht tells Sedlatschek that they have orders from above (from the Oberbombenwerfer) to release some bombs. Sedlatschek, reluctant to get involved in any actual fighting, voices his confusion about the prefix ober (above), remarking that since bombs fall not up but down (herab), the person in charge should be called Herabbombenwerfer. The German responds that this is ridiculous because the word Oberbombenwerfer is formed on the analogy of Oberkellner (head waiter), whom one often calls “Ober” for short, everyone recognizing that the reference is to the waiter in charge. A bit of bickering about the use of Ober ensues, and before we know it the Austrian asks if it’s OK for him to drop a few bombs now. Wagenknecht, having won the verbal victory with his absurd analogies, responds, “Na meinswegen,

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F ig u re 7 . “Der Oberbombenwerfer” (ca. 1922) Still from Peter J. Gnad’s YouTube recording of Karl Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, act 1, scene 25.

wenn’s dir Spaß macht” (Sure, for all I care, if you enjoy it; LTM, 181–82). And he quickly exits from the plane, leaving the Austrian peasant-­soldier, who seems to have no inkling of what’s at stake, to do the job. The reluctant recruit, whose main concern at the start of the scene was to keep the overbearing German from pressing against his shoulder, is now claiming the title. And that title contains a further irony: Obenbombenwerfer, Pistorius tells us (353), was the epithet given in the press to the German crown prince, William. Kraus is here playing once again on newspaper dispatches so as to demonstrate that truth—at least certain local truths—can be stranger than fiction. “Even the newspaper,” Benjamin says of Kraus’s art, “is quotable” (“Karl Kraus,” 453). And Benjamin continues: “The quotation summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin. . . . As rhyme, it gathers the similar into its aura; as name, it stands alone and expressionless. In citation the two realms—of origin and destruction—justify themselves before language” (454). And as language goes, Kraus was convinced, so goes the nation. The satiric thrust of Last Days is less dependent on plot or character—indeed, scenes can easily be reordered and even reconfigured—than on its unmasking of the particular language games emerging from the war archive: the everyday dispatches from the city or the battlefield, always already mediated and rechanneled. In this great time—or is it a small time?—it is the weaponry of cliché that rules.

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Der Oberbombenwerfer: Kraus, as Timms notes (140), was especially sensitive to the “dehumanizing effect of such World War I compounds as Menschenmaterial (‘human material’), Verteidigungskrieg (‘defensive warfare’), Schutzhaft (‘protective custody’), and Schicksalsgemeinschaft (‘communal destiny’)”—compounds that intentionally obscure the horrors of war. And his greatest animus, in the immediate postwar period, was reserved for the word Hakenkreuz (literally, “hooked cross”), the symbol adopted as its emblem by Hitler’s fledgling Nazi Party as early as 1920. How, Kraus asks, could the Christian cross, emblem of religious contemplation, coexist with “the hook, an implement for cutting and hacking?” (Timms, 140). When words transmit such contradictory messages simultaneously, there is sure to be something suspicious, even sinister, behind them.42 Language, for Kraus, thus has a strong ethical component: he would have approved of Ezra Pound’s dictum “Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. . . . If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.”43 In Kraus’s later years, the cleansing of language becomes something of an obsession: in the 1932 Fackel essay “Die Sprache” (Language), for example, he declares that “to confront the riddles of [language’s] rules, the scenes of its dangers, is a mania more admirable than the madness that thinks it can control language.”44 And in his fascination with linguistic puzzles like the famed duck-­rabbit example, Kraus has been said to anticipate the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, whose propositions were being formulated gradually in the early 1930s. In 1932, the year Kraus published the Fackel essay cited above, Wittgenstein was lecturing at Cambridge on what he calls “the puzzles of language.”45 But unlike Kraus, this Wittgenstein takes language as he finds it, without making the slightest value judgment as to the ethical value of this or that word or phrase. The aim, on the contrary, is to describe and understand what is, to understand what a given proposition might mean in a given context. “There are no gaps in grammar; grammar is always complete” (Lectures, 16). And again, “grammatical rules are arbitrary, but their application is not”; “all explanations take place inside language” (Lectures 58, 62). Accordingly—and here we come to the cornerstone of the Philosophical Investigations—“the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” And to accept this axiom is also to accept its corollary, “Ordinary language is alright.” Kraus’s own language theory, coming as it did out of an earlier epoch, could not allow for such Gelassenheit: “ordinary language,” for him, was certainly revelatory, but that didn’t mean it was “alright.” For him, words are still viewed as carriers of specific cultural/political import: it is words, especially coinages like Hakenkreuz and Oberbombenwerfer, that measure that

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culture’s values. But what makes Kraus so modern—if not postmodern— is his understanding, in a work like Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, of the role that found text could play in the new world of media—a world he had so thoroughly mastered. One may, as one reads Kraus’s apocalyptic super-­ drama, with its wild mix of genres and visual/sonic hyperbole, disagree with any number of statements his characters—even the Optimist and the Nörgler—make. Again, one may find the play’s author too pessimistic, too cynical. But the sense of immediacy and accuracy in scenes that put the reader/ viewer in the position of both witness and accessory makes The Last Days of Mankind a docudrama whose time, a century later, has surely come.

CHAPTER TWO

The Lost Hyphen Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March

Bruck-­Kiralyhida was once like so: hyphenated. Then came the Revolution, it washed away the hyphen, and with that the Dual Monarchy was finished. . . . The hyphen was in reality a bridge, the bridge over the Leitha, connecting cis- and trans. Traffic crossed the bridge completely unimpeded. Joseph Roth, “Bruck and Kiralyhida” (1919)1 The most powerful experience of my life was the war and the end of my fatherland, the only one I have ever had: the Dual Monarchy of Austria-­ Hungary. To this date I am a patriotic Austrian and love what is left of my homeland as a sort of relic. Jo seph Roth, letter to Otto Forst-­Battaglia, October 28, 19322

At the annual New Year’s Day concert of the Vienna Musikverein, the elegant concert hall erected by Emperor Franz Josef in 1863 (figures 8 and 9), the orchestra always performs “The Radetzky March” by Johann Strauss the Elder. Figure 10, for example, shows Franz-­Welser Möst, a native of Linz, conducting the piece in 2011 to a rapturous audience.3 “The Radetzky March,” with its memorable melodic form, its intermittent waltz motifs and energetic optimism, engages the audience as do few comparable works. A century and a half after its composition—it was written in 1848 to celebrate Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky’s victory over the Italian armies in Piedmont, a victory that turned out to be Austria-­Hungary’s last great military triumph—“The Radetzky March” is still a great concert favorite, with audiences often participating by clapping and marching in place. And not only is Strauss’s patriotic composition popular in Austria: it is regularly played at military parades from Chile to South Korea.4 For Joseph Roth, “The Radetzky March”—he once called it “the Marseillaise of reaction”5—could hardly have been a more potent emblem, but not quite the emblem of what the Vienna Phiharmonic and the various military

Figure 8. Musikverein am Karlplatz, main facade, Vienna (1866–69/1999). Photograph: © Gerald Zugmann / www​.zugmann​.com.

Figure 9. Musikverein am Karlplatz, Golden Hall, Vienna (1866–69/1999). Photograph: © Gerald Zugmann / www​.zugmann​.com.

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F ig u re 1 0 . Franz Welser-­Möst conducts Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in Johann Strauss Sr.’s “The Radetzky March” (1848). Still from YouTube recording, New Year’s Day, 2011.

bands take it to be. The novel introduces Strauss’s march at the opening of chapter 2. The scene is the weekly Sunday-­afternoon band concert in the park of a small unnamed town in Moravia in the “golden” pre–­World War I years. The military band in question, that of the Xth Infantry, is led by one Kapellmeister Nechwal and performs “The Radetzky March” under the balcony of District Commander Franz, Baron von Trotta: Though all the band members were so thoroughly familiar with it that they could have played it without a conductor, in the dead of night, and in their sleep, the kapellmeister nevertheless required them to read every single note from the sheets. And every Sunday, as if rehearsing “The Radetzky March” for the first time with his musicians, he would raise his head, his baton, and his eyes in military and musical zeal and concentrate all four on any segments that seemed needful of his orders in the round at whose midpoint he was standing. The rugged drums rolled, the sweet flutes piped, and the lovely cymbals shattered. The faces of all the spectators lit up with pleasant and pensive smiles, and the blood tingled in their legs. Though standing, they thought they were already marching. The younger girls held their breath and opened their lips. . . . The elderly ladies sat in the neighboring park, their small gray heads trembling. And it was summer.6

Roth’s gentle satire of this provincial Sunday-­in-­the-­park ritual seems, at first glance, quite different from Karl Kraus’s cruel caricature of Aus-

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trian war maneuvers. The chronology of the novel is straightforward, its point of view omniscient. As in Kraus, rumor (Die Gerüchte), hearsay, and omen abound, and events repeat themselves or mirror one another. But citation, Kraus’s dominant device, plays little role here: Roth’s language is concrete and precise, its imagery graphic and colorful. Compared, say, to Joyce’s Ulysses or Kafka’s Trial, the novel appears technically conservative: a decline-­and-­fall saga in which the fate of the Trotta dynasty mirrors the larger fate of the Austrian-­Hungarian Empire between the Battle of Solferino (1859)—the battle in which the Austrian armies, commanded by the emperor himself, lost to the French and Italian armies—and the First World War, which marked the empire’s death. And yet the ostensible realism of the narrative is itself a form of irony, designed to draw the reader into the hall of mirrors of this deeply ambivalent and complex novel. The band concert, for example, is not quite the symbol of the Old Order it is, at first reading, taken to be. On this particular Sunday, when, as is his weekly custom, Kapellmeister Nechwal comes to call on the district commander for after-­dinner coffee and cigars, Herr von Trotta’s son Carl Joseph, then a fifteen-­year-­old cadet at military school, is home for a holiday: They sat in broad leather armchairs. Herr Nechwal talked about the latest Lehár operetta in Vienna. He was a man of the world, the kapellmeister. He went to Vienna twice a month, and Carl Joseph sensed that the musician hid many secrets of the great nocturnal demimonde in the depths of his soul. He had three children and a wife “from humble circumstances,” but he himself stood in the brightest splendor of the world, quite separate from his family. He relished and told Jewish jokes with impish gusto. The district commander did not understand them, nor did he laugh, but he said, “Very good, very good!” How is Frau Nechwal? Herr von Trotta would inquire regularly. He had been asking that question for years. He had never seen her, nor did he wish ever to meet the wife “from humble circumstances.”7

Roth never tells us in so many words that Nechwal is Jewish, but one who makes Jewish jokes—jokes which the district commander simply doesn’t understand—is not likely to be a native son of Catholic Austria. And furthermore, Nechwal is associated, at least in Carl Joseph’s mind, with something just a shade louche—the milieu of Viennese operettas and the “great nocturnal demimonde.” Here is the kapellmeister’s further dialogue with the district commander:

The Lost Hyphen: Roth  |   45

“And how are your children?” asked Herr von Trotta, who could never remember whether they were sons or daughters. “The eldest boy is doing well at school,” said the kapellmeister. “So he’ll be a musician too,” asked Herr von Trotta und Sipolje with a smidgen of condescension [mit leiser Geringsschätzung]. “No,” replied Herr Nechwal, “another year and he’ll be entering military school.” “Ah, an officer!” said the district captain. “That’s good. Infantry?” Herr Nechwal smiled. “Of course! He’s capable. Maybe someday he’ll join the general staff.” “Certainly, certainly,” said the district captain. “Stranger things have happened.” A week later, he had forgotten everything. One did not recall the bandmaster’s children. (RM, 28; RAD, 37).

Does von Trotta know that Herr Nechwal is a Jew? Roth leaves the question open, it being clear, in any case, that the district commander feels himself decidedly superior to a mere bandleader, even a bandleader who aspires to a military career for his son. The irony is that the class divisions so evident here have already been eroded: Franz, Baron von Trotta is, after all, the grandson of Slovenian peasants from the eastern village of Sipolje. And indeed the next time we hear the charming rhythms of the “The Radetzky March,” it is at Frau Resi’s brothel, to which the district commander’s son, now Lieutenant Carl Joseph on his first military post, reluctantly repairs with fellow officers. “They stood by Aunt Resi’s blue lantern. Captain Taittinger knocked on the bolted door. Someone opened. Inside, the piano instantly began to tinkle: ‘The Radetzky March.’ The officers marched into the parlor. ‘Fall out singly!’ Taittinger commanded. The naked girls thronged toward them, a bustling cluster of white hens” (RM, 74–75; RAD, 92). And later, in the disreputable tavern where Carl Joseph and his only friend, Dr. Max Demant, are drinking themselves blind the night before Max has to fight the duel that will kill him, “the pianola blared away . . . a potpourri of familiar marches, among which the opening drumbeats of ‘The Radetzky March,’ distorted by hoarse crackling but still recognizable, boomed at specific intervals” (101; RAD, 123–24). The next and last time the novel introduces Strauss’s composition is when Carl Joseph, disgraced and reduced to the mercenary status of his Slovenian ancestors, is killed by a bullet while he is carrying pails of water to aid the dying troops (RM, 320; RAD, 390–91). The structure of Roth’s novel is less that of a realistic bildungsroman (or, more properly, anti-­bildungsroman, it being what Carl Joseph unlearns that

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matters)8 than that of poetic fairytale or fable, but a fable whose moral is by no means clear. For Roth is not just, as most critics would have it, submitting the dying Habsburg Empire to trenchant critique; the von Trottas—and this is the astonishing feat of the novel—are presented with equal measures of sardonic irony and sympathetic understanding. It is their perspective, after all, from which most of the novel’s events are viewed. The opening chapter of The Radetzky March sets the stage, presenting the novel’s foundational event as a mistake from which all others will follow. During the noon break at the Battle of Solferino, the young lieutenant Joseph Trotta, a Slovenian peasant, sees the emperor looking across the field through binoculars as he walks along the line. Trotta knows that, battle pause or not, a soldier using field glasses is considered a target by the rear flank of the enemy, and so he rushes over to Kaiser Franz Josef and pushes him to the ground. A bullet meant for the emperor thus misses its target and hits Trotta’s shoulder. What the “heroic” deed points up is less Trotta’s bravery than the emperor’s carelessness—he should not have been on foot and unprotected—and suggests that the loss of the battle may also have had something to do with bad judgment. The Battle of Solferino, in any case, was the last battle in which the monarchs led their own armies in the field. Is the “Hero of Solferino” meant to be a parodic figure? Yes and no. Years after he has been knighted and honored, and now himself a father, Baron Joseph von Trotta picks up his son’s first-­grade reader and comes across the following account: The monarch [it said] had ventured so far ahead in the heat of fighting that he suddenly found himself ringed by a throng of enemy troopers. At that moment of supreme need, a lieutenant of tender years galloped over at full speed on a sweat-­covered sorrel, swinging his saber. . . . An enemy lance bored through the young hero’s chest, but most of the foes were already slain. Gripping his naked sword in his hand, our young undaunted monarch could easily fend off the ever-­weakening attacks. The entire enemy cavalry was taken prisoner. And the young lieutenant—Sir Joseph von Trotta was his name—was awarded the highest distinction that our Fatherland has to bestow on its heroic sons, the Order of Maria Theresa. (RM, 7; RAD, 13)

Von Trotta is dumbstruck by this “pack of lies.” Not a word is true: neither the emperor nor Trotta was on horseback, they were not in the midst of battle, and the emperor was not fending off attacks with a sword. No one was taken prisoner. And the “lieutenant of tender years” was not Sir Joseph

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von Trotta but an ordinary Slovenian peasant recruit who happened to be on the spot. It becomes Baron Joseph von Trotta’s life mission to right this wrong, to correct the official history book. At every turn he is told that the fabricated story is just the thing to instill patriotism in children. Finally Trotta is granted an audience with the emperor himself. But the great man, Trotta’s idol, just shrugs off the lie with the idiomatic Austrian phrase “Lassen S’ die Geschicht!” (Drop it!). “ ‘People tell a lot of lies,’ ” the kaiser confirmed.” Then he adds, by way of apology, “My ministers must know what they’re doing. I have to rely on them. Do you catch my drift, my dear Trotta?” (RM, 10; RAD, 17). But the baron/captain is intransigent and asks for a discharge from the army. Even though the passage is later removed from the schoolbook thanks to the kaiser’s intervention, Captain von Trotta is wholly disillusioned and decides that his only son Franz should choose a civilian career. The villain in this picture is neither the emperor nor Trotta but, as in the case of Kraus, the discourse of public media—here a government-­ commissioned schoolbook for young children. Roth, himself a brilliant journalist in the tradition of Kraus, knew only too well how newspapers and government documents work. The children’s story must convey the right patriotic sentiments. In another sense Trotta is himself a child, his potential development arrested by the bestowal of the knighthood. And the emperor, never held accountable, is seen throughout as even more simplistic in his wishes and commands. At the same time, the novel pre­sents the Kaiser as surprisingly endearing. He is quick to grant Trotta an audience; he speaks plainly and casually, admitting the truth. He even has the offensive passage expunged from the textbook. In the meeting with Trotta, it is the emperor who is humane, Trotta who is intransigent and rigid and sees everything in black and white. And yet Trotta is pleased when his son’s school friend—a certain Professor Moser in Vienna—paints his portrait, a portrait that revives happier memories and will figure prominently in the novel. Moreover, when Trotta dies he leaves the bulk of his fortune to the Military Invalid Fund. His son receives a letter of condolence from His Majesty, “which spoke twice about the forever ‘unforgotten services’ rendered by the late deceased” (RM, 18). Even as seemingly simple a person as the peasant-­turned-­hero Joseph Trotta cannot be stereotyped or pigeonholed. Surely this is one of the central motifs of The Radetzky March. Much of one’s life is circumscribed by one’s social and cultural circumstances, especially, in this world, by class. But there is always the possibility of difference. And the irony of the novel is that just as the famously patriotic “Radetzky March” is played by a Jew-

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ish kapellmeister, so this graphic tale of military and provincial life in the last days of the Habsburg Empire is told neither by an aristocratic insider nor by a Viennese literary intellectual like Karl Kraus but by a narrator who represents the novel’s author: a German-­speaking Jewish writer from the empire’s most far-­flung eastern province, Galicia. Roth was, by his own account, a quintessential outsider. Th e Or der of Th i ng s The Radetzky March, composed in Paris (Roth’s home between 1925 and his death in 1939), was published in Berlin in 1932, just a few months before Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich. The novel tracks the dissolution of a particular complex of values—values in many ways absurd and regressive, but benign in comparison to the political climate of post–­World War I Europe. A pacifist at the outset of the war, and in his youth a confirmed leftist, Roth had come, by 1932, to distrust Communism as much as Fascism. Nor did he have any confidence in parliamentary democracy as it had functioned—or, more accurately, failed to function—in the Weimar Republic and especially in postwar Austria. “I’m a European, a man of the Mediterranean,” Roth protested to a friend from the new Soviet Union, where he had been sent in 1926 as foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung.9 This “man of the Mediterranean,” who also referred to himself as “a Roman and a Catholic, a Humanist and a Renaissance man,” was born in 1894 as Moses Joseph Roth in the frontier town of Brody in Galicia, now part of the Ukraine, but in Roth’s childhood a proud imperial crownland of the Habsburgs. Brody (figures 11 and 12), some eight hundred kilometers east of Vienna, was the second-­largest city in Galicia after Lemberg (Lvov; figures 13 and 14). In 1914 more than 65 percent of its citizens were Jews, yet there was also much intermarriage. “My mother,” Roth wrote his Berlin publisher in 1930, “was a Jewess of strong, earthy, Slavic constitution”: She had no money and no husband, because my father, who turned up one day, and whisked her off to the west with him—probably with the sole purpose of siring me—left her in Katowice, and disappeared, never to be seen again. He must have been a strange man, an Austrian scallywag, a drinker and a spendthrift. He died insane when I was sixteen. His specialty was the melancholy which I inherited from him. I never saw him. (Letters, 150–51)

Pl ate 1 . Map of Austro-­Hungarian Empire in 1914. From L. H. Holt, The History of Europe from 1862 to 1914 (New York: Macmillan, 1918). Private collection of Roy Winkelman. Photograph: Maps Etc. / FCIT / USF.

Pl ate 2 . Distribution of ethnic groups of Austria-­Hungary in 1910 (compiled by William R. Shepherd, 1911). Wikimedia Commons. Photograph: Andrein.

Pl ate 3 . Map of Europe (1922). Department of Military Art and Engineering, US Military Academy (1959). Gen. Vincent Esposito, supervisor. Wikimedia Commons.

Pl ate 4 . Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, no. 1, April 1899. Photograph: copyright Austrian Academy Corpus (AAC-­FACKEL: http://​www​.aac​.ac​.at​/fackel).

Pl ate 5. Deborah Sengl, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, act 1, scene 1 (2013). Taxidermy rats, mixed media, on wooden pedestal. 30 × 40 × 40 cm. © Deborah Sengl. Photograph: Mischa Nawrata.

Pl at e 6 . Deborah Sengl, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, act 1, scene 11 (2013). Taxidermy rats, mixed media, on wooden pedestal. 30 × 40 × 40 cm. © Deborah Sengl. Photograph: Mischa Nawrata.

Pl ate 7 . House of Andrea Turio (the square between Alexandrovska and Nikolaevski), Ruse, Bulgaria, built ca. 1900. Wikimedia Commons. Photograph: ZioDave @ Flickr (flickr​.com​/ photos​/ziodave/), 2006.

Pl at e 8 . Theater Square, Czernowitz (est. 1905). Wikimedia Commons. Photograph: Sasha-­korol, 2007.

F ig u re 1 1 . Ringplatz, Brody, Galicia (ca. 1910).

F ig u re 1 2 . Druckerei (Printworks) Feliks West, Brody, Galicia (built ca. 1910). Photograph, present day: Börries Kuzmany.

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F ig u re 1 3 . Postcard showing Heiligengeistplatz, Lemberg, Galicia (late nineteenth century).

F ig u re 1 4 . Akademiestrasse, Lemberg, Galicia (late nineteenth century).

This account, as the noted Roth scholar and translator Michael Hofmann has pointed out, is part invention: it is true that Roth never met his father, Nachum Roth, who evidently had a complete mental breakdown and died in a sanatorium.10 But Roth père, far from being an “Austrian scallywag,” was a Hamburg businessman, born in Galicia; he was introduced to his wife Maria by her brothers and married her in the Brody synagogue in 1892.

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Joseph’s birth was thus quite legitimate. And his mother, far from being poor, belonged to a large, close-­knit, and fairly prosperous family. Young Joseph attended the town’s all-­Jewish school, where German was the official language, then the excellent German Gymnasium and, for a few semesters, the University of Lemberg, before moving on to study in Vienna, which was, for him and his compatriots, Mecca itself. In later years, Roth invented all sorts of tall tales about the father he had never known: perhaps he was a Polish count with whom his mother had had a brief affair (shades of Apollinaire!), an artist, a Viennese munitions manufacturer, an officer. Such fantasies were not entirely without foundation, for the Galicia of Roth’s childhood was a crossroads of East and West, a place where, in Roth’s words, the Jews “speak several languages, are themselves the product of several generations of mixed marriages, and fatherland for them is whichever country happens to conscript them.”11 Multilingualism made even an outpost like Brody oddly cosmopolitan: besides German and Yiddish, Roth himself knew both Polish and Russian, as well as French, learned as a matter of course at school, and probably some Italian. In the empire of his childhood, fewer than one-­quarter of Franz Josef’s subjects spoke German as a first language, and even within Austria proper, every second person was a Slav of one kind or another—Czech, Slovak, Pole, Ukranian, Croat, Slovene.12 The Jews were themselves highly differentiated, ranging from Hasidim to Zionists to the largely assimilated. For Eastern Jews, as Roth explains it very candidly in his wonderful book of reportage The Wandering Jews, the dominant dream was to go west. Among those who managed to do so, anti-­Semitism was endemic: It is an oft-­ignored fact that Jews, too, are capable of anti-­Semitism. One does not want to be reminded by some recent arrival from Lodz of one’s own grandfather from Posen or Katowice. This is the unworthy but understandable attitude of an insecure middle class just scaling the steep ladder into the echelons of the upper middle class, with fresh air and scenic views. At the sight of a cousin from Lodz, one may easily lose one’s balance and fall. (WJ, 122)

Cynical as these comments are, they are certainly accurate: when Roth himself came to Vienna in 1914, supporting himself, as did so many young men from the provinces, as a Hauslehrer (tutor) for an aristocratic family, he quickly adopted the pose of dandy, sporting a cane, wearing a monocle, and kissing ladies’ hands (Küss die Hand) left and right.13 The war brought this idyll to an abrupt close: Roth enlisted in a rifle corps and was sent to a Polish-­speaking unit in Galicia, where he soon managed

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to find employment writing war dispatches rather than on active duty. After the war and the death of Old Vienna, he felt increasingly ambivalent about his Jewishness. In The Wandering Jews his sympathy is with the Ostjuden of his childhood: he declares his preference for the peddlers and traders of the poor dirty villages of Galicia to the aspiring businessmen, determined to make it in the West. Roth could be very cutting about the latter—“Half of all the Jews who today speak contemptuously or disparagingly of the East had grandfathers who came from Tarnopol” (WJ, 21). The Jews, in Roth’s view, were fated to be a wandering people: “They have no fatherland, the Jews, but every country in which they live and pay their taxes looks to them for patriotic commitment and heroism” (WJ, 20). And the war, Roth recognized, had made the Jewish situation especially dire: The war caused a lot of Jewish refugees to come to Vienna. For as long as their homelands were occupied, they were entitled to “support.” Not that money was sent to them where they were. They had to stand in line for it on the coldest winter days, and into the night. . . . They took to smuggling. They brought flour, meat, and eggs from Hungary. They were locked up in Hungary for buying up foodstocks. They were locked up in Austria for importing unrationed foodstuffs. They made life easier for the Viennese. They were locked up for it. When the war was over, they were repatriated, sometimes forcibly. A Social Democratic provincial governor had them thrown out. To Christian Socialists, they are Jews. To German nationalists, they are Semitic. To Social Democrats, they are unproductive elements. (WJ, 67).

And yet from Roth’s perspective “Zionism can bring only a partial solution to the Jewish Question” (WJ, 136). He himself wanted to be quite simply “a European.” If only the host nations of Europe—especially France—could attain “inner freedom, as well as the dignity conferred by sympathy for the plight of others” (WJ, 127). But by 1933 the dream of a pan-­European identity was pretty much dead. In that year—the year Hitler came to power—Roth writes his friend and fellow novelist Stefan Zweig, “It will have become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe. Quite apart from our personal situations— our literary and material existence has been wrecked—we are headed for a new war. . . . The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.” But Roth did deceive himself. In April 1933 he writes Zweig, “I am an old Austrian officer. [He was not.] I love Austria. I view it as cowardice not to use this moment to say the Habsburgs must return. I want the monarchy back, and I will say so” (Letters, 252). And again, “So far as I’m concerned, I

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stood in the field for nine months for the Habsburgs. No swastika merchant can claim that. I have a right to my fatherland” (254). Thus the Jewish writer who had argued a few years earlier that Jews have no fatherland puts in his claim for Habsburg citizenry. “It is imperative that you must love Austria,” he writes Zweig in August 1933; “it will love you back” (267). And he distinguishes his pleasure-­loving Austria from a cold, bureaucratic Prussia to which he feels no relationship whatsoever. “The Habsburgs,” he persists in 1934, “will return. . . . Austria will be a monarchy” (Letters, 412). It was a dream soon shattered by the Anschluss (March 1938) and Kristallnacht (November 1938), where copies of Roth’s books were among the first to be burned. He had for years been a serious alcoholic, and now he no longer made any effort to curb his drinking. Roth died of delirium tremens in May 1939, just a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War. He was forty-­five. Among his papers there was a letter from the American PEN Club, inviting the author to be a special guest at the World Congress of Writers to be held at the World’s Fair on May 8–10, 1939. “When the four basic freedoms—the right to speak, to publish, to worship, and to assemble—are being denied,” wrote PEN chair Dorothy Thompson, “and threatened over an increasingly large part of the world, it seems to us particularly urgent that writers from all countries should gather to consider ways and means of defending free expression under difficult circumstance” (Letters, 530). A freedom congress in the United States: one cannot imagine Joseph Roth attending such an event. For him, Paris was the Great Good Place that Vienna had failed to be, and salvation was always and only a personal affair. “I have never,” he had observed back in 1933, “overestimated the tragic destiny of Jews, least of all now, when it is a tragedy to be a decent human being” (Letters, 250). To be a decent human being: the phrase echoes the words of another great Austrian writer who became an exile—Ludwig Wittgenstein. Having enlisted to fight in World War I in 1914, and confronted for the first time by the enemy (in this case the Russians on the Eastern Front), Wittgenstein wrote in his diary, “Now I shall have the chance to be a decent human being.” Indeed, the war, he remarked a number of times, was a chance “to turn into a different person.”14 For Roth as for Wittgenstein, decency (Anständigkeit) went hand in hand with a reluctance to make large generalizations and moral judgments about truth, goodness, and beauty. Explanation is the enemy. In both cases the aim is to show rather than tell, to exemplify rather than judge. And thus in The Radetzsky March, as in the Tractatus, “of what one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

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Fath er s a nd S o n s Chapter 2 of Roth’s novel, which begins with the band concert playing “The Radetzky March” and culminates in one of the great seduction scenes in modern fiction (Carl Joseph succumbing to Frau Slama), is paradigmatic of Roth’s technique. It portrays a single Sunday during the summer military school vacation of the fifteen-­year-­old Carl Joseph von Trotta, making his annual visit to his widowed father, District Captain Franz Baron von Trotta und Sipolje. The narrative takes place on a particular Sunday, but since so many of this day’s events are habitual and rote, much of what happens—the band concert playing “The Radetzky March,” for example, or the afternoon drive of the town’s one rich landowner Herr von Winternigg—­happens every Sunday. Indeed, so repetitive and ritual are the events relayed that deviation, when it does occur, is particularly startling. Here is the protocol: On Sundays, Herr von Trotta was off duty. He reserved the entire morning, from nine to twelve, for his son. Punctually at ten minutes to nine, a quarter hour after early mass, the boy stood in his Sunday uniform outside his father’s door. At five minutes to nine, Jacques, in his gray butler’s livery, came down the stairs and said, “Young master, your Herr Papa is coming.” Carl Joseph gave his coat a last tug, adjusted the waist belt, took off the cap, and as prescribed by regulations, propped it against his hip. The father arrived; the son clicked his heels; the noise snapped through the hushed old house. The old man opened the door and with a slight wave of his hand motioned for his son to precede him. The boy stood still; he did not respond to the invitation. So the father stepped through the door. Carl Joseph followed but paused on the threshold. “Make yourself comfortable!” said the district captain after a while. It was only now that Carl Joseph walked over to the large red-­plush armchair and sat down opposite his father, his knees drawn up stiffly and the cap and white gloves upon them. Through the narrow cracks of the green venetian blinds, narrow stripes of sunshine fell upon the dark-­red carpet. A fly buzzed, the wall clock began to strike. (RM, 21; RAD, 29)

What makes this passage so arresting is that every detail, so necessary and inevitable, is presented without comment or reaction—neither the father’s nor the son’s, neither the butler’s nor, for that matter, the narrator’s. Like a film, the scene unfolds before us—a scene in which the domestic is wholly systematized, indeed militarized. For the district captain there is no distinc-

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tion between the two, no way of modifying the ritual enactment, echoed beyond his windows by the performance, always identical, of “The Radetzky March.” Even the natural sunlight is caught between and confined within the narrow strips of the venetian blinds. In this context, the father’s command “Make yourself comfortable!”—even more casual in the idiomatic Austrian lingo: “Mach dir’s bequem!”—is wonderfully absurd. The dialogue between father and son that follows is more inquisition than conversation: the father’s predictable questions, always answered by the son’s “Jawohl, Papa!” (Yessir, Papa!) produce a rhythm so habitual and familiar that even when the district captain remarks that his son has evidently “disgraced” himself so far as equestrian skills are concerned, nothing happens. The room is silent; “the clock ticked, the fly buzzed.” But in the midst of the inquisition about schoolwork and grades, Papa suddenly asks, “You’re a big boy, my son, your voice is changing. Are you in love yet?” [Etwa verliebt?]. “Carl Joseph turned red. His face burned like a red lantern, but he held it bravely toward his father. “ ‘So, not yet!’ said the district captain” (RM, 22; RAD, 30). And the boy’s recitation of plot summaries of the “great books” continues. In a Victorian novel, the sensitive son would consider the father’s authoritarian rule and the severe Sunday ritual intolerable. But this is not at all the case here. Carl Joseph evidently loves the band concert, loves the fact that his own father is the local representative of the “kind and great, sublime and just, infinitely remote and very close” emperor (RM, 23; RAD, 31). And now comes the Sunday dinner ritual, which is even more conventionalized and hence comforting: “the heavy silver ladle and the fish tureen and the scalloped fruit knives and the tiny demitasses and the wee frail spoons as thin as thin silver coins: all these things together meant summer, freedom, home” (RM, 24; RAD, 32). The startling word here is of course freedom (Freiheit). How can freedom be thus circumscribed? That question will come back to haunt Carl Joseph in his later increasingly unlucky and unhappy life. But for the moment, the dinner ritual provides familiar pleasure for both father and son. Jacques, wearing white gloves, serves. Fräulein Hirschwitz, the housekeeper in this motherless home, “a huge curved brooch across her bosom like some kind of scimitar” (RM, 24), ladles out the soup: A warm golden shimmer hovered in their plates; it was the soup, noodle soup: transparent, with thin, tender, entwined, golden-­yellow noodles. Herr von Trotta und Sipolje ate very swiftly, sometimes fiercely. He virtually destroyed one course after another with a noiseless, aristocratic, and

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rapid malice: he was wiping them out. Fraülein Hirschwitz took tiny portions at the table and then, after dinner was over, ate the entire sequence of dishes over again in her room. Carl Joseph fearfully and hastily swallowed hot spoonfuls and huge mouthfuls. In this way they all finished in tandem. (RM, 25; RAD, 33)

The paradigm, even of eating dinner, is that of military drill, and yet a drill designed to produce as much sensual pleasure as possible. And for the first time a note of intentional deception creeps in: the only way Fräulein Hirschwitz—taking ladylike little spoonfuls—can finish in tandem with the others is to pretend to eat, saving her real meal for later. Meanwhile, as dinner continues with Tafelspitz (boiled beef, an Austrian national specialty), the vegetables take on a life of their own: “the glowing violet beets, the lush-­green earnest spinach, the bright cheery lettuce, the acrid white of the horseradish, the perfect oval of new potatoes swimming in melting butter and recalling delicate baubles” (RM, 25; RAD, 34). Then come the “paragons” of cherry dumplings (Carl Joseph takes two), and napkins are folded. Dinner is over. The ritual has had the precision of a march or a classical ballet—­ everything in its time and place. And yet this perfect dinner ritual has its own contradictions. The order and discipline of the proceedings are at odds with the erotic indulgence of the weekly feast. Herr von Trotta, the narrator remarks, “was a Spartan. But he was also an Austrian” (RM, 25). There are other disjunctions. Carl Joseph’s mother, long dead, can only watch the proceedings from her portrait on the wall. Fräulein Hirschwitz, her stand-­in, doesn’t really belong because she is German, as the district captain likes to remind her, maliciously chiding her unfamiliarity with the name of this or that Austrian dish. Herr von Trotta himself speaks the “nasal Austrian German of higher officials and lesser nobles. It vaguely recalled distant guitars twanging in the night and also the last dainty vibrations of fading bells; it was a soft but also precise language, tender and spiteful at once” (RM, 26; RAD, 35). A language, one might add, that was an outgrowth of von Trotta’s Slavic origin: his father, we know from chapter 1, had spoken Slovenian to his own father. The idea of order, in this context, is as precarious as it is precious. The Sunday dinner ritual over, Carl Joseph goes for a walk. Aimlessly, he reaches the town limits and the constabulary headquarters, commanded by Sergeant Slama, whom he knows slightly. “He decided to knock” (RM, 29). Why Carl Joseph knocks is never quite clear; Slama is not a friend, just a casual acquaintance. But Frau Slama invites him in, and he accepts. Young Frau Slama brings lemonade. Then the unexpected—or is it unexpected?—­ happens:

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Frau Slama refilled his glass. She brought cigarettes. He was not allowed to smoke. She lit a cigarette for herself and drew on it indolently, with flaring nostrils and jiggled her foot. Suddenly, without a word, she took the cap from his knees and put it on the table. Then she thrust the cigarette into his mouth. Her hand was redolent with smoke and cologne; the bright sleeve of her dressing gown with its pattern of summery flowers shimmered before his eyes. He politely puffed the cigarette, its tip wet from her mouth, and gazed at the lemonade. Frau Slama reinserted the cigarette between her teeth and placed herself behind Carl Joseph. He was afraid to turn around. All at once, both her shimmering sleeves were around his neck, and her face bore down on his hair. He did not stir. But his heart pounded; a huge tempest burst inside him, convulsively held back by his petrified body and the solid buttons of the uniform. (RM, 30; RAD, 39–40)

And now she leans back and “with delicate precision began undoing button after button on his tunic.” Step by step, the uniform, the emblem of Trotta discipline and control, comes off. Note that young Trotta is just as passive as he was in the interrogation scene with his father. Orders are orders, whether orders to recite or to eat or to make love, and he accepts them all quite happily and “politely.” Indeed, when he leaves Frau Slama a little while later, he “bangs his heels together” and shakes her hand as if nothing had happened. Even his future rendezvous with Frau Slama are ordered and ritualized: we learn that he visits her every other day at 4:00 p.m. when the sergeant is on duty. It is all a great secret (or is it?) until a year or two later, when Carl Joseph, home once more for the holidays, learns from his father that Frau Slama has died in childbirth. The implication is, of course, that the stillborn child is Carl Joseph’s, but for the moment it is not clear how much the others know. The district captain, in any case, tells his son a condolence visit is in order, and the son can only comply. The condolence visit (chapter 3) is one of the funniest—and also saddest—scenes in the novel. Sergeant Slama wants to offer his visitor the proverbial Himbeersaft (raspberry syrup) served on such occasions by his wife, but he doesn’t know in which cupboard she kept it. Trotta knows exactly where it is but can’t say so without revealing his secret. The formal visit goes off quite smoothly. Trotta leaves feeling relieved until, on his way home, he is hailed by the sergeant at his back, waving a packet of letters he wants to return—Carl Joseph’s love letters to Frau Slama. So the sergeant has known the truth since her death (or perhaps all along?), and so, for that matter, has Carl Joseph’s father, who had urged him to pay his respects. The ulti-

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mate irony is that the discovery of young Trotta’s adultery will have no overt repercussions whatsoever, because Slama, the constabulary sergeant, is of lower rank than his wife’s lover. There is nothing Herr Slama can say or do. The brilliance and subtlety of this seduction scene is at least partly a function of its unexpectedness. On first reading, one expects that Frau Slama will do no more than exchange polite niceties with her young guest. Then again, when she opens the door, “the interior smelled cool and a bit fragrant. Frau Slama had dabbed a drop of scent on her dressing gown,” later identified as mignonette. In itself this gesture needn’t mean anything, but note that immediately, in an echo of his reaction to the presence of Kapellmeister Nechtwal, Carl Joseph “thought of the Viennese nightclubs [Nachtlokale]” (RM, 29). Clearly that “night world” has become an obsession for the fifteen-­year-­old. Or perhaps the boy has already frequented these Nachtlokale and is in fact not the virgin his father supposes. His passivity may thus be reinterpreted as anticipation. In Carl Joseph’s world, it turns out, the lovemaking ritual is not so different from the other rituals— straightening the crease of his trousers, the paternal inquisition, the Sunday dinner—he observes. In each case, one learns the rules of the game from an older, more experienced guide and then makes one’s move. Jawohl, Papa! The rules are not to be questioned. And for that matter, Carl Joseph may have known all along that Frau Slama would be available to him; perhaps this is why he rang this particular doorbell rather than another. Roth purposely leaves much unsaid: we never know whether and how Carl Joseph had lost his virginity; nor do we have any idea what Frau Slama has in mind—just that she evidently finds young Trotta attractive—nor what Carl Joseph is thinking or feeling beyond immediate desire. Once a ritual is initiated, it is a point of honor to follow through. The same thing will happen later with Frau Diamant. Like “The Radetzky March” itself, form—more accurately, formula—trumps all possible deviations. And the refusal to speak—or think—about the things that really matter suggests that self-­discipline has made one’s inner feelings all but inaccessible. “The limits of my language,” wrote Wittgenstein, “mean the limits of my world.” Frau Slama doesn’t speak words of love to young Trotta; she lets the gesture of putting her lit cigarette in his mouth say it all. But what happens when these very rigid rituals break down? When dinner isn’t served promptly at one o’clock, when there is no Tafelspitz, no golden ring of potatoes swimming in melted butter? What happens later when Carl Joseph receives the news that Frau Slama (Kathi) is dead? The order the Trottas cling to is a microcosm of the order of the empire itself, with its endless rules and regulations, its provisos and permissions, its

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pomp and circumstance. Order is not hateful; on the contrary, Carl Joseph observes it with relief since it saves the trouble of making difficult decisions. Still, once the familiar system reveals its cracks, as it does when young Trotta is confronted by Frau Slama’s death and his own possible guilt, there is no way out. “At military school they never learned anything about how an officer is to conduct himself in this kind of situation” (RM, 54; RAD, 67). And so the young cadet goes to a bar and has a brandy, and then a second. That— and here, as was the case for Roth himself and as will be the case when Carl Joseph enters the service—is the “solution.” D u e l a nd Disgr ac e The scene now shifts to regimental life in the small Moravian town where the young Lieutenant Trotta is assigned his first military post. The grandson of the “Hero of Solferino” must contend not with the defense of the nation but merely with the pointless routine of morning maneuvers and evenings at the Officer’s Club and “Aunt Resi’s” brothel. None of the things he so painfully learned at military school—memorizing the plays of Koerner, mastering mathematical problems—now make the slightest difference. The emperor, far from being expected in the field, is reduced to his portrait, in full military regalia, which hangs on one wall of the club: “it was as if the Kaiser, unapproachably secure in his crystal armor, no longer needed Trottas. Peace had worn on for too long” (RM, 70). The routine Carl Joseph has observed so punctiliously throughout his young life gives way to endless free time, spent primarily in the newly learned ritual of drinking strong liquor. Carl Joseph befriends the regimental surgeon, the Jewish Dr. Max Demant, whose unfaithful wife Eva has flirted with Trotta on a number of occasions. An unlikely pair, Trotta and Demant are linked by their outsider status—grandson of an illiterate Slovene peasant and grandson of “an old tall Jew with a silver beard,” as Demant puts it (RM, 88). It is Trotta’s chivalrous “rescue” of Frau Demant—he accompanies her home from the theater after her husband has left her there after a quarrel—that prompts a duel between Demant and the malicious Count von Tattenbach: a duel where both are killed. Disgraced, Trotta is subsequently transferred. Like the earlier seduction scene, the Trotta-­Demant vigil before the dawn of the duel is a great set piece. From Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895), where the heroine’s husband challenges and kills her lover, the romantic duels of nineteenth-­century fiction originate in a rigid code of honor—honor to be defended at all costs. But Max Demant’s duel is not with the man who may have violated the

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honor of his wife—von Trotta—who is actually quite innocent, but with the drunken army captain Count von Tattenbach, “his short rotund body on bandy equestrian legs, the eternally red skull with the close-­shorn, clear-­ blond hair parted down the middle and his pale, beady, red-­rimmed little eyes” (RM, 95), who slanders Trotta and then taunts Demant as a Jew. “Yid, Yid, Yid!” as another office recalls it, “he says it eight times in a row—I had enough presence of mind to count precisely” (RM, 94). The anti-­Semitic slur introduces a new motif into the novel. It is one thing to patronize a bandleader (Nechwal) who is of Jewish extraction, but military life is something else again. True, Carl Joseph’s regiment is a melting pot, as the names of his fellow officers—Kovacs (Hungarian), Prohaska (Czech), Reznicek (Slav) and Bärenstein (German)—suggest. But an army doctor is not quite a soldier anyway, and as a Jew Demant is doubly doomed. In befriending the latter and having an all-­night spree with him before the duel, Trotta thus compromises himself. To save his honor, Carl Joseph knows, there is no recourse but regimental transfer. He writes his father and receives the following letter in return: Dear Son, Thank you for your precise account and for your confidence. The fate your comrades met with touches me deeply. They died a death that befits men of honor. In my day, duels were more frequent and honor far more precious than life. In my day, officers, it seems to me, were also made of sterner stuff. You are an officer, my son, and the grandson of the Hero of Solferino. You will know how to cope with your innocent and involuntary involvement in this tragic affair. Naturally you are sorry to leave the regiment, but you will still be serving our Kaiser in any regiment, anywhere in the army. Your father, Franz von Trotta P.S. As for your two-­week furlough, to which you are entitled with your transfer, you may spend it as you wish, either in my home, or even better, in your new garrison town, so that you may more easily familiarize yourself with your new situation. (RM, 114; RAD, 138–39)

For Carl Joseph, every word here must be painful. The duel, a result of little more than petty malice and anti-­Semitism, looks ahead to the postwar era (in which Roth is writing), when the Tattenbachs will try to drive the in-

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creasing number of Demants out of Austria. But protocol prevails. The only grandson of the Hero of Solferino is not even permitted to come home to his father’s house—a house referred to in the district captain’s letter as my home, not ours. And so, in an episode reminiscent of the fairy-­tale motif of the hero’s banishment, Carl Joseph von Trotta is transferred to an infantry rifle battalion in a miserable town on the Russian border, “the monarchy’s final eastern railroad station” (RM, 126). Here—amid the landscape that Roth knew well from his childhood—the young Austrian captain meets a whole new world of commerce, trade (including rough trade), and an exotic ethnic figuration quite unlike the Sunday-­in-­the-­park world of “The Radetzky March” back home. On the border, a “noble ring of green forests and blue hills” contains in its midst a strange new workforce, coming to replace the poor peasantry of earlier years: Neither [their] wares nor the business practices corresponded to the civilized world’s notion of commerce. . . . Indeed, the livelihoods of these tradesmen were a riddle. They had no shops. They had no names. They had no credit. But they did possess a finely whetted, miraculous instinct for any and all secret sources of money. They lived off other people’s work, but they also created work for others. They were frugal. They lived as squalidly as if subsisting on manual labor, but it was other people’s labor. Always on the move, always on the alert, with glib tongues and quick minds . . . (RM, 127; RAD, 153)

Who are these new commercial travelers? From Trotta’s perspective—and it is through his perspective that we view this strange new world—they are merely unpleasant and odd newcomers, but the reader comes to learn that these rootless Easteners, “always on the move,” are primarily Jews, now mingling with the Slavs of the region, with the Hungarians, Slovenes, Croatians, and Serbs, to create the mix that will be so volatile later: They dealt in feathers for feather beds, in horsehair, in tobacco, in silver ingots, in jewels, in Chinese tea, in southern fruit, in horses and cattle, in poultry and eggs, in fish and vegetables, in jute and wood, in cheese and butter, in fields and woodlands, in Italian marble, in human hair from China for the manufacture of wigs, in raw silk and finished silk, in textiles from Manchester, in Brussels lace and Moscow galoshes, in linen from Vienna, and lead from Bohemia. . . . They sent deserters from the Russian army to the United States and young peasant girls to Brazil and Argentina. (RM, 127–28; RAD, 154)

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Roth characteristically provides no dates for the emergence of this new commercial class; we know only that it is happening long after the Hero of Solferino saved the emperor’s life. Realistically, given the three generations of Trottas, the time must now be the first decade of the twentieth century, but Roth purposely gives his narrative the aura of fairy tale and legend. Centuries seem have elapsed between the young Kaiser Franz Josef’s appearance on the Italian battlefield and the arrival of his grandson at the border town, where the officers, “non-­aristocrats mostly and from a German-­ speaking background,” are “cut off from their homeland customs, from their German mother tongue. . . . At the mercy of the unending bleakness of the swamps, they fell prey to gambling and to the sharp schnapps distilled in this area and sold under the label 180 Proof. From the harmless mediocrity in which military school and traditional drilling had trained them, they skittered into the corruption of this land” (RM, 131; RAD, 156). In this heart of darkness, the dominant figure is a Polish landowner named Count Wojciech Chojnicki, who invites the officers to lavish parties. The count is the first person Carl Joseph has ever met who actually criticizes the Kaiser, pronouncing him “mindless and senile,” and makes fun of all the nations and ethnicities held together by the empire: The German Austrians were waltzers and boozy crooners [Walzertänzer und Heurigensänger], the Hungarians stank, the Czechs were born bootlickers, the Ruthenians were treacherous Russians in disguise, the Croats and Slovenes [Kroaten und Slowenen], whom he called Cravasts and Slobbers [Krowoten und Schlawiner], were brushmakers and chestnut roasters, and the Poles, of whom he himself was one after all, were skirt chasers, hairdressers, and fashion photographers. (RM, 135; RAD, 164)

Indeed, the count declares, “the empire is doomed. The instant the Kaiser shuts his eyes, we’ll crumble into a hundred pieces. The Balkans will be more powerful than we. All the nations will set up their own filthy little states, and even the Jews are going to proclaim a king in Palestine. Vienna already stinks of the sweat of the Democrats. I can’t stand being on the Ringstrasse anymore. The workers wave red flags and don’t care to work. . . . The Burgtheater is playing Jewish smut, and every week a Hungarian toilet manufacturer becomes a baron” (RM, 136; RAD, 165). Such nihilistic racism is very different from the naive faith of the Trottas, who, themselves of Slavic rather than Germanic ancestry, have taken for granted that citizens of the empire, from whatever origin, have in common the protection of their emperor and his ministers. It is significant, for ex-

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ample, that the district captain’s one close friend and chess partner is the local spa physician, a lifetime resident of this particular town and hence considered a trusted native, although his surname, Skowronnek, stemming from the Polish word for skylark, identifies him as of Polish-­Jewish ancestry. Like Herr von Trotta, Dr. Skowronnek is a good Austrian patriot. But the world of these patriots is changing. In chapter 10, Roth rehearses once again a day in the life of Herr von Trotta, but this time the rituals are broken by the absence of the day’s official mail on the breakfast tray. Fräulein Hirschwitz brings the news that Jacques the butler is ill—news wholly unanticipated given that von Trotta’s value system cannot allow for change of any sort. He is so upset that he cannot eat his breakfast. “Jacques was in bed with a mysterious disease”—this knowledge is confused in von Trotta’s mind with signs of change in the larger world: Yesterday there had been another meeting of Czech workers. A Sokol Gymnasts’ celebration had been announced; delegates from “Slavic countries” were due tomorrow. The German-­language Social Democrats were likewise drawing attention. A worker at the spinning plant had been beaten up by other workers, supposedly—and this was confirmed by reports from agents—for refusing to join the red party. All these things worried the district captain, they pained him, they upset him, they wounded him. . . . He gave his assistant stringent orders to instantly break up any meeting that dared to pass a resolution. Of all the words that had lately become modern, he hated this one most of all— perhaps because it needed to change just a single tiny letter to turn into the most disgraceful word of all: revolution. (RM, 141; RAD, 171)

The parallel (unbeknownst to Herr von Trotta) with the situation in his son’s garrison town is striking. But the father is much more adamant than his feckless son. Can resolution so easily morph into revolution? If Jacques should die, anything is possible. For the first time in his life, Franz, Baron von Trotta visits Jacques’s humble little cottage and sits at the old man’s bedside. “Probably a cold in the head,” he says comfortingly. “ ‘Yessir [Jawohl], Herr Baron!’ replied Jacques, making a feeble attempt to click his heels under the blanket” (RM, 144). To click one’s heels together under the blanket of one’s deathbed! What could be more poignant than Jacques’s inability even now to break with protocol? It takes a few days for the old man to die—at one moment he gets up and starts polishing boots as usual—and only as he is dying does Herr von Trotta learn that the real name of the butler who has served him for all these years is Franz Xaver Joseph Kromichl. “Then why do you call

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yourself Jacques?” asks von Trotta. “Those were his orders” is the reply (RM, 148), referring to the district captain’s father. And so it is as if Jacques’s death is a replay of that of the “Hero of Solferino.” A “first-­class funeral with four black horses and eight liveried footmen” is ordered. And Herr von Trotta will never be the same: Now the district captain felt that his house was changed: empty and no longer homey. He no longer found his mail next to his breakfast tray, and he also hesitated to give his orderly new instructions. He no longer touched a single one of the small silver bells on his desk; if he sometimes absently reached for one, he merely caressed it. Now and then in the afternoon, he pricked up his ears, thinking he could hear old Jacques’s ghostly footfalls in the staircase. Sometimes he entered the small cottage where Jacques had lived, and he reached through the cage bars to hand the canary a morsel of sugar. (RM, 152; RAD, 184–85)

Role reversal is complete: Jacques no longer feeds his master; rather, the master goes to the servant’s house to feed his canary. It is the only way Herr von Trotta can express his feelings, his special love for Jacques as an emblem of the “heroic” tradition to which he has dedicated his life. Fa re w ell t o a n Idea The failures of the von Trotta family are not, as is often held, merely circumstantial: theirs is also the failure, so characteristic of their time and place, of language. Ritual, the more elaborate the better, is acceptable; communication of a more normal sort—communication between father and son, between friends and lovers—is terribly difficult. After Jacques’s death, everything seems to fall apart for the district captain. He goes to visit his son in the remote border garrison only to find that Carl Joseph has become a passive drunk. But the father’s grief cannot be verbalized. On the day of his departure, “the whole battalion escorted Herr von Trotta to the [railway] platform”: Herr von Trotta wanted to say something special, but nothing suitable occurred to him. He glanced tenderly at his son. But then he instantly feared that someone would notice that glance, and he lowered his eyes. He shook Major Zoglauer’s hand. He thanked Chojnicki. He tipped his dignified gray silk hat, which he always wore when traveling. He held the hat in his left hand and threw his right arm around Carl Joseph’s back. He kissed his son on both cheeks. And always he wanted to say, Don’t

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cause me any grief, I love you, my son! All he said was, “Stay well!” For the Trottas were shy [schüchterne] people. (RM, 171)

That last sentence seems at first surprising: how can the district captain, with his endless commands and prescriptions, his obsession with protocol and contempt for those who don’t follow it, be so tongue-­tied? Perhaps because his is a culture in which the division between feeling and speaking has become all but unbridgeable. The emperor too, we learn in later sequences, is quite shy, as is Carl Joseph. Increasingly, words—the official words and state dogma—can no longer control actions. Wittgenstein, aware of that split, insisted that “there can be no ethical propositions” (Tractatus 6.42), only ethical actions. If Herr von Trotta could verbalize his feelings, he would no doubt agree. The situation comes to a head when Carl Joseph, after the final disgrace of his gambling debt, appeals to his father for the huge sum of money that must be repaid before the son can resign from the service. And now tragedy provides the district captain with his finest hour. Unable to get the money from the good Dr. Skowronnek or from the premier landowner Herr von Winternigg, he decides to go straight to the emperor himself. Obtaining an audience, he rehearses the royal protocol for three days, puts on his dress uniform, and orders a cabby to take him to Schönbrunn: The high white gilt-­edged double door was flanked by two giant sentries, like dead statues. The brownish-­yellow parquet floor, with only its center covered by a strip of red carpeting, hazily mirrored the lower part of Herr von Trotta’s body: the black trousers, the gilt tip of the scabbard, and also the billowing shadow of the coattails. Herr von Trotta rose. He walked across the carpet with timid, soundless steps. His heart pounded. But his soul was tranquil. (RM, 278; RAD, 339–40)

When the double doors “split apart” and he faces Kaiser Franz Josef, Baron Franz von Trotta knows a moment of pure happiness. “They were like two brothers, one of whom had become a Kaiser, the other a district captain.” And in less than a minute, the emperor has granted Trotta’s request, even though “he had already forgotten whether it was the lieutenant’s grandfather or father who had saved his life at the Battle of Solferino” (RM, 279). “My best to your papá,” the Kaiser tells Trotta in parting. “My father is dead, Your Majesty,” responds the district captain (RM, 281). But the emperor, his memory failing, barely notices. The scene now shifts, without an explicit time signal, to the moment when Carl Joseph, having been reprieved by the emperor, is attending the

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great summer gala ball held in Count Chojnicki’s “Little Forest,” a venue that has been transformed into a kind of fairyland for the occasion. It is an operatic moment, the late-­night dancing and drinking interrupted first by a thunderstorm and then by the arrival of a dragoon with a letter for the regiment colonel in “big, blue, dreadful script. heir to throne rumored assassinated in sarajevo” (RM, 291). For the reader the moment is as unexpected as it is for the guests at the festival, for despite rumors here and there in earlier chapters, war has not been felt to be imminent. At least not by the von Trottas and their associates, all of them creatures of habit. But nothing has prepared us for the response that now occurs. The Hungarian aristocrats cheer: “ ‘Bravo!’ cried Baron Nagy Jenö, the one from the hussars. Although he undeniably had a Jewish grandfather in Bogumin [Ödenburg] and although his father had purchased his baronage, he considered the Magyars one of the noblest races in the monarchy—nay, the world!—and he managed to forget his Semitic background by taking on all the defects of the Hungarian gentry” (RM, 295; RAD, 360). The baron, long suspicious that “Franz Ferdinand was partial to the Slavic peoples, and hostile to the Hungarians,” is applauded by his fellow Hungarians even as the Slovenes, who hate the Magyars, are outraged. A huge brouhaha ensues, and only Lieutenant Trotta, raising the saber that Dr. Demant willed to him upon his death, shouts for order. He now decides that he wants a discharge immediately, is granted one, and returns—largely unwittingly—to the peasant life of his ancestors. The Trottas, it seems, have come full circle. But this is not the end either. Within a month, war is declared, and simple reflex tells Trotta what he must do. “Here was the war for which he had prepared himself since the age of seven” (RM, 313). Carl Joseph dons his old uniform, joins the local regiment, and is carrying buckets of water to the thirsty men in the field when “a bullet hit[s] his skull” (RM, 320). As he falls, the drumbeats of “The Radetzky March” pound through his head. What does it all signify? The novel’s epilogue, which relates the death of Kaiser Franz Josef himself as well as of Franz, Baron von Trotta (who evidently could not bear to outlive his hero), ends with Dr. Skowronnek returning from his friend’s funeral with the mayor: Dr. Skowronnek told the coachman to drop him off at the café. He went to his usual table as on any other day. The chessboard lay there as if the district captain hadn’t died. The waiter came to clear it away, but Skowronnek said, “Leave it!” And he played a game against himself, smirking [schmunzelnd], occasionally looking at the empty chair across the table,

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his ears filled with the gentle noise of the autumn rain, which was still running tirelessly down the panes. (RM, 331; RAD, 404)

The irony could hardly be greater. The emperor has been buried in his Capuchin vault; the Trottas with all their certainties and fixed beliefs are gone; Count Chojnicki has come back from the front and is in an insane asylum in Vienna, where Frau von Taussig, with whom Carl Joseph had his unfortunate affair, is a voluntary nurse. It is Dr. Skowronnek, the good Austrian of Jewish ancestry, who is the survivor. Having lost his chess partner, he makes the best of the situation by playing against himself, smiling and winking now and again as if pleased with his moves. Outside the rain keeps falling, but the game goes on. Pl ay i ng aga i nst O ne se l f In a 2005 essay, Michael Hofmann reminds us that The Radetzky March was a “forgotten classic” till the early 1980s, a half-­century after its publication.15 No doubt, in the Hitlerzeit itself, and especially immediately after the Holocaust, readers would have looked with disfavor on a novel by a Galician Jew who looked back with a measure of nostalgia on the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. But from the distance of our own moment, a longer view emerges. Again, to cite Hofmann: When I began reading Roth [in the 1980s], the dual monarchy of Austria-­ Hungary, uneasily incorporating 17 nationalities, was something I had been made to study . . . at school. It was certainly nothing I felt the least thing for, and the idea that I should would have seemed to me absurd. Now it seems to me a heroic project, and its end in a blizzard of competing nationalisms a continuing tragedy for Europe, which the EU is a pallid and rather soulless effort to wrest round. The recent wars on the European mainland, Milosevic and Tudjman, the siege of Sarajevo and the atrocities in Bosnia, the shelling of Dubrovnik, the destruction of the ancient bridge at Mostar, and further back the division of Europe, the Iron Curtain, the murder of six million Jews and both world wars, all seem to me to be directly traceable to the end of the dual monarchy.

This was written in 2005, before the now-­serious economic split between northern and southern Europe that is threatening the survival of the European Union and before the Hungarians elected their current proto-­fascist government. The drumbeats of Strauss’s “Radetzky March,” heard today, take on a very different frisson, or so I felt when I looked at Adam Albrecht’s

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F ig u re 1 5 . Adam Albrecht, Fieldmarshal Radetzky during the Battle of Novara, March 23, 1849 (1853). Photograph: Heerensmuseum, Vienna. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

painting The Battle of Novara, March 23, 1849 (figure 15, which in the video guide to the Heerensmuseum in Vienna is viewed to the accompaniment of Strauss’s Radetzky March). In his journalism and especially in his letters to friends, Roth was deeply—and justifiably—pessimistic about the future, his own as well as Europe’s. In his fiction, on the other hand, he remains curiously nonjudgmental. Who, after all, was to blame for the events recounted in The Radetzky March? Would the Trottas have been better off had they been left to their peasant lives in Slovenia? Was the emperor, increasingly old and out of touch, to blame? Was it the autocratic form of government? the acquisition of too much land by the earlier Habsburgs? the inevitable result of industrialization and the diaspora of Slavs, Eastern Jews, and other “undesirables” in the increasingly competitive capitalist economy? or merely the passage from one era to another that was inevitably making the kaiserlich und königliches empire obsolete? In one of the great scenes in The Radetzky March, Lieutenant Carl Joseph von Trotta, fresh from rejection by his mistress Frau von Taußig in Vienna, is instructed to disperse, from the nearby bristle factory, a horde of strikers who have been threatening a mass demonstration. Trotta, having consumed a few glasses of 180-­proof schnapps on the way to the factory square, is trying unsuccessfully to focus his mind: “They [the demonstrators] came.

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They came from the direction of the tavern. Ahead of them wafted their singing, a song the lieutenant had never heard before. It had scarcely been heard in this region. It was ‘The Internationale,’ sung in three languages. . . . Lieutenant Trotta couldn’t make out a word” (RM, 208; RAD, 253). The key here is the phrase “three languages.” The Dual Monarchy had prided itself on its very real multilingualism, its ethnic variety. When Hitler first came to Vienna and sat in on sessions of Parliament, he was especially attentive to the speeches in Czech and Hungarian, trying to understand how the system of nationalities worked (or didn’t work).16 He quickly came to the cynical conclusion that, protocol notwithstanding, the only language that really counted in this parliament was German. How long then could the center of the empire hold? Carl Joseph von Trotta, himself a Slovenian but trained to be a member of the German-­speaking nobility, “couldn’t make out a word” (RM, 208). And so he gives a premature order to shoot, misjudging the force of the opposition, a furious mob that retaliates with stones and “nailed slats [that] plummeted upon their backs and necks” (RM, 210). Lieutenant Trotta is hit by one of these missiles and suffers a fractured skull. He now knows that his military career is over. The strike scene takes place on the eve of Sarajevo. Faced by a new type of enemy—an enemy quite unknown to General Radetzky on the battlefields of Italy or France, made up as it is of fellow citizens whose language is incomprehensible—the last of the Trottas cannot find his bearings. Is the bitterly ironic death of the young lieutenant turned water carrier for the troops to be understood as the overdue end of an anachronistic order? Or has something valuable been lost? On this crucial and complex question The Radetzky March takes no clear position. Indeed, this seemingly closural novel, ending as it does with the death of the von Trotta line as well as of the emperor, remains wide open to interpretation. The chess game that the good spa doctor is playing with himself on the last page will be played over and over again.

CHAPTER THREE

​“The Subjunctive of Possibilities”​ Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities

Whoever has [a sense of possibility] does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. Robert Mu sil , The Man without Qualities1

The opening chapter of Musil’s great unfinished novel, titled “From Which, Remarkably Enough, Nothing Develops,” begins with an account of the barometric pressure, isotherms, astrological signs, water vapor in the air, and humidity on a “fine day in August 1913” in Vienna.2 But it is the second, seemingly straightforward paragraph that sets the stage for Musil’s particular form of irony: Automobiles shot out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark clusters of pedestrians formed cloudlike strings. Where more powerful lines of speed cut across their casual haste they clotted up, then trickled on faster and, after a few oscillations, resumed their steady rhythm. Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound. . . . By this noise alone, whose special quality cannot be captured in words, a man returning after years of absence would have been able to tell with his eyes shut that he was back in the Imperial Capital and Royal City of Vienna. Cities, like people, can be recognized by their walk. Opening his eyes, he would know the place by the rhythm of movement in the streets long before he caught any characteristic detail. It would not matter even if he only imagined that he could do this. (MWQ, 3; cf. MOE, 9)

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Automobiles shooting out of “deep, narrow streets”: it is a cliché of the urban novel, or, for that matter, of early film. But what is peculiar in Musil’s account is that his description of the city is hardly accurate. In the prewar Vienna of 1913, there was as yet little automobile traffic; it was the era of electric trams and, within the inner city, pedestrians: consider a 1910 photograph of the Stefansplatz (figure 16), still a pedestrian walkway, except for a tram or two coming down the street. On the Graben (figure 17), horse-­ drawn carriages were still quite common: the clanging trams and clop-­clop of horses would hardly have produced the “wiry texture of sound” (drahtige[s] Geräusch) that the narrator identifies—a texture that makes its appearance only after the war (figure 18). It seems, then, that “cities, like people,” cannot “be recognized by their walk.” The accident recounted in chapter 1, in which an unidentified man has evidently been hit by a heavy truck and taken by ambulance to the hospital, provides another false lead. The motorized ambulance was largely developed by the Red Cross in World War I (figure 19), the war also accelerating the production of trucks, needed for the transport of military materiel. The lady and gentleman who witness the accident—perhaps, the narrator slyly suggests, Musil’s power couple Frau Ermelinda Tuzzi (“Diotima”) and Paul Arnheim—are members of “a privileged social class, with their distinguished bearing, style of dress, and conversation” (MWQ, 4). “The lady,” we read, “had a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach, which she credited to compassion, although she mainly felt irresolute and helpless.” But the authority of her male companion assuages her fears. Given an explanation of the accident—“the brakes on these heavy trucks take too long to come to a full stop’ ” (MWQ, 5)—the lady, and indeed the whole crowd, evidently experiences the relief that follows the assignment of a namable cause: She did not really understand, or care to understand, the technology involved, as long as his explanation helped put this ghastly incident into perspective by reducing to a technicality of no direct personal concern to her. Now the siren of an approaching ambulance could be heard. The speed with which it was coming to the rescue filled all the bystanders with satisfaction: how admirably society was functioning! The victim was lifted onto a stretcher and both together were then slid into the ambulance. Men in a sort of uniform were attending to him, and the inside of the vehicle, or what one could see of it, looked as clean and tidy as a hospital ward. People dispersed almost as if justified in feeling that they had just witnessed something entirely lawful and orderly. (MWQ, 5; MOE, 11)

F ig u re 1 6 . Stefansplatz, Vienna (ca. 1910). Photograph: Interphoto/Alamy.

F ig u re 1 7 . Graben, Vienna (ca. 1900). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Photochrom Prints Collection.

F ig u re 1 8 . Graben, Vienna (ca. 1922).

F ig u re 1 9 . Ford Model T Field Ambulance (1916). Wikimedia Commons. Photograph: WyrdLight​.com.

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And the gentleman proceeds to provide his companion with “American statistics” for the number of persons killed or injured by automobile accidents in a given year. Nothing particular, as the title of the chapter tells us, develops from this scene, and yet it could hardly be more pregnant with meaning. To begin with, the references to speeding cars, dangerous trucks, ambulances, and men in uniform suggest that the real time of Musil’s novel is not quite the designated 1913 (when these things were not the fabric of everyday life) but the 1920s, when Musil was writing The Man without Qualities (part 1 was published in 1930). As we go on to read the deeply ironic account of the so-­called Parallel Campaign,3 in which the highest Viennese circles were making plans for the seventieth jubilee of Emperor Franz Josef’s accession to the throne in 1848, we know not only that the event planned for 1918 will never take place but also that the conversion of military vehicles to civilian use is hardly a guarantee of law and order. The inside of a vehicle that “look[s] as clean and tidy as a hospital ward”: is this what was wanted of the new century? Second, the author is preparing us for a new world quite unlike that of the Dual Empire, which is ostensibly its setting. The upper classes are now distinguished not by their aristocratic pedigrees but by “the initials of their names embroidered on their underwear.” Indeed, Diotima (Frau Ermelinda Tuzzi) is the bourgeois, not very well educated wife of the equally bourgeois Hans Tuzzi, who has risen to the post of section chief in the Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the doomed Habsburg Empire—or is it the new shrunken republic? And her intimate friend Dr. Paul Arnheim, the super-­ rich German entrepreneur and intellectual, is “presumed to be of Jewish descent: at least on his father’s side, it was reported with certainty” (MWQ, 111); despite all his purported power, accordingly, he is doubly an outsider in the high social circles of aristocratic Austria. Third, the Vienna of Musil’s novel will remain, to the end, curiously disembodied: like its hero Ulrich, it is presented as a city “without qualities.” True, Ulrich and his friends and acquaintances are forever debating how life should be lived, what the proper ethical, social, and cultural norms should be. But unlike Karl Kraus’s Vienna, and quite unlike the provincial Austrian town where Franz von Trotta serves as district captain in Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, we never quite feel the pulse of Musil’s city, the sensuous and the particular being regularly refracted through the consciousness of the narrator, even though that consciousness is itself subject to irony and comic critique. Even the dialogue in this novel is not particularized: it is closer to mock-­Platonic dialogue (hence the names Diotima, Bonadea, etc.) than to the idiolect of particular individuals. As Musil himself puts it in

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chapter 1, at the end of the paragraph about automobiles: “Why are we satisfied to speak vaguely of a red nose, without specifying what shade of red, even though degrees of red can be stated precisely to the micromillimeter of a wavelength, while with something so infinitely more complicated as what a city one happens to be in, we always insist on knowing it exactly? It merely distracts from more important concerns” (MWQ, 4; MOE, 9–10). What are those important concerns? The double vision that allows us to view the events of the novel from the point of view both of the prewar era when they ostensibly take place and of the postwar climate of Musil’s present—a present already shadowed by the horrific future awaiting Europe— gives the novel its very particular tone and structure. Seeing double, coupled with an awareness of the possible, the contingent, the subjunctive: it is a tension that haunts Musil’s pages from first to last, there being no closure possible in this world of failed potentialities. Then, too, it should be said right away that the narrator is neither omniscient nor the third-­person limited narrator of, say, Henry James, but rather the voice of an ironic and disillusioned observer who attributes to his characters motives that may or may not be conscious or even genuine. Who is it that thinks, on the first page of the novel that “cities, like people, can be recognized by their walk”? Is it “the man returning after years of absence” (MWQ, 1), in other words, our hero, Ulrich? Yes, but Ulrich’s perspective shades easily into that of the ironically detached narrator. When we read, in chapter 1, a sentence like “The lady had a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach, which she credited to compassion, although she mainly felt irresolute and helpless” (MLQ, 5), a moment’s thought shows us that we are not really privy to the lady’s thoughts. She herself doesn’t know that she feels “irresolute and helpless”; only an external interpreter can extrapolate from that queasy feeling in Frau Tuzzi’s stomach. And so chapter 1 ends appropriately with an inconclusive dialogue between lady and gentleman: “Do you think he’s dead?” [Arnheim’s] companion asked, still on the unjustified assumption [das unberechtigte Gefühl] that she had experienced something unusual. “I expect he’s alive,” he answered, “judging by the way they lifted him into the ambulance.” (MWQ, 5)

We never know the outcome. Chapter 2 shifts its attention to Ulrich’s little villa, just down the street from the accident, and introduces us to the “man without qualities.” Note further that we can’t be sure why the lady’s assumption that she had experienced something unusual is “unjustified.” Were such terrible accidents witnessed routinely on the inner-­city streets of

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Vienna? Or is Musil’s point that Ermelinda Tuzzi (who turns out to be Ulrich’s own distant cousin) is not quite capable of experiencing anything “unusual” (etwas Besonderes), this Diotima being the very antithesis of Plato’s female philosopher, even though, as we soon learn, she, like her forebear in the Symposium, fancies herself an authority on Love? In the Moebius-­strip-­like structure which is Musil’s novel, the ironies are always multiple. “ Th e U t opi a of Essay is m ” No plot, no realistic characterization, no palpable setting: it has often been recognized that The Man without Qualities is less novel than a sequence of intricately related essayistic meditations and speculations. In chapter 62, Musil tries to define the gradual process whereby Ulrich, trained as a mathematician, learns to open himself up to a way of thinking that transcends both deductive and inductive reasoning and yet avoids ideological certainties: It was more or less in the way an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it—for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept—that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life. The value of an action or quality, and indeed its meaning and nature, seemed to him to depend on its surrounding circumstances, on the aims it served. . . . All moral events seemed to him to be the function of other events on which they depended. In this way an open-­ended system of relationships arises, in which independent meanings, such as are ascribed to actions and qualities by way of a rough first approximation in ordinary life, no longer exist at all. What is seemingly solid in this system becomes a porous pretext for many possible meanings. (MWQ, 270; MOE, 250)

If this sense of “essayism” implies anarchy and skepticism, Musil is quick to make clear that although “terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable . . . the essay is subject to laws that are no less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable” (270). The domain of the great essayists like Montaigne “lies between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry” (MLQ, 273). In probing a particular issue from all sides, essayists have understood that “every moral precept, such as the well-­known and simple: ‘Thou shalt not kill’ . . . is neither a fact nor a subjective experience. We know that we adhere to it strictly in some respects, while allowing for a great many, if

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sharply defined exceptions”—in this case, beginning with Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (274). The essayistic impulse, in distinction to a scientific one, posits that “there [is] only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live” (275). “For me,” as Musil puts it in a short essay of 1914, “ethics and aesthetics are associated with the word essay.”4 The linkage of ethics and aesthetics immediately recalls the famous words of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, “Ethics and aesthetics are one” (§6.421).5 What this meant to Wittgenstein is that both ethical and aesthetic judgments posit the existence of real value and hence cannot be expressed in propositions: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world” (Tractatus §6.5). Musil would not disagree with this formulation, first articulated, incidentally, in Wittgenstein’s Notebook 1914–16, dating from the same year as Musil’s own essay.6 But he reminds us that the word essay means not only “attempt” but “weighing.”7 As such, the essay brings together “the domain of epistemology, the science of knowledge,” on the one hand, and “the domain of life and art” on the other. Only the first domain can claim “the criterion of truth”; in fiction, characters and events are inconsistent, and the truth criterion cannot apply. “The essay,” writes Musil, “lies between these two areas. It takes its form and method from science, its matter from art. . . . It pre­sents not characters but a connection of thoughts. . . . There is no total solution, but only a series of particular ones” (Essays, 48, my emphasis). Again, “one suddenly understands the world and oneself differently: this is intuitive knowledge in the mystical sense” (Essays, 50). Or as Wittgenstein puts it in the Tractatus (§6.522), “Things that cannot be put into words make themselves manifest and are what is mystical.” It is no coincidence that Musil and Wittgenstein stressed “intuitive knowledge” in these particular texts. In a discerning essay on The Man without Qualities as an essayistic novel, Thomas Harrison views the form as a direct response to the Great War: “Comfortable certainties about Western society, convictions about right and wrong, the status and credibility of the individual, philosophies of freedom and self-­determination, the fundamental rationality of human beings and the reliability of their intellects seemed suddenly as precarious as the very Austro-­Hungarian Empire into which Musil had been born, which imploded overnight in 1918.” The essay, Harrison adds, incorporating at it does “apothegm, lyrical condensation, personal confession, invective, irony and satire,” has “neither the rigidity of a philosophical treatise nor the utter freedom of poetic imagination.” As for Musil’s novelistic articulation of the essay, “when all of experience is contingent, occasional, particular and filled with potential,” it requires “narrative staging”: only in time, after all, can the causes and consequences of “the contingencies and fatalities of cultural meanings” reveal themselves.8

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A related case is made by Jean-­Pierre Cometti in his Musil philosophe: L’utopie de l’essayisme: “Unlike the philosopher, the essayist doesn’t demonstrate and lacks the ambition to do so; his ‘arguments’ are closer to intuitions and suppositions; they don’t have the systematicity that philosophical argumentation demands; its logic is not that of the concept.”9 Here the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations is an important analogue. “I have written down all these thoughts,” we read in its preface, “as remarks, short paragraphs, of which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another.” And Wittgenstein goes on to admit that he couldn’t “force [his thoughts] in any single direction against their natural inclination. And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-­cross in every direction.”10 Musil’s “investigation” makes similar “criss-­cross” leaps, but his mode is more dialectical than Wittgenstein’s; his “experience [was] that a swing in one direction is always followed by a swing in the opposite direction” (MWQ, 268). Or again, “Every time Diotima had almost opted in favor of some idea, she could not help noticing that its opposite was equally great and equally worthy of realization. . . . Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they turn into their opposites when one tries to live up to them” (MWQ, 247). If The Man without Qualities is a historical novel, it is “historical” in a curiously parodic way, its focus being not on the culture and psychodrama of Habsburg Vienna but on the interregnum of the interwar years when Enlightenment norms, accepted without question for so many decades, went up in smoke along with the lost empire. War, a word barely alluded to until the last chapters of this novel, is clearly the elephant in the room. M u sil ’ s Wa r War is nothing but the continuation of peace by stronger measures. (MWQ, 568) Der Krieg ist nichts wie die Fortsetzung des Friedens mit stärkeren Mitteln.11 (MOE, 521)

Chapter 8 of The Man without Qualities is a now famous, and sometimes free-­standing, essay called “Kakania”—Musil’s coinage for the lost empire that was kaiserlich and yet also the land of kaka, as German-­speaking children refer to stool. The comic-­nostalgic account begins with geography:

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Glaciers and sea, Karst limestone and Bohemian fields of grain, nights on the Adriatic chirping with restless cicadas, and Slovakian villages where the smoke rose from chimneys as from upturned nostrils while the village cowered between two small hills as if the earth had parted its lips to warm its child between them. Of course cars rolled on these roads too but not too many! The conquest of the air was being prepared here too, but not too intensively. A ship would now and then be sent off to South America or East Asia but not too often. There was no ambition for world markets or world power. Here at the very center of Europe, where the world’s old axes crossed, words such as “colony” and “overseas” sounded like something quite untried and remote. (MWQ, 28–29; MOE, 32–33)

The first irony is that despite its fairy-­tale opening, this geographical description is quite accurate: the Austro-­Hungarian Empire did contain both glaciers (in the Austrian Alps) and sea, limestone in Slovenia and grain in Czechoslovakia, “nights on the Adriatic” (in, say, Dubrovnik) and little villages in Slovakia. The locales signify loss: truncated postwar Austria had lost all of the above except its glaciers. The late empire is depicted as the very antithesis of Germany, with its relentless industrial revolution, its “ambition for world markets, for overseas colonies.” The kaiserlich-­königlich empire was content with its own “colonies” from Trieste to Transylvania, with the big prize of Hungary at its center. True, the annexation of Bosnia-­ Herzegovina in 1908 would lead to the conflict with Serbia and hence the Great War, but overseas expansion was unheard of. “Ruinous sums of money were spent on the army but only just enough to secure its position as the second-­weakest among the great powers” (MWQ, 29; MOE, 32–33). Politically, Musil reminds us, Kakania manifested deliciously absurd contradictions: Liberal in its constitution, it was administered clerically. The government was clerical, but everyday life was liberal. All citizens were equal before the law, but not everyone was a citizen. There was a Parliament, which asserted its freedom so forcefully that it was usually kept shut; there was also an Emergency Powers Act that enabled the government to get along without Parliament, but then, when everyone had happily settled for absolutism, the Crown decreed that it was time to go back to parliamentary rule. (MWQ, 29–30)

Again, this passage has an uncanny accuracy, predicting, for example, the Dollfuss regime of 1933–34, when Parliament was simply suspended by the

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chancellor’s fiat. And yet as the memoirs of Elias Canetti or the letters of Freud testify, its intellectuals loved Austria: “One enjoyed a negative freedom there, always with the sense of insufficient grounds for one’s own existence.” It happened (Es ist passiert), people here said of events that might have been regarded as momentous elsewhere; “Es ist passiert . . .”—a peculiar locution unknown elsewhere in German or any other language, whose breath could transform facts and blows of fate into something as light as thistledown or thought. Perhaps, despite so much that can be said against it, Kakania was, after all, a country for geniuses; which is probably what brought it to its ruin.12

It happened: the intransitive construction and use of it recall the Karl Kraus who concluded his Last Days of Mankind with the absurd disclaimer (attributed to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm), “Ich habe es nicht gewollt!” (I didn’t want it!). Musil’s own national affiliation was complex. Born in Klagenfurt (Carinthia) to a Catholic but wholly secular German-­speaking family, he grew up in the Czech city Brno (Brünn), where his father was a prominent professor of engineering at the Technische Hochschule. Educated in Austrian military schools, young Musil followed his father’s example and took an engineering degree in Brno. But he longed for a more humanistic education and moved to Berlin, where he took a second doctorate in psychology and philosophy. In Berlin, Musil met the love of his life, his future wife, Martha Marcovaldi, seven years older than he, twice married, divorced, and the mother of two children. She was also Jewish—a fact that would transform Musil’s life after 1933 (when he had to leave Berlin) and again in 1938 (when he had to leave Vienna). In the prewar years he was very much part of the Berlin literary scene, known as the author of Der junge Törless and editor of the important literary magazine Die Neue Rundschau, but he took no part in the patriotic war fever or cult of German exceptionalism that characterized the avant guerre. Indeed, the moment war broke out in 1914, Musil returned to Austria to enlist. Given his military training, he was put in command of a regiment in Linz and then transferred to the Italian border in South Tyrol. Like Wittgenstein, who promptly returned from Cambridge to Vienna to enlist and then found himself loathing military life on the Eastern Front, Musil felt completely estranged from his fellow soldiers. Here is a notebook entry of August 1914 (Notebook 17):

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In the barracks, disorder, loss of inhibition, except when on duty. Dirt several centimeters thick, temporary beds, drinking. Stealing is rife. Cases are broken open. One can’t leave anything lying around for one moment. . . . He doesn’t need a brush but steals two, sees a third and rushes headlong at the man: “You’ve got my brush!” and takes it by force. . . . Even the officers only say: “At least don’t go stealing from your own comrades!”13

But, again like Wittgenstein, Musil soon saw active combat, receiving a bronze military-­service cross, and being promoted by the end of 1915 to battalion adjutant. Active duty ended in March 1916, when Musil was hospitalized for a stomach ulcer, presumably produced by the terrible army food. Now he wrote sketches, and a satiric play, Panama, that he never published; upon release from the hospital, he became editor of the army newspaper for the southwestern front, the Tyroler Soldatenzeitung. In this position he was able to critique the social privilege and arrogance of the aristocracy (perhaps partly a rebuke to his father, who had been knighted shortly before the war) as well as what he took to be the destructive nationalism of Germany. After war’s end, he took a position in the archive of the press section for the office of foreign affairs in the new Austrian Republic. From this vantage point he observed, with increasing frustration, the activities of the League of Nations in Paris as well as the terrible trials of the Austrian Republic in its efforts to create a viable national government within its severely shrunken borders.14 In 1917 Musil had toyed with the idea of writing a war novel; his diaries are full of brilliantly precise descriptions of daily life at the front, including images of alluring peasant women, the sounds of bombardment, the fear and premonition of death, and reportage like the following: Boarding the wagons. During the long wait, groups of people, a few here, a few there, go off unnoticed; in the evening many of the squad are tipsy, some of them are completely drunk. The brigadier with his cane is at the station; he makes a speech. In the wagons a menagerie of sound. Otherwise well-­behaved people are like animals. Good-­natured persuasion and threats have no effect. We have the sliding doors closed. From within fists drum against them. At some of the doors there is secret resistance. Lieutenant v. Hoffingott who takes charge of the door closing shouts “Hands away!” and, in the same instant, strikes against the secret hands with his hunting knife. . . . This movement of the hunting knife was indescribable. Like an electrical charge released in a blot of lightning; but with no flash, no lightning or the like—something white, decisive . . .15

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But by 1920, disillusioned by the Treaty of Versailles, with its excessive punishment of the defeated and its creation by sheer fiat of so many independent states out of the provinces of the former empire, Musil turned his focus to politics and the larger ethical issues of postwar life. “The peace treaties,” he wrote, were “less forgivable than the declarations of war. For the war was the catastrophe of an old world, the peace treaties the obstacle to the birth of a new one.”16 Indeed, “all the horrors of the War are excusable when set against the indifference with which one has left the Central States in post-­war misery.”17 And again, this time with a bitterness turned inward on Austria itself: “The times: Everything which manifested itself in the war and after the war, was already there before. It was there: There was a tendency: 1. Simply to let things happen. Absolute cruelty. . . . 2. Only experiencing the means. . . . Everything must be shown to be already submerged in the novel about the pre-­war period.”18 Here is the rationale for the double vision of The Man without Qualities, the placement of the story in 1913 even as the tone and mood are those of the postwar decade. The events of the period—the attempt to create new democratic governments, the rise of Fascism and Communism, the economy in crisis, the repudiation of the old aristocratic caste and its supporters—all these demanded authorial obliqueness if they were to be understood by the readership of the postempire world. In his diary Musil could observe, “National Socialism really is the continuation of war, and Hitler possesses an instinct for the times” (Diaries, 415).19 But in his novel, such generalizations had to be conveyed through the depiction of events, through dialogue and the narrator’s speculation. It is only in the notes written after the Anschluss in 1938, when Musil living in exile and penury in Zurich, is contemplating how to end volume 2, that we read the startling entry, “Fundamental idea: All lines lead to the war” (MWQ vol. 2, 1747). And again, a few years later: Overall problem: war Pseudorealities lead to war. The Parallel Campaign leads to war! War as: How a great event comes about. All lines lead to the war. Everyone welcomes it in his fashion. .... Someone remarks; that was what the Parallel Campaign had always been looking for. It has found its great idea. (MWQ vol. 2, 1755)

These are, of course, bitter words, written at a time of crisis. But they contain the overarching irony latent all along: that the Great Idea Diotima and her inner council have so earnestly and “creatively” sought, the thing for

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which the emperor and the Dual Monarchy would be most remembered, would be the war itself. A “ Cro sse d- ­Out ” V i en na In an early sketch for the preface to his novel, Musil wrote: This novel takes place before 1914, a time that young people will no longer know at all. And the novel does not describe this time the way it really was, so that one could learn about it from this book. But it describes the time as it is mirrored in a person outside the mainstream. Then what does this novel have to do with people of today? Why don’t I write a novel about today instead? This has to be established as best it can. But that it concerns an (invented) story should also become part of the manner of its telling. The path of history is to be applied not only in the novel but to it. (ca. 1920)20

In the Nachlass, sizable portions of which are reproduced in volume 2 of the Wilkins-­Pike English edition, Musil provides us with additional or alternative versions of what could or might have happened in his very long novel, suggesting that there is no single “correct” version of the story, that had the author lived to tell the tale, certain outcomes would have been different. The Man without Qualities, often criticized for having no clear direction, no coherent plot, is thus more properly considered as what John Ashbery called “an open field of narrative possibilities”21 and hence a novel curiously ahead of its time—indeed, less novel than a conceptual work like Christian Marclay’s The Clock, in which each film clip is presented in real time and yet the sequencing is quite unpredictable. Musil’s ostensible time frame is the year 1913: the last completed chapter of part 2 (38) finds the principals—Count Leinsdorf, Diotima and her husband Sektionschef Tuzzi, General Stumm von Bordwehr, and of course Ulrich—still debating how to organize the great Parallel Campaign. Practically speaking, nothing has really changed. At the same time, each given moment has been displayed as pregnant with possibilities. Take, for example, the “story” of the Fischels, bank director Leo Fischel, his wife Clementine, and their daughter Gerda, which is introduced in chapter 35 and then picked up again—always after an interval—in at least six further chapters. In part 2, where the incestuous Ulrich–­Agathe relationship is foregrounded, the Fischels disappear, but Musil has not forgotten them.

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Among his posthumous papers, there is a long sequence called “Fischel / Gerda / Hans Sepp / Ulrich: Late 1920s” (MWQ, vol. 2, 1644–86)—a sequence that gives a whole new twist to the fate of Gerda’s beau. The Fischel narrative gets much less space than, say, the Diotima/Tuzzi /Leinsdorf/Arnheim plot or that of Moosbruger’s trial for murder or Clarisse and Walter’s marriage. And yet, beginning as a kind of sideline, a burlesque interlude within the framework of the Parallel Campaign narrative, its disclosures about the social relationships, hypocrisies, comic self-­deceptions, and newly explosive anti-­Semitism of the fledgling Austrian Republic take on special significance. The reader first sees bank director Leo Fischel through the eyes of Ulrich, the Man without Qualities, whose own thought processes are characterized by their marked dialectic. Designing furniture for his newly acquired little chateau, for example, “no sooner had he come up with an impressively massive form that it occurred to him that something spare and strictly functional could just as easily be put in its place” (MWQ, 15). Ulrich the mathematician, trained in logic and with complete respect for “the facts,” somehow can no longer take his work seriously. Perhaps, as we learn in chapter 13, he is living in a time when being a success no longer means anything. Or so Ulrich has concluded when he comes across a newspaper article that describes a particular race horse as having “genius.” If a horse can be said to have genius, what is it? Is success worth striving for? Facing the uncertainty of his future, Ulrich abandons, at least for the moment, his quest to be a serious mathematician or scientist. He has a rather pointless love affair with a good-­natured but sexually rapacious married woman (dubbed “Bonadea,” the narrator’s good goddess), who saves him in a street accident, and through sheer inertia and his father’s recommendation, he becomes absorbed in the diplomatic maneuvers of the Parallel Campaign. Chapter 35: Ulrich has been taking a flanêur’s evening walk through the city, daydreaming, stopping to contemplate the beauty of a particular Baroque church, and vaguely planning to “renovate” his life, when his reverie is interrupted by “an acquaintance addressing him out of nowhere”: Before leaving home that morning this acquaintance had had the unpleasant surprise of finding in a side pocket of his briefcase a circular from Count Leinsdorf, which he had received some time ago and forgotten to answer because his sound business sense disinclined him from having anything to do with patriotic movements originating in high social circles. “Rotten business,” he doubtless said to himself at the time, though that was not at all what he would have wanted to say publicly.

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. . . When he opened the form letter this time, he saw something he had previously overlooked and that now caused him acute embarrassment; it was really only a phrase, two little words that turned up in all sorts of places throughout the text, but these two words had cost the portly man several minutes of indecision as he stood, briefcase in hand, before leaving his house. They were “the true” [der wahre]. (MWQ, 139; cf. MOE, 133)

Here, as so often in Musil’s introduction of a new character, the point of view of the narration is indeterminate. Take the phrase “because his sound business sense disinclined him from having anything to do with patriotic movements originating in high social circles” (“weil sein gesunder Geschäftssinn vaterländischen Aktionen, die von hohen Kreisen ausgingen, abhold war”; MOE, 133). Is this the explanation of the impersonal narrator, who can account for Fischel’s motives? Or is Musil using oratio obliqua to ironize Fischel’s attribution to himself of “sound sense” (gesunder Geschäftssinn)? Or is it Ulrich who infers, from the conversation with Fischel, the bank director’s self-­satisfaction with his own business acumen? A case can be made for each of the above, the effect of the overlay of perspectives being, in any case, to make it impossible to take the Herr Direktor quite seriously. The stage is now set for further disclosure: Bank Director Fischel—for that is what he was called, Director Leo Fischel of the Lloyd [sic] Bank, though he was only a manager with the title of director—(Ulrich, though much younger, could regard himself as a friend from earlier days; he had been quite close to Fischel’s daughter Gerda, the last time he had stayed in the city, though he had called on her only once since his return)—Leo Fischel knew Count Leinsdorf as a man who made his money work for him and kept up with other methods. (MWQ, 139–40; MOE, 133)

A bank director who is really only a manager, a manager of the British Lloyd’s Bank who is obviously not British but, as we can surmise from the name, a Viennese Jew (answering to the common prejudice of the time that in Austria, as in Germany, the bankers were all Jews), a bank director whose daughter Gerda had once been “quite close to” Ulrich, but how close was that and why no longer? Without filling in the background, Musil makes clear that Fischel is somehow insecure, that he has never felt quite comfortable with Count Leinsdorf, and that only “special circumstances”—we will

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soon learn that Fischel’s wife Clementine is from an upper-­class Catholic family and hence socially acceptable—have put him on the guest list for the Parallel Campaign event. Pressing Ulrich as someone who might know what Leinsdorf really means by the adjective true (wahre), as in true patriotism, true progress, and the “true Austria,” Fischel cannot understand Ulrich’s satiric reference to “P.I.F.” A dedicated financier, he associates all such acronyms with the names of cartels and trusts: Ulrich’s “Principle of Insufficient Cause”—no doubt a parodic allusion to Schopenhauer’s famous treatise22—is beyond him. “You are dodging the issue,” he tells Ulrich. “I know what progress is, I know what Austria is, and I probably know what it is to love my country too, but I’m not quite sure what true patriotism is” (MWQ, 140). Progress? The scene purportedly takes place in 1913, as the campaign is getting under way, but the mood and issues are those of the postwar era. In the avant-­guerre, bank directors didn’t have to prove their love of country: they were obviously happy to be doing well in the heart of the Dual Empire. Progress for Fischel means, quite simply, “the bank’s progressively increasing profitability” (MWQ, 142). So when Ulrich responds that there is in fact no true faith, no true morality, “but the wars, the viciousness and the hatreds unleashed in their name, have transformed the world in a fruitful way,” the word wars seems abstract enough to refer to nameless iniquities of the distant past. For the reader, however, the above sentence has a specific referent: since the war, which was World War I, the world is no longer the same, and the fruits of progress now appear in a strange new light. “ ‘I give you my solemn word,’ Ulrich [says] gravely, ‘that neither I nor anyone else knows what “the true” anything is, but I can assure you that it is on the point of realization’ ” (MWQ, 141). To which Fischel, who has just said that he doesn’t know what the true Austria or true progress might possibly be, responds with the words “You’re a cynic!” And ironically, Fischel, foolish though he is, is right: Ulrich’s response to his query is both condescending and snobbish; he knows very well Herr Fischel has no idea what the “Principle of Insufficient Cause” is. At chapter’s end, when Fischel tells Ulrich, “You would have made a first-­rate diplomat (MWQ, 141), he is, in one sense, quite right: diplomats, the novel makes clear, are by profession devious and insincere, and in their social settings Ulrich has been playing along. At the same time, Ulrich knows only too well how dangerous those lofty philosophical notions of “the true” can be. When we return to the Fischel plot, more than one hundred pages and many chapters later, months seem to have gone by, but in fact time has

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not elapsed; we are just given more background on the existing situation. Clementine Fischel, we now learn, comes from a ministerial family—of good social standing but hardly wealthy: Twenty-­four years ago she had married Leo Fischel, for two reasons: first, because families high in the civil service sometimes have more children than means; but second, for a romantic reason, because compared with the relentlessly thrifty tightness of her parental home, banking seemed a liberal-­minded, modern profession, and in the nineteenth century a cultivated person did not judge another person’s value according to whether he was a Jew or a Catholic; indeed, as matters stood then, she almost felt there was something particularly refined in rising above the crude anti-­ Semitic prejudice of the common people. (MWQ, 218; MOE, 203)

One surmises, sharing the narrator’s tongue-­in-­cheek account, that the two reasons are really one and the same, and that the lofty sentiments about rising above the prejudice of “the common people” is a convenient rationalization Clementine uses to justify what turns out to be a disastrous union. They key word here is almost (nahezu): in other words, at heart she is anti-­ Semitic: Later the poor woman was destined to see a nationalist spirit welling up all over Europe, and with it a surge of Jew-­baiting, transforming her husband in her very arms, as it were, from a respected free spirit into a corrosive spawn of an alien race. In the beginning she had resisted this transformation with all the indignation of a “magnanimous heart,” but as the years passed she was worn down by the naively cruel and steadily growing hostility and intimidated by the general prejudice. In time, as the differences between herself and her husband gradually became acrimonious—when, for reasons he would never quite go into, he never rose above the rank of manager and lost all prospects of ever being appointed a bank director—she came to justify to herself with a shrug, many things that wounded her by remembering that Leo’s character was, after all, alien to her own, though toward outsiders she never abandoned the principles of her youth. (MWQ, 218; MOE, 203)

Here the fusion of inside and outside perspectives (“magnanimous heart” is obviously Clementine’s own view of herself ) gives us a devastating portrait of anti-­Semitism as it evolved from the fin de siècle toward the Hitler years. Why does Fischel never rise to a position above manager? No doubt, internalizing the anti-­Semitism with which he is confronted, he, and therefore

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his wife as well, blames his career failure on prejudice; at the same time, we can’t be sure there isn’t some other reason. Perhaps Fischel isn’t very bright. Musil, adopting the voice of the bemused fabulist, treats both Fischels less as individual characters than as ciphers of the time: “since misfortune had decreed that in the course of this marriage the mood of the times would shift away from the old principles of liberalism that had favored Leo Fischel—the great guiding ideals of tolerance, the dignity of man, and free trade—and reason and progress in the Western world would be displaced by racial theories and street slogans, he could not remain untouched by it either” (MWQ, 219; MOE, 204). The demise of liberalism in favor of “racial theories and street slogans” is nothing if not horrific. And yet the triad “tolerance, the dignity of man, and free trade” comically exposes Fischel’s own particular mindset. Does the dignity of man really depend on free trade? Here and later, Musil deplores the anti-­Semitism that poisons Fischel’s life, even as he recognizes that it is difficult to take this bank director quite seriously. The Man without Qualities is a profoundly tough-­minded novel: its characters are never simply to be pitied as victims. The case of Fischel’s daughter is especially painful. Gerda’s character is the inevitable product of her upbringing: the only child of a Jewish father and an inherently anti-­Semitic social-­climbing mother, she is brought up to regard herself as distinctly not Jewish. Unconsciously overcompensating, she chooses as her friends “a swarm of Christian nationalists her own age, none of whom offered the slightest prospect of being able to support a wife; instead, they despised capitalism and maintained that no Jew had yet proved capable of serving as a great symbol of humanity. Leo Fischel called them anti-­Semitic louts, and would have forbidden them the house, but Gerda said, ‘You don’t understand, Papa, they only mean it symbolically’ ” (MWQ, 221; MOE, 206). Musil’s circumspection almost lets the reader as well as Gerda off the hook. Isn’t this “Christian nationalism” perhaps a harmless new movement? Since it is against capitalism, perhaps it is an acceptable form of socialism? It takes a moment to realize that the combination of “nationalist” and anticapitalist gives us precisely National Socialism, otherwise known as Nazism. In Clementine’s estimation, Gerda’s new friends are just “silly boys without real breeding,” although their “insist[ence] on parading their mystical anti-­Semitism” does bother her enough to consult Ulrich as to what to do (MWQ, 332–33; MOE, 307–8). Ulrich goes to visit Gerda: she is clearly drawn to him, but he finds her sexually unattractive. In chapter 73 we are introduced to one of the novel’s most disturbing characters, the “student who was nothing and had as yet

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no prospect of becoming something” (MWQ, 336), Hans Sepp. “Blond, free, Germanic, and forceful” Gerda, Musil suggests in one of his great essayistic digressions, is an easy target for such a young man from nowhere: In her home, nationalism and racism were treated as nonexistent, even though they were convulsing half of Europe with hysterical ideas and everything in the Fischel household turned on nothing else. Whatever Gerda knew of it had come to her from the outside, in the dark form of rumors, suggestion, and exaggeration. . . . One day she met the Christian-­German circle of young people to which Hans Sepp belonged, and suddenly felt she had found her true home [ihrer wahren Heimat]. It would be hard to say what these young people actually believed in; they formed one of those innumerable undefined “free-­spirited” little sects that have invested German youth ever since the breakdown of the humanistic ideal. They were not racial anti-­ Semites [Rasseantisemiten], but opponents of “the Jewish mind,” by which they meant capitalism and socialism, science, reason, parental authority and parental arrogance, calculation, psychology, and skepticism. Their basic doctrinal device was the “symbol”; as far as Ulrich could make out . . . what they meant by “symbol” was the great images of grace, which made everything that is confused and dwarfed in life, as Hans Sepp put it, clear and great, images that suppress the noise of the senses and dip the forehead in streams of transcendence. Such symbols were the Isenheim Altar, the Egyptian pyramids, and Novalis; Beethoven and Stefan George were acceptable approximations. But they did not state in so many words what a symbol was: first, because a symbol cannot be expressed in so many words. (MWQ, 337–38; MOE, 312–13)

None of Musil’s actual political essays convey as perceptively as does this passage the particular appeal, to a sheltered young woman like Gerda, of Fascism, with its cult of irrationalism and spectacle, its faux grandeur, its transcendence by means of suffering, and its self-­immolation. In this German-­loving circle—a postwar phenomenon so different from the polyglot, multiethnic empire—a solemn hyperbole, what Hans calls in “his tirades accompanied by kisses,” the “region of the Unconditional,” is all. There is no room for humor or self-­deprecation, no room for the qualities Italo Calvino described so beautifully in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium: lightness, quickness, precision, visibility, multiplicity—the very traits with which Musil has endowed his “man without qualities.”23 An incipient National Socialism took itself nothing if not seriously: Hitler, let’s recall, adored Wagner, and the Nazis admired the heady mix of nation-

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alism and mysticism that characterized Stefan George’s poetry. For Musil and his hero—and this is wittily articulated in chapter 83 (“Pseudoreality Prevails, or Why Don’t We Make History Up as We Go Along?”)—­perhaps the “muddling through” that was “the principle of government in old Kakania” (MWQ, 392) was a less dangerous solution than the Nietzschean transvaluation of values and cult of individualism to which as a young man he had responded with such enthusiasm.24 Kakania’s government is now compared to “the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he arrives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is a certain going off course. The present is always like the last house in town, which somehow no longer counts as the last house in town” (MWQ, 392; MOE, 362). It is this sense of contingency that provides perspective in the later—and darker—chapters about the House of Fischel. In chapter 103 a great debate takes place between Leo Fischel, Ulrich, and Hans Sepp about the meaning of progress. Predictably, Fischel is all for progress, Sepp against. Ulrich, again predictably, is somewhere in between: “The trouble is that progress always wants to do away with old meaning” (MWQ, 528). It assumes that earlier problems have been “solved” so as to make way for more recent ones. But, Ulrich tells Gerda, “there are all sorts of possibilities for the way things might turn out” (533). Gerda, taking Sepp’s side, says angrily, “How things might turn out! That’s always the way with you; it would never occur to you to wonder how things should be” (533). To which Ulrich gives a response central to the entire novel: “You and your friends—always jumping the gun. There’s got to be a supreme goal, an ideal, a program—an absolute. Yet in the end, all that ever comes of it is a compromise, some common denominator. Isn’t it tiring and ridiculous to be always reaching for the heights and always ending up settling for some mediocre result?” It was essentially the same conversation he had had with Diotima, with only superficial differences. (MWQ, 533; MOE, 489)

And that afterthought says it all. Intellectually, Ulrich can make the case for common sense, for a meaningful solution, a golden mean. He is certainly capable of seeing through Hans Sepp. But in his own way he wants Gerda ( just as he has wanted his silly but attractive cousin Diotima), and the conversation here leads to the failed seduction scene of chapter 119, when the virginal Gerda, coming to Ulrich to offer herself up, is paralyzed with fear and nothing happens.

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In all these scenes the Fischel plot serves as an ironic accompaniment to the Diotima-­Arnheim-­Leinsdorf intrigues of the Parallel Campaign. Eventually (book 2) Director Fischel is invited to participate in the campaign; Gerda, her mother’s daughter, has used every social connection available to be invited to the Tuzzi salon. But what about Hans Sepp? In the late 1920s (MLQ, vol. 2, 1644) Musil created a much fuller identity for his proto-­ Nazi. In a discarded manuscript of that period, he produces a version of yet another of Ulrich’s visits to the Fischel house and digresses to fill in Hans’s background: An emerging impurity on his skin could put [Hans] in a bad mood for days, and that was no rare occurrence, for in his petit-­bourgeois family care of the skin did not rank very high. As in many Austrian families, it had stopped at the state it had reached before the middle of the nineteenth century: that is, every Saturday the bathtub or a wash trough would be filled with hot water, and this served for the cleaning of the body that was forgone on all the other days. There were just as few other luxuries in Hans Sepp’s family home. His father was a minor government functionary with a small salary and the prospect of an even scantier pension. . . . If he looked around, all that Hans Sepp could claim as a distinction was his German name. (MWQ, vol. 2, 1650)

The portrait sketch here lacks the perspectivism of the finished chapters of part 1, but it provides insight into Musil’s view of the dark political situation. Hans Sepp is proud that his name isn’t a characteristically Austrian one like Vybrial or Bartolini but a genuine German one—rather like Hitler. And indeed the portrait of the envious petit bourgeois “student” in the “new” Germanic world shows us the latency of Fascism that comes hard on the heels of the demise of the once-­powerful empire. Musil might have shown Hans Sepp succeeding in political life, but that is not what happens. On the contrary, in this posthumous chapter Hans and Gerda finally drop the chastity game and become lovers, but she soon loses interest, while Hans and some fellow students are involved in a political demonstration against Count Leinsdorf, and Hans is punished by being conscripted into the Kakanian army. Here “his whole spirit of contradiction [is] blown away” (MWQ, vol. 2, 1663); he has no one with whom to pronounce his endless jeremiads against the status quo, and he is finally driven to suicide. Meanwhile, Fischel, when last seen by Ulrich, is romancing a young dancer and planning to divorce Clementine. More surprising: the longtime bank “director” has given up Lloyd’s Bank and gone into business

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for himself. “What are you now, actually?” Ulrich asks him. The answer: “It’s not easy to explain casually to an outsider. I conduct transactions. Transactions of goods, transactions of currency, political transactions, art transactions. In every case the important thing is to get out at the right moment; then you can never lose” (MWQ, vol. 2, 1683). These words, which look ahead to our own hedge fund and inside-­trader traffic, were written in the late 1920s and provide only one possible outcome of the Fischel story. Musil would probably have discarded the episode as too definite, too obviously satiric. Indeed, if we take part 1 of The Man without Qualities as a whole (it concludes with the death of Ulrich’s father and the young man’s consequent departure from Vienna), we may note that the text is remarkable precisely for not tying up loose ends. We have come, as it were, full circle to the beginning when we learn that Ulrich is “in that familiar state . . . of incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center, so characteristic of the present, and whose strange arithmetic adds up to a random proliferation of numbers without forming a unit.”25 If in the published novel itself Musil insists on letting a Hans Sepp be known through his own words, and through the consciousness of those with whom he converses, it is because, as Burton Pike puts it, “Musil was constantly absorbing the world as we actually live it and trying to understand its possibilities on the assumption that we barely understand a civilization that is just now coming into being. . . . Always, what [Musil] knows must be understood in relative, functional terms, in a context, in a world of other possible intentions and values.”26 Those other possible values, as dramatized in the posthumous chapter, are always in the background, providing a context for the actual narrative. Ey e s W i de Ope n In “Ruminations of a Slow-­Witted Mind” (1933), written for the Berlin Neue Rundschau (but not, for obvious reasons, publishable there or anywhere in the new Germany of the Third Reich), Musil expresses his incredulity at the access to power of the Nazis: The basic rights of the morally responsible person, freedom of speech and expression, the entire edifice of inalienable convictions, millions who were accustomed to believe passionately in these things saw them abolished at a stroke, without lifting a finger for them! They had sworn to lay down their lives for their principles, and they hardly lifted a finger! They felt their minds being plundered but realized suddenly that their bodies were more important. . . .

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One can really only assume that with their eyes wide open the men of intellect saw nothing, and had the bad luck to overlook just those things that the future would reveal to be the most important. (Precision, 216, my emphasis)

What could account for such blindness on the part of so many? Unlike the Weimar intellectuals, Musil had never believed that Socialism—or indeed any overarching system—was the answer. “As an individual,” he wrote in Notebook 19 in 1920, “I am a revolutionary. That cannot be otherwise for the creative individual always is. But in politics I am evolutionist” (Diaries, 271). In the same notebook Musil referred to the “inadmissible simplification of Marxism: separation of the exploiters from the exploited while, in fact, between them lies the gigantic layer of the bureaucracy in the most general sense, and this problem is today the thorniest one that socialism faces” (Diaries, 264). In 1922, soon after he had begun work on The Man without Qualities, Musil published an essay called “Helpless Europe [Hilfloses Europa]: A Digressive Journey.” The war, he argued, challenging such thinkers as Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West had just been published, had called into question the very possibility of a coherent theory of history. “We haven’t really changed much,” he begins, “a little presumptuous before, a little hung over afterwards. First we were bustling good citizens, then we became murderers, killers, thieves, arsonists, and the like, but without really experiencing anything. . . . I think there is only one explanation for this: we were lacking the concepts with which to absorb what we experienced” (Precision, 117). The Man without Qualities dramatizes—and complicates—this contradiction. People by no means inherently “bad” get drawn into situations that neither they nor their antagonists could have anticipated. No overarching hypothesis, Musil argued, is “quite correct”: consider the fuss made about the essence of the archetypal Greek Man or the Greek Spirit, whereas “Oriental life elements are known to have influenced the Hellenic sphere” and so must be taken into account in any discussion of the Greek ethos (Precision, 120). Definitions of “modern civilized man,” moreover, ignore the reality that “this being is every bit as capable of cannibalism as of The Critique of Pure Reason” (Precision, 121). If this sounds excessively pessimistic or cynical, Musil does not intend it that way. He merely wants us to think more realistically and to pay more attention to the actual workings of the state. “The war, it seems to me, erupted like a disease in this social organism.” And again, “The war may have bad a thousand different causes, but it is undeniable that each of them—­nationalism, patriotism, economic imperialism, the mentality of

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the generals and the diplomats, and all the rest—is tied to certain spiritual conditions that characterize a shared, and therefore codetermining situation.” And one of “the most telling symptoms of the catastrophe” was “the totally laissez-­faire attitude toward the teams of specialists in running the machinery of the state. It was like sleeping in the Pullman car of a train and being awakened only by the crash” (Precision, 128). This is an important observation, and one rarely made. Read the correspondence of the Weimar intellectuals—say, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno—and the last thing discussed will be the actual running of the different departments of the government, or, for that matter, the contributions of particular elected officials and civil servants. For intellectuals, politics, as opposed to political theory, was—and this is still often true today—a dirty game. “The solution,” writes Musil, “lies neither in waiting for a new ideology nor in the clash of the ones that are quarrelling today, but in the creation of social conditions that safeguard the stability and depth of ideological endeavors in general. What we lack is not substance but function!” (Precision, 131). The Man without Qualities was designed to explore precisely the follies and iniquities that arise when a society is putting too much faith in substance—the articulation of lofty theoretical formulations—rather than function. Abstraction, Musil suggests in a passage that recalls Wittgenstein’s distinction between ethical concepts (impossible) and ethical actions (necessary), is the bugbear. “What passes for ethics in our current literature is for the most part a narrow foundation of real ethics, with a skyscraper of morality above it” (Precision, 132). It is this “skyscraper of morality” that Musil dissects so wittily and brilliantly in his unfinished— and unfinishable—novel. When we first meet Diotima (Ermelina Tuzzi), her “high-­minded” ideas for the Parallel Campaign are described as being “as completely guileless as a damp little sponge releasing the moisture it had previously soaked up for no particular purpose” (MWQ, 100). She is soon soaking up the grand schemes of her Prussian visitor Paul Arnheim—a colossus whose books “proclaim nothing less than the merger of soul and economics, or of ideas and power” (111). The Great Idea is no more than moisture from a damp sponge, whether the idea in question is the Parallel Campaign or the lofty ideas of the judges, attorneys, psychiatrists, and onlookers as to the “guilt” of Moosbrugger, or Clarisse and Walter’s ideas of the artist’s role in society, or even Ulrich’s idea of what his own role as “man without qualities” should be, Musil uses metaphor to distance a given character’s actions from his or her thoughts so as to produce high comedy. When, for example, Diotima learns that it is her salon the great Arnheim wants to visit, she feels “singled

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out like a writer who is being translated into the language of a foreign country for the first time” (112). The comparison here is clearly not Diotima’s own; she, who has never written anything, cannot know how it feels to be thus “translated.” Indeed, Musil’s ironic metaphors regularly point at the split between self-­awareness and behavior. Idea, seemingly adopted and promulgated, is swallowed up in the elaborate ritual that controls the daily life of the governing class during these years of interregnum. Another favorite Musil device is the catalog, usually reeled off by an unnamed “high official.” At the first session of Diotima’s committee for the Parallel Campaign, for example, a nameless professor’s embarrassing reference to the conflict in the Balkans (about to explode, as the reader knows), is followed by a speech by a privy councilor: It was a relief to all when the representative of the Imperial Privy Purse came to the rescue by quickly giving them a list of foundations and endowments to be expected, in that jubilee year, from His Majesty’s private funds. It began with the donation of a sum for the building of a pilgrims’ church, a foundation for the support of deacons without private means, gifts to the Archduke Karl and Field Marshal Radetzky’s Veterans Clubs, to the soldiers, widows and orphans from the campaigns of ’66 and ’78, followed by funds for pensioned noncommissioned officers, for the Academy of Sciences and so it went, on and on. . . . The moment they had all been read off a Frau Weghuber, a manufacturer’s wife with an impressive record of charitable works, rose promptly to her feet, quite impervious to any idea that there might be something more pressing than the objects of her concern. She advanced a proposal for a Greater Austrian Franz Josef Soup Kitchen, which was received sympathetically. However, the delegate from the Ministry of Public Worship and Education pointed out that his own department had received a somewhat similar suggestion, namely, the publication of a monumental work, Emperor Franz Josef I and His Time. (MWQ, 183; MOE, 172–73)

The perspective here is most likely Ulrich’s—we have just learned, in the previous paragraph, that “Ulrich did not know” the unfortunate professor— but here Musil fuses what Ulrich sees and hears with the voice of the impassive chronicler: this was said and then this, until the absurdity of the final link hits us: another book about Franz Josef will hardly feed the hungry masses Frau Weghuber has in mind, but then again the creation of a Greater Austrian Franz Josef Soup Kitchen is much too pedestrian an idea to satisfy the lofty Parallel Campaigners. In the next chapter the whole notion of charity is blown away by Diotima’s own “pronouncement that the True

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Austria was the whole world. The world, she explained, would find no peace until its nations learned to live together on a higher plane, like the Austrian peoples in their fatherland” (185). Count Leinsdorf cannot help “admir[ing] this woman’s fiery idealism and breadth of vision” (185). And so it goes in session after session. Nothing ever changes, although in the final chapters of part 2, bickering and boredom have set in and the mood has imperceptibly shifted to irritability, no one knows quite why. Mindless drawing-­room dialogue, Musil wants to the reader to see, sets the stage for what will be the deadliest of wars. Indeed, the Great Idea that Diotima, Leinsdorf, and Arnheim are searching for so earnestly is none other than the war itself. To put it another way, it is the outbreak of war that will conclude the search and will set the stage for the next war, only twenty years in the future. Consider the rise of anti-­Semitism, as chronicled in the latter pages of the novel. In part 2, chapter 20, Count Leinsdorf, concerned about recent ethnic uprisings protesting German dominance in Parliament and elsewhere, brings up in conversation with Ulrich the “Jewish Question.” “I’ve nothing at all against the Jews,” the count assures Ulrich, “They are intelligent, hardworking, and reliable. But it was a great mistake to give them those unsuitable names. Rosenberg and Rosenthal, for instance, are aristocratic names; Baer and Wolf and all such creatures are originally heraldic beasts; Meyer derives from landed property; Silver and Gold are armorial colors” (MWQ, vol. 2, 916; MOE, 843). It seems that Leinsdorf’s anger is directed not against Jewish bankers or businessmen like Leo Fischel (who, after all, knew his place) but against high-­ranking administrative officials who are using their good German names to infiltrate the ruling class: “The whole so-­called Jewish Question would disappear without a trace if the Jews would only make up their minds to speak Hebrew, go back to their old names, and wear Eastern dress [orientalische Kleidung],” he explained. “Frankly, a Galician Jew [ein Galizianer] who has just recently made his fortune in Vienna doesn’t look right on the Esplanade at Ischl, wearing Tyrolean costume with a chamois tuft on his hat. But put him in a long flowing robe, as rich as you like so long as it covers his legs, and you see how admirably his face and his grand sweeping gestures go with his costume. . . . I am against assimilation the way the English nobility practice it; it’s a tedious and uncertain process. But give the Jews back their true character and watch them become a veritable ornament, a genuine aristocracy of a rare and special kind among the nations gratefully thronging around His Majesty’s throne—or, if you prefer to see it

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in everyday terms, imagine them strolling along on our Ringstrasse, the only place in the world where you can see, in the midst of Western European elegance at its finest, a Mohammedan with his red fez, a Slovak in sheepskins, or a bare-­legged Tyrolean!” (MWQ, vol. 2, 916–17; MOE, 844)

Here, in one fell swoop, is the denial of everything the German-­speaking Jews had been fighting for since emancipation in 1867, the denial of any possibility of true belonging, of genuine citizenship. Nowhere in his earlier appearances had Count Leinsdorf ever made such remarks, such links between Jews, Mohammedans, Slovaks, and poor Tyroleans (i.e., part Italians)—all of them ethnic outsiders who should know their place. Gerda Fischel would have been shocked had she heard Leinsdorf’s speech. But why now? Why the sudden and extravagant anti-­Semitic tirade? It was during World War I and immediately thereafter that the Eastern Jews— from Galicia, from the Bukovina, from Romania and Bulgaria and Russia— poured into Vienna, many of them wearing “long flowing robes,” sporting beards, and speaking not Hebrew, as Leinsdorf foolishly thinks, but Yiddish. These recent arrivals have no resemblance to Paul Arnheim, long rumored to be a Jew but priding himself on his Prussian identity and his German patriotism.27 And hostility to the arrival of these new “aggressive” outsider Jews in the now impoverished republic fanned the flames of the National Socialism soon to triumph, in Austria as in Germany. Musil’s touch is so light, so delicately ironic, that we read The Man without Qualities largely as comedy. No sooner has Count Leinsdorf finished his little diatribe against uppity Jews who have adopted names like Rosenthal then he shifts to a new topic he knows a little more about—Rhine wines. It is a comic moment. But this small irony shouldn’t deceive us. Ulrich, the novel’s antihero and largely its central consciousness, does not make the slightest objection to Leinsdorf’s assessment of the Jews: indeed, he “could not do otherwise than express his admiration for His Grace’s acumen” (MWQ, 917). Politeness, protocol, passivity: these acquired modes of behavior regularly come into conflict with the continuing idealism, the hope for more rational solutions, that is Ulrich’s better nature. But then Ulrich and Musil are not identical, even though the novel’s protagonist often expresses his creator’s thoughts. Musil’s is a complex vision, a Nietzschean perspectivism, with special attention to the precise context of a given action, choice, or motive. He studied the situatedness—social, cultural, familial—of human interactions with the same zeal that Wittgenstein applied to the context, within a given sentence, of ordinary words like blue or pain. And so Ulrich’s own actions are sometimes treated to the ironic dissection applied to the other characters.

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Why, for starters—and this is the question that sets so much of the novel in motion—does Ulrich, a man so highly educated and possessed of so many talents and tastes, get caught up in the absurdly regressive Parallel Campaign in the first place? How and why, to put it another way, does he become a Man without Qualities? The peculiarly Kakanian oscillation between utopianism and apathy (Es ist passiert) is very different, Musil suggests, from the ideological battle between Left and Right—between Communism and an ascendant Fascism—that was engaging the intellectuals of the neighboring Weimar Republic. In the end, however, both tensions are emblematic of an interregnum that had not learned the lessons of 1914–18 and thus set the stage for the war to come. In Musil’s Notebook 19 (1919–21), we read the entry “One must not avoid the question what this war actually was. One cannot simply walk away as if one had shaken off some state of intoxication, in which millions of people had lost their nearest relatives or their livelihood. This [event] must tear the culture apart, it is one of those repressed experiences that take their revenge in the form of hysteria.”28 In The Man without Qualities, hysteria is largely beneath the surface. Ulrich’s troubled friends Walter and Clarisse are the exception. The comedic forms—satire, mock epic, burlesque, parody, and especially a free-­floating irony—prevail, but only narrowly. “It was the same as anywhere else in the world, of course, but when God cut off Kakania’s credit, He did it in so special a way that entire nations and ethnicities had their eyes opened to the high cost of culture [Kultur]. Like bacteria they had been sitting pretty in their medium [in ihrem Boden] without bothering their heads about the proper curvature of the sky above.”29

CHAPTER FOUR

Coming of Age in Kakania Mother Tongue and Identity Theft in Canetti’s Autobiography

My earliest memory is dipped in red. I come out of a door on the arm of a maid, the floor in front of me is red, and to the left a staircase goes down, equally red. Across from us, at the same height, a door opens and a smiling man steps forth, walking towards me in a friendly way. He steps right up close to me, halts, and says: “Show me your tongue.” I stick out my tongue, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a jackknife, opens it and brings the blade all the way to my tongue. He says: “Now we’ll cut off his tongue.” I don’t dare pull back my tongue, he comes closer and closer, the blade will touch me any second. In the last moment, he pulls back the knife, saying, “Not today, tomorrow.” He snaps the knife shut again and puts it back in his pocket. Every morning, we step out of the door and into the red hallway, the door opens, and the smiling man appears. I know what he’s going to say and I wait for the command to show my tongue. I know he’s going to cut it off, and I get more and more scared each time. That’s how the day starts, and it happens very often.1

The first volume of Elias Canetti’s autobiography, The Tongue Set Free (Die gerettete Zunge), opens with this traumatic memory. For years Canetti evidently kept the story to himself; only much later did he learn what had happened. In the summer of 1907, when he was two, his family was vacationing in Carlsbad in upper Bohemia. The guesthouse had red walls and red carpets. His nanny, a girl of fourteen, took him out early every morning; she had an assignation in town with her boyfriend, who evidently taunted the toddler with the knife trick. When Canetti’s parents finally found out what was going on, they sent the girl back to Bulgaria. The fear of having one’s tongue cut out gives Canetti his title; the terrifying memory points directly to the vexed relationship between author and what was literally his mother’s tongue, German. As a child in the Danube port city of Rustchuck2 on the Bulgarian-­Romanian border, Canetti spoke

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the language of his Sephardic Jewish community, the Spanish dialect called Ladino. With the servants, peasants, and townspeople he spoke Bulgarian. But his parents, educated in Vienna and devotees of Austrian high culture, especially the plays performed at the Burgtheater, where they had hoped to be actors, spoke German to one another. It was their secret language, the language of love. How the young Elias acquires this forbidden language and comes to make it his own is the story of The Tongue Set Free. The two subsequent volumes of Canetti’s memoirs—The Torch in My Ear (Die Fackel im Ohr) and The Play of the Eyes (Das Augenspiel)3—thicken the plot by dramatizing how the adopted mother tongue is shaken by the echoes of forgotten languages, indeed, how multilingualism complicates—and often undermines—identity. Written late in life, Canetti’s three-­volume memoir, which takes us from his birth in 1905 to 1937, the year before the Nazi Anschluss, provides an arresting narrative of growing up in the shadow of the dissolving Central European empire in the age of the world wars.4 The terrifying “red” memory with which The Tongue Set Free opens is as much a cultural marker as it is a psychological one.5 From the first, Canetti’s childhood world is seen as a unique mixture of savagery and sophistication. On the one hand, physical violence seems to be part of daily life; on the other, the Rustchuk community is both cultured and linguistically adept: “on any one day you could hear seven or eight languages”: “Aside from the Bulgarians, who often came from the countryside, there were many Turks, who lived in their own neighborhood, and next to it was the neighborhood of the Sephardim, the Spanish Jews—our neighborhood. There were Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, Gypsies. From the opposite side of the Danube came Rumanians: my wet nurse, whom I no longer remember, was Rumanian. There were Russians here and there” (Tongue, 4). Such linguistic and ethnic diversity, notes the critic Claudio Magris, is at the heart of Austro-­Hungarian identity in the late years of the Habsburg monarchy—“a plurality of heterogeneous components and irreconcilable contradictions.”6 “Habsburg identity,” he observes, “is paradigmatic of the lost or fractured identity of the modern individual”: “In imperial Austria-­ Hungary, whose anthem was sung in so many languages, one could define oneself only by subtraction or negation. . . . [The Austrian did not] identify with the individual nationalities grouped together under the Dual Monarchy: rather, he was the ribbon that tied the bundle together, the invisible element that was common to them all and identical with none. The Austrian existed in the abstract idea of unity, in a non-­material or hinternational dimension” (Magris, 273). It is such hinternationality—a contradictory mix of the global and the local—that Robert Musil characterizes in The Man without Qualities in re-

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ferring to the Austro-­Hungarian Empire as Kakania.7 The epithet refers to the label kaiserlich und königlich (imperial and royal), abbreviated as “k & k,” but Kakania also puns on kakos, Greek for “bad,” and its derivatives like kaka (German equivalent of our English “doo-­doo” or “poo-­poo”). Canetti’s Vienna, writes Magris, “almost always unnamed, or grotesquely symbolized, which so often constitutes the backdrop for [Musil’s] magnificent and distorted representation of reality, is first and foremost the place where the true and the false are mixed” (Magris, 275). Indeed, the inability to define one’s “real” identity is at the heart of Canetti’s autobiography. On first reading, the memoir seems largely straightforward, accessible, and perhaps excessively anecdotal, its second and third volumes filled with character sketches of leading authors, artists, and public figures of the time. But the casual organization belies the autobiography’s consistent exploration less of Canetti’s own psychological development— he studiously avoids introspection—than of the decisive role geography has played in his life. This is especially true in The Tongue Set Free. Canetti’s Rustchuk has a long and exotic history: a Roman outpost, it was occupied in 1388 by the Turks and by the 1500s became a trade center on a par with Venice and Genoa.8 Canetti’s ancestors, who had migrated to Adrianopolis (now Edirne) after the Spanish expulsion of the Sephardic Jews in 1492, founded prosperous businesses. Even after the city passed into Russian hands in the Balkan War of 1877–78 and became part of the newly constituted Bulgaria, Rustchuk remained a multiethnic site. At the time of Canetti’s birth in 1905 (figure 20), it had four Christian Orthodox churches, five mosques, and three synagogues. The Bulgarian kings of Canetti’s day came from the German nobility, one of his great-­uncles was the consul of Austria-­Hungary, and the city, with its coffee houses and elegant buildings designed by visiting Viennese architects (figure 21; plate 7), was known as Little Vienna. Prior to World War II, Bulgaria was home to forty-­eight thousand Jews. The war—in which this Danube satellite of the Habsburg Empire declared its Nazi allegiance—was to change all that. By 1965 only fifty-­one hundred Jews still lived in Bulgaria: the world Canetti grew up in had virtually disappeared. But for him, as we soon learn, it had already collapsed much earlier. “ A n U nque nch a ble Y e a r ni ng f or L e t ters ” “If I say that Rustchuk is in Bulgaria, then I am giving an inadequate picture of it,” the narrator tells us in the first chapter of The Tongue Set Free, “for people of the most varied background lived there” (Tongue, 4). As Canetti portrays it, the town has a fairy-­tale quality; he recalls that “the rest of the

F ig u re 2 0 . Elias Canetti’s birthplace, Ruse, Bulgaria, Slavianska Street 12 (built 1902). Wikimedia Commons. Photograph: Trygve W. Nodeland (September 2009).

Figure 21. Main square, Ruse, Bulgaria (est. 1900). Wikimedia Commons. Photograph Todor Bozhinov, August 2009.

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world was known as ‘Europe,’ and if someone sailed up the Danube to Vienna, people said he was going to Europe. Europe began where the Turkish Empire had once ended” (Tongue, 5). The other side of the Danube, directly across from Rustchuck, was Romania: when the river froze over, the narrator’s mother told him, well-­off Bulgarians were driven in sleighs across the ice to Romania. Sometimes “wolves came down from the mountains and ravenously pounced on the horses in front of the sleighs. The coachman tried to drive them away with his whip, but it was useless.” Finally two hunters shot them, but “my mother had been terribly afraid; she described the red tongues of the wolves, which had come so close that she still dreamt about them in later years” (Tongue, 9). Red tongues: another memory “dipped in red.” One night during the Feast or Purim the little boy “was awakened by a giant wolf leaning over [his] bed”: A long red tongue dangled from his mouth and he snarled fearfully. I screamed as loud as I could: “A wolf! A wolf!” No one heard me, no one came. I shrieked and yelled louder and louder and cried. Then a hand slipped out, grabbed the wolf’s ears, and pulled his head down. My father was behind it, laughing. I kept shouting: “A wolf! A wolf!” I wanted my father to drive it away. He showed me the wolf mask in his hand. I didn’t believe him, he kept saying: “Don’t you see? It was me, that was no real wolf.” But I wouldn’t calm down, I kept sobbing and crying. (Tongue, 20)

In the age of Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams had been published in 1900), one would think Father Canetti would have known better than to play such tricks on his young son, but when it came to child psychology, the Rustchuk sensibility seems to have been more “Turkish” than “Austrian,” the irony being that the father’s action was prompted precisely by nostalgia for Vienna. Having wanted to become an actor at the Burgtheater, “he was mercilessly thrust [instead] into his father’s business. The town did have an amateur theater, where he performed with Mother, but what was it measured by his earlier dreams in Vienna? He was truly unleashed, said Mother, during the Purim festival” (Tongue, 20). Young Canetti, in any case, suffered for months from what the author of The Tongue Set Free remembers as “wolf panic.” Childhood is thus viewed as a violent swing between barbarism and civilization: the fear of red tongues, his own as well as wolf tongues, and then of the tonguelike comet, said by the local peasants to presage the end of the world, haunts his early years. Red is also the color of the rags worn by the Gypsies, who, according to local custom, file through the houses of

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the affluent members of the Sephardic community every Friday night, collecting their gift of food from the sabbath table. Again, the narrator recalls being terrified: “Sacks dangled from many of their shoulders, and I couldn’t look at those sacks without imagining that they contained stolen children.” Watching the Gypsies eat, he is “amazed at how friendly they were to their children, not at all like nasty child-­snatchers. But that changed nothing in my terror of them” (Tongue, 14). Fear and violence: when little Elias’s great playmate, his cousin Laurica, four years older than he, starts school and learns to read and write, the five-­year-­old boy is madly jealous. Laurica taunts him with the pages of her notebooks, whose “letters of the alphabet in blue ink fascinated me more than anything I had ever laid eyes on” (Tongue, 28). She keeps teasing him, waving the notebooks in the air and withholding them, until one day he can’t stand it. Grabbing an axe he finds in the kitchen yard, he chants, “Agora vo matar a Laurica” (Now I’m going to kill Laurica). And he is about to strike her when her screams are heard by his relatives, and he is stopped and severely punished. This story is further complicated by a reference to the axe as belonging to “the Armenian” (Tongue, 29). An earlier chapter bears the title “The Armenian’s Axe”; the man in question is employed to chop wood for the family. Young Elias listens to his “sad” songs”—sad, according to the narrator’s mother, because the Armenian had to flee Istanbul, where the Turks had wanted to kill him, and had lost his entire family. “He had watched from a hiding place when they had killed his sister. Then he had fled to Bulgaria, and my father had felt sorry for him and taken him into the house” (Tongue, 12). Canetti recalls that although he barely exchanged a few words with the tall dark man, somehow he “developed a deep love for him.” And the putative attack on Laurica only enhances that feeling: “No one recognized the connection between my murderous goal and the fate of the Armenian. I loved him, his sad songs and words. I loved the axe with which he chopped wood” (Tongue, 30). Why? Perhaps because the presence of the nameless Armenian anticipates Canetti’s own exile, his need to make his way among strangers from whom, as we later learn, he, like the Armenian, will maintain his distance. Laurica, in any case, soon takes her revenge, although she claims it to be entirely an accident. At the Canetti home, caldrons of water brought from the Danube are placed on the terrace, where they are boiled for purification. Playing tag, Elias and Laurica run between the vats; she gives him a shove and he falls into the boiling water. The boy is scalded all over his body and almost dies: “For many weeks I lay abed in awful pains” (Tongue, 31). Indeed, childhood is remembered largely for its violence and physi-

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cal pain. Why then does the narrator call Rustchuk “a marvelous city for a child” (Tongue, 4)? Perhaps because the writer’s close-­knit family unit, with its colorful rituals and exotic customs—Grandmother Canetti never did anything but “sit on her Turkish divan, smoking and drinking strong coffee” (16)—placed such strong emphasis on learning and culture, beginning with the acquisition of languages. And language takes on a special importance precisely because the mature Canetti can remember the events of his past only in another language: The events of those years are present to my mind in all their strength and freshness (I’ve fed on them for over sixty years), but the vast majority are tied to words that I did not know at that time. It seems natural to me to write them down now, I don’t have the feeling that I am changing or warping anything. It is not like the literary translation of a book from one language to another, it is a language that happened of its own accord in my unconscious, and since I ordinarily avoid this word like the plague, a word that has become meaningless from overuse, I apologize for employing it in this one and only case. (Tongue, 10)

This is a very curious passage. Canetti’s animosity toward Freud was well known.9 Although in his role as memoirist he loved to dissect the psychosocial makeup of others, he seems to have an aversion to self-­analysis and introspection. Freud’s emphasis on “individual processes” rather than group formations strikes Canetti as misplaced (Torch, 121). But one could also argue—precisely from a Freudian perspective—that Canetti fears his own demons. As Claudio Magris observes, “[his] autobiography, which seems to be saying everything, hides an absence, a kind of black hole that seems to be swallowing up the essential truth of this life. . . . Behind the friendly gentleman evolving his extremely polite form in order to protect his own reserve, there is another, the abnormal and impossible other” (Magris, 285). That other cannot be acknowledged; if, after all, the language one spoke as a child is lost, then perhaps so is the affect that went with it. And here the question of the “mother tongue” (Muttersprache) comes to the fore. German—Viennese German—is first introduced as the “happy” private language of Canetti’s parents: They were very much in love at that time and had their own language, which I didn’t understand; they spoke German, the language of their happy schooldays in Vienna. Most of all, they talked about the Burgtheater; before ever meeting, they had seen the same plays and the same actors there and they never exhausted their memories of it. Later I found

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out that they had fallen in love during such conversations, and while neither had managed to make their dream of the theater come true— both had passionately wanted to act—they did succeed in getting married despite a great deal of opposition. (Tongue, 23)

The reference is to the maternal (Arditti) family’s sense of superiority: one of the oldest and most prosperous Sephardic families in Bulgaria, the Ardittis consider Grandfather Canetti an “upstart from Adrianopolis” (Tongue, 23). The escape hatch from this Sephardic rivalry is the German language. For the young Canetti, the sound of German is quickly associated with imagination and pleasure. “I believed they were talking about wondrous things that could be spoken only in that language. After begging and begging to no avail, I ran away angrily into another room, which was seldom used, and I repeated to myself the sentences I had heard from them, in their precise intonation, like magic formulas” (Tongue, 24). The boy is enchanted not only by the name Wien (Vienna) but even by the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, which arrives at his family’s house every day: It was a grand moment when [Father] slowly unfolded it. As soon as he began reading it, he no longer had an eye for me. I knew he wouldn’t answer anything no matter what. . . . I tried to find out what it was that fascinated him in the newspaper, at first I thought it was the smell; and when I was alone and nobody saw me, I would climb up on the chair, and greedily smell the newsprint. But then I noticed he was moving his head along the page, and I imitated that behind his back. . . . Once a visitor who had entered the room called to him; he turned around and caught me performing my imaginary reading motions. He then spoke to me even before focusing on the visitor and explained that the important thing was the letters, many tiny letters, on which he knocked his finger. Soon I would learn them myself, he said, arousing within me an unquenchable yearning for letters [eine unstillbare Sehnsucht nach Buchstaben]. (Tongue, 27, my emphasis; Zunge, 42)

Thus the actual letters of the German alphabet become attached to the mysterious city of dreams, Vienna. “I knew it took four days to get there on the Danube. They [his parents] often spoke of relatives who went to Vienna to consult famous physicians. The names of the great specialists of those days were the very first celebrities that I heard about as a child. When I came to Vienna subsequently, I was amazed that all these names—Lorenz, Schlesinger, Schnitzler, Neumann, Hajek, Halban—really existed as people”

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(Torch, 27). And so the magic of Vienna is reinforced; the city is seen in Edenic terms as the place where people speak a special language of great wonder and beauty. All the more confusing, then, that when the boy’s parents decide to move away from Rustchuk to take advantage of a business opportunity and to get away from the tyranny of Grandfather Canetti, who has volubly cursed his son’s decision, they go not to glamorous Vienna— that move came later and was hardly glamorous—but to Manchester, whose language, while hardly secret, is entirely unfamiliar. Th e Pa i n of Birth English, the language six-­year-­old Canetti and his two younger brothers are now taught with great dispatch, is associated in his mind with Order. The teachers at his new elementary school, the governess Miss Bray, the daily routine: all are quite different from “life in Rustchuk [which] had been loud and fierce, and rich in painful accidents” (Tongue, 44). The young Canetti, given to wild behavior, does not quite fit into the English scene. Falling in love with a little girl named Mary Handsome, or rather with her cheeks that look like round red apples, he pursues her, longing to kiss those red cheeks. When Mary’s mother complains, the teacher, a Miss Lancashire, tells the boy’s parents that “she had never witnessed such a fierce passion in her school, she was a bit confused and wondered if it might have something to do with ‘Oriental’ children maturing much earlier than British children” (Tongue, 46). Oriental, surely a code word for Jewish here, calls to mind everything Eastern, foreign, dark, and slightly alien in the Canetti background vis-­à-­vis the English. At the same time, Canetti loves Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels; weeps for the Titanic, struck by an iceberg in the middle of the night; and thrills to the stories about Captain Scott’s South Pole expedition. The tension between cultures, and between past and present, is epitomized by the boy’s recitation, at the behest of his father, of the family’s home address, “234 Burton Road, West Didsbury, Manchester, England,” to which Canetti insists on adding the final place-­name “Europe.” “Geography,” he recalls, “had become very important to me, and my knowledge of it was increased in two ways, I received a jigsaw puzzle: the multicolored map of Europe, pasted on wood, was cut up into the individual countries. You tossed all the pieces into a heap and then put Europe together again lightning-­fast. Thus every country had its own shape, with which my fingers grew familiar, and one day I surprised my father by saying: ‘I can do it blindfolded!’ ” (Tongue, 47). These conversations are conducted in English, and Canetti might even-

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tually have passed for an English schoolboy, had it not been that one morning his adored father, aged thirty-­one, suddenly drops dead of a heart attack. His twenty-­seven-­year-­old mother, who has just returned from a stay at a health spa near Salzburg, had, so she confessed to her husband the night before he died, conducted a chaste romance with her physician. The death of his adored father turns out to be the watershed of Canetti’s life: when, after the mourning period, his mother decides to move the family to Vienna, the secret language—German—now becomes his, but under duress, not choice. It happens, ironically, in the French-­speaking part of Switzerland, where the bereaved young widow has taken her children for the summer en route to their new life in Vienna. Miss Bray, their English governess, is still with them when Canetti’s mother abruptly decides that her eldest son, who is eight years old, must learn German in anticipation of his Viennese schooldays. The excruciatingly painful German lessons are paradigmatic of the role Canetti is soon forced to assume: We sat at the big table in the dining room, I on the narrower side, with a view of the lake and the sails. She sat around the corner to my left and held the textbook in such a way that I couldn’t look in. She always kept it far from me. “You don’t need it,” she said, “you can’t understand it yet anyway.” But despite this explanation, I felt she was withholding the book like a secret. She read a German sentence to me and had me repeat it. Disliking my accent, she made me repeat the sentence several times, until it struck her as tolerable. But this didn’t occur often, for she derided me for my accent, and since I couldn’t stand her derision for anything in the world, I made an effort and soon pronounced the sentence correctly. Only then did she tell me what the sentence meant in English. But this she never repeated. I had to note it instantly and for all time. Then she quickly went on to the next sentence and followed the same procedure. (Torch, 67)

The acquisition process is terribly painful! Learning sentences by heart and translating their content without ever seeing them in writing turns out to be almost impossible. Confronted by his mother’s daily mockery—she calls him an idiot—he is finally saved by Miss Bray, who knows no foreign language whatsoever and is quite satisfied that there are English speakers around the world. Miss Bray prevails upon Mme Canetti to let her son look at the book, and suddenly everything changes. The unfamiliar Gothic script opens up: in seeing the words in writing, the boy can follow the lesson. And soon he is speaking German quite fluently.

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It is a major turning point, not as a preparation for school in Vienna but because German is his mother’s language, the language of her lost love. “She herself had a profound need to use German with me, it was the language of her intimacy. . . . Her true marriage had taken place in that language” (70). For Canetti himself “it was a belated mother tongue, implanted in true pain” (“es war eine spät und unter wahrhaftigen Schmerzen eingepflantzte Muttersprache”): The pain was not all, it was promptly followed by a period of happiness, and that tied me indissolubly to that language. It must have fed my propensity for writing at an early moment, for I had the book from her in order to learn how to write, and the sudden change for the better actually began with learning how to write Gothic letters. She [Mother] certainly did not tolerate my giving up the other languages; education, for her, was the literature of all the languages she knew, but the language of our love—and what a love it was!—became German. (Tongue, 71; Zunge, 102–3)

And even more explicitly a few pages further: “In Lausanne, where I heard French all around me, picking it up casually and without dramatic complications, I was reborn under my mother’s influence to the German language, and the spasm of that birth [dem Krampf dieser Geburt] produced the passion tying me to both, the language and my mother” (Tongue, 74; Zunge, 107). Such “rebirth” comes at a price. For a variety of reasons, the author’s suffocating relationship with his mother will deteriorate until they are wholly estranged. As for the German language, it is important to note what this “mother tongue” is and isn’t. Learning “German” at eight from his Ladino-­ speaking mother, who herself learned the language as a schoolgirl in Vienna, Canetti is isolating himself from his Bulgarian Sephardic childhood on the one hand and from the orderly English future his father had planned for him on the other. Doubly exiled from his “fatherland,” he remains an outsider, never quite part of the scene. This is especially true when, in the late 1920s, Canetti spends a few weeks in Berlin. In The Torch in My Ear he recounts his meetings with George Grosz and Bertolt Brecht, both of whom he came to dislike for their Marxist preoccupation with material conditions. The Threepenny Opera, whose premiere he attended in August 1928, strikes him as “coldly calculated”: It was the most accurate expression of this Berlin. The people cheered for themselves: this was they and they liked themselves. First they fed their

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faces, then they spoke of right and wrong. . . . Penalty had been abolished: the royal messenger rode in on a real horse. The shrill and naked self-­complacence that this performance emanated can be believed only by the people who witnessed it. If it is the task of satire to lash people for the injustice that they devise and commit, for their evils, which turn into predators and multiply, then, on the contrary this play glorified all the things that people usually conceal in shame: however, the thing that was most cogently and most effectively scorned was pity. (Torch, 306)

This is a curious misunderstanding of the great Brecht–­Kurt Weill opera, which blames not citizens themselves but a cruel economic system for the mendacity and fraud by which human beings survive. The drama hardly “glorifies” the behavior of the Peachums and their friends. But from Canetti’s perspective, Weimar Berlin, as personified in the hilarious but cruel Threepenny Opera, lacks heart, it subordinates all ideals to political necessity. The only writer with whom he feels at home is Isaac Babel, whom he considers a fellow learner. “When all the pretexts crumbled, I was left with the excuse of expectation. I wanted people, including myself, to become better” (Torch, 313). I wanted people, including myself, to become better: here Canetti echoes Wittgenstein, who frequently declared in his diary that his aim was to become a different—by which he meant better—person.10 Canetti’s “German” is not that of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic; the doctrinaire Marxism of a Brecht cannot, in his eyes, match the highly individual and mercurial vision of a Karl Kraus. Closed systems are the enemy; language, after all, whether spoken or written, is subject to surprising openings. Canetti, Daniel Heller-­Roazen posits in his Echolalias, is the “exemplary case” of those writers “who don’t have a single mother tongue, who even before they study a foreign language, have already begun to lose the one they once learned ‘without any rules.’ ”11 And Heller-­Roazen refers us to the chapter in Canetti’s Play of the Eyes called “Hudba” (308–18). Shortly before his mother’s death in June 1937, Canetti visits Prague for the first time. Despite the large number of Czechs in Vienna, he doesn’t know a word of the language. Strolling the streets and overhearing conversations, he decides that Czech must be a “combative language, because all the words were strongly accented on the first syllable” (315). One of those words—and it gives Canetti his chapter title—is hudba, meaning “music”: All the other European languages I knew of had the same word for it: “music,” a beautiful, resonant word—when you pronounced it in Ger-

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man you felt you were leaping into the air. When you accented it more on the first syllable [as in English], it didn’t seem quite so active, it hovered awhile in midair before taking off. I was almost as attached to this word as to a tangible object, but as time went on, I began to feel uneasy about its being used for every kind of music, especially as I became better acquainted with modern music. (Play, 316)

Hudba, he decides, is the perfect word for Stravinsky’s Les Noces, or for the likes of Bartók and Janácek. And, absorbed in his pleasure at this and other Czech inflections, he recognizes that “possibly the force with which Czech words hit me might be traced back to my childhood memories of Bulgarian. But those memories had vanished, I had completely forgotten Bulgarian, and how much of a forgotten language stays with us I have no way of knowing. . . . I absorbed Slavic sounds as parts of a language which touched me in some inexplicable way” (Play, 317). “What,” asks Heller-­Roazen, “did Canetti hear in the hudba of the Czech language?” Obviously, it was not—or not merely—the idiom of the inhabitants of Prague, since, as he makes clear, he could understand close to nothing of this tongue at all. But it would be equally inadequate to conclude that the writer simply perceived in it Bulgarian. Even had Canetti retained his knowledge of the Balkan language, despite his repeated statements to the contrary, he could hardly have discovered it again within Czech. The typological affinities between the southern Slavic and the western Slavic tongues do not suffice for one to assert that each can be found within the other. It would be more precise to maintain that in Prague, Canetti heard not a language but an echo: the sound within one tongue of another that had been forgotten. . . . The music of Czech, as Canetti perceived it, summoned the one childhood tongue that was not bound to his mother, which not only preceded the German he learned from her in Lausanne but also was independent of the Ladino in which she spoke to him before his father’s death. (Heller-­Roazen, 175–76)

No tongue, in other words, is truly a “mother tongue.” The effect of hearing these foreign words, writes Canetti, “was not at all comparable to that of music, for one feels threatened by words one does not understand, one turns them over in one’s mind in an attempt to blunt them, but they are repeated and in repetition become more menacing than ever” (Play, 318). Surely it is no coincidence that the calling into question of the mother tongue is juxtaposed to the account of Mme Canetti’s cruel death from

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cancer in 1937. The Play of the Eyes ends with that death, which foreshadows the death of Austria itself the following year (March 12, 1938, the Anschluss). Canetti now has to flee Vienna. In London, where he and his wife Veza settle, he will, ironically enough, be speaking the English he learned in Manchester as a child, only to have been trained to renounce it in favor of German. Wor ds at Wa r From the Ladino and Slavic sounds of childhood to the English of grammar school days, the French of Swiss hotels, and the acquired German “mother tongue,” the clash of languages was to make Canetti wary of principles, of affiliation and membership, whether in a political party, religious group, or a nation. If pressed, he would identify himself quite simply as a European. But what did that really mean? The world wars, painful as they were for those who readily defined themselves as French or English or German, were especially traumatic for a writer like Canetti who, at home in so many languages, had, in his actual life, no Heimat. Consider part 3 of The Tongue Set Free, called “Vienna 1913–1916.” Within that framework (in 1916 Madame Canetti moved her sons to Zurich), which oddly counters the usual chronology of the war period (1914–18), the Great War seems almost a distraction; it exists largely on the periphery of the young Canetti’s consciousness. In the summer of 1914, the family is staying in a spa outside Vienna: We spent a good chunk of the day in the health-­resort park, where Mother took us. The spa band played in a round kiosk at the center of the park. The band leader, a thin man, was named Konrath; we boys nicknamed him “carrot,” using the English word. I still spoke English with my little brothers; they were three and five years old. Their German was somewhat shaky; Miss Bray had only returned to England a few months ago. It would have been unnatural restraint to speak anything but English among ourselves, and we were known in the park as the little English boys. (Tongue, 90)

On the day that Germany declares war on Russia (August 1), the band launches not into its usual repertoire, like Johann Strauss’s “Radetzky March,” but into the Austrian imperial anthem. A crowd gathers and sings, “Gott erhalte, Gott beschütze unsern Kaiser, unser Land,” followed by the German anthem, “Heil dir in Siegerkranz” (“Hail to Thee in Victor’s Laurels”). The nine-­year-­old Canetti recognizes the latter as the same tune as

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“God Save the King” and starts, perversely, to sing it in English “at the top of my lungs.” His little brothers follow suit. Suddenly, I saw faces warped with rage all about me and arms and hands hitting at me . . . everyone was beating away at us in utter confusion. But the thing that made a much deeper impact on me was the hate-­twisted faces. . . . This first experience with a hostile crowd was all the more indelible. As a result, for the rest of the war, in Vienna until 1916 and then in Zurich, I favored the British. But I learned my lesson from the punches. So long as I stayed in Vienna, I made sure not to let anyone perceive anything of my attitude. English words outside the house were now severely prohibited for us. I observed the taboo and kept on reading my English books all the more fervently. (Tongue, 91)

I am reminded here of the scene in Karl Kraus’s Last Days of Mankind in which the Café Westminster is patriotically renamed Westmünster, and all its signage changed accordingly. Indeed, the schoolboy soon has to learn the hate sentences that Kraus reproduces in act 1, scene 1, with reference to a picture postcard sent from the front: “Jeder Stoss ein Franzos!” “Jeder Tritt ein Britt!” “Jeder Schuß ein Russ!” (Zunge, 130). Fanny, the Canettis’ Czech maid, resents the denigration of the Russians, as does Canetti’s mother, who reminds her son that her best friend in Rustchuk, Olga, had been a Russian. The net effect of the conflicting signals received is to make Canetti increasingly aloof from his surroundings. In 1915, when the family visits Rustchuk for the first time since their move to Manchester, he perceives his hometown as an exotic Eastern place, romantically quaint but also irritating in its provincialisms. At this stage there is no nostalgia. Back in Vienna, “the effects of war could be felt in everyday life” (109). Canetti avoids all larger political commentary, but there is a telling incident that uncannily prefigures what will happen to Jews like himself. On the way home from school, Canetti and his friend Max Schiebl, the son of an Austrian general, are approaching the Franzensbrücke, the railroad bridge that spans the Danube canal: A train was standing there, it was stuffed with people staring down at us, mutely, but questioningly. “Those are Galician—” Schiebl said, holding back the word “Jews” and replacing it with “refugees.” Leopoldstadt was full of Galician Jews who had fled the Russians. Their black kaftans, their earlocks, and their special hats made them stand out conspicuously. Now they were in Vienna, where could they go. They had to eat too, and things didn’t look so good for food in Vienna.

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I had never seen so many of them penned together in railroad cars. All the time we kept staring, it never moved from the spot. “Like cattle,” I said, “that’s how they’re squeezed together, and there are also cattle cars.” “Well, they’re so many of them,” said Schiebl, tempering his disgust at them for my sake; he would never have uttered anything that could offend me. But I stood transfixed, and he, standing with me, felt my horror. No one waved at us, no one called, they knew how unwelcome they were and they expected no word of welcome. They were all men and a lot were old and bearded. “You know,” said Schiebl, “our soldiers are sent to the war in such freight cars. War is war, my father says.” Those were the only words of his father’s that he ever quoted to me, and I realized he was doing it to wrench me out of my terror. But it didn’t help, I stared and stared and nothing happened. I wanted the train to start moving, the most horrible thing of all was that the train still stood on the bridge. “Aren’t you coming?” said Schiebl. (Tongue, 110)

This seemingly minor anecdote is paradigmatic of Canetti’s oblique commentary on World War I—a war that not only exploded the geographical and cultural parameters of his childhood but also laid the groundwork for the war to come. It was in the latter years of World War I that Jews from the Eastern Front, fleeing the Russian enemy, escaped to Vienna. The growing presence of these “aliens” was one of the factors that, after the war, accelerated the virulent anti-­Semitism that brought the Nazis to power. Note that Schiebl, the general’s son, characteristically has contempt for these strangers with their earlocks and caftans—strangers who speak a unfamiliar foreign language. Young Canetti’s own vision is more surreal; he sees the people crowded into the cars as so much cattle. No one speaks: the Galicians seem to be as alien to the Jewish Canetti as to his friend, but somehow he senses an (unwanted) affinity to them. For Schiebl, the cattle cars are just the freight cars used in war to dispatch soldiers; there is nothing so unusual about them. But for the young Canetti, the image is unbearable. The boy cannot know, of course, that twenty-­five years later those cattle cars will be transporting Jews just like himself, not to Vienna but away from it. But intuitively he senses the terror. And the Canetti who writes about it knows exactly what happened. The Tongue Set Free contains no battle dispatches, no accounts of fighting in the trenches, and little political discussion of the causes of war, the failures of government, and so on. And yet this one incident, relayed in all its terror, is a searing indictment of the war, which displaced the citizens of what had been a peaceful empire, and forced the growing number of East-

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ern Jews, who were at home in rural Galicia, to seek asylum and food in a city that despised them. It is the migration from the dreaded East that sets the stage for the conflicts of the 1920s—conflicts that were to culminate in the triumph of that leading native son Adolf Hitler. Here and elsewhere throughout the three-­volume autobiography that ends on the eve of World War II, Canetti pre­sents events concretely and graphically but doesn’t draw any sort of moral. Indeed, in the next chapter he moves on to a seemingly unrelated characterization of his mother’s friend Alice Asriel. A De c eler at e d Cro w i ng Go in fear of abstractions! Ezra Pound’s battle cry in his early Imagist manifestos could serve as epigraph to Canetti’s memoirs. Concrete and often stark, the events and incidents put before us in these pages don’t always add up. With rare exceptions, the reader is not told what to think, and the clues can be quite contradictory. Consider, for example, the ambivalence Canetti displays toward his own place, as a Jew from the distant provinces of the empire, in the social fabric of Vienna. In the Rustchuk world, as I noted earlier, the rich Sephardic Jewish families were well positioned in society and experienced little anti-­Semitism. And even in England, despite his teacher’s veiled allusion to Orientals, young Canetti knew little discrimination. But anti-­Semitism, in remission, so to speak, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, takes on a new life with the outbreak of war with Serbia (August 1914), although it was hardly a Jew who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Young Canetti regularly walks home from school with a gangly and awkward boy named Paul Kornfeld. The classroom teacher, Herr Tegel, seeing the boys together, says disapprovingly to Canetti, “You walk with him? You are offending your teacher” (Tongue, 82). Kornfeld explains to Canetti that their schoolmates are harassing both of them because they are Jews, but when Canetti tells his mother about the incident, she brushes it off with the words “That was meant for Kornfeld. Not for you.” From our standpoint today, this remark is shocking in its insensitivity, its lack of solidarity. But Canetti doesn’t seem to find it especially strange. “For her,” he explains, “we were something better, namely Sephardim” (Tongue, 82). It would take years for Canetti to learn that in the eyes of the Nazis, the ranking of Jews would be seen as entirely meaningless. The issue is dropped, but when, in 1919, Canetti is in school in Zurich, he can no longer avoid daily attacks aimed at himself and the other Jewish boy in his class, Färber. “I was so amazed that at first I couldn’t believe it. Until now, no one had ever insulted me” (Torch, 207). Taking up the cause,

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Canetti gathers together the seventeen Jewish students at the school and organizes a petition to the administration, complaining of their treatment and demanding that it stop. At first nothing happens, but in due course the insults and taunts stop, evidently on orders from the headmaster, and the other boys start being friendly again. But it is only a brief respite. In Canetti’s account of his return to Vienna in 1924 to study chemistry at the university, the Jewish question is, at first, curiously set aside. Karl Kraus, Canetti’s new idol, whose inspired lectures are the talk of the town, has been, like so many Viennese Jews, largely assimilated. Born into a large wealthy Jewish family in Moravia, he was baptized a Catholic in 1911 but left the Church a decade later because of his anger at its nonresistance to the war. Given his own cruel attacks on various Jewish publishers, writers, and political figures, he was—and continues to be—accused of Jewish self-­ hatred. Canetti avoids the issue: he wants, rather, to have us see that in the heyday of Red Vienna, the famed editor of Die Fackel was a glorious presence: Kraus hated war, I was told, and during the Great War, he had managed to print many antiwar pieces in Die Fackel, despite the censors. He had exposed corruption, fought against graft. . . . It was a miracle he hadn’t landed in prison. He had written an eight-­hundred-­page play, The Last Days of Mankind, containing everything that had happened in the war. When he read aloud from it, you were simply flabbergasted. No one stirred in the auditorium, you didn’t dare breathe. He read all parts himself, profiteers and generals, the scoundrels and the poor wretches who were the victims of the war—they all sounded as genuine as if they were standing in front of you. Anyone who had heard Kraus didn’t want to go to the theater again, the theater was so boring compared with him: he was a whole theater by himself, but better, and this wonder of the world, this monster, this genius bore the highly ordinary name of Karl Kraus. (Torch, 66)

The cult of genius, of intellect, of the Great Man, trumps any issue of religious identification or solidarity. When he finally hears Kraus lecture, Canetti is especially enchanted by his voice, “which had something unnaturally vibrating about it like a decelerated crowing [ein verlangsamtes Krähen]” (Torch, 70; Fackel, 83). As for the rhetoric itself, Canetti remarks elsewhere that it depends on two devices: “literalness and horror”12—the literalness of quotation in The Last Days of Mankind that measures the horror of the Great War. Kraus’s

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oratory is now juxtaposed to the equally vehement oratory that Canetti encounters on his “final Danube voyage” back to Bulgaria in the summer of 1924 (Torch, 82). Here, in what is by now a distant world, composed as it is of his remaining relatives (most of whom have moved from Rustchuk to the capital, Sofia), Canetti meets his cousin Bernhard Arditti, who has become an ardent Zionist and is urging the family to immigrate to Palestine. “They weren’t badly off in Bulgaria,” the autobiographer remarks; “there were no persecutions of Jews, no ghettoes, nor was there any oppressive poverty” (Torch, 90). But the call of the Promised Land is powerful, and Arditti castigates his fellow Sephardic Jews for their snobbery, their reluctance to ally with those other Jews (Ashkenazis) whom they considered inferior. He spoke Ladino to them and scourged them for their arrogance, which was based on this language. I was amazed to discover that it was possible to use this language, which I regarded as a stunted language for children and the kitchen; it was possible to speak about universal matters, to fill people with such passion that they earnestly considered dropping everything, leaving a country which took them seriously and respected them, in which they were certainly well off—in order to move to an unknown land that had been promised them thousands of years ago, but didn’t belong to them at this point. (Torch, 91, my emphasis)

Note that Arditti’s blueprint for the Zionist future and Kraus’s apocalyptic vision of Viennese decadence and collapse are not unrelated, although the young Canetti doesn’t see the link at the time. In 1924 Kraus was at the height of his fame; he was certainly “taken seriously and respected.” But the corruption and mendacity he exposed did culminate less than ten years later in the expulsion of the Jews from Vienna to one “unknown land” or another. Perhaps Cousin Bernhard had it right. Canetti himself, however, has opted for the world of the “mother tongue”: “When I told [my cousin] I wanted to write in German and no other language, he shook his head: ‘What for? Learn Hebrew! That’s our language. Do you believe there’s a more beautiful language?’ ” (Torch, 92). It is an alternative Canetti never so much as considered. He is, after all, a citizen of Europe, a child of the empire, an Austro-­German intellectual and artist. It was, he writes, not a “propitious time for Old Austria. The monarchy, having crumbled, was discredited. . . . The dismemberment of Austria, the amazing survival of Vienna—now an oversized capital—as a ‘hydrocephalic’ head, was on everyone’s mind. But by no means did [young people] relinquish the intellectual claim that is part of a metropolis” (Torch, 119, em-

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phasis mine). The cult of Mahler, for example, was at its height; as for issues of religion and politics, “except for everything ordained by Karl Kraus, nothing was definite” (118). These intellectually stimulating days were not to last. The turning point in The Torch in My Ear comes on July 15, 1927, with the setting on fire, by a well-­disciplined “army” of workers, of the Palace of Justice. The workers were demonstrators for the Socialist Party; their attackers were members of the local Frontkämpfer, right-­wing veterans of World War I.13 “The police were ordered to shoot: there were ninety deaths” (Torch, 245). Canetti’s sympathy is entirely with the workers, and yet the event—“the closest thing to a revolution that I have physically experienced”—does not politicize him; rather, it gives him his first real taste of what it means to be part of a crowd—“a modern crowd that had formed without a leader” (Torch, 251). Here is the germ of Crowds and Power (1960), Canetti’s magnum opus that ranges from the rain dances of the Pueblo Indians to the Nazi spectacles of the 1930s. He is especially interested in the First World War, when, in his view, “the whole German people became one open crowd”: Those first August days of 1914 were also the days in which National Socialism was begotten. Hitler himself is our authority for this. He later described how, at the outbreak of war, he fell on his knees and thanked God. It was his decisive experience, the one moment at which he himself honestly became part of a crowd. . . . But Hitler would never have achieved his purpose had not the Treaty of Versailles disbanded the German army. The prohibition on universal military service robbed the Germans of their most essential closed crowd. . . . The prohibition on universal military service was the birth of National Socialism. Every closed crowd which is dissolved by force transforms itself into an open crowd to which it imparts all its own characteristics. The party came to the rescue of the army, and the party had no limits set to its recruitment from within the nation. Every single German—man, woman or child, soldier or civilian—could become a National Socialist. (Crowds and Power, 181)

This controversial statement is of course retroactive: at the time, as Canetti recalls it in The Torch in My Ear, he was happy to ignore events in Germany, enjoying his increasing role in Viennese literary and art circles. In The Play of the Eyes he alludes only briefly to Hitler’s coming to power in 1933—“everything that happened from then on seemed sinister and of evil omen” (Play, 89)—while most of this volume is taken up with discussions of Canetti’s own writing (especially his play The Wedding), his relationships with Musil, Broch, Anna Mahler, Alban Berg, his romance with his

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wife-­to-­be, Veza, and so on. The rise of anti-­Semitism is barely at issue. At the end of this, the third volume of Canetti’s memoir, Anschluss and World War II are still in the future. Claudio Magris has remarked that Canetti’s autobiography, “which seems to be saying everything, hides an absence, a kind of black hole that seems to be swallowing up the essential truth of this life” (Magris, 284). Like Kien, the antihero of his great novel Auto-­da-­Fe, the Canetti of the memoirs “perfects his own blindness in order not to have to perceive the myriad aggressions of things” (Magris, 278). What we have, in other words, is an autobiography that does everything in its power to avoid being auto-­biography. Canetti always prided himself on knowing how to hear, to listen to the words of others and mimic their speech patterns: from Karl Kraus he learned “that one can do anything with other people’s words” (Torch, 220). “This kind of hearing was impossible unless you excluded your own feelings. . . . The important thing was the pure, unadulterated shape: none of these acoustic masks (as I subsequently named them) could blend with the others” (220, my emphasis). It’s not that one doesn’t have feelings (Canetti’s own were especially complicated, given the Oedipal relationship to his mother and stormy love affairs with a series of women), but they are finally, so Canetti felt, much less important than the words that can never quite capture the essence of those feelings—words that create their own world. Wor d At tac k s In a 1969 address at the Bavarian Academy of the Fine Arts, Canetti begins with the disclaimer “I am only a guest in the German language, which I learned at the age of eight. . . . I cannot even regard it as a credit that I held on to German when I came to England over thirty years ago [as an exile from the Nazis] and decided to remain. For continuing to write in German there was as much a matter of course as breathing and walking. I could not have done otherwise, another possibility was never even considered.”14 But the writer’s relation to that language—in this case German—becomes much more self-­conscious. “One compared more, especially in the most everyday phrases, in which the differences were conspicuous and palpable” (Conscience, 140). Thus the core language becomes “more private and more intimate. . . . Among all these people who speak their daily things in English, one has a secret language for oneself, which serves no outer purposes anymore . . . to which one clings more and more obstinately, the way people may cling to a faith that is taboo in their greater environment” (141). It is, Canetti insists, “the words themselves that do not let one go. . . . The peculiar strength and energy of words can be felt most strongly when one is

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often forced to replace them with others” (141). In his early years of exile in England during World War II, Canetti recalls, he “filled page after page with German words . . . isolated words, never yielding any sense. . . . Very often they were nouns, but not exclusively; there were also verbs and adjectives among them” (142). All the more odd that Canetti’s syntactic structures and tropes are so readily translatable. In composing my own essay here, designed primarily for an Anglophone audience, I have rarely felt the need to supply the German original for a particular quotation in parentheses. For the fact is that Canetti was not a poet; he was not even, except perhaps in Auto-­da-­Fe, a remarkable stylist. Compare for example, the opening of “Geburt des Bruders” to its English equivalent in “My Brother’s Birth”: In der frühesten Zeit, als ich noch in einem hohen Kinderstuhl steckte, kam es mir sehr weit bis zum Boden vor . . . (Zunge, 24) At a very early time, when I was still in a highchair, the floor seemed very far away . . . (Tongue, 14)

To my ear, this charming representation of infant fear is equally effective in both languages. The words are not ambiguous, the syntax is uncomplicated. What then of those “word attacks” Canetti talks of in his academy speech? Perhaps the answer is that Canetti’s is the language of the always already translated. Familiar as he was with so many different languages and not wholly at home in any one of them, not even his “mother-­tongue,” he intuitively looked for words and syntactic constructions that would “go” in the other language. In the exile, both mental and physical, that was his lifelong fate—an exile that, however unconsciously, undermined the likelihood of real intimacy with his peers, whether Austrian, German, English, French, Bulgarian, or Romanian, or his fellow Jews—Canetti was, so to speak, writing in translation. From his origins in the provincial towns of the lower Danube to his residence in the capitals of Europe, his cosmopolitanism, astonishing in its energy and erudition, almost covers his tracks. Yet there is also a curious absence. Despite the striking incidents recounted, the dramatic events described, and the dialogues with others carefully cited, we never really come to know the author. The quirks of others are carefully noted, but never his own. It is as if the ability to weave in and out of so many languages, coupled with the loss of any place that could be called “home” (Canetti spent his last years in the ultimate “international” refuge, Switzerland), resulted in a loss of identity that no clever character sketches or descriptions of place could recover. “The tongue set free” thus becomes

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the emblem less of one particular individual than of a cultural condition. Such “identity theft,” we should note, is the very antithesis of Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre.” Whereas Rimbaud (and Baudelaire before him) cultivated the Other (le Voyant) as strenuously as possible so as to transcend the everyday ordinary self that, in W. B. Yeats’s words, “speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table,”15 Canetti took himself to be chronicling, quite simply, how it was. But how was it? Canetti’s is neither the visionary nor the realistic mode. He is the supreme ironist, plotting out, bit by bit, a world in which the ardent humanism its chronicler professes—his passion for art, the intellectual life, and for Great Men—no longer makes sense. At the end of The Play of the Eyes, this language expert, so “cosmopolitan” and worldly, remarks, “One feels threatened by words one does not understand, one turns them over in one’s mind in an attempt to blunt them, but they are repeated and in repetition become more menacing than ever” (Play, 318).

CHAPTER FIVE

The Last Habsburg Poet Paul Celan’s Love Poetry and the Limits of Language

How did you translate Heimat? Heimat is an untranslatable word. And does the concept even exist? It’s a human fabrication, an illusion. Pau l Cel an , in conversation with Jean Daive1

The publication in 2008 of the correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan2 was treated by the literary press as a major event—a tale with the aura of Hollywood film. In post–­World War II Vienna, dark and handsome Jewish Holocaust survivor from Czernowitz, on the distant eastern border of the old Austro-­Hungarian Empire (after World War I officially Romania), meets and falls in love with beautiful blonde Austrian Catholic girl, the daughter of an SS officer from a Carinthian village in the so-­called Dreiländereck between Italy, Slovenia, and German-­speaking Austria (see plate 1).3 Celan is twenty-­eight, already considered a promising poet; Bachmann is twenty-­three, completing a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger at the University of Vienna and also beginning to make her name as a poet. Both have received, as was customary in the years entre deux guerres in both Czernowitz and Klagenfurt, a classical German education on the Viennese model. Both poets, in their youth, regard Vienna as the City of their Dreams, their magic goal. “Within reach, though far enough, what I could aim to reach, was Vienna,” Celan recalls in his acceptance speech for the Bremen Prize in 1958.4 Similarly, Bachmann writes: When the war was over, I left [my village] and came, full of impatience and great expectations, to Vienna, which, to my imagination, seemed unattainable. It became my home on a new border: between East and West, between a great past and a dark future. And when later I traveled to Paris and London, Germany and Italy, the journey was minor because in my memory the road from my valley to Vienna will always be the longest.5

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But once in the capital, both poets are deeply disappointed: the Vienna of 1948, the divided and occupied city made famous by Orson Welles’s The Third Man, is hardly kaiserlich und königlich. Poor, depressed, and demoralized, Vienna holds too many memories of its recent Nazi past. Within eight months Celan moves on to Paris, where he will marry an aristocratic Frenchwoman, Gisèle de Lestrange, become the father of a son, Eric, and settle for the rest of his life. The year of Celan’s marriage, 1953, Bachmann leaves Vienna to live restlessly in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Both poets attain success quite readily, going on to be published widely and win the top literary prizes. Both have nervous breakdowns, make suicide attempts, and, in the 1960s, spend extended periods in mental hospitals. In 1970, when he is just fifty, Celan drowns himself in the Seine; in 1973 Bachmann, then forty-­six, is burned to death in a hotel fire in Rome—a fire caused by smoking, quite possibly also a suicide. Not quite a Hollywood ending after all. Indeed, the love affair between the two poets was from the first as traumatic as it was passionate. After the initial bliss of Vienna, misunderstanding and recrimination set in, so that every letter sets up new psychological roadblocks. But in October 1957 the two meet at a Wuppertaler Bund conference on literary criticism and the affair is renewed, this time much more ardently on Celan’s part: he dedicates the bulk of the poems in Sprachgitter (1959) to Bachmann.6 Initially deeply in love, she soon has misgivings, presumably because of Celan’s wife and child, and by May 1958 the affair is over. In November, Bachmann moves in with the Swiss writer Max Frisch. Love now gives way to troubled friendship, centering on the painful accusations of plagiarism leveled against Celan by the widow of the French poet Yvan Goll.7 But there is a further complication, one that students of Celan knew nothing about until very recently, when a surprising new memoir appeared in Germany. Between 1952 and 1962, the main decade of his passionate correspondence with Bachmann, the supposedly happily married Celan was also having an entirely secret and serious affair with another young Austrian woman, again of Catholic background—Brigitta Eisenreich. In her Celan’s Kreidestern (Chalk Star) of 2011, Eisenreich, a distinguished anthropologist living in Paris, details her childhood in Linz, her family’s monarchist anti-­Nazi convictions, her revulsion to the Hitlerzeit, and her postwar decision to emigrate from an unpromising Austria to France. At the time she met Celan through her novelist brother, she was a twenty-­four-­year-­old Sorbonne student, supporting herself as an au pair. For a decade Eisenreich saw Celan a few times a week; he would appear under her seventh-­story window, whistling the central motif of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, and

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she would let him in. A year into the affair she became pregnant, and Celan paid for her to go to Berlin to have an abortion. When she returned a week later, depressed and anxious, there was no one at the train to meet her. But like Bachmann, Eisenreich was soon captivated again. Once again, poetry plays a major role in the affair, Celan often presenting Eisenreich with the same lyrics he sent to Ingeborg or dedicated to his wife Gisèle. “There is no doubt,” Eisenreich says with some asperity, that this charming poet was also “a seducer [Ein Verführer], with a definite repertoire of magical arts [Zauberkünsten].”8 Celan, Bachmann, Eisenreich: surely all three were psychologically damaged people, victims each in their own way of the events of war that changed their lives forever. Indeed, presented in skeleton outline, Celan’s painful story may bring to mind Adorno’s now notorious declaration that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”9 But it wasn’t the writing of poetry that was impossible for Celan or Bachmann—on the contrary, both were remarkably productive and admired prize-­winning writers—it was life itself. For both poets—and, for that matter, for Brigitta Ehrenreich as well—the condition of exile is accompanied by the peculiar statelessness that had resulted, well before World War II, from the demise of the Austrian-­Hungarian Empire at the end of the preceding war. When, in 1918, that empire suddenly vanished, so did its polyglot multiethnic identity. As Bachmann puts it in a 1955 interview: “The political and cultural uniqueness of Austria—which cannot be understood in terms of its geography because its borders are not really geographical ones—has been much too little understood. Poets like Grillparzer and Hofmannsthal, Rilke and Robert Musil could never have been Germans. The Austrians participated in so many cultures and developed a different sense of the world from the Germans.”10 Wittgenstein, the first German edition of whose Philosophical Investigations appeared in 1960, largely through Bachmann’s initiative, is a case in point. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”—the famous proposition (5.6) in the Tractatus—was made by a philosopher in exile from his own language, one never quite at home in his adopted language and hence conscious of every syntactic nuance and every verbal misunderstanding.11 The contrast with the German Heidegger, who conceived of language as the coming into being of thought, is telling.12 “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” If this is the case, what happens when a particular linguistic formation, with its particular dialects, idioms, colloquialisms, and set of references, has been lost? This is a question that has been largely ignored in the case of both Celan and Bachmann, critical inquiry having been focused for decades now on

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Celan’s repudiation of the German language itself, as it became indelibly associated in the poet’s mind with the language of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. In a much-­cited statement of Celan’s, we read: No matter how alive its traditions, with most sinister events in its memory, most questionable developments around it, [German poetry] can no longer speak the language which many willing ears seem to expect. Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts “beauty.” It tries to be truthful. If I may search for a visual analogy while keeping in mind the polychrome of apparent actuality: it is a “greyer” language, a language which wants to locate even its “musicality” in such a way that it has nothing in common with the “euphony” which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horrors.13

Given this reaction to German, Celan might well have followed the example of the many writers—one thinks immediately of his contemporary Beckett—who emigrated and chose to write in the language of their adopted countries.14 Like Beckett’s, for that matter, Celan’s daily life in Paris was conducted in French. But although he produced brilliant translations from the French (curiously enough, both he and Beckett translated Rimbaud’s Bateau ivre), as well as from Russian and English, he insisted that when it came to one’s own poetry, only one’s native language would do. “Only in one’s mother tongue,” he told his first love, Ruth Lackner, in the early 1940s, “can one express one’s own truth, in a foreign language the poet lies.”15 And not only one’s mother tongue but, as Celan was to put it many years later, a purified version of it: I do not believe there is such a thing as bilingual poetry. Double-­talk, yes, this you may find among our various contemporary arts and acrobatics of the word, especially those which manage to establish themselves in blissful harmony with each fashion of consumer culture, being as polyglot as they are polychrome. Poetry is by necessity a unique instance of language. Hence never— forgive the truism, but poetry, like truth, goes all too often to the dogs— hence never what is double.16

To avoid such “doubleness,” the poet must reconstruct the language itself. In a much-­quoted passage from the Bremen Prize speech of 1958, Celan declares: “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through ter-

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rifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.”17 Taking Celan’s own lead here, commentators have come to regard Celan’s as, in the words of Angel Fioretos, “a language which appears at odds with itself.”18 Celan, writes Anne Carson, “is a poet who uses language as if he were always translating.”19 Pierre Joris, the leading Celan translator, a poet who has grappled for years with the poet’s curious neologisms and knotty compounds, insists that “Celan’s is truly an invented German”: Celan’s language, though German on the surface, is a foreign language, even for native speakers. Although German was his mother tongue and the Kultursprache of his native Bukovina, it was also, and in an essential way, his other tongue. Celan’s German is an eerie, nearly ghostly language; it is both mother-­tongue, and thus firmly anchored in the realm of the dead, and a language the poet has to make up, to re-­create, to re-­ invent, to bring back to life.20

And in his Aesthetic Theory (2002), Adorno, who praises Celan as “the most important contemporary representative of German hermetic poetry,” writes, with reference to the late poetry, “Celan’s poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes negative. They imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings, indeed beneath all organic language: It is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars.”21 A language beneath all organic language, a language that comes to us composed of what Derrida calls, in his famous essay on Celan, “circumcised” words.22 The ne plus ultra of this case for Celan’s “invention” of German may be found in a 2013 encomium in Poetry magazine by the young Russian émigré poet Ilya Kaminsky, who has chosen to write his own lyric in English. In his “Of Strangeness That Wakes Us,” Kaminsky claims that “[Celan] had to contend with the inadequacy of the German language to express the experience of the Jewish poet, post-­Holocaust. His is the lyricism of privacy,” his relationship to the German language “almost cryptogrammic.”23 The difficulty with these formulations is that they are based on the assumption that the poet’s “mother tongue” was, of course, German. Here, for example, is Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe: Celan was not just at the extreme fringes of Mitteleuropa; he was of German birth, born into that language. In a true and understandably for-

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gotten sense, his nationality was German. This did not in any way preclude his having a completely different origin, or to be more precise, a completely different heritage. Thus, his language always remained that of the Other, an Other language without an “other language,” previously rather than laterally acquired, against which to measure itself.24

But the fact is that Celan was not German; he came from a city on the eastern border of the Habsburg Empire—a city 750 miles from Berlin and 1,000 from Frankfurt—and his East European ancestors certainly did not acquire their German idiolect in Germany. In the multiethnic provinces of Celan’s—or, for that matter, Bachmann’s—youth, “German” was embedded in a network of other languages: Romanian, Russian, Polish, Slovenian, Croatian, Yiddish, Italian. No one knew only one language; Kafka and Musil grew up in what is now Czechoslovakia, Canetti in Bulgaria, Georg Lukács in Hungary. Bachmann spoke Slovenian, Italian, and French; in Malina, the heroine notes that “Malina was . . . from the Yugoslav border like myself; sometimes we still speak to each other in Slovenian or Windish, a few words, as in the first days: Jaz in ti. In ti in jaz.” And Ivan, the narrator’s lover, born in Pécs, Hungary, refers to his children as the gyrekek.25 As for Celan, by the time he entered gymnasium he knew German, Romanian, French, Hebrew, and some Russian. The German language may be the “mother tongue,” but it is Austrian German, with its own much softer accent, its dialect variations, idioms, neologisms, and compounds. Indeed, those exotic compounds that provide the very titles Celan used, beginning with the 1959 volume Sprachgitter (Speechgrille)—Die Niemandsrose (The Noone’s Rose), Atemwende (Breathturn), Fadensonnen (Threadsuns), Lichtzwang (Lightduress)—are much more likely to occur in a language that inevitably turns to combination in the process of absorbing the “purer” forms of the dominant languages. To an Austrian ear like my own, in any case, Celan’s neologisms and phrasing do not sound or look like translations or cryptograms. Consider these lines from Atemwende: weggebeizt vom Strahlenwind deiner Sprache26

In the polyglot empire, where grammatical rules were not always strict, Weggebeizt (weg [away] + gebeitz) would probably have been understood as the past participle of beißen (to bite) and hence mean “bitten away.” But the actual past participle of beißen is gebissen; gebeitz is the past participle of a different verb: beizen, to corrode.27 Strahlen are beams, here probably sunbeams or sunrays that color the windy air. So in English we would have

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“Bitten away by” or “Corroded away by” the “beaming [or sparkling] wind of your speech.”28 Corroded and bitten are semantically cognate—both referring to the destruction of one thing by another—and the conjunction of the two words phonetically makes the action quite graphic. An invented language? Well, yes, in the sense that Emily Dickinson “invented” a language, but no one has ever argued that, however strange, Dickinson’s is not American English. Brigitta Eisenreich recalls that Celan regularly asked her to recite poetry because her accent reminded him of his mother Fritzi, who spoke “Prager Deutsch . . . the authentic lingua austriaca, as I too spoke it.” “I knew too,” Eisenreich adds, “how much the various voyages to Germany depressed him, although, as he confessed, he missed the daily immersion in the spoken [German] word. No doubt he came to me—perhaps this was his primary motive—to find a substitute [Ersatz] for this missing element” (Eisenreich, 44–45). A substitute for a missing language: in a similar vein, Celan regularly appealed for help to Ingeborg Bachmann, as the kindred spirit who could show him how to navigate what he called the German “jungle’’—an environment where, on Celan’s first postwar visit in 1952, a fellow member of Gruppe 47 remarked maliciously that this poet from Austrian provinces recited his poems “in a singsong straight out of a synagogue.”29 As in the case of Brigitta, Paul turned to Ingeborg for a sense of familiarity that neither the Paris of his family life nor the Germany where he lectured, published, and gave readings could supply. Indeed, Celan himself quipped that he was “a belated child of the old Vienna,” a “posthumously born Kakanier.”30 A Kakanier, let’s recall, whose real name was Paul Antschel. O u t of C z er no w i t z In the afterword to the edition of her correspondence with Paul Celan, Ilana Shmueli, the poet’s childhood friend, whose family immigrated to Israel right after the war, describes the city of their youth as follows: Old Czernowitz, often boastfully referred to as “Little Vienna,” the little bulwark of Western culture . . . on the border of Galicia, with a population that was more than half Jewish. Religious and emancipated, rich and poor Jews, who hailed from anywhere and had their sights set on many places; Romanians, Ruthenians, Swabians, Poles, Hutsuls, and Gypsies. Czernowitz with its colorful churches [figure 22], its old synagogue [figure 23], the Bishop’s fancy residence, the Hassidic court of the Rabbi of Sadagora on the outskirts. The former kaiserlich-­königlich pro-

F ig u re 2 2 . Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, Czernowitz (built 1864). Wikimedia Commons. Photograph: Detlef Langer, 2007.

F ig u re 2 3 . Czernowitz synagogue (1877).

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vincial metropolis, bordered by the forest of beech trees, with its gardens and fountains, its respectable city center, its Ringplatz [figure 24] and Herrengasse, the elegant facades and neighborhoods of fine residences [plate 8; figure 25]. And below these, the crooked Jewish lanes, the dark courtyards. . . . Life was fast-­paced in this city with its well established bourgeoisie, its communists, Socialist Bund members and Zionists, its students, poets, scholars, and would-­be scholars, with its love of books, its westward gaze. . . . The authorities tried hard to make the city Romanian—in vain. The majority of the Jewish bourgeoisie cherished and loyally defended its Austro-­German “cultural values.” Every “better family” had its library of German Classical and Romantic writers.31

Austro-­German cultural values: it is this facet that needs emphasis vis-­à-­ vis Celan, who is known primarily as perhaps the greatest Holocaust poet (witness his famous Todesfuge), and regularly referred to as Romanian or vaguely “Eastern European.” But Czernowitz at the time of his birth was only nominally Romanian and hardly the shtetl. After emancipation was granted by Emperor Franz Josef in 1867, German became the native language of the educated population, and the Jews quickly assumed important positions: in the self-­proclaimed Golden Age that followed, Jews constituted one-­third of all students at the German Franz-­Josef-­University, founded in 1875.32 By 1914, when the war began, there were three independent German-­language daily newspapers, several magazines edited by Jewish journalists, and an active circle of Jewish intellectuals and writers. Jews were prominent among landowners, timber merchants, factory owners, and bankers; they made up a large percentage of physicians and lawyers. Even after the war, when Bukovina was deeded to Romania, Czernowitz remained, as Israel Chalfen notes, essentially “a German-­language Jewish city”—a city in which Jews and Christians were on good terms. “Everywhere in the city one could hear their Bukovinian German, with its Austrian informality and Slavic breadth, and interwoven with Yiddish idioms” (Chalfen, 13). In Shmueli’s words, “the German that was spoken in Czernowitz was infamous for its contorted grammar, its arcane vocabulary, and turns of speech” (Shmueli, 142). Leo Antschel, Paul’s father, was a timber broker, by no means affluent, but he and his wife Fritzi (Schrager) were able to send their only child to the city’s most exclusive and expensive kindergarten, where German remained the language of instruction. As Chalfen puts it, “They considered no sacrifice too great for their son’s expensive tuition. Paul was to enter the city’s

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F ig u re 2 4 . Gruss aus Czernowitz, Ringplatz (ca. 1895).

F ig u re 2 5 . Theater, Czernowitz (built 1905) Photograph: Sasha-­korol, 2010.

best social circles, keep his German mother tongue as pure as possible, take up an intellectual job, and live in honor and prosperity. They were also concerned about his Jewish education, especially his father. . . . To [his mother] the German language was more important, and all her life she saw to it that correct, formal German was spoken at home—she did not tolerate the colloquial Bukovinian dialect” (Chalfen, 41). Fritzi’s was the lingua austriaca that Brigitta Eisenreich refers to in her

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F igure 26. Classic Tyrolean loden wool jacket, early 1930s.

memoir. The precocious Paul was soon reading Goethe’s Faust, and later, when, after a stint at a conservative and increasingly anti-­Semitic gymnasium, he attended the very liberal Habsburg-­oriented Liceul [Lycée] Marele Voevod Mihai, he read Goethe, Kleist, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Kafka, along with the French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, who were to remain among his favorites. After his bar mitzvah in 1933, he evidently refused to have anything further to do with institutionalized Judaism, which he associated with his difficult father, an early Zionist sympathizer. Indeed, he took the opposite route: for his twelfth birthday his Viennese relatives had brought him a Tyrolean loden jacket, which he adored. “The Tyrolean jacket with green lapels [figure 26], a rarity in the Bukovina,” became, Chalfen tells us, “Paul’s trademark until his last years in the gymnasium. His circle of female friends, which was to form a few years later, found the unusual clothing particularly appealing. The traditional suit was also a link with Vienna, the city of Paul’s longing” (Chalfen, 48). The Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 ended this fantasy abruptly. But from the distance of Bukovina, the meaning of the Nazi takeover was not yet clear. In the autumn the eighteen-­year-­old Paul set out for France: he had enrolled in the school of medicine at Tours and thus got to spend time in Paris before returning in the summer of 1939. War broke out on September 1, but given the Hitler–­Stalin Non-­aggression Pact, Romania was under fairly lax Soviet occupation. In the interim Paul, obviously unable to return to France, switched from medicine to the study of Romance languages at Czernowitz University, embarked on his first serious love affair (with Ruth Lackner), and met regularly with his literary coterie to read, translate, and write poetry. Ironically, these were productive and exciting years for him. But with the breaking of the Hitler–­Stalin Pact in June 1941, the immediate arrival of German troops, the creation of the first ghetto in Czernowitz, and soon the deportations of the Jews to nearby camps, Paul’s whole world col-

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lapsed. On a fateful Saturday in June 1942, he evidently quarreled with his mother, who refused to join him and Ruth in their factory hideout; the following morning he returned to the family home only to find it boarded up, his parents having been arrested and deported. He was never to see them again. The combination of filial guilt, fear for his own life, and exhaustion from heavy manual work in the forced labor camps was overwhelming. In 1944, when the second Soviet occupation began—this one as brutal as its Nazi counterpart—the poet had to undergo a new round of forced labor and daily humiliation. Only at war’s end could he finally leave Czernowitz for Bucharest, and from there, after two more years, he crossed the Romanian–­ Hungarian border and with difficulty reached Vienna, now in ruins. Paul Antschel was twenty-­eight years old. How does someone who was previously petted and spoiled by his adoring mother and admired by his community as a charming and gifted young man survive the incidents just cited? In Paul’s case, the reaction was delayed. Writing from Vienna to his closest friend in Bucharest, Peter Solomon, he refers regretfully to the “too short season which was ours, cette belle saison des calembours, who knows when it will happen again, now that we don’t play anymore Question-­Réponse.”33 The reference is to the Surrealist game Le Cadavre exquis. According to his American translators, Julian Semalian and Sanda Agalidi, Paul was not just being polite to his friend; in his first months in Bucharest, he was enjoying his new freedom, meeting local poets and artists, and engaging with the Surrealist cenacle then active. Writing poetry in Romanian, moreover, had, as his translators note, the effect of destabilizing his native German in significant ways. He had, of course, spoken Romanian from childhood on but had never thought of writing in what he had been taught to regard as a minor language. But now, in the first phase of his exile, writing in Romanian provided an opening of the field. Celan’s Bucharest poems, most of them in free verse but including eight prose poems, are exercises in the Surrealism that was then the dominant mode imported from France. Hallucinatory, fragmentary, replete with conceit and catachresis, they differ markedly from the poems written in German just a few years earlier. Here, for example, is the third stanza of a love poem of 1944, “Der Pfeil der Artemis” (“The Arrow of Artemis”), written in Czernowitz: Wie soll, der über himmelblauen Kies sich mit den Nymphen drehte, leicht, nicht denken, daß ein Pfeil der Artemis im Wald noch irrt und ihn zuletzt erreicht?

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How should he who, above sky-­blue pebbles, used to spin round lightly with the nymphs, not ponder that Artemis’s arrow still lurks in the forest and in the end will strike him?34

Compare this rhyming iambic pentameter stanza, with its rather conventional nature imagery and references to Greek myth, to “Love Song,” written in Romanian a year or so later: When the nights begin for you at dawn Our phosphorescent eyeballs will scurry down from the walls, chiming walnuts, You’ll juggle with them and a wave will crash in through the window, Our single shipwreck, the translucent floor through which we’ll peer at the vacant room below our own; You’ll furnish it with your walnuts and I’ll suspend your tresses, curtains for the window, Someone will come and it will, at last, be rented. We’ll return upstairs to drown alone at home. (Romanian Poems, 27)

Here, in a characteristically Surrealist reversal, the lovers fall not down but upward: the “shipwreck” of their sexual union is defined as sudden rise, a jet of passion that throws them “upstairs to drown alone at home.” The poem’s lighthearted tone, playful eroticism, and extravagant metaphor (e.g., phosphorescent eyeballs as chiming walnuts) strike an entirely new note in the young poet’s oeuvre—a note underscored, at this crossroads in his life, by the metamorphosis of Paul Antschel into Paul Celan. It happened as follows. Penniless in Bucharest, Paul found work as a Russian translator for the now Soviet-­sponsored Romanian regime. As Chalfen tells it: [Paul] was entrusted with the translation of . . . The Peasants by Chekhov and the play “The Russian Problem” by Konstantin Simonov. This play was to be performed in the Romanian National Theater, and its successful translation was expressly praised in the play’s program. But since anti-­Semitism was still widespread in Romania, and Paul’s last name sounded too Jewish, he had to choose a pseudonym in both cases. So the Chekhov volume is signed by the translator “Paul Aurel,” and in Simonov’s play the translator’s name appears as “A. Pavel.” In the later case

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Paul’s first name became a Romanian last name, and the Jewish last name became an initial. (Chalfen, 183)

The process of transformation was now irreversible. When Paul translated Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Times, he was allowed to sign his own name to it—but in Romanian orthography Antschel became Ancel. And then in 1947, when four of his own poems were accepted for an anthology of English, French, and German poetry under the title35 Agora, Number 1, he signed his name Paul Celan—an anagram of Ancel. Within the year (May 20, 1948), Ingeborg Bachmann would write to her parents: “Today something else happened. The surrealist poet Paul Celan, whom I had just met two nights earlier with [Hans] Weigel, and who is very fascinating, has, splendidly enough fallen in love with me, which adds a little spice to my dreary work. Unfortunately he has to go to Paris in a month. My room is a poppy field at the moment, as he inundates me with this flower.”36 This sounds idyllic enough: the new “fascinating” lover who compensates for the dull daily round of work, the daily gift of beautiful flowers. In a later note Ingeborg talks of the “festive evening” Paul planned for her birthday. But she knows little about Celan: in one of her first letters to Paris, she writes, “I [long to] take your strange, dark head between my hands and want to push the stones off your chest, free your hand with the carnations and hear you sing” (#5). Or again, “To me, you are from India or some ever more remote, dark brown country; for me, you are the desert and the sea and everything that is secret. I still know nothing about you and often fear for you because of it” (#7). Paul was, at least initially, quite happy to play this role of dark stranger. His very first letter to Ingeborg, delivered in Vienna with a book of Matisse reproductions, contains the poem “In Ägypten” (“In Egypt”), with the dedication “For Ingeborg”: Du sollst zum Aug der Fremden sagen: Sei das Wasser! Du sollst die Du im Wasser weißt, im Aug der Fremden suchen Du sollst sie rufen aus dem Wasser: Ruth! Noëmi! Mirjam! Du sollst sie schmücken, wenn du bei der Fremden liegst. Du sollst sie schmücken mit dem Wolkenhaar der Fremden. Du sollst zu Ruth und Mirjam und Noëmi sagen: Seht, ich schlaf bei ihr! Du sollst die Fremde neben dir am schönsten schmücken. Du sollst sie schmücken mit dem Schmerz um Ruth, um Mirjam und Noëmi

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Du sollst zur Fremden sagen: Sieh, ich schlief bei diesen! You shall say to the stranger’s eye: be the water! You shall seek in the stranger’s eye those you know to be in the water. You shall call them from the water: Ruth! Naomi! Miriam! You shall adorn them when you lie with the stranger. You shall adorn them with the cloud-­hair of the stranger. You shall say to Ruth, to Miriam and Naomi: See! I sleep beside her! You shall adorn the stranger next to you most beautifully of all. You shall adorn her with the pain over Ruth, over Miriam and Naomi. You shall say to the stranger: See! I slept beside these!37

Unlike the fragmented, condensed, and elliptical later poems, with their curious neologisms and portmanteau words, “In Egypt” avoids syntactic and verbal ambiguities; its only even remotely obscure word is Wolkenhaar (“cloud-­hair”), which in the context almost surely refers to the beloved’s pubic hair. And yet even this early poem is difficult and disquieting. A litany with its nine commandments addressed in oracular tones to the poet himself, “In Egypt” appears as an almost blasphemous version of the Decalogue: it gives notice to the poet’s former lovers, those women of Israel with the great biblical names—Ruth, Naomi, Miriam—that in his “Egyptian” exile, the poet will turn, has already turned, to a stranger; that hers will now be the baptismal water in which he bathes. But conversely the stranger is made to understand that she is in the direct line of those others—the earlier loved ones whose memory can’t be erased. The Ruth of the Old Testament is of course herself an exile from her native land, Naomi (in German transliterated Noëmi) is her Jewish mother-­in-­law, Miriam is the prophetess sister of Moses. But Naomi Ruth was also the name of Celan’s first serious love— the Ruth Lackner with whom he was spending the night in Czernowitz on the evening his parents were deported by the Nazis.38 Thus even though the stranger is to be given pride of place and adorned more beautifully than her predecessors, her superior finery is made of the very pain the poet has suffered at the loss of the others. And the poem ends with the reminder to his new mistress—almost a threat, given the final exclamation point—“See! I slept beside these!” One can read “In Egypt” as a passionate homage to the poet’s new love—

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the enticing stranger who finally allows him to forget his past. Celan himself later construed it this way: in a letter written ten years later, when the old love flared up again, he tells Bachmann, “Think of ‘In Ägypten’: Every time I read it, I see you step into the poem: you are the reason for living [der Lebensgrund], not least because you are, and will remain, the justification for my speaking [die Rechtfertigung meines Sprechens]” (IBPC, #53). But the poem itself is hardly as worshipful. Ingeborg as “the justification of my speaking”? Perhaps, but the newly chosen stranger is also a conduit that connects the poet’s present to the past of Ruth, of Naomi, of Miriam. Indeed, in the poem present and past, “Egypt” and “Israel,” are at once sharply differentiated and yet, in another sense, curiously indistinguishable. There is no resolution. Tellingly, “In Egypt” is dedicated to the “painfully precise one” (Der peinlich genauen) from her “painfully imprecise” (Der peinlich ungenaue) admirer. Celan, who in principle advocated precision in poetry as avidly as did Bachmann, came to dislike all definite references to a past that had to be erased, as did the geography of his childhood and youth in the Bukovina. In the love poems for Ingeborg (or indeed in his love poems in general), the present, however shadowed by oblique echoes, must be central. Erotic union in Celan’s practice can only be understood as happening now—or at least in a series of nows—and the scene of encounter tends to be abstract. Where are we? What were we? What, for that matter, will we be? Such questions are irrelevant. It is the moment that counts. As he will put it in “Corona,” “it is time for it to be time.” F ö hn i ge s D u “My room,” Bachmann writes her parents shortly after meeting Paul, “is a poppy field at the moment, as [Paul] inundates me with this flower.” It is a curious choice. The poppy, after all, is the flower of sleep and death. The oxymoronic phrase “poppy and memory” (Mohn und Gedächtnis), the title of Celan’s second collection (1952), first appears in one of the key poems of the Vienna period, “Corona,” which Ingeborg in a letter to Paul of June 24, 1949, calls “your most beautiful poem” (IBPC, #7). Here is the stanza in question: Mein Aug steigt hinab zum Geschlecht der Geliebten: wir sehen uns an, wir sagen uns Dunkles, wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis, wir schlafen wie Wein in den Muscheln, wie das Meer im Blutstrahl des Mondes.

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My eye moves down to the sex of the loved one: we look at each other, we say dark things to each other, we love each other like poppy and memory, we sleep like wine inside seashells, like the sea in the moon’s bloody light.39

Mohn und Gedächtnis, forgetting and remembering: for Celan, as for the English Metaphysical poets he so admired, sex is always close to death. To “sleep like wine” in the confinement of a seashell is at once pleasurable and ominous in its obliviousness to the sea outside it—the sea that in its turn sleeps, oblivious to the bloody moonbeams reflected on its surface. “Corona” begins as a variant of Rainer Marie Rilke’s famous “Herbsttag” (“Herr, es ist Zeit . . .”), that mournful ode to autumn. But in the first stanza of “Corona,” autumn is seen as the poet’s ally, eating the falling leaves out of his hand: Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde. Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn. Die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale. Autumn is eating a leaf from my hand: we are friends. We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk: Time goes back into its shell.

The second line here alludes, I think, to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (“Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run”)—a poem Celan praises in a later letter to Bachmann (IBPC, #55).40 As in Marvell, the note is one of sardonic carpe diem: the poet knows only too well that time can’t be stopped, that it is already “go[ing] back into its shell.” But for the moment (next stanza), “Im Spiegel ist Sonntag, / im Traum wird geschlafen, / der Mund redet wahr” (In the mirror it’s Sunday, / in dreams people sleep, / the mouth tells the truth). The reversal of norms here is telling: only in dreams, the poet implies, do lovers really sleep; only for a Sunday moment can the mouth tell the truth. In the third stanza, the seemingly matter-­of-­fact gaze at the “sex of my loved one,” as well as the looks and “dark” words exchanged, continue the spell. But poppy is accompanied by memory, and in the fourth stanza, reality intrudes:

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Wir stehen umschlungen im Fenster, sie sehen uns zu von der Straße: es ist Zeit, daß man weiß! Es ist Zeit, daß der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt, daß der Unrast ein Herz schlägt, Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird. Es ist Zeit. Embracing, we stand in the window; they watch us from the street: it is time that they knew! It is time that the rock consent to blossom, that unrest make a heart beat, It is time for it to be time. It is time.

Like Adam and Eve exposed after the Fall, the embracing lovers are now aware of being seen by outsiders. The poet is defiant: “It is time that they knew,” time for the rock to be willing to blossom, time for love to declare itself. But as we come to the end of the poem, the tone has turned somber. The last “it is time,” coming as it does after a moment of silence, sounds like a warning—“Hurry up please, it’s time!” The moment is frozen. And we remember that the corona of the title connotes not just a crown or wreath or aureole of light, but also the crown of thorns. The perfection of the final frozen moment can, in any case, be seen as troubling. And that seems to be the way Bachmann herself read “Corona”: “I have often reflected that ‘Corona’ is your most beautiful poem; it is the complete anticipation of a moment in which everything turns to marble, and remains thus forever. For me here, however, it is not becoming ‘time.’ I hunger for something I shall not receive, and everything is flat and stale, tired and worn out before it is even used” (IBPC, #7: Vienna, June 24, 1949). Rather than reading “Corona” as a passionate love poem, defiant of time and the disapproval of outsiders, Bachmann takes “It is time” as a moment of unfortunate closure when “everything turns to marble.” If “Corona” allows for such opposing interpretations, it is not because its vocabulary or syntax is especially arcane—Bachmann seems to have no difficulty with the poem’s language—but because the context of given statements is curiously absent. “It is time that they knew!” Who are “they”? people in general? former lovers? relatives? What language game is Celan playing here? Unlike the earlier Romanian “Love Song,” with its exotic prop-

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erties likes those “phosphorescent eyeballs, scurry[ing] down the walls,” “Corona” embeds simple concrete expressions in the present tense—“My eye moves down to the sex of the loved one” or “Embracing, we stand in the window, they watch us from the street”—in a series of larger exclamations that have no meaning outside the poem and an equivocal one within it. It is a poetry of context-­deficiency that is nevertheless curiously precise and suggestive in its formal patterning. Consider, for example, the recurrence of ovals, from the shape the poet’s hand makes in line 1 to the nut shell in 2–3 to the wine-­containing mussel in line 11. Austrian literature entre deux guerres was characterized by a deep irony, an irony bordering on cynicism that accompanied extreme disillusion coupled with nostalgia for a loved and lost culture. In the writings of Joseph Roth and Elias Canetti, Karl Kraus and Robert Musil—and of course in Kafka—there is much that is funny, hilarious, grotesque. In its extreme form, such irony culminates in the postwar fiction of Thomas Bernhard, where nothing is held sacred except the power of language to convey the mendacities of one’s neighbors and countrymen. But for Celan—indeed in the Celanian moment—irony is carried to its logical conclusion, which is to say, to a refusal to define, to assert, to take a stand. Under these circumstances, language constructions, as Wittgenstein took such pains to demonstrate in his later writings, become increasingly equivocal and the reader’s role more demanding.41 Celan’s new love lyric, at once erotic and abstract, passionate yet disembodied, ironically masks the particularities of its genesis. We know, for example, that Celan’s second volume, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold) was dedicated to his wife Gisèle, but that dedication did not prevent Celan from sending the very same poems, without the slightest qualm, to Ingeborg or Brigitta. Consider “Weiß und Leicht” (“White and Light”), one of a sequence of poems in the 1959 collection Sprachgitter (Speechgrille) that were dedicated and sent to Ingeborg, this one in its entirety on October 17, 1957, with no comment except the urgent request “Read this, Ingeborg, read this: / For you, Ingeborg, for you.”42 The title as rendered in English is misleading: the adjective leicht, not to be confused with licht (light in the visual sense), means lightweight, easy. In this sense, “Weiß und Licht” looks ahead to the phrase ohne Gewicht (without weight) in the fourth stanza: Weiß, was sich uns regt. ohne Gewicht,

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was wir tauschen. Weiß und Leicht: laß es wandern. White, what moves us. without weight what we exchange white and light: let it drift.

Where are we? Such phrases as “laß es wandern” (let it drift) are casual and colloquial enough, but what is the “it”? The connectives are missing: At the opening, “I” and “you” find themselves in a strange dreamscape where no other human beings seem to exist: “Sicheldünen, ungezählt” (Sickle dunes, uncounted). In the protected “wind-­shadow” (“Windschatten”) or leeward side of those sickle dunes, the arm of the naked speaker seems to have become part of the very body of the beloved, here addressed, in the female, as “Verlorne” (lost one): Die Strahlen. Sie wehen uns zuhauf. Wir tragen den Schein, den Schmerz and den Namen. The rays. They blow us into piles. We bear the shining, the pain and the name.

The love proffered here is intense but hardly a source of joy. Yes, the “you” is central—no one else exists but the lovers—but the empty landscape is cruel, what with those light rays (searchlights?) blowing the lovers about like piles of dead leaves. And it is “we” who must bear the Schein—the German noun means not only shining light but also semblance or counterfeit— an appearance that may deceive.43 Together with Schmerz (pain) and the unnamed “name,” the lovers must evidently bear a great deal. We can read in biographical details and say that the “shining” of ecstasy is coupled with the “pain” and “name” associated with the guilt felt by the adulterous couple: the letters of the period are full of references to “brave” Gisèle (on Paul’s part) and “poor” Gisèle (on Ingeborg’s),44 and the address to “you” as the lost one reinforces this allusion. But we need not let such a literal reading suffice. In the broader sense, “White and Light” pre­sents the contradictory pull of eroticism: the lovers, sheltered as they seem to be from the apocalyptic winds blowing over the dunes, cannot escape the light beams from be-

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yond—beams whose Schein is a reminder of the outside world. Weightless (“Ohne Gewicht”) and drifting—a kind of unbearable lightness of being— the lovers witness the newly formed cliff of sand coming closer, foam rising up from the sea. In the fifth and sixth stanzas, the plural noun Die Stirnen is repeated four times: Die Stirnen winkt es heran, die Stirnen, die man uns lieh, um der Spiegelung willen. Die Stirnen. Wir rollen mit ihnen dorthin. Stirnengestade. The brows it beckons them to come, the brows we were lent for mirroring’s sake. The brows. We roll with them there. Brow-­shore.

The German noun Stirnen more broadly designates foreheads. No eyes, it seems, for these lovers, and no mouths for speaking or kissing: the reference to foreheads marked by brows, mirroring one another, suggests skulls rather than faces, borrowed brows above hollowed-­out eyes that are rolling toward some sort of mound by the shore (Stirnengestade)—a mound that can only refer to corpses. But the death note is muted. “Schläfst du?” (Are you asleep?) asks the lover, receiving no answer. “Sleep,” he urges her, even as the “Meermühle” (sea mill) turns “eishell und ungehört / in unsern Augen” (ice-­bright and unheard, / in our eyes). In the poem’s last lines, the brightness of the light rays has given way to the “ice-­bright” waters of the sea, and in the subtle catachresis of the ending, the eyes of the lovers hear nothing. What, then, is the “weightless” “exchange”—“white and light”—they have made as they “roll” toward the shore of “Lichtschaum und stäubender Welle” (light-­foam and spraying wave)? In the end the reader cannot say—the narrative, a kind of echo-­structure composed of differential light,

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is quite beyond paraphrase—but this is not to say that the poem is Surrealist, and certainly not nonsensical. We know, to begin with, that this is a poem that takes erotic love very seriously but sees that love as always shadowed by something else on the other side of the dune or of the sand cliff— something briefly forgettable for the “you” who is asleep (again the poppy effect) but always there. The sound structure of Celan’s poem reinforces this terrible life–­death tension. In the poem’s predominantly short lines with irregular stress patterns, formal control is achieved by a network of assonance, consonance, and alliteration, as in “Wir tragen den Schein, den Schmerz und den Namen,” or “eishell und ungehört.” Then, too, sound repetition is treated as deceptive: the assonance, for example, of short is found in Windschatten, ich, sich, klippenher winkend, licht, stirnen, winkt, wir, willen emphasizes separation rather than coalescence. And the title itself, with its false sound chiming of Weiss and Leicht, emphasizes difference. On October 14, 1957, after the Wuppertal conference that brought them together, Celan and Bachmann spent the night in Cologne at a hotel called Am Hof, near the cathedral and the banks of the Rhine. The “Hof ” in question is the archbishop’s palace. On October 20, Celan sent Bachmann the poem “Köln, Am Hof ” (“Cologne, Am Hof ”): Herzzeit, es stehn die Geträumten für die Mitternachtziffer.

Heart-­time, there stand the dreamt ones for the midnight numeral.

Einiges sprach in die Stille, einiges schwieg, einiges ging seiner Wege. Verbannt und Verloren waren daheim. . . . . . . . . . Ihr Dome. Ihr Dome ungesehn ihr Ströme unbelauscht, ihr Uhren tief in uns.

Something spoke into the silence, something kept quiet, something went its own way. Banished and lost were at home. ......... You domes. You domes unseen, you streams unlistened to, you clocks deep inside us.45

When Ingeborg does not reply immediately, Paul writes again, urging her to make the “fulfillment into life, Ingeborg, into life.” He wants “to take away the feeling of guilt that awoke in you when the world sank away from me. To take it away from you forever” (IBPC, #49). Ingeborg disagrees:

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If I have to think of [Gisèle] and the child—and I will always have to think about them—I will not be able to embrace you. That is all I know. The fulfillment, you say, must be “Into life.” That is true for the dreamt ones [Die Geträumten]. But are we only the dreamt ones? And has there not always been a fulfillment, and have we not already despaired at life, even now, when we think it is a matter of a step—a step out, a step over, a step together? (IBPC, #52)

Paul rejects Ingeborg’s gloomy prediction that “I will bring destruction again, for her and for you and me” (#52). “Destruction, Ingeborg?” he responds. “No, certainly not. Rather, the truth.” And he adds, “You also know, when I met you, you were both for me: the sensual and the spiritual [das Sinnliche und das Geistige]. The two can never be separate, Ingeborg” (#53, my emphasis). Waiting to be together is not an option: “Life is not going to accommodate us, Ingeborg; waiting for that would surely be the most unfitting way for us to be.” And he shifts attention to his poem: “Is ‘Köln, am Hof’ not a beautiful poem?” he asks. “Höllerer [Celan’s editor] whom I recently gave it to print in Akzente . . . called it one of my most beautiful ones. Through you, Ingeborg, through you. Would it ever have happened if you had not spoken of the ‘dreamt ones’?” Why is the epithet die Geträumten so striking? Normally lovers are of course represented as dreamers, but “the dreamt ones” has peculiar force in emphasizing that each is the object of the other’s dream. To be the one dreamt of by the one of whom one dreams: what more could one want? Celan takes up the question in one of his rare occasional poems, with its composition of place. Köln (Cologne) is a neutral ground for these lovers: neither belongs there nor has special associations with or fondness for the German city. The letter enclosing the poem, moreover, is signed “Paris, Quai Bourbon, Sunday 20 October 1957” (IBPC, #47)—another river, another cathedral (Notre Dame) in view, a later date—as if to undercut the authority of the setting. And indeed, in this minimalist poem, description quickly gives way to displacement: we see neither hotel room nor the lovers, nor even the view from the window. Rather, we are told that it’s “heart-­time” (Herzzeit), on the analogy of lunchtime or bedtime—heart-­time which is also the hour of midnight, as seen on the cathedral clock and perhaps also heard to strike.46 The second stanza, with its unknown source of sounds and silences and its personification of the “banished and lost” (“Verbannt und Verloren”) shifts to abstraction. It has been suggested (see “Notes” in Gedichte, 658) that “Verbannt und Verloren” refers to the Jewish ghetto located in the square in front of the Cologne town hall in the Middle Ages. But recall

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that in “Weiss und Leicht” it is the beloved “you” who is “Die Verlorne.” And those at home at the hour of midnight, even as the voices outside recede into dark alleys and vanish, are after all the lovers themselves: those who, like the couple in John Donne’s “The Good-­Morrow,” a poem Celan admired and translated, “make one little room an everywhere.”47 He is Verbannt, she Verloren. Alone together, the dreamt ones are oblivious to their surroundings: the cathedral domes are “unseen,” the brooks (tributaries of the Rhine?) unheard. Only “deep inside us” does time take on meaning. In a letter of November 7, 1957, Paul reminds Ingeborg of the day they spent together in Paris back in 1950. He adds, “On 14 October 1957 we were in Cologne, Ingeborg. You clocks deep in us” (#56). It is an equivocal metaphor. On the one hand, “we” hear and see nothing except for the “clocks deep in us”; in the moment of love, we feel we can control time. But the moment of the “dreamt ones,” the moment of the midnight numeral, cannot last: indeed, the actual dating of the poem at the prosaic hour of 2:30 p.m. on October 20 qualifies the moment even as it memorializes it. And the later poems in the Ingeborg cycle express increasing malaise. Consider “Ein Tag und Noch Einer” (“One Day and One More”), sent to Ingeborg on December 13, 1957 (IBPC, #73): Föhniges Du. Die Stille ging mit uns mit wie ein zweites, deutliches Leben. Ich gewann, ich verlor, wir glaubten an düstere Wunder, der Ast, gross an den Himmel geschrieben, trug uns, wuchs in die Mondbahn, ein Morgen stieg ins Gestern hinauf, wir holten den Leuchter, ich weinte in deine Hand. You Föhnwind. The silence went along with us like a second, transparent life. I won, I lost, we believed in dark miracles, the branch etched high in the sky, bore us, grew into the moon’s orbit, a morning rose up into yesterday, we fetched the candlestick, I wept into your hand.48

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A Föhn wind is a dry down-­slope wind that occurs on the lee side of a mountain range. Native to southern Austria, Bavaria, and Switzerland, it brings an influx of warmer air, suddenly raising the temperature by as much as 30˚C, and hence is said to bring on migraine or fever (Wikipedia). An analogous phenomenon—prominent in Southern California—is the Santa Ana desert wind. Celan turned noun into adjective to arrive at Föhniges du with its double meaning: it refers, on the one hand, to Ingeborg’s mercurial side, her constant changeability; on the other, she is the Föhn wind that can suddenly raise the poet’s temperature. Notice that the poet is addressing someone who shares his local vocabulary; he could hardly address Gisèle as “Föhniges Du.” But despite the intimacy of this ten-­line poem, its mood is somber: the love affair, it is clear, is on a downward spiral, the tree branch that bears the two into the moon’s orbit is at the breaking point. Throughout November, Paul and Ingeborg had been discussing her impending move to a new apartment in Munich (#58) and her need to acquire a lamp. “I sometimes speak to you in Paris,” writes Ingeborg on November 14, “as if you were alone there, and I often fall silent when I admit that you exist along with everything there, and that I exist along with everything here. But then we shall have clarity and no more confusion—and go in search of the lamp!” (#59). Paul echoes this sentiment on November 23: “Let us then go in search of the lamp, Ingeborg, you and I, we” (#63). The two finally have a rendezvous in the early days of December and evidently purchase not a lamp but a candlestick (#70). Paul reads Ingeborg’s sardonic new play “The Good God of Manhattan,” an allegory of their affair. And then on December 16 Ingeborg writes Paul, “The poem [‘One Day and One More’] just came; you wrote it on the 13th, on Friday, the day I moved in with the candlestick” (#74).49 In the poem itself, these events are telescoped: the elliptical and condensed narrative, with its rush of verbs and curious line breaks—almost every line breaks off between subject and verb or verb and object—conveys a painful short-­circuiting: “I won, I lost, we believed / in dark miracles”; “I cried / into your hand.” Here, as in “Köln, Am Hof,” Celan’s language is by no means an invented German: difficulty results not from the creation of neologisms but from the mystery of the stark fairy-­tale plot, what with the branch carrying the lovers toward the moon, only to dissolve with the coming of daylight and the tears of separation. What makes this and related lyrics such remarkable love poems is their oscillation between “dark miracle” and very graphic “cry into your hand.” The cycle of love poems in Sprachgitter is based on Celan’s day-­by-­day experience in the critical months of his affair with Bachmann, but despite the self-­conscious rupture with a past too painful to invoke—“ein Morgen stieg

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ins Gestern hinauf ” (“a morning ascended into yesterday”), with its pun on Morgen/“tomorrow”—they bear what is called in “Engführung,” the great poem that concludes the volume, an “unmistakable trace” (“untrügliche Spur”).50 A trace of what precisely? Of the Föhn he once knew so well, the wind now turned into an epithet defining the woman addressed. Föhniges— the coinage might well have been received by a former resident of Carinthia with a smile of recognition. “Those clocks deep in us”: these buried grace notes of a lost world rise to the surface of Celan’s poems at unexpected moments and remind us of another unmistakable trace in the sequence: the name Antschel. But that was in another country, and the Paul Antschel who had climbed the hills around Czernowitz finding rose-­laurel to pre­sent to Ruth was dead. What remained, and what the love poems of Sprachgitter bring to life so arrestingly, were those “groundwater traces” (Grundwasser-­ spuren) of “Nächte, entmischt. Kreise / grün oder blaue, rote/ Quadrate” (nights, unmixed, circles / green or blue, red / squares).51 “I believe,” declared Lacoue-­Labarthe, with reference to two later poems— “Tübingen, Jänner” and “Todtnauberg”—“these poems to be completely untranslatable, including within their own language, and indeed, for this reason, invulnerable to commentary. They necessarily escape interpretation, they forbid it.”52 What matters in Celan, Lacoue-­Labarthe suggests, is always the not said, the empty space between words and phrases that leads back to the impossibility of speaking the unspeakable, which is, of course, Auschwitz. But can the signifier “Auschwitz” (or “Holocaust”) really encompass the complexity of a poetry like Celan’s? Is it true that, in Pierre Joris’s words, “Celan’s life is inseparable from the fate of the Jewish people in the twentieth century,” that “the Shoah is thus core to the life and work” (CLP, xxi)? This is the pressing question for Celan’s readers. My own response is that the equation of Celan with the poetry of the Shoah, while true enough as generalization, plays down difference: there were, after all, many ways of responding to the Holocaust, and Celan’s way was highly individual and related at every turn to the historical and cultural milieu within which he wrote. We might recall, for starters, that on the fatal evening Celan’s parents were arrested and deported, the twenty-­two-­year-­old poet was spending the night, against his parents’ wishes, with his then beloved, Ruth Lachner, in their secret hideout. Eros and thanatos: from this moment on, love and death were inextricable in Celan’s poetic unconscious. He was to marry a French aristocrat and become a French citizen, but, interestingly, Paris as locale figures very little in his poetry (think of Baudelaire!), whose imagery is primarily derived from nature—sunbeams and moonbeams, wind and snow, fog, ashes, rocks, minerals, trees, rare flowers and plants—plants

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that grew in the hilly countryside around Czernowitz. While married to Gisèle Lestrange, he had passionate affairs with two Austrian women, and the colloquial, abbreviated syntax of his poetry often lapses into the argot of his Austrian childhood. Here, to conclude, is one of Celan’s late minimalist poems (1968), from the posthumous collection Schneepart (Snowpart): Mit der Stimme der Feldmaus quiekst du herauf,

With the Voice of the Fieldmouse you squeal up

eine scharfe a sharp Klammer, clamp beißt du dich mir durchs Hemd you bite your way through my shirt in die Haut, into the skin ein Tuch, a cloth, gleitest du mir auf den Mund, you slide across my mouth mitten in meiner in the middle of my dich Schatten beschwerenden casting a shadowy weight on you Rede. with my speech.53

Is this little lyric as “invulnerable to commentary” as Lacoue-­Labarthe suggests? Certainly it is difficult to translate, because the German syntax cannot be literally duplicated. But the diction is not esoteric, and the poem’s narrative is highly suggestive and meaningful. I take it that the poet is with his unnamed beloved, probably in bed, because the sound of her voice, a little squeal like that of a mouse, comes from somewhere below. Her voice is like a sharp clamp biting through his shirt into his skin. Finally, she covers his mouth with a cloth, thus cutting off words she doesn’t want to hear—a speech that has been casting a shadow on her very being. In thirty-­five words, cut at odd angles and rich with alliteration and assonance, Celan gives us a quick sketch of a light but potentially cruel moment. The reader cannot know what has happened or who is involved, but the diction is graphic, even colloquial, the imagery sharply etched, and the mood of menace beneath the lighthearted mouse squeals of the loved one carefully established. It is the openness to the most delicate range of emotions that is so Celanian. From first to last, his poems can be understood as “die Gespräche, taggrau, / der Grundwasserspuren” (“the conversations, day-­gray / of the groundwater traces”)—traces of the complex cultural mix of which Paul Antschel, born into a nation (Romania) that was, after all, never his own, was the inheritor.

CODA

Becoming a “Different” Person Wittgenstein’s “Gospels”

I don’t think I would get on with Hegel. Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: “I’ll teach you differences.” . . . The remark “You’d be surprised” wouldn’t be a bad motto either. . . . I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view. Lud wig Wit t gen st ein in conversation with M. O’C. Drury1

Austro-­Modernist literature of the earthquake years—years of war following the loss of empire—is, as we have seen, characterized by the extreme tension, irony, and identity loss that often accompany the loss of Heimat and the new life of exile.2 In the theater of Karl Kraus, the novels of Musil and Roth, the autobiographical writing of Canetti, or the poetry of Celan, no choice seems to be the right choice, no “solution” not subject to dissolution. And yet the questions, urgent ones about what Wittgenstein called “forms of life,” keep pressing. After his experience on the battlefield in World War I, Wittgenstein, we recall, came to insist that one cannot change society, one can only change oneself. To become a different—presumably a better—person became the goal. In Wittgenstein’s case, the change involved much speculation on the religious life, specifically on a Christianity he admired but could never quite call his own. In the anticlerical, politically left Cambridge of the 1930s, the Austro-­Jewish exiled philosopher turned his attention to a close reading of the Gospels. It is an interesting chapter in the annals of the post–­Habsburg Empire world.

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Observant Jewish ancestors were always something of an embarrassment for the assimilated artists and intellectuals—for example, Gustav Mahler and Stefan Zweig—of the Habsburg Empire. “One does not want to be reminded,” Joseph Roth remarked sardonically in The Wandering Jews, “by some recent arrival from Lodz of one’s own grandfather from Posen [Poznan] or Katowice.”3 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) had little knowledge of or interest in his own paternal great-­grandfather, Moses Maier, who was a Jewish land agent in the principality of Wittgenstein, Westphalia, at the turn of the nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic decree of 1808, which demanded that everyone, including the Jews, take on a surname, Moses Maier took on the name of his employers, the Seyn-­Wittgensteins. His son Herman was baptized a Protestant and adopted the middle name Christian so as to further distance himself from his Jewish past. And although Herman Christian Wittgenstein, who became a successful wool merchant in Leipzig, married the Jewish Fanny Figdor, she too converted to Protestantism just before they married in 1838.4 Their son Karl, the philosopher’s father (1847–1913), was to become a legend: one of eleven children, he ran away to the United States to seek his fortune, learned business from the ground up, and returned to Austria-­Hungary to become the leading steel baron of Austria and one of the wealthiest men in Europe. His wife Leopoldine Kalmus was the daughter of a Czech Jewish father and an Austrian-­Slovene Catholic mother, the first non-­Jewish member of the family (Monk, 6–8). Karl Wittgenstein’s children were baptized Catholics—not because their parents were in any way religious but because it was considered the only proper course for the leading families of fin-­de-­siècle Vienna. Ancestors like Moses Maier were considered quaint and embarrassing primitives, to be forgotten as quickly as possible—a situation Joseph Roth satirizes so brilliantly in The Wandering Jews. The true religion of the Wittgensteins, in any case, now became culture: the Palais Wittgenstein hosted such composers as Brahms and Mahler, and Karl Wittgenstein collected artworks including Rodin sculptures and Klimt paintings. The eight Wittgenstein children, of whom Ludwig was the youngest (the brother closest in age, Paul, became the well-­known concert pianist who lost an arm in World War I but continued to perform) evidently did receive Catholic instruction at home,5 but questions of faith and dogma remained largely external, not only throughout Wittgenstein’s childhood and adolescence but also in his first Cambridge period before World War I, when the English philosophers tended to be atheists like Bertrand Russell or Kantian idealists like G. E. Moore and F. H. Bradley. It was the war that changed everything. In August 1914 Wittgenstein,

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who had recently returned to Vienna from a long stay in Norway, where he was working on the early drafts of the Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus (1922), immediately enlisted as a volunteer. His was not a conventional patriotism; on the contrary, just a few months into the war he wrote in his secret diary: “I feel . . . more than ever the tragedy of our—the German race’s situation! For that we cannot defeat England seems to me as good as certain. The English—the best race in the world—cannot lose! We, however, can lose and will lose, if not this year then the next! The thought that our race will be defeated depresses me terribly because I am German through and through!”6 The racialized—many would now say racist—vocabulary of this diary entry reflects the peculiarly conflicted consciousness not only of Wittgenstein himself but of his moment. Consider the ironic situation of the young philosopher, who had been in self-­exile in England since 1908 (when he was not quite twenty), now referring to himself as “a German through and through,” and yet serving on the Eastern Front with soldiers, mostly recruited from the distant provinces of the empire, who were not “German” at all but Poles, Slavs, or Magyars. Indeed, his real reason for enlisting was that, as his sister Hermine would put it, Wittgenstein had “an intense desire to take something difficult upon himself and to do something other than purely intellectual work.” What he most wanted, he insisted, was “to turn into a different person.”7 It was an ideal that never left him. “If you and I are to live religious lives,” he told his friend Maurice Drury more than two decades later, “it must not just be that we talk a lot about religion, but that in some way our lives are different” (Drury, 109, emphasis mine). What does it mean to make self-­transformation one’s central purpose in life? For Wittgenstein, as for many of the members of the Austrian upper bourgeoisie, especially those of Jewish extraction, the world of actual politics (as opposed to political theory, Marxist and otherwise) was little more than a sordid business—the subject, in Vienna, of countless exposés in the great feuilleton Die Fackel by Karl Kraus. During and after World War I, the sense of impotence and despair about politics was especially strong, and increasingly intellectuals felt that the “nation” was beyond repair and that thus everything depended on individual integrity, on personal choice. Between 1916, when Wittgenstein was engaged in active combat on the Russian Front, and 1918, when he was a prisoner of war in Italy, the Tractatus, originally conceived as a treatise on the nature of logic written under the sign of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, was transformed into a strange amalgam in which the philosopher’s mathematical examples and elucidation of the picture theory of language were followed by a quasi-­mystical meditation on the meaning of life. The opening proposition, “The world is everything that is the case.” was to give way,

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unaccountably, to the Tractatus’s conclusion: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The diary entries for this period reflect Wittgenstein’s reading in Kierkegaard, William James, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and especially Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, a book that Wittgenstein reread until he knew it by heart, carrying it around wherever he went so that he became known by his fellow soldiers as “the man with the gospels.”8 “Perhaps,” he wrote in his journal on May 29, 1916, “the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. I am a worm, but through God I become a man. God be with me. Amen” (quoted in Monk, 138). Such prayers continue nightly for the next few months, culminating in a famous lyrical passage in Notebooks 1914–1916: What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. . . . The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God.9

A number of these propositions find their way into the Tractatus: 6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. 6.432 How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.10

But whereas the word “God” is repeated at least ten times in the Notebooks, the proposition just cited (6.432) contains the only reference to “God” in the Tractatus. In a notebook entry of August 8, 1916, we read How things stand, is God. God is, how things stand.

And this gnomic chiasmus—a mini-­poem—is followed by the sentence “Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life [der Einzigkeit meines Lebens] arises religion—science—and art” (Notebooks, 79). In the Tractatus, the explicit “How things stand, is God” is replaced by “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is” (6.44). It seems that the author of the Tractatus has tempered his original notebook entries, has made them more oblique. And he no longer claims to understand the “how” of the world.

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To become a different person: Wittgenstein’s first practical decision after the war was to give away his entire inheritance. One of the wealthiest men in Vienna, he made his fortune over to his siblings, convinced as he was—and here he was still a Tolstoyan—that money was nothing but a burden, that it was, in other words, harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, although this rich man didn’t quite believe in heaven. Soon thereafter, in any case, he enrolled in a teacher training college and moved out of the family mansion, having decided to give up philosophy, become a country schoolteacher, and help to change the lives of the peasant children in the villages of Trattenbach and later Puchberg. But as in the case of his war experience, Wittgenstein’s enchantment with village life soon gave way to disgust. “Trattenbach,” he wrote to Bertrand Russell in 1921 (sounding for all the world like the D. H. Lawrence of the travel books, whose adulation of the “noble” peasantry regularly turned sour), “is a particularly insignificant place in Austria and the Austrians have sunk so miserably low since the war that it’s too dismal to talk about” (Monk, 201). And although he had a devoted following among some of the boys in his classes, he often lost his temper, boxed their ears, and pulled the girls’ hair. Matters came to a head in the autumn of 1925 when an eleven-­year-­old boy, whom Wittgenstein had struck on the head, collapsed. It turned out the boy was suffering from leukemia, and it may not have been the blow that made him collapse, but the resulting uproar led to Wittgenstein’s immediate forced resignation and the end of his career as a primary school teacher. Christian humility had utterly failed him. He now turned to secular interests—first the architectural design of his sister’s house in Vienna and then the association with the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists, who made much of the newly published Tractatus.11 In 1929, upon the invitation of John Maynard Keynes, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge and took up a new life as philosophy don. What brought religion—and specifically Christianity—back into the picture was ironically the very politics from which he had tried so hard to distance himself: Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany in 1933, culminating in the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. Wittgenstein’s first reaction to Nazi politics was to become self-­conscious about his own Jewishness in a decidedly negative way. Like so many upper-­class Viennese Jews whose parents and grandparents had taken so much trouble to assimilate, he had long harbored a latent anti-­Semitic strain. In 1925, when his close friend Paul Engelmann became interested in Zionism and planned to immigrate to Palestine, Wittgenstein wrote, “This may be the right thing to do and may have a spiritual effect. I might want to join you. Would you take me with you?”12 But once settled in Cambridge, he oddly internalized the new Nazi

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propaganda by writing journal entries expressing doubt about the ability of a Jew like himself to be a genius or even to develop a mode of thinking that might be more than merely “reproductive.”13 It is as if for the first time he had to recognize that he was, after all, a Jew, at least according to Nazi definitions, and he began to worry whether the anti-­Semitic prejudice that Jews cared too much about money might not be true (C&V, 18), or whether there weren’t in fact specific Jewish character traits such as secrecy or cunning— traits he himself might share (C&V, 19). Wittgenstein has been much—and deservedly—criticized for these anti-­ Semitic speculations14—speculations that came to an abrupt end as the events of the late 1930s overtook them. With Anschluss in 1938, Wittgenstein had to quickly obtain British citizenship so that he could reenter Austria without fearing arrest. It then became his mission to negotiate the transfer of huge sums of money to the Nazis in order to have his elderly sisters (who, like himself, had never regarded themselves as Jewish) declared Mischlinge (of mixed blood) and be permitted to remain in Vienna.15 But by this time—in fact, by 1932—he had dropped the language of anti-­Semitism and recognized that the racial strain of thinking to which he had given vent was a sign of his own vanity and weakness. He was to confess as much to his Cambridge friends, especially to his Russian tutor and great friend Fania Pascal, who was, in her own words, “a Jewish girl from the Ukraine . . . whose childhood was darkened, branded by the anti-­Semitism of Tsarist Russia.”16 It was in 1937, on the eve of Anschluss and war—the “dark time” in which the Philosophical Investigations were conceived—that Wittgenstein returned to a reading of the New Testament. He had made his fateful journey to the Soviet Union in 1935 and realized that the collectivism he encountered there could never be an answer for him, even if the Russians had, as was his original hope, permitted him to remain in the Soviet Union as an ordinary worker. By 1937 Wittgenstein’s key concepts—on meaning as context-­dependent (“the meaning of a word is its use in the language”), on the rejection of “theory” and the need for metalanguage, on the insignificant role of the pronoun I in discourse—had been adumbrated, although these basic topoi were in need of constant revision and improvement. Now, in the midst of laying out a philosophy of everyday life, as free as possible from judgmental categories and imperatives, he reread the Gospels and the Pauline epistles from a new perspective. The most remarkable of his journal commentaries—commentaries we will no doubt be attempting to explicate for years to come—date from September–­December 1937, when Wittgenstein was spending solitary time at his cottage at Skjolden, Norway.17 The central thrust of this commentary,

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carried forward in six separate entries reprinted in Culture and Value, is that Christianity is not a doctrine but a description of an actual practice: “Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, not a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘recognition of sin’ is an actual occurrence & so is despair & so is redemption through faith. Those who speak of it (like Bunyan) are simply describing what has happened to them; whatever gloss someone may want to put on it!”18 The distinction made here between theory and practice (Gebrauch) will be familiar to those who have read Wittgenstein’s controversial “Remarks on Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough” (1931), which argues that the great anthropologist’s discussion of the “primitivism” of ancient fertility rites condescendingly sidesteps the status of those rites as meaningful practices. In Frazer’s account, the elaborate prayers to rain gods found in early African cultures exemplify “primitive” and “savage” superstitions that attributed natural phenomena like rainfall or fire to some sort of divine intervention. But, Wittgenstein suggests, suppose we interpret the accounts of these rituals quite literally. If so, we notice a curious detail in Frazer’s account: the prayers to the “Kings of the Rain” take place not during the long dry season but on the contrary, “when the rainy period comes.”19 “Surely,” writes Wittgenstein, “that means that they do not really believe that he [the god] can make it rain, otherwise they would do it in the dry period of the year.” Rather, he argues that these are rituals performed as appropriate for the season, rather like our own knocking on wood to avoid an impending disaster (see PO, 137). Are all religions then equally “true” or valuable? In the 1931 “Remarks,” Wittgenstein implies that they are: Frazer’s account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory: it makes these views look like errors. Was Augustine in error, then, when he called upon God on every page of the Confessions? But—one might say—if he was not in error, surely the Buddhist holy man was—or anyone else—whose religion gives expression to completely different views. But none of them was in error, except when he set forth a theory. (PO, 119)

And the passage from Culture and Value cited above makes a similar case: Christians, like the John Bunyan of Pilgrim’s Progress, “are simply describing what has happened to them.” It is interesting that among the religions Wittgenstein here cites as prac-

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tices, Judaism is not one. He evidently regarded Jewishness as a matter of race or ethnicity rather than religion, and the Old Testament, which he knew well, was read typologically as an anticipation of the New. If religion is, as Wittgenstein often posited, dependent on one’s time and place—one’s cultural moment, which dictates the form one’s prayers and rituals will take—then, for Wittgenstein, that religion could only be the Christianity in which he had been raised as a baptized Catholic Austrian. In the 1937 journal entries, accordingly, he drops the relativistic approach of “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” and tries to characterize his own view of the Gospels: God has four people recount the life of the incarnate God, each one differently and contradicting each other—but can’t one say: It is important that this account should not have more than quite ordinary historical plausibility, so that it won’t be taken as the essential, definitive one. So that the letter would find no more credence than it deserves and the Spirit would remain true. I.e.: What you are supposed to see cannot be communicated even by the best, most accurate historian; therefore it suffices—yes, it is even preferable—to have a mediocre representation. . . . But what is essential—that is, essential for your life—is put by the Spirit into these words.20

This is an important formulation, suggesting that for Wittgenstein the message of the Gospels—a message that is so central for him—is enhanced by the very variability of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, a variability that underscores the idea that truth can never be single or unitary. The four Gospels are taken as having what Wittgenstein calls, in his own philosophy, family resemblances; it is precisely because of their related differences that we recognize the “family” itself as an entity. It is a system of differences Wittgenstein contrasts to the more doctrinal thrust of Paul’s epistles: The spring that flows calmly and clearly in the Gospels seems to build to a froth in the Epistles of Paul. Or that is how it seems to me. Perhaps it is just my own impurity that reads muddiness into it; for why shouldn’t this impurity be able to pollute what is clear? But I feel as if here I saw human passion, something like pride or anger, which doesn’t square with the humility of the Gospels. It’s as though he is really insisting here on his own person, & doing so moreover as a religious act, something which is foreign to the Gospel. I would like to ask—and I hope this isn’t blasphemous—: “What would Christ have said to Paul?” But one might rightly respond to this: What business is it of yours? See to it that you become a more decent person! In your present state,

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you are absolutely incapable of understanding what may be the truth here. In the Gospels—so it strikes me—everything is less pretentious, humbler, simpler. There there are huts—with Paul a Church. There all human beings are equal & God is himself a human being; with Paul there is already a hierarchy; rewards, and official positions.— So at least my nose tells me.21

And again: “The doctrine of election by grace that we find in Paul, for example, is, from my perspective, ugly nonsense. So it is not meant for me since I can apply this picture to myself only falsely. If it is a pious and good picture, then it is so at quite a different level, where it must be applied quite differently from the way I could apply it.”22 The contrast of Jesus to Paul, coupled with the preference for the differential narrative of the four Gospels to the didacticism of the Pauline epistles, is a central motif for Wittgenstein and stands in direct opposition to the claims of such recent philosophers as Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, who have reassessed Paul as the key figure responsible for a new political theology—the apostle, in Badiou’s terms, of a universalism that simultaneously shatters the strictures of Judaic law and the conventions of the Greek Logos.23 In an influential study of the 1990s, Jacob Taubes argued that the Paul’s epistle to the Romans should be read as a “political declaration of war on the Caesar.” Paul’s great contribution, according to this line of thought, was to disconnect the commandments to love God and love the neighbor. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus is represented as aligning love of God and love of neighbor as the “first” and “second” principles of the law, virtually fusing them into a single commandment. In Romans 13:8–10, on the other hand, which begins with the admonishment “Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law,” Paul is directly challenging Jesus’s linkage of the two commandments. Jesus himself failed “to fully realize his own singular and necessary role in salvation, that is, to acknowledge that there is no way to the father except through the son.”24 Christianity can thus become the religion of the Son. The Father is no longer needed, and the way is open for the establishment of the Earthly City in the allegorical shadow of heaven. The aim, as Agamben puts it, is to “deactivate” a “sacred space” so as to “liberate” its potential usefulness as a neighborhood—a political community that can stand up to and overthrow the authority of the father—the old order—so as to make way for revolution.25 Had Wittgenstein been apprised of such arguments, he would no doubt have dismissed them as the purest nonsense (Unsinn)—a way of characteriz-

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ing Christianity so that it is no longer a religious practice but a political one. From his perspective such hermeneutical sophistry is the antithesis of the right way of regarding the writings of the New Testament. Then again, his own distinction between the practices of Jesus and Paul and his understanding of Paul’s emphasis on the institution of the Church does anticipate the arguments of Agamben and the others. It was the authority of the Church that Wittgenstein could never quite accept, even as he loved the precepts and practice put forward especially in the Sermon on the Mount. In his Cambridge years (and in the Norwegian and Irish interludes) Wittgenstein by and large tried to practice what he preached: he lived by all accounts the life of the monk in very simple and humble circumstances. And whereas Paul’s twenty-­first-­century “apostles” are intent on changing the world, Wittgenstein, as we have seen, wanted only to change himself. “Christianity, I believe,” he wrote in his journal in 1946, “says among other things that sound doctrines are all useless. You have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.) That all wisdom is cold: & that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights, than you can forge iron when it is cold.” “Faith,” he adds, citing Kierkegaard, “is a passion.”26 As in Trattenbach, however, such faith proved to be impossible to sustain: Wittgenstein may have chosen to live humbly, with a minimum of material comforts, but his sexual liaisons with various young men were carried on with secrecy and subterfuge, and on intellectual and cultural matters he could be arrogant and dismissive. We can see this especially clearly in the marvelous “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” recorded by Ludwig’s close friend Maurice Drury.27 Born in Devon to Irish parents, Drury had come up to Trinity College in 1929, shortly after Wittgenstein’s own return to Cambridge, and he proved to be an ardent—but also unusual—disciple. Drury’s plan, after taking his undergraduate degree, was to study theology and be ordained as an Anglican priest. He was thus the perfect interlocutor for Wittgenstein; indeed, his decision, after one year at a theological college at Cambridge (Westcott House), not to go on but rather to study medicine, later becoming a psychiatrist in Dublin, was surely prompted in large part by Wittgenstein’s critique of theology. When Wittgenstein and Drury first met in 1929, Drury informed the philosopher tutor of his plan to take holy orders: wittgenstein: I don’t ridicule this. Anyone who ridicules these matters is a charlatan and worse. But I can’t approve, no I can’t approve. You have intelligence, it is not the most important thing, but you can’t neglect it. Just imagine trying to preach a sermon

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every Sunday, you couldn’t do it, you couldn’t possibly do it. I would be afraid that you would try and elaborate a philosophical interpretation or defense of the Christian religion. The symbolism of Christianity is wonderful beyond words, but when people try to make a philosophical system out of it I find it disgusting.28

Just a few pages earlier, Drury remarks that “intellectual vanity, whether in himself or in others, was something that Wittgenstein detested” (Drury, 92). It is true that Wittgenstein was harder on himself than on anyone else—­ extremely self-­critical and constantly driven by the need for revision of his most basic concepts. Still, the outright dismissal of Christianity as a “philosophical system” and the firm conviction that Drury could not possibly want to be an Anglican priest testifies to a thorough skepticism that does not exactly accord with the Christian humility Wittgenstein longed to possess. Indeed, he reveals himself here as the detached ironist, the “Man without Qualities” of the post-­empire years, making fun of his Anglo-­Irish friend until the latter started to waver and renounced his plan to be ordained in the Anglican Church. Toward the end of his life, Wittgenstein came to feel guilty about having pushed Drury so hard. The World War II years changed both men a great deal: Wittgenstein, who volunteered during the war in a London hospital dispensary, became almost deferential toward the Drury who had fought in Egypt and then participated in the invasion of Normandy. Wittgenstein was now reading the church fathers and taking a greater interest than heretofore in a Roman Catholicism he admired but couldn’t believe in. In 1949, when Drury was working in a psychiatric hospital in Dublin and Wittgenstein was living close by, the following conversation took place: wittgenstein: Drury, you have lived a most remarkable life. First those years in Cambridge studying philosophy; then as a medical student; then the war experiences—and now all this new work in psychiatry. drury: There is one thing about it that I feel is all wrong with me. I have not lived a religious life. wittgenstein: It has troubled me that, in some way I never intended, your getting to know me has made you less religious than you would have been had you never met me. drury: That thought has troubled me too. wittgenstein: I believe it is right to try experiments in religion. To find out, by trying, what helps one and what doesn’t. When I was a prisoner in Italy, I was very glad when we were compelled to attend

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Mass. Now why don’t you see if starting the day by going to Mass each morning doesn’t help you to begin the day in a good frame of mind. I don’t mean for one moment that you should become a Roman Catholic. I think that would be all wrong for you. It seems to me that your religion will always take the form of desiring something you haven’t yet found. (Drury, 179)

This is a very telling exchange. Despite his expressed remorse—­Wittgenstein had regularly rebuked the young Drury for such things as having a crucifix over his bed in the theological college or attending services in a church that had a piano instead of an organ—Wittgenstein still expects Drury to share his own “religious” sense, which is, here as before, that of the outsider attracted to the emotion and aestheticism of Christianity quite aside from the tenets of Christian doctrine. Attending Mass in the Italian prison camp was evidently a good thing; it made one feel better. Truth is never at issue. And a moment later, when Drury suggests that despite his own Anglicanism and preference for the English liturgy, “a child brought up in the colorful symbolism of the Roman Catholic Liturgy would get a stronger and deeper impression of religious awe than one brought up in the plainer Protestant tradition” (179), Wittgenstein falls back on his old prejudices: “I don’t agree with you at all. I would much prefer to see a child educated by a decent Protestant pastor than by a greasy Roman Catholic priest. When I look at the faces of the clergy here in Dublin, it seems to me that the Protestant ministers look less smug than the Roman priests. I suppose it is because they know they are such a small minority” (180). This is, of course, the old class-­ conscious, biased, and snobbish heir to the Wittgenstein fortune reverting to type. From the perspective of neighboring Austria, Italian priests (during World War I) were evidently all right; Irish priests were considered “greasy,” smug, and low class. On the other hand, when the issue is textual rather than personal, it is Wittgenstein who takes the broader view. Consider this exchange on the Old Testament in the last year of Wittgenstein’s life (1951): drury: There are some passages in the Old Testament that I find very offensive. For instance, the story where some children mock Elisha for his baldness. “Go up, thou bald head.” And God sends bears out of the forest to eat them. wittgenstein (very sternly): You mustn’t pick and choose just what you want in that way. drury: But I have never been able to do anything else.

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wittgenstein: Just remember what the Old Testament meant to a man like Kierkegaard. After all, children have been killed by bears. drury: Yes, but we ought to think that such a tragedy is a direct punishment from God for a particular act of wickedness. In the New Testament we are told the precise opposite—the men on whom the Tower of Siloam fell were not more wicked than anyone else. wittgenstein: That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. You don’t understand, you are quite out of your depth. (183)

This conversation is the last recorded one before Wittgenstein’s final illness, and we might conclude that he was therefore not quite himself when he spoke so cuttingly to Drury. But in fact Wittgenstein’s words make sense. If religion is regarded as a practice, not a theory, the Old Testament cannot be read as a commonplace book, some of whose aphorisms we like, some not. On the contrary, it must be taken whole, and thus its individual narratives must be granted their donnée. After all, as Wittgenstein notes, children have been killed by bears. He had already made this case in 1943, in response to Drury’s reference to the “primitivism” of Egyptian religious rites he encountered during the war (Drury, 162): drury: One thing did surprise me and rather shocked me. On going into one of the temples there was on the wall a bas-­relief of the god Horus with an erect phallus in the act of ejaculation and collecting the semen in a bowl! wittgenstein: Why in the world shouldn’t they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine’s attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn’t prevent it being a religious ceremony.

Here again, in contrast to Frazer, Wittgenstein is taking the commonsense view and trying to see each religious practice from its own perspective. What he rejected was never a particular practice but its institutionalization and codification. Like Karl Kraus, he could forgive a given action but not the institution that tried to codify that action into law. “Man can embody truth,” wrote Yeats shortly before his death, “but he cannot know it.”29 Wittgenstein, who does not seem to have been familiar with Yeats’s poetry, would have approved of this formulation. His last writings, collected in the book On Certainty (Über Gewissheit), circle round

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and round the issue of knowledge, concluding, much more confidently and serenely than did his earlier work, that we “know” what we need to know for the purposes of everyday life and should accept the limits that experience and language impose upon us. “If,” as he puts it in §115, “you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”30 What sort of certainty? In the pages of notes that constitute Wittgenstein’s posthumous book, the assertiveness of the Tractatus gives way to a much more temperate, even comic way of making one’s case. For example, “If a blind man were to ask me ‘Have you got two hands?’ I should not make sure by looking” (§125). Or again: Why do I not satisfy myself that I have two feet when I want to get up from a chair? There is no way. I simply don’t. This is how I act. (§148)31 How does someone judge which is his right and which his left hand? How do I know that my judgment will agree with someone else’s? (§150)32 “I know that that’s a tree.” Why does it strike me as if I did not understand the sentence? Though it is after all an extremely simple sentence of the most ordinary kind? It is as if I could not focus my mind on any meaning. Simply because I don’t look for the focus where the meaning is. As soon as I think of an everyday use of the sentence instead of a philosophical one, its meaning becomes clear and ordinary. (§347)33

What such examples make clear, Wittgenstein suggests, is that explanation has to end somewhere: §341. The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn. §342. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted. §343. But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put. §344. My life consists in being content to accept many things.34

Can one imagine the younger Wittgenstein expressing such resignation? By the end of the Second World War, the fever of the interregnum

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years had largely spent itself. “The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves” (“Die apocalyptische Ansicht der Welt ist eigentlich die, daß sich die Dinge nicht wiederholen,” C&V, 64). Accordingly, how things are, not what they should be, became the pressing issue. Unlike the Pauline philosophers of our own time like Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein had no nostalgia for a time when world revolution on the Soviet or Chinese model seemed possible. It is only one’s own actual life that one can change—and in the present, not the future. And the everyday, the domain of the late Wittgenstein, could be investigated only by studying how communication actually works, how the everyday conversations called “language games” proceed. The perspective of exile—of having to operate in a language in which one was never quite at home—gave special importance to the discrimination of difference.35 In his Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy,36 Alain Badiou, basing his argument on a reading of the Tractatus only and focusing on the famous conclusion “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” suggests that what he calls Wittgenstein’s “mystical act” reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a series of esoteric aphorisms and meaningless propositions. Badiou’s treatment of Wittgenstein is curiously harsh; he remarks, for example, that despite all of Wittgenstein’s resolves to change his life, he was, to the end, nothing but a philosophy professor at Cambridge (86). Indeed, Badiou asserts, the insistence on the capacity to change one’s life assumes, in Pauline terms, that one has already been saved.37 But then, as Wittgenstein made clear in his notebooks commentaries of 1937 (see C&V, 37), he specifically rejected the Pauline “doctrine of election by grace” as “ugly nonsense” (ein hässlicher Unsinn). And what Badiou called his “esoteric aphorisms” and “meaningless propositions” can be seen from another angle as precisely the stuff that the poetic, as we have come to understand it in our own time, is made of. Indeed, although Wittgenstein never expressed an interest in—or even knowledge of—Keats, his way of “doing” philosophy is finally not unlike Keats’s faith in “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”38 “The meaning of the world,” we read in the Tractatus, “must lie outside the world.” “What,” asks Badiou with a measure of exasperation, “can the word Christianity possibly mean to Wittgenstein? Certainly it does not refer to an established or institutional religion!”39 True, but for Wittgenstein that was precisely the point. In a telling notebook entry from 1930 (composed shortly after he had taken up residence in Cambridge), Wittgenstein writes:

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Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simply everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up & we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, sitting down, etc. so that we are suddenly observing someone from the outside in a way we can never see ourselves; as if we, so to speak, witnessed a chapter from a biography with our own eyes,—surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything that a playwright could produce to be performed or spoken onstage. We would be seeing life itself.—But then we do see this every day & it doesn’t make the slightest impression on us! Yes, but we don’t see it in perspective [ Ja, aber wir sehen es nicht in der Perspektive]. . . . Only the artist can represent the individual thing so that it appears to us as a work of art. . . . The work of art forces us—so to speak—to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object is only an object like any other [Ohne die Kunst aber ist der Gegenstand ein Stück Natur wie jedes andre].40

This statement looks ahead in uncanny ways to the conceptualist aesthetic of the present. For Wittgenstein, the poetic construct—in this case a play—is distinguished not, as most Modernist critics from I. A. Richards to the Russian Formalists would have it, by its use of special language, whether imagery, metaphor, pun, or rhetorical figure, but by its “perspective” or framing as an initiating concept, a framing that makes us spectators/readers feel that we are witnessing “life itself ” as it is actually lived but which we normally fail to “see.” And once the importance of framing is understood, it becomes incumbent on the philosopher-­poet to produce not a coherent logical treatise but, as Wittgenstein puts it in the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, a series of remarks (Bemerkungen), “short paragraphs . . . sometimes jumping. in quick change, from one area to another.”41 The pronouns I and you are ubiquitous in these “remarks,” giving Wittgenstein’s questions and answers an intimate tone: the reader is, so to speak, overhearing a highly personal debate. Such impassioned self-­questioning, a kind of regulated equivocation, was as central to Austro-­Modernism as it is to our own artworks. Closure was the enemy; think of the permanently unfinished Man without Qualities or again, the “beginning again and again” of Canetti’s memoirs. It is a nice irony in this regard that even the circumstances surrounding Wittgenstein’s death have been subject to debate. The friends and disciples who gathered around Wittgenstein’s deathbed remembered that the philosopher had once said he hoped his Catholic

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friends would pray for him, and so they called in a Dominican priest, who pronounced the final prayers. And Drury tells the following story: I remember that Wittgenstein once told me of an incident in Tolstoy’s life. When Tolstoy’s brother died, Tolstoy, who was then a stern critic of the Russian Orthodox Church, sent for the parish priest and had his brother interred accordingly to the Orthodox rite. “Now,” said Wittgenstein, “that is exactly what I would have done in a similar case.” When I mentioned this, everyone agreed that all the usual Roman Catholic prayers should be said by a priest at the graveside. This was done the next morning. But I have been troubled ever since as to whether what we did then was right. (Drury, 184)

Right in whose eyes? For a believer like Drury, the administration of the last rites was of course problematic. For Wittgenstein, it was a way of saying to his friends that he was hedging his bets. Since he didn’t believe in the afterlife (however much he may have wanted to believe in it), how could such a solution hurt him? And he wanted, at least for the moment, to convey hope. As his nurse, Mrs. Bevan, reports it, Wittgenstein’s last words were “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” These were the words spoken by a man, who, by his own account, had repeatedly contemplated suicide. In interpreting Wittgenstein’s last words, we have to accept the contingency of the moment. In der Welt ist alles wie es ist und geschieht alles wie es geschieht. “In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen” (Tractatus §6.41).

Notes

I ntrod u c ti o n 1. Claudio Magris, Danube [1986], trans. from the Italian by Patrick Creagh (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2008), 197. 2. See Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrian: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10–11—hereafter cited as Silverman in text; Gordon Brook-­Shepherd, The Austrians: A Thousand-­Year Odyssey (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1996), 233–51. 3. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (1943), trans. Benjamin Huebsch and Helmut Rippberger (New York: Viking, 2011), 285. Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (New York: Pantheon, 2002) refers to Austria as “a smallish provincial republic of great beauty, which did not believe it ought to exist” (8). 4. Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography, trans. H. F. Broch de Rothermann (New York: New York Review of Books, 1989), 275–76. 5. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, pt. 1 chap. 4, trans. Sophie Wilkins, ed. Burton Pike (New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1995), 11; Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 16. 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus (1922), bilingual ed., trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1992). References are to proposition numbers (§) rather than pages: §5.634 Alles, was wir sehen, könnte auch anders sein. §6.41 Der Sinn der Welt muss ausserhalb ihrer liegen. In der Welt ist alles wie es ist and geschieht alles wie es geschieht. 7. See Hermine Wittgenstein, “My Brother Ludwig,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), 1–13: see p. 3; Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Macmillan / Free Press, 1990), 111. 8. Joseph Roth, A Life in Letters, trans. and ed. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 56. 9. Hobsbawm, “Coda,” in Interesting Times, 419–20.

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10. Karl Kraus, preface to The Last Days of Mankind, trans. Michael Russell, http://​thelastdaysofmankind​.com​/ the​-­preface​.html. The German edition used here is Karl Kraus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986): “Die unwahrscheinlichsten Gespräche, die hier geführt werden, sind wortlich gesprochen worden; die grellsten Erfindungen sind Zitate. . . . Das Dokument ist Figur; Berichte erstehen als Gestalten, Gestalten verenden als Leitartikel” (9). All subsequent references to Die letzten Tage der Menschheit are to this edition. 11. Robert Musil, Notebook 8 (1920), in Diaries 1899–1941, trans. Philip Payne, ed. Mark Mirsky (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 209; for the original, see Robert Musil, Tagebücher, vol. 1, ed. Adolf Frisé (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983), 356: “Einen Menschen ganz aus Zitaten zusammensetzen!” 12. Silverman, Becoming Austrian, 22. 13. Richard Schüller, Unterhändler des Vertrauens: Aus den nachgelassenen Schriften von Sektionschef Dr. Richard Schüller, ed. and trans Jürgen Nautz (München: R. Oldenbourg, 1990), 216–18. 14. Ibid., 219. 15. I draw here on Brigitte Hamann, “Jews in Vienna,” in Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas Thornton (New York: Oxford, 1999), 325–59. Cf. Thomas Weyr, The Setting of the Pearl: Vienna under Hitler (New York: Oxford, 2005), chap. 2. 16. Brook-­Shepherd, Austrians, 98–99. And see Silverman, Becoming Austrian, 3–27. 17. See Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna, 343–46. 18. Bernard Wasserstein, On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 18–19, xvii. 19. See Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 2, The Post-­war Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 29–30. Timms estimates that when converted Jews are included, the percentage of Jews in Vienna was close to 30%. His chapter “Austrian Identity Politics” (21–40) is a very valuable, succinct source on the crisis of postwar Austrian history and the sharp rise of anti-­Semitism. I am indebted to this book, subsequently cited in text as Timms, throughout. His earlier volume Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 1, Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), has an important chapter on The Last Days of Mankind, titled “Documentary Drama and Apocalyptic Allegory,” 371–87. 20. See William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 238. 21. Paul Celan, “Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris, 1961,” in Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow, 2005), 23. 22. Karl Kraus, “Die Sprache,” Die Fackel 34, nos. 885–87 (1932): 4, http://​corpus1 ​.aac​.ac​.at​/fackel/. “Die Sprache ist die einzige Chimäre, deren Trugkraft ohne Ende ist, die Unerschöpflichkei, an der das Leben nicht verarmt.” The translation is by Edward Timms (137). All further references to Die Fackel are to this digital edition of the entire corpus (1899–1936), made available by the Austrian Academy of Wissenschaft: Fackel Gate. 23. Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus” (1931), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934,

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trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 433–58; see 438. 24. Karl Kraus, “Ghosts” [Gespenster], Die Fackel 21, nos. 514–18 ( July 1919): 66. Timms further contextualizes the passage: see Timms, 47. 25. Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick, introduction to Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1. 26. Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, “Why War?” (1933), in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 26. Hereafter cited in text as “Why War?” 27. In the early 1930s, Wittgenstein was briefly attracted to Communism and even considered moving to the Soviet Union and becoming an ordinary worker. Once there, however, he became rapidly disillusioned. 28. Gregor von Rezzori, “Troth,” in Memoirs of an Anti-­Semite: A Novel in Five Stories, trans. from the German by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: New York Review Books, 2008), 201, 204. The book is hereafter cited in text as Memoirs. 29. Wittgenstein Ms 120, Trinity College, Cambridge, cited by Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 394. 30. Dritte Walpurgisnacht was published only posthumously: the authoritative edition is Dritte Walpurgisnacht, ed. Christian Wagenknecht (Munich: Suhrkamp, 1989). For the Hitler sentence and other short extracts, see Fackel, 1933, F890–905, 153. According to Edward Timms, Dritte Walpurgisnacht “incorporates over a thousand excerpts from the political discourse of 1933, interwoven with more than two hundred literary allusions” (Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 2, Post-­war Crisis, 496).

Cha p ter O ne 1. Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 1, no. 1 (April 1899): 1–2. See Austrian Academy of Wissenschaft, Fackel Gate: http://​corpus1​.aac​.ac​.at​/fackel. 2. Karl Kraus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Tragödie in fünf Akten mit Vorspiel und Epilogue (1922; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 72, subsequently cited in the text as LTM; Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind, trans. Michael Russell, http://​ thelastdaysofmankind​.com/, subsequently cited as Russell. This new translation goes only up through act 3, and only about half the scenes in acts 1–3 are included. A book version of the entire play has been announced for 2015–16. In his introduction to the section already available in print, namely the almost freestanding epilogue “The Last Night” (“Die letzte Nacht”), Russell notes that he thinks of his version as “a parallel (not an equivalent) in Irish writing in English in the twentieth century—the Irish language as James Joyce used it.” The Long Night (San Bernadino, CA: Forgotten Cities, 2014), 14. Russell admits, as must any Kraus translator, that no translation can wholly reproduce the Austrian dialect jokes. In the first line, for example, “sterbien” is a purposeful misspelling of sterben (to die) so as to have a silly rhyme for “Serbien” (Serbia). A second translation, very imaginative but even more partial and less accessible, is Robert MacDonald’s translation of selected scenes of Last Days, made available to me on a set of CDs by David Batchelor, who produced the play for the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, directed by Giles Havergal, aired at the Edinburgh

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Festival in 1983 and then produced sixteen years later by David Batchelor for the BBC (December 11–12, 1999) in a four-­hour version, again directed by Havergal and starring him as Giles the Grumbler. Paul Scofield played God, Anna Ford the radio announcer. See Programme no. 99BG1915LBO; Final Tape no. OLN949/99BG1915. It received glowing reviews—see, for example, Alan Brownjohn, “The End of the World of Drama,” Times Literary Supplement, December 17, 1999—but has not been broadcast again. The CDs are cited here as BBC I–­IV, followed by the time where the speech in question begins. In November 2015, when this book was already in proof, Yale published the first complete English translation of The Last Days of Mankind, by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms. This scholarly translation, accompanied by very valuable notes and glossary, will no doubt be the definitive translation for years to come; had it been available earlier, I would have used it here. Still, it is less adventurous than either Russell’s or MacDonald’s, both of which strive to mimic Kraus’s speech rhythms and use of Viennese and Tyrolean dialect. I am thus happy to rely on these when possible. Where no name is given, the translation is my own. Cf. YouTube video of my lecture at the Getty Research Institute ( January 22, 2015) based on this chapter, with readings, images, and the videos listed in notes here, available at https://​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​J4aBOFwHvto. 3. See Friedrich Pfäfflin and Eva Dambacher, Karl Kraus, Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturachivs in Schiller Nationalmuseum Marbach, 1999–2000 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 210–11, figure 129. This text is subsequently cited in text as Pfäfflin. 4. Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta, trans. Jonathan McVity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). “Die Lage in Deutschland ist ernst, aber nicht hoffnungslos, die Lage in Österreich ist hoffnungslos, aber nicht ernst.” 5. I have written extensively on these avant-­garde movements in The Futurist Moment: Avant-­Garde, Avant-­Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986; 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Twenty-­First Century Modernism (London: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2002; for a summary, see my entry on the avant-­garde in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 110–13. 6. Translation mine. “In dieser großen Zeit,” Die Fackel 16, no. 404 (December 5, 1914): 1, my emphasis. 7. Robert Musil, “Europäertum, Krieg, Deutschtum,” Die Neue Rundschau 25 (September 1914): 1303, trans. and cited by Stanley Corngold. “The Great War and Modern German Memory,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 192. 8. This thesis was argued more fully in Mann’s long essay Betrachungen eines Unpolitischen (1918; Reflections of an Unpolitical Man [Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2001]). I have discussed the prowar mood of the French, Italian, and Russian avant-­garde in my own essay “The Great War and the European Avant-­Garde,” in Sherry’s Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, 141–65; and cf. my Futurist Moment, esp. chap. 1. Thomas Mann’s brother, the novelist Heinrich Mann, took the opposite position, siding with the French pacifist Romain Rolland. See Corngold, “Great War and Modern German Memory,” 194.

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9. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), trans. Arthur Wesley Wheen (New York: Random House, 2013), frontispiece. The Academy Award–­winning American film (1930) was directed by Lewis Milestone and produced by Carl Laemmle Jr.; the screenplay was by Maxwell Anderson, and the actors included Lew Ayres. 10. Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus” (1931), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 440. This seminal essay (433–58) is translated by Edmund Jephcott. 11. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1940), Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 315–16. The Baudelaire essay (313–55) is translated by Harry Zohn. 12. See Corngold, “Great War and Modern German Memory,” 213. The reference (see 216n49) is to Jay M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 13. For a useful treatment of Kraus’s complex response to Jews and his own Jewishness, specifically vis-­à-­vis his journalism, see Paul Reitter, The Anti-­Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-­Fashioning in Fin-­de-­Siècle Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 14. For a detailed examination of Kraus’s evolving politics in the war and postwar period, see Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 2, Post-­war Crisis, chaps. 1, 2, and 11. On the swastika, see esp. pp. 8–10. 15. Die Fackel 17, nos. 406–12 (October 1915): 341; cited and translated by Edward Timms in ibid., 9. 16. Peli Grietzer, “The Aesthetics of Sufficiency: On Conceptual Writing,” review of Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, ed. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (2010), Los Angeles Review of Books, October 12, 2012, http://​ lareviewofbooks​.org​/review​/ the​-a­ esthetics​- ­of​-­sufficiency​- ­on​- ­conceptual​-­writing. 17. See Marjorie Perloff, “Vocable Scriptsigns: Differential Poetics in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget and John Kinsella’s Kangaroo Virus,” in Poetry, Value, and Contemporary Culture, ed. Andrew Roberts and John Allison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 21–43. Cf. Perloff, “Screening the Page / Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text,” in New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed. Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 143–64. This essay is reprinted in Contemporary Poetics, ed. Louis Armand (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 376–92. 18. For the complicated publishing history of the play, see the “Anhang” (appendix) of LTM, 775–86. 19. Karl Kraus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Bühnenfassung des Autors (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005). The Nachwort gives a complete table of the transposition of scenes from the original to the stage version (see 230–31). Act 1, for example, contains scenes formerly in acts 2 and 3 as well, making for a very different play. 20. For a fine French translation, see Les Derniers Jours de l’humanité, trans. Jean-­Lous Besson and Henri Christophe (Paris: Agone, 2005). 21. Figure 6 (see Pfäfflin, 288–89) reproduces p. 96 of Die Fackel 23, nos. 577–82 (November 1921): 96, Reklamefahrten zur Hölle, with the headline “Schlachtfelder-­ Rundfahrt im Auto” (Roundtrip of the battlefields by motorcar). The advertised

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tour, recommended especially for autumn sightseeing, which includes first-­class hotels and gourmet dinners in Verdun and Metz, looks ahead to the commercialization of current tours of concentration camps. To hear Karl Kraus read “Schlachtfelder-­ Rundfahrt im Auto,” see Kraus, “Reklamenfahrten zur Hölle,” https://​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​ATRX52E4xI4​&​ index​=​3​&​list​=​PL7dhcficlfEuajK8ANZRCh2​-Q ­ J4Dpr1ph/. 22. See the excellent commentary by Alison Croggon on her blog Theatre Notes for September 19, 2004: http://​theatrenotes​.blogspot​.com​/2004​_09​_01​_archive​ .html. 23. See https://​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​1Xaa1K47vU0. 24. See BBC Radio 3, program no. 99BG1916LBO, final tape no. OLN949/ 99BG1915; presenter Peter Kislinger, producer Piers Burton-­Page, broadcast De‑ cember 12, 1999. 25. See Leo A. Lensing’s “‘I Did Not Want This’: The Uses and Abuses of Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind,” Times Literary Supplement, January 9, 2015, 12–13. Lensing notes that Thomas Schulte-­Michels’s production at the Volkstheater “completely eliminated the twenty-­two dialogues between the Grumbler and the Optimist,” thus removing a central element of the play. And Lensing is highly critical of the setting of Last Days in a psychiatric ward. The second production, by Georg Schmiedleitner, evidently interprets the Grumbler and Optimist as comic figures à la Stephen Colbert and otherwise reduces the venom of Kraus’s play. Deborah Sengl’s installation, by contrast, earns high praise from Lensing, and it is indeed brilliant and devastating, her humanoid rats carrying out Kraus’s own description of his actors and narrators as portraying those who have, in Kraus’s own words in the preface to Last Days, “no flesh, only blood, no blood, only printer’s ink; in puppetry and shadow-­play, stripped down to their frantic emptiness.” See Russell, http://​thelastdaysofmankind​.com. 26. For Kraus’s sources for the uses of Fremdenverkehr, see Agnes Pistorius, “Kolossal montiert”: Ein Lexikon zu Karl Kraus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (Vienna: Ibera, 2011), 148–49. This reference book, at once a register of names and an elucidation of concepts, is extremely useful. 27. Her real name was Gretl Horn. For the newspaper accounts used by Kraus, see Pistorius, “Kolossal montiert,” 203. In Letzten Tage, the actress is named Elfriede Ritter—an irony in light of the fact that the “Ritter” of Thomas Bernhard’s later darkly sardonic play Ritter Dene Voss (1984) is the Viennese actress Ilse Ritter, famous at the Burgtheater in the World War II years. 28. For the newspaper accounts, see Pistorius, “Kolossal montiert,” 203. 29. All three are Jewish names, and Kraus has been accused here and elsewhere of anti-­Semitism, but the fact is that he makes equal fun of non-­Jewish names— e.g., ones that are typically Tyrolean. 30. My translation. Cf. BBC, Programme 1, 26″35′, and Russell, http://​thelast daysofmankind​.com​/act​-­i​-­scene​-­14​.html. 31. I, 24; LTM, 174–77. Kraus’s scene is based on an earlier account in Die Fackel ( January 1913) and also refers to a picture postcard of von Hötzendorf (see fig. 5), accompanied by his adjutant major Rudolf Kundmann, studying the map of Balkans. See Pistorius, “Kolossal montiert,” 87–88.

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32. LTM, 191; my translation. 33. https://​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​V​_AcihWWShc. Peter Gnad’s reading is accompanied by parodic images of lovely Romantic and Art Nouveau images of beautiful, ethereal young women in various poses. 34. LTM, 627; trans. Robert MacDonald, BBC II, pt. 2, 12.32. In the BBC version, the letter is read by the woman herself in a broad Irish brogue that corresponds nicely to the Austrian country dialect. The spelling mistakes in the German original are intentional; MacDonald has made them more specifically grammar mistakes. 35. Die Fackel 20, no. 484 (October 15, 1918): 188–94. It begins, “In Wien waren Gerüchte verbreitet sein, es sein in Wien Gerüchte verbreitet, mehr wurde über das Wesen der Gerüchte eben darin bestehe, daß man es nicht sagen könne, man war nur auf Gerüchte angewiesen, um überhaupt herausubekommen, was es für Gerüchte eigentlich seien, und so gingen denn in ganz Oesterreich Gerüchte von Mund zu Mund” (my italics). For an excellent reading of the piece for Dada TV, see Mario Hellinger, https://​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​V​_AcihWWShc/. 36. Here the MacDonald translation is rather free. For a literal translation, see Bridgham and Timms, 446. 37. See Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 2, Post-­war Crisis, 392–94. 38. In his controversial The Kraus Project (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2013), Jonathan Franzen calls Last Days “the strangest great play every written” and argues that whereas the bulk of the play is postmodern in its use of quotation, “what makes the play modern, rather than postmodern, is the figure of the Grumbler, who in most respects is indistinguishable from Kraus himself. . . . His coordinating subjectivity is too central to be postmodern” (257). 39. “Wenn die Menschheit keine Phrasen hätte, brauchte Sie keine Waffen,” Die Fackel 23, nos. 572–76 ( June 1921): 12. 40. This image is a stillshot of the video in which Peter J. Gnad reads the scene of the “Oberbomber” from act 1, scene 25: see https://​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​ =​qgfc8Avkzyw. 41. See Pistorius, “Kolossal montiert,” 546, 447. 42. Ironically, the English word for Hakenkreuz, swastika, has a very different etymology and set of connotations. The word swastika, from the Sanskrit svastika, designates an equilateral cross with four arms bent at ninety degrees. It dates back to ancient civilization, in the Mediterranean world as well as in China and India. The Sanskrit svastika is a composite: su meaning “good” or “auspicious,” asti meaning “to be,” and ka as a suffix. The swastika literally means “to be good” (Wikipedia). 43. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 32. 44. See Die Fackel 34, nos. 885–87 [1932]: 3: “Den Rätseln ihrer Regeln, den Plänen ihrer Gefahren nahezukommen, ist ein besserer Wahn als der, sie beherrschen zu können.” See Timms, “Language,” chap. 8 in Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 2, Post-­war Crisis, 137–56. 45. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures: Cambridge, 1930–32, ed. Desmond Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1.

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Cha p ter T wo 1. Joseph Roth, “Bruck and Kiralyhida” [orig. in Der Neue Tag, July 20, 1919], in Roth, The Hotel Years, ed. and trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: New Directions, 2015), 63. 2. Joseph Roth, A Life in Letters, trans. and ed. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 221. Subsequently cited as Letters. 3. The performance led by conductor Franz Most at the annual New Year’s con‑ cert, 2011, is available on YouTube; see https://​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​pYYTd tRrg8M. The reader is urged to watch this video, which gives a stunning example of the popularity of Strauss’s “Radetzky March,” the huge audience participating at every step with extraordinary enthusiasm. 4. See, for example, Hawk Black, Radetzky March Military Parade 2013, YouTube, https://​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​is2oDrnflCU. 5. Joseph Roth, “Music in the Volksgarten,” Frankfurter Zeitung, April 8, 1928, in Hotel Years, 208. 6. Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March [1932], trans. from the German by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1996), 19–20, subsequently cited as RM. The more recent translation by Michael Hofmann, Roth’s premier English translator (London: Granta, 2013), at this writing has not yet been published in the United States. But Hofmann’s introduction (v–­xvi) is very useful, as is Alan Bance’s introduction to the Neugroschel translation (ix–­xxx). For the original German, see Joseph Roth, Radetzkymarsch (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003), 26–27. This edition subsequently cited as RAD. For long citations, I regularly cite both English and German page numbers. 7. RM, 28. The German “aus einfachen Verhältnissen,” translated by Neugroschel as “from a simple background,” seems more adequately translated by the cliché “from humble circumstances.” The Neugroschel translation sets off dialogue according to conventional English rules, but the reader should note that in the German, dialogue is always run in to the surrounding paragraph. 8. The term anti-­bildungsroman is used vis-­à-­vis The Radetzky March by Malcolm Spencer, In the Shadow of Empire: Austrian Experiences of Modernity in the Writings of Musil, Roth, and Bachmann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 159. Spencer’s chapter on Roth (151–92) is very perceptive, but he takes the characters, especially Carl Joseph, as average, mediocre figures who don’t learn from experience—as ciphers, one might say, of the declining empire. The myth of decline—which I take to be a simplification—is fully explored by Claudio Magris in Der Habsburgische Mythos in der modernen östereichischen Literatur, 3rd. ed. (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2000). 9. Letter to Bernard von Brentano, September 26, 1926, in Roth’s Letters, 85. 10. See Michael Hofmann, introduction to Roth, Letters, 3–5. 11. Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews [1926; 2nd ed. 1937], trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 15. Subsequently cited as WJ. 12. See J. M. Coetzee, “Emperor of Nostalgia,” review of The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth [trans. Michael Hofmann], New York Review of Books, February 28, 2002, http://​www​.nybooks​.com​/articles​/archives​/2002​/ feb​/28​/emperor​- ­of​-­nostalgia​/​ ?pagination​=​false​&​printpage​=​true/.

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13. See ibid., 3. 14. See Rush Rhees, “Postscript,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), 212–15. “Jetzt wäre mir die Gelegenheit gegeben, ein anständiger Mensch zu sein.” And in a letter to Bertrand Russell shortly before he enlisted, Wittgenstein writes, “And I keep on hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different human being” (ein anderer Mensch werden). 15. Michael Hofmann, “My Life with Roth,” Guardian, December 30, 2005, 6, http://​www​.guardian​.co​.uk​/ books​/2005​/dec​/31​/ featuresreviews​.guardianreview 20​/print/. Cf. Frederic Raphael, “Double Vision,” review of Joseph Roth’s A Life in Letters, TLS 17 (February 2012): 3–5. 16. See Brigitte Hamann, “In Parliament,” chap. 4 of Hitler’s Vienna: The Apprenticeship of a Dictator, trans. Thomas Thornton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 116–32.

Cha p ter Three 1. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, 2 vols., trans. from the German by Sophie Wilkins with Burton Pike (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), vol. 1, chap. 4, 11. All further references to the English translation are to this edition, hereafter abbreviated MWQ; where no volume number is given, volume 1 is designated. For the original, see Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1952; repr. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1997), hereafter abbreviated MOE. For the epigraph, see MOE, 16: —Wer ihn [den Möglichkeitssinn] besitz, sagt beispielweise nicht: Hier ist dies oder das geschehen, wird geschehen, muß geschehen; sondern er erfin‑ det: Hier könnte, sollte oder müßte geschehen; und wenn man ihm von irgend etwas erklärt, daß es so sei, wie es sei, dann denkt er: Nun, es könnte wahrscheinlich auch anders sein. Volume 2 of the English edition includes From the Posthumous Papers, the 600-­ page Aus dem Nachlass, which is volume 4 of the Gesammelten Werke in Neun Bänder (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981). When referring to the novel itself, I include both English (MWQ) and German (MOE) page numbers. For the notes and sketches in the Posthumous Papers, I note only the English. 2. “The meteorological description of the opening paragraph is not only a parody of epic style, but also a poetic heightening and parody of scientific style.” David S. Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture 1880–1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 218. See also Philip Payne, Robert Musil’s “The Man without Qualities”: A Critical Study, Cambridge Studies in German (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 69; Günter Graf, Studien zur Funktion des ersten Kapitels (Göppingen, Germany: Kümmerle, 1969). 3. The “parallel campaign” was designed to rival—and surpass—the German plan for Kaiser Wilhelm II’s 1918 Jubilee; the Kaiser would have been on the throne a mere thirty years as compared to Franz Josef’s seventy. 4. Musil, “On the Essay” (1914?), in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed.

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and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 48–51. Subsequently cited as Essays. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1988). References are to proposition numbers (§). 6. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd ed., ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 77. 7. Essay (both English and German) from the Middle French essai, meaning “trial, attempt,” which in turn comes from the Late Latin exagium, “a weighing, weight” (from the Latin exigere: ex- “out” + agere “to act, test, weigh”). 8. Thomas Harrison, “The Essayistic Novel and Mode of Life: Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities,” Republics of Letters 4, no. 1 (2014), http://​arcade​.stanford​ .edu​/rofl​/essayistic​-­novel​-­and​-­mode​-­life​-­robert​-­musils​-­man​-­without​- ­qualities. 9. Jean-­Pierre Cometti, Musil philosophe: L’utopie de l’essayisme (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 140, my translation. Cometti carefully traces Musil’s essayism back to Nietzsche and to Ernst Mach, the subject of Musil’s doctoral thesis. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd. ed., trans. G. E. M. Amscombe (New York: Macmillian, 1958), v. 11. MWQ, 568; MOE, 521. This is the “conviction,” voiced by General Stumm von Bordwehr at a late stage of the Parallel Campaign. But Musil takes it more broadly as the dominant view of the Habsburg establishment. 12. MWQ, 31. Here the Wilkins translation strikes me as somewhat confusing, and I have adjusted it slightly. The German reads: Es ist passiert, sagte man dort, wenn andre Leute anderswo glaubten, es sei wunder was geschehen; das war ein eigenartiges, nirgendwo sonst im Deutschen oder einer andern Sprache vorkommendes Wort, in dessen Hauch Tatsachen und Schicksalschläge so leicht wurden wie Flaumfedern und Gedanken. Ja, es war, trotz vielem, was dagegen spricht, Kakanien vielleicht doch ein Land für Genies; und wahrscheinlich ist es daran auch zugrunde gegangen. (MOE, 35) 13. Robert Musil, “Notebook 17, May 1914 to August 1914 or later,” in Diaries 1899–1941 (orig. German ed. Adolf Frisé), ed. and trans. Philip Payne, ed. Mark Mirsky (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 173; Tagebücher, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek by Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976), 299: In den Kasernen Unordnung, Entfesselung. Mit Ausnahme des Dienstes. Zentimeter hoher Schmutz, Notlager, Trinken. Es wird wie verrückt gestohlen. Koffer erbrochen. Liegen lassen darf man überhaupt nicht. . . . er braucht keine Bürste, nimmt sie mit Gewalt, sieht eine dritte und stürtzt auf den Mann los: du hast meine Bürste, nimmt sie mit Gewalt. . . . Selbst die Offiziere sagen nur: wenigstens nicht in der eigenen Kameradschaft stehlen. 14. For this background, see Luft, Robert Musil, 121–31. 15. Musil, “Little Notebook without a Number,” 1916 to 1918–19, in Diaries, 194; see Tagebücher, 323.

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16. Robert Musil, Briefe nach Prag (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1971), trans. and cited in Luft, Robert Musil, 132. 17. Musil, “Notebook 8, 1920,” in Diaries, 210; Tagebücher, 359: “Alle Greuel des Kriegs sind entschuldbar gegen die Gleichgültikeit mit der man die Mittelstaaten im Nachriegselends beläßt.” I have adjusted the English translation slightly in the interest of accuracy. 18. “Notebook 8, 1920,” in Diaries 208, my emphasis. Cf. Tagebücher, 353–54: “Die Zeit: Alles, was sich im Krieg and nach dem Krieg gezeigt hat, war schon vorher da. Es war da: 1. Geschehenlassen. 2. Nur das Mittel erleben . . . Alles muß man submarin auch schon in dem Vorkriegsroman zeigen.” My emphasis. 19. Musil, “Notebook 31, 7 Feb 1930 to Spring 1936,” in Diaries 415; Tagebücher 825. For a good succinct summary of Musil’s thoughts and observations on German politics from 1919 to 1933, see Luft, Robert Musil, 141–60. 20. “Sketches and Notes about the Novel 1920–1929,” in From the Posthumous Papers, Man without Qualities, 2:1722. My emphasis. 21. John Ashbery, Three Poems (New York: Viking, 1972), 41. 22. In German the acronym is “Das PDUG,” for “Das Prinzip des unzureichenden Grundes” (MOE, 134), a parodic reversal of Schopenhauer’s title Der Satz vom zureichenden Grund. The acronym, which of course Fischel doesn’t recognize, sounds like that of a conglomerate or union. 23. See Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Calvino died before composing his final (sixth) chapter, so there are only five “memos.” 24. On Musil’s gradual disillusionment with Nietzsche, who had been such a key figure in his intellectual development, see Alan Thiher, Understanding Robert Musil (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 27–29. A more positive view of the relationship is advanced by Malcolm Spencer, In the Shadow of Empire: Austrian Experiences of Modernity in the Writings of Musil, Roth, and Bachmann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 119–24. 25. MWQ, 15. Here the translation of the last clause is quite free. The German (MOE, 20) reads, “deren merkwürdige Arithmetik ausmacht, die vom Hundertsen ins Tausendste kommt, ohne eine Einheit zu haben.” 26. Burton Pike, introduction to Musil, Precision and Soul, xxi. 27. It has often been noted that Arnheim was modeled on Walter Rathenau (1867–1922), a leading German Jewish secularized industrialist who held a high post in the War Ministry of Kaiser Wilhelm and was also an illustrious writer. Rathenau was assassinated in 1922, shortly after the Treaty of Rapallo, in which Germany renounced its prior territorial claims. The assassins claimed Rathenau was a Soviet spy, but their real motives were no doubt primarily anti-­Semitic. 28. Diaries, 270, with some slight emendations. The original reads: “Man darf auch der Frage nicht aus dem Weg gehn, was dieser Krieg eigentlich war. Man kann nicht weggehn, wie wenn man von einem Rausch eben aufgestanden wäre, wo Millionen Menschen ihre Nächsten verloren haben oder ihre Existenz. Das muß einen Riß ins Volk machen, eines jener unterdrückten Erlebnisse, die sich als Hysterie rächen,” (Tagebücher, 543). 29. MWQ, 576, with slight emendations of my own: the translation of Kultur as “civilization,” for example, seems misleading, since the Germans regularly distin-

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guished between the two, regarding civilization as something lesser. And “ganze Völkern” can apply to both nations and ethnic groups. Cf. MOE, 529.

Cha p ter F o ur 1. Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free, Remembrance of a European Childhood, trans. from the German by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 3; Die gerettete Zunge, Geschichte einer Jugend (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1977), 9. A more accurate translation of Gerettete would be “rescued.” All further references to the English translation are designated by Tongue, the German by Zunge. 2. In the Farrar Straus translation by Neugroschel, the name of the town is spelled Ruschuk without the t. Here I follow the German spelling used by Canetti himself. Today the Bulgarian town is called Ruse (or the French “Rousse”). 3. Elias Canetti, The Torch in My Ear, trans Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982); Die Fackel im Ohr (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1980); The Play of the Eyes, trans. from the German by Ralph Mannheim (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986); Das Augenspiel Lebensgeschichte, 1931–1937 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985). 4. A fourth volume, Party in the Blitz: The English Years, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: New Directions, 2005); Party im Blitz: Die Englische Jahre (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag 2003), was published posthumously; this volume has fascinating, malicious vignettes of English intellectuals and artists whom Canetti knew, but it is more sketchbook than finished memoir. See my review in Bookforum, December/ January 2006, www.bookforum.com/archive/dec_05/perloff.html. 5. The knife incident is usually read as introducing the motif of castration, which is integral to the Oedipal drama recounted later in the memoir: Canetti’s love-­hate relationship with his mother is central throughout. See, for example, Anne Fuchs, “The Deeper Nature of My German,” in A Companion to the Works of Elias Canetti, ed. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 47–49. 6. Claudio Magris, “The Many People That Make Up a Writer: Canetti and Caka­ nia,” in Essays in Honor of Elias Canetti, trans. from the German by Michael Hulse (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 273. As a native of Trieste, a city hotly contested in the days of the Habsburg Empire and still much more multiethnic than most of Italy, Magris has special insight into the situation. 7. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (New York: Random House, 1995), chap. 8 (pp. 27–35). 8. See Svoboda Alexandra Dimitrova and Penka Engelova, “Canetti, Rustchuk (Roustchouk, Rousse) and Bulgaria: The Impact of Origin on Canetti’s work,” in Companion, 263–74. 9. In The Torch in My Ear, Canetti recalls that in the Vienna of 1924–25 “there was hardly a conversation in which Freud’s name did not pop up, a name no less compressed for me than that of Karl Kraus; yet the name Freud was more alluring because of its dark diphthong and the d at the end, as well as its literal meaning, joy” (119). Canetti then turns approvingly to the idea of the “Freudian slip” but is skeptical of the Oedipus complex and declares that in regard to the crowd, soon to be the subject of Canetti’s own seminal Crowds and Power, “Freud’s comments

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. . . were . . . completely inadequate” (121). See also “Elias Canetti and Theodor W. Adorno in Conversation,” in Critical Essays on Elias Canetti, ed. David Darby (New York: G. K. Hall, 2000), 137–53. 10. See Hermine Wittgenstein, “My Brother Ludwig,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), 3; Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Macmillan / Free Press, 1990), 111. What Wittgenstein especially had in mind was the need to be honest, open, transparent, both with himself and with those close to him. In part, he was surely thinking of his “deviant” sexuality—an issue he never did succeed in conveying openly. But he was also referring to his religious views, which were conflicted and complicated. See the coda below. 11. Daniel Heller-­Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 164–65. 12. Elias Canetti, ”Karl Kraus: The School of Resistance,” in The Conscience of Words, translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 31. Hereafter referred to as Conscience. 13. See, for example, Kristie A. Foell, “July 15, 1927: The Vienna Palace of Justice is burned in a mass uprising of Viennese workers, a central experience in the life and work of Elias Canetti,” in The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 464–70. 14. Canetti, Conscience of Words, 140. 15. W. B. Yeats, “A General Introduction For My Work,” in Essays and Introductions (1937; repr. New York: Macmillan, 1961), 509. Yeats continues, “There is always a phantasmagoria.” And again, “[The poet] is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete” (509).

Cha p ter F i v e 1. Jean Daive, Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan [1996], trans. from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop (Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 2009), 78. 2. Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, Herzzeit: Der Briefwechsel, mit dem Briefwechseln zwischen Paul Celan und Max Frisch, ed. Bertrand Badiou et al. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008); Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan: Correspondence, ed. Bertrand Badiou et al., trans. Wieland Hoban (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2010). The English edition is subsequently cited in the text as IBPC; the German edition is referred to as Herzzeit. Letters are usually designated by their number with # rather than page numbers so that readers may refer to both editions readily. When the extensive notes are cited, the reference is to page numbers. 3. See Ingeborg Bachmann, “Interview with Ekkehart Rudoph, 25 March 1971,” in Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden: Gespräche und Interviews, ed. Christine Koschel and Inge von Weidenbaum (Munich: Piper, 1991), 81. The volume is subsequently cited as Interviews. 4. Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” in Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-­on-­Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow, 2005), 34. Volume is subsequently cited as Celan, Prose.

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5. “Als der Krieg zu Ende war, ging ich fort und kam voll Ungeduld und Erwartung nach Wien, das unerreichbar in meiner Vorstellung gewesen war. Es wurde wieder eine Heimat an der Grenze: zwischen Ost und West, zwischen einer großen Vergangenheit und einer dunklen Zukunft. Und wenn ich später auch nach Paris und London, nach Deutschland und Italien gekommen bin, so besagt das wenig, denn in meiner Erinnerung wird der Weg aus dem Tal nach Wien immer der längste bleiben.” Ingeborg Bachmann, Die Wahrheit ist dem Menschen zumutbar: Essays, Reden, Kleinere Schriften (Munich: Piper, 2011), 101. My translation. This collection is subsequently cited as Bachmann, Essays. 6. Of the twenty-­nine poems in Sprachgitter, twenty-­one are dedicated to Bachmann; see IBPC, 102–3. The important long sequence “Engführung,” however, is not included. 7. In a 1960 letter to a Munich literary magazine, Claire Goll claimed that Celan had made “cursory and inept” translations of her late husband Yvan Goll’s French poetry and that Celan’s “burning ambition” could not tolerate a Swiss publisher’s rejecting them. She cited “parallel passages” along with hearsay about Celan, the “master plagiarist.” The charges were entirely groundless, and Bachmann and Frisch begged Celan to ignore them as just malicious slander. But not even the prestigious Büchner Prize, awarded to Celan by Germany’s Academy of Language and Literature in late April 1960, could dispel the poet’s anxiety. He became increasingly paranoid, the attack—and the seeming indifference to it on the part of his supposed friends—leading to his first major mental breakdown. See John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 154–55. 8. Brigitta Eisenreich, Celans Kreidestern (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011), 35. 9. Celan knew this famous thesis, commenting on it in a note of 1951, “No poem after Auschwitz (Adorno): what sort of an idea of a ‘poem’ is being implied here? The arrogance of the man who hypothetically and speculatively has the audacity to observe or report on Auschwitz from the perspective of nightingales and song thrushes” (see Lorenz Jäger, Adorno: A Political Biography, trans. Stuart Spencer [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004], 187) . In all fairness, the later Adorno revised his famous dictum: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream, hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.” See Adorno, Negative Dialectics [1963], trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973), 363. 10. Ingeborg Bachmann, “Interview with N. N.” (1955), in Interviews, 11–12. My translation. 11. The proposition dates from Wittgenstein’s time of active duty during World War I; see Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 43. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, §5.6. Bachmann cites the proposition as central to her own poetics in an interview of March 1971, see Interviews, 83. And in her 1953 essay on Wittgenstein (“Ludwig Wittgenstein— Zu Einem Kapitel der Jüngsten Philosophiegeschichte”), responding to Ewald Wasmuth’s suggestion that the “mystical” propositions in chapter 6 of the Tractatus can be related to Heidegger’s question “Why is there Being and not nothingness?,” Bachmann remarks that, on the contrary, it would have been impossible for

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Wittgenstein to accept Heidegger’s belief that language is the coming into being of thought. See Bachmann, Essays, 17n4. 13. Paul Celan, “Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris, 1958,” in Prose, 15–16. Cf. Celan, “Antwort auf eine Umfrage der Librairie Flinker, Paris, 1958,” in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 3:167: Düsterstes im Gedächtnis, Fragwürdigstes um sich her, kann [die deutsche Lyrik] bei aller Vergegenwärtigung der Tradition, in der sie steht, nicht mehr die Sprache sprechen, die manches geneigte Ohr immer noch von ihr zu erwarten scheint. Ihre Sprache ist nüchterner, faktischer geworden, sie mißtraut dem “Schönen,” sie versucht, wahr zu sein. Es ist also, wenn ich, das Polychrome des scheinbar Aktuellen im Auge behaltend, im Bereich des Visuellen nach einem Wort suchen darf, eine “grauere” Sprache, eine Sprache, die unter anderem auch ihre “Musikalität” an einem Ort angesiedelt wissen will, wo sie nichts mehr mit jenem “Wohlklang” gemein hat, der noch mit und neben dem Furchtbarsten mehr oder minder unbekümmert einhertönte.” 14. In “Celan & France,” Contretemps 2 (May 2001): 4, Pierre Joris compares Celan to those other transplanted Romanian writers Tristan Tzara and E. M. Cioran, who, once in Paris, wrote in French. 15. See Israel Chalfen, “Conversations with Ruth Lackner,” in Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth (New York: Persea, 1991), 184. Cf. Daive, who recalls the following conversation: [Celan]—Have you thought of writing in another language? [Daive]—No. Have you? [Celan]—Yes, sometimes in French . . . But it’s not possible. 16. Celan, “Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris, 1961,” in Prose, 23. Cf. Celan, “Antwort auf eine Unfrage der Librarie Flinker, Paris, 1961,” in Gesammelte Werke, 3:175: An Zweisprachigkeit in der Dichtung glaube ich nicht. Doppelzüngigkeit—ja, das gibt es, auch in diversen zeitgenössischen Wortkünsten bzw.–­ kunststücken, zumal in solchen, die sich, in freudiger ûbereinstimmung mit dem jeweiligen Kulturkonsum, genauso polyglott wie polychrom zu etablieren wissen. Dichtung—das ist das schicksalhaft Einmalige der Sprache. Also nicht— erlauben Sie mir diese Binsenwahrheit: Dichtung sieht sich ja heutzutage, wie die Wahrheit, nur allzuoft in die Binsen gehen—also nicht das Zweimalige. 17. Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” in Prose, 34. Cf. Celan, “Ansprache anlässlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen,” in Gesammelte Werke, 3:185–86:

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Erreichbar, nah und unverloren blieb inmitten der Verluste dies eine: die Sprache. Sie, die Sprache, blieb unverloren, ja, trotz allem. Aber sie mußte nun hindurchgehen durch ihre eigenen Antwortlosigkeiten, hindurchgehen durch furchtbares Verstummen, hindurchgehen durch die tausend Finsternisse todbringender Rede. Sie ging hindurch und gab keine Worte her für das, was geschah; aber sie ging durch dieses Geschehen. Ging hindurch und durfte wieder zutage treten, “angereichert” von all dem. 18. Aris Fioretos, preface to Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), xi. I discuss Jacques Derrida’s “Shibboleth for Paul Celan,” found in the same collection, in “Sound Scraps, Vision Scraps: Paul Celan’s Poetic Practice,” in Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 177–202. 19. Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Kios with Paul Celan) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 28. 20. Pierre Joris, introduction to Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, a Bilingual Edition, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2014), lxx; this volume is subsequently cited as CLP. Joris made this particular formulation in 1995, in his introduction to Paul Celan, Breathturn, trans. Pierre Joris (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1995), 51–52. In his introduction to the monumental Collected Later Poetry, Joris expands on this argument, demonstrating precisely how Celan’s later vocabulary comes from complex sources, including botany, Jewish mysticism, other languages such as Romanian, Osip Mandelstam’s Russian, and, as I argue here, Austrian dialect. See Joris, introduction to Celan, CLP, lxvi–­lxxvii. 21. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 322. Celan met Adorno in 1961; he had read with interest Adorno’s essay on Heine’s alienated language in Notes on Literature but, on the whole, distrusted the critic. In inscribing an offprint of his 1959 “Conversation in the Mountains,” in which the character Klein is modeled on Adorno, Celan mentions the vacation village of Sils Maria, “where I was to meet Herr Prof. Adorno, who I thought was a Jew” (see Jäger, Adorno, 185). The sardonic reference is to Adorno’s abandonment of his Jewish father’s name, Wiesengrund, in favor of his Catholic mother’s maiden name. In 1962, when Adorno failed to speak in support of Celan in the Yvan Goll plagiarism case, the poet wrote the punning lines “nicht / ab-­, nein wiesen- / gründig, / schreiben sie, die / Aber-­Maligen, dich / vor / die / Messer,” which Jäger translates as “Not cryptically, no as Wiesengrund, they, the revenants, write you before the knives’” ( Jäger, Adorno, 187). The critique of name changing is odd in light of Celan’s own name change, but Celan seems to have felt that Adorno, able to escape Germany, never understood the suffering that Nazi victims like himself and his family experienced. 22. Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth for Paul Celan,” trans. Joshua Wilner, in Word Traces, ed. Fioretos, 3–72. 23. Ilya Kaminsky,”Of Strangeness, That Wakes Us,” Poetry 201, no. 4 ( January 2013): 470–71.

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24. Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe, “Two Poems by Paul Celan” (1968), in Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); repr. in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 402–3. 25. Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, trans. Phiip Boehm (New York: Holes and Meier, 1990), 7, 33. The Slovenian phrase means “Me and you. You and me.” 26. Paul Celan, Die Gedichte: Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 180. All further references to this definitive one-­volume annotated edition are abbreviated as Gedichte. 27. According to Wie sagt man in Österreich? Wörterbuch des österreichischen Deutsch, ed. Jakob Ebner (Berlin: Dudenverlag, 2009), 66, the noun Beißer is Austrian slang for a polemical, argumentative, aggressive person who will have his way. This handbook is very helpful with both vocabulary and pronunciation: it explains, among other things, the impact Italian, the language of its often contested neighbor, had on the Austrian language. 28. See Perloff, “The Return of Luap Nalec: Pierre Joris, ‘Translating’ Paul Celan,” in Pierre-­Joris—Cartographies of the In-­Between, ed. Peter Cockelbergh (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2011), 302. Joris translates the lines to read “Eroded by / the beamwind of your speech,” CLP, 46. Eroded connotes a gradual wearing away, whereas Weggebeizt means, more properly, “corroded.” Again, “beamwind” strikes an archaicizing note I don’t find in Strahlenwind. 29. See Felstiner, Paul Celan, 65. According to Felstiner’s note (301n31), the poet in question was Hans Werner Richter. On Celan’s reaction to such meetings, see IBPC, 61. 30. Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Versions—Drafts—Materials, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull, trans. Pierre Joris (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 185; for the second quotation, see Felstiner, Paul Celan, 6. Kakania was the ironic name bestowed on the kaiserlich und königliches Habsburg Empire: see chap. 3. 31. Ilana Shmueli, afterword to The Correspondence of Paul Celan and Ilana Shmueli (Riverdale-­on-­Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow, 2010), 141–42. Shmueli met Celan again a few years before his suicide, she helped to arrange his visit to Israel, and they had a brief affair. 32. See Israel Chalfen, Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth, 7. I am indebted to this excellent biography throughout. Hereafter in text it is referred to as Chalfen. 33. See Julian Semalian and Sanda Agalidi, introduction to Paul Celan, Romanian Poems, trans. Semalian and Agalidi (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003), 10–11. 34. Celan, “Der Pfeil der Artemis,” in Gedichte, 17. My translation. 35. See Chalfen, Paul Celan, 184. Paul Antschel was never to change his name legally. See his letter to Gershom Schocken, February 5, 1970, in Correspondence of Paul Celan and Ilana Shmueli, 89. 36. See notes to letter #1 in IBPC, 4; Herzzeit, 251. 37. IBPC, #1. Cf. Hans Höller and Andrea Stall, ”The Secrecy of Letters in the Poems: Poetological Afterword,” in IBPC, 323; “Das Briefgeheimnis der Gedichte,” in Herzzeit, 227. The translation here is mine. Wieland Hoban (Herzzeit, 3–4) gives a more archaicizing translation, using “Thou shalt” throughout, and translating “Seht” and

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“Sieh” as “Behold,” evidently to capture the apocalyptic tone of the original. But I think Celan was writing more colloquially. Note that the Seagull edition of IBPC is not always reliable: on p. 3, for example, line 4 of the German text of “In Ägypten” is missing. Further, some words defy accurate translation: “Seht” in line 7 addresses the women in the plural, whereas “Sieh” in line 11 addresses Ingeborg (or, in any case, one woman) in the singular, but in English the pronoun form doesn’t distinguish between the two. For a fine recording of Paul Celan reading “Ägypten” (note his Austrian accent), see www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​jI48Ycx5mV8. 38. See Chalfen, Paul Celan, 146–47; Barbara Wiedemann, “Kommentar,” in Celan, Gedichte, 610–11. For the poem itself, published in Celan’s second book, Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952), see Gedichte, 42. 39. Celan, Gedichte, 39. For Michael Hamburger’s translation, see “Corona,” in Paul Celan: Poems, a Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1980), 48–49. There is a fine translation by Jerome Rothenberg in Paul Celan: Selections, ed. Pierre Joris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 44, but it is rather free, and in the interest of accuracy I have preferred to compose my own. For Celan’s own reading of the poem, see www​.youtube​.com ​/ watch​?v​=X ​ 25​-I­ DqiC5k/. 40. Celan adds, “Read the other poems by Marvell too, he is probably the greatest next to Donne” (IBPC, #55.). Celan translated “To His Coy Mistress” and other Marvell poems. 41. In Celans Kreidestern, Brigitta Eisenreich has an apposite comment: One should note that the postwar years in Austria were characterized by an extreme hunger for love, coupled with a sense of erotic freedom: the experience of war, deprivation, sacrifice, deracination, and diaspora contributed to the breakdown of class boundaries: a definite unmaking of bourgeois values was the result, accompanied as it was by the removal of so many previous barriers, but, at the same time, by a kind of verbal prudery—one feared sentimentality, one did not exult in elaborate declarations of love, for one knew ahead of time that words were never adequate. (43, my translation) 42. Paul Celan, “Weiss und Leicht,” letter #45, to Ingeborg Bachmann, Paris 17.10.1957, IBPC, 73–75, Herzzeit, 58–59. “Weiss und Leicht” was published in Sprachgitter (1959): see Gedichte, 98–99. 43. For a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s complex treatment of the word Schein—shining, showing forth, but also mere appearance, facsimile, simulacrum—as that word was picked up by Charles Bernstein in his Shadowtime, see Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 95. 44. See IBPC, #52, 61, 62. In #49 Celan talks of “tak[ing] away the feeling of guilt that awoke in you when the world sank away from me. To take it away from you forever.” 45. Gedichte, 104, my translation. The whole poem is reproduced in letter #47 in IBPC, Herzzeit. There are some variants here: in line 10, “Ströme” was “Wasser”

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in the letter version, line 4 was indented, and “ihr Dome” was not separated from the stanza that follows it. The poem was revised for publication in Sprachgitter. 46. Compare the “great cathedral gong” in Yeats’s “Byzantium.” 47. See Eisenreich, Celans Kreidestern, 63–64, 163–64n108. 48. IBPC, #73. In the revised and published version of “Ein Tag und Noch Einer” in Gedichte (105), lines 6–10 read: “rasch an den Himmel geschrieben, trug uns, wuchs / durchs ziehende Weiß in die Mondbahn, ein Morgen / sprang ins Gestern hinauf, wir holten, / zerstoben, den Leuchter, ich stürtzte / alles in niemandes Hand.” This translates as “quickly etched in the sky, bore us, grew / through the pull of white in the moon’s orbit, a morning / rose up into yesterday, we fetched, / torn apart, the candlestick, I plunged it / all into nobody’s hand.” This version is clearly more disturbing, suggesting a final argument or deadlock between the lovers, especially in the last lines where “I wept/ into your hand” gives way to the notion of giving it all into the hands of a no one. 49. Various critics have read the candlestick as a veiled reference to the menorah and hence as a reassertion of Celan’s Jewish values. See Jürgen Lehmann, with Unter Mitarbeit von Jens Finckh, Markus May, and Susanna Brogi, Kommentar zu Paul Celans “Sprachgitter” (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2005), 318. But in “Tenebrae” and related poems, candleholders are associated with Catholic liturgy. It is also, of course, a sexual symbol. 50. Gedichte, 113. In Robert Kelly’s translation in Selected Poems, the poem is called, in a very free translation, “Stretto” (67–74); Hamburger (117) calls it “The Straitening.” 51. Gedichte, 116; Selected Poems, 72. 52. Lacoue-­Labarthe, “Poetry as Experience,” 406. 53. Gedichte, 319. Translation mine. Pierre Joris’s translation (see CLP, 332–33) is more elegant than mine, but quiekst (line 2) means squeals, not squeaks, and I see no reason not to translate the verb literally here; also, the last lines seem misleading to me because “Schatten beschwerenden” is an ablative absolute here: literally, “in my—casting a shadow so as to weigh you down— / speech.” Joris translates the lines “words weighing you, shadow, / down,” suggesting that the shadow is “you.”

C oda 1. M. O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1981), 94, 171. Hereafter referred to in text as Drury. 2. James C. Klagge’s excellent Wittgenstein in Exile (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011) has a somewhat misleading title; Klagge is concerned less with literal exile than with the idea that Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century, that his philosophy fits no prior paradigms. 3. Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews (1937), trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 22. 4. See Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Macmillan / Free Press, 1990), 4–5. Hereafter referred to in text as Monk.

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5. See Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, vol. 1, Young Ludwig 1889–1921 (Berkeley: University of Califoria Press, 1988), 24–33. 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Geheime Tagebücher 1914–1916, ed. Wilhelm Baum (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 1991), my translation: Fühle . . . mehr als je die furchtbare Traurigkeit unserer—der deutschen Rasse—Lage! Denn daß wir gegen England nicht aufkommen können, scheint mir so gut wie gewiß. Die Engländer—die beste Rasse der Welt— können nicht verlieren! Wir aber können verlieren und werden verlieren, wenn nicht in diesem Jahr, so im nächsten! Der Gedanke, daß unsere Rasse geschlagen werden soll, deprimiert mich furchtbar, denn ich bin ganz und gar deutsch! (33) 7. Hermine Wittgenstein, “My Brother Ludwig,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, 3; Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 111. 8. See Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 116. Wittgenstein was fascinated by the character of Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov but later remarked, in conversation with Drury in 1930, “What would really have interested me would be to have seen how a character like Smerdyakov [Alyosha’s half-­wit servant brother, who murders their father] could have been saved rather than Alyosha”: see Drury, Some Notes on Conversations, 123. For a good early account of the Tolstoy connection, see [Ludwig Wittgenstein and] Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (New York: Horizon, 1968), 79–81; cf. Alan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 161–64; cf. Bill Schardt and David Large, “Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and the Gospel in Brief,” Philosopher 89 (Autumn 2011), http://​www​.the​-­philosopher​.co​.uk​/ witty​.htm. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd ed., ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), June 11, 1916, July 8, 1916 (pp. 72–74): Was weiß ich über Gott, und den Zweck des Lebens? Ich weiß daß diese Welt ist. Daß ich in ihr stehe wie mein Auge in seinem Gesichstfeld. Daß etwas an ihr problematisch ist, was wir ihren Sinn nennen. Daß dieser Sinn nicht in ihr liegt sodern außer ihr. . . . Den Sinn des Lebens, d.i. den Sinn der Welt, können wir Gott nennen. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus [1922], German text with aEnglish translation by C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1992). References are to proposition numbers (§) rather than pages. 11. See Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, chap. 5, 120–66. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein to Paul Engelmann, May 15, 1925, quoted in Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 229. 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, rev. ed., ed. G. H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman; rev. ed. Alois Pichler; trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 16. All further references are to this edition, cited as C&V. The German is on the left side of the page (e.g., 32), the English on the right (32e). Because Culture and Value

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was a private notebook, not designed for publication, in almost every case I reproduce the original German entry in an endnote. I also adapt some of Winch’s translations, which often render Wittgenstein’s colloquial German in a rather stilted and awkward English. 14. Critics have been especially severe on Wittgenstein’s stated admiration for the overtly anti-­Semitic and misogynist Otto Weininger: for a fair-­minded discussion of the relationship, see Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 309–27. 15. See ibid., 385–400; Alec Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 201–19. 16. Fania Pascal, “Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, 49. 17. During part of the time, his young protégé and lover Francis Skinner, with whom he had gone to Russia, was with him in Norway. 18. C&V, 32: Das Christentum ist keine Lehre, ich meine, keine Theorie darüber, was mit der Seele des Menschen geschehen ist & geschehen wird, sondern eine Beschreibung eines tatsächlichen Vorgangs im Leben des Menschen. Denn die “Erkenntnis der Sünde” ist ein tatsächlicher Vorgang & die Verzweiflung desgleichen & die Erlösung durch den Glauben desgleichen. Die, die davon sagen (wie Bunyan), beschreiben einfach, was ihnen geschehen ist; was immer einer dazu sagen will! 19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 137; subsequently cited as PO. For Frazer’s own discussion to which Wittgenstein refers, see James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd. ed., 12 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1917), 2:2. 20. C&V, 36–37: Gott läßt das Leben des Gottmenschen von vier Menschen berichten,von jedem anders, & widersprechend—aber kann man nicht sagen: Es ist wichtig, daß dieser Bericht nicht mehr als sehr gewöhnliche historische Wahrscheinlichkeit habe, damit diese nicht für das Wesentliche, Ausschlaggebende gehalten werde. Damit der Buchstabe nicht mehr Glaube fände, als ihm gebührt & der Geist sein Recht behalte. D. h.: Was Du Sehen sollst läßt sich auch durch den besten, genauesten Geschichtschreiber nicht vermitteln, ja ist vorzuziehen, eine mittelmäßige Darstellung. . . . Das Wesentliche, für Dein Leben Wesentliche aber legt der Geist in diese Worte. 21. C&V, 35; October 4, 1937: Die Quelle, die in den Evangelien ruhig & klar fließt, scheint in den Briefen des Paulus zu schäumen. Oder, so scheint es mir. Vielleicht ist es eben bloß meine eigene Unreinheit die hier die Trübung hineinsieht; denn warum sollte diese Unreinheit nicht das klare verunreinigen können? Aber mir ist

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es, als sähe ich hier menschliche Leidenschaft, etwas wie Stolz oder Zorn, was sich nicht mit der Demut der Evangelien reimt. Als ware hier doch ein Betonen der eigenen Person, & zwar als religiöser Akt, was dem Evangelium fremd ist. Ich möchte fragen—& möge dies keine Blasphemie sein—: “Was hättewohl Christus zu Paulus gesagt?” Aber man könnte mit Recht darauf antworten: Was geht Dich das an? Schau das Du anständiger wirst! Wie Du bist, kannst Du überhaupt nicht verstehen, was hier die Wahrheit sein mag. In den Evangelien—so scheint mir—ist alles schlichter, demütiger, einfacher. Dort sind Hütten;—bei Paulus eine Kirche. Dort sind alle Menschen gleich & Gott selbst ein Mensch; by Paulus gibt es schon etwas wie eine Hierarchie; Würden, & Ämter.—So sagt quasi mein geruchsinn. 22. C&V, 37, November 11, 1937: Die Lehre z.B. von der Gnadenwahl, bei Paulus, ist auf meiner Stufe Irreligiosität, ein häßlicher Unsinn. Daher gehört sie nicht für mich da ich das mir gebotene Bild nur falsch anwenden kann. Ist es ein frommes & gutes Bild, dann für eine ganz andere Stufe, auf der es gänzlich anders im Leben muß angewandt werden, als ich es anwenden könnte. In the later 1940s, however, so Drury reports, Wittgenstein softened his stance, noting that he had been wrong to discriminate so fully between the Gospels and Paul and that “it was the same religion in each” (Drury, Some Notes on Conversations, 105). And in 1949, “at one time I thought that the epistles of St. Paul were a different religion to that of the Gospels. But now I see clearly that I was wrong” (ibid., 178). 23. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Badiou claims that the Paul of the epistles provides a paradigm of the subject that still harbors a genuinely revolutionary potential: the subject is that which refuses to submit to the order of the world as we know it and struggles for a new one instead. 24. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul [1993], trans. from the German by Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 16–17. Note that this is an odd formulation since it was Jesus who said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” ( John 14:6). 25. See Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter of the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Agamben, Profanations [2005], trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 77–78. Cf. Kenneth Reinhard, ed., The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, 2nd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); the essays are by Reinhard himself, Slavoj Žižek, and Eric L. Santner. 26. C&V, 61, October 11, 1946. “Das Christentum sagt unter anderm, glaube ich, daß alle guten Lehren nichts nützen. Man müsse das Leben ändern. (Oder die Richtung des Lebens.) Daß alle Weisheit kalt ist; & daß man mit ihr das Leben so wenig in Ordnung bringen kann, wie man Eisen kalt schmieden kann. . . . Weisheit ist leidenschaftslos. Dagegen nennt Kierkegaard den Glauben eine Leidenschaft.”

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27. Rush Rhees’s collection Ludwig Wittgenstein contains two essays by Drury. The first and shorter one (91–111) appeared in a volume of Essays in Honour of G. H. von Wright; the offprint reached Drury two days before his death on Christmas Day 1976. The second and longer one (112–89) is a draft prepared in 1974; some of the items in this draft were revised for the published essay. But here I refer to both as Drury by the page numbers in Rhees’s collection. 28. Drury 101, my italics. The dialogue is repeated, in fuller form, in the longer form of the “Conversations”: see 116–17. On Catholicism as a philosophical system, cf. the following remark (1930) to Drury: “It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him” (123). 29. W. B. Yeats, letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, January 4, 1939, in Collected Letters, ed. Allen Wade (London: Rupert Hart-­Davis, 1954), 922. 30. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Über Gewissheit), ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 18. Subsequently cited in the text as OC. §115. Wer an allem zweifeln wollte, der würde auch nicht bis zum Zweifel kommen. Das Spiel des Zweifeln selbst setzt schon die Gewißheit voraus. 31. (§148) Warum überzeuge ich mich not davon, daß ich noch zwei Füße have, wenn ich mich von dem Sessel erheben will? Es gibt kein warum. Ich tue es einfach nicht. So handle ich.” 32. (§150) Wie beurteilt Einer, welches seine rechte und welches seine linke Hand ist? Wie weiß ich, daß mein Urteil mit dem der Andern übereinstimmen wird? 33. (§347) “I know that that’s a tree.” Warum kommt mir vor, ich verstünde den Satz nicht? Obwohl er doch ein höchst einfacher Satz von der gewöhnlichesten Art ist? Es ist als könnte ich meinen Geist nicht auf irgendeine Bedeutung einstellen. Weil ich nämlich die Einstellung nicht in dem Bereiche suche, wo sie ist. Sowie ich aus der philosophischen an eine alltägliche Anwendung des Satzes denke, wirdsein Sinn klar und gewöhnlich. (§347) 34. §341. D. h., die Fragen die wir stellen, und unsre Zweifel beruhen darauf, daß gewisse Sätze, vom Zweifel ausgenommen sind, gleichsam die Angeln, in welchen jene sich bewegen. §342. D.h., es gehört zur Logik unsrer wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen, daß Gewisses in der Tat nicht Angezweifelt wird. §343. Es ist aber damit nicht so, daß wir eben nicht alles untersuchen können: und us daher notgedrungen mit der Annahme zufriedenstellen müssen. Wenn ich will, daß die Türe sich drehe, müssen die Angeln feststehen. §344. Mein Leben besteht darin, daß ich mich mit manchem zufrieden gebe.

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35. It is unfortunate that Wittgenstein seems to have been quite unaware of the possibility of discussing difference in Jewish writings, from the Bible on down, as well as in Christian ones. 36. Alain Badiou, The Antiphilosophy of Wittgenstein [2009], trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2011). 37. Ibid., 85. Cf. Badiou’s earlier Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997). 38. John Keats, letter to George and Tom Keats, December 21, 1817, in Selections from Keats’s Letters [1817], http://​www​.poetryfoundation​.org ​/ learning ​/essay​/237 836​?page​=2 ​ /. 39. Badiou, Antiphilosophy of Wittgenstein, 25. 40. C&V, 6. Cf. Marjorie Perloff, “Towards Conceptualism: The Aesthetic of Kringelburch #52,” in Kulturen & Werte: Wittgenstein’s Kringelbuch als Initialtext, ed. Josef Rothhaupt and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 339–53; and Perloff, “Wittgenstein’s Shakespeare,” in Will the Modernist: Shakespeare and the European Historical Avant-­Gardes, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Caroline Patey (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), 107–24. 41. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preface, Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte; rev. 4th ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 3.

Index

Adler, Viktor, 9, 10 Adorno, Theodor, 95, 127, 184n9, 186n21; works: Aesthetic Theory, 129 Agalidi, Sanda, 187n33 Agamben, Giorgio, 161, 162, 192n25 Albrecht, Adam: Fieldmarshal Radetzky during the Battle of Novara, 68 fig. 15 Allison, John, 175n17 Anderson, Maxwell, 175n9 Anschluss, 2, 5–6, 16–17, 53, 83, 102, 114, 116, 135, 158. See also Nazis/ Nazism Anscombe, G. E. M. 180n6, 180n9, 193n30, 194n41 anti-Semitism, 9–11, 12, 16–17, 59–60, 131, 172n19, 191n14; Canetti on, 117–18, 121; Jews and, 51; Kraus’s, 25, 176n29, 176n31; Kristallnacht, 53; Musil on, 85, 88–90, 92, 97–98, 172n19, 181n27; rebirth of, 117; Roth on, 51; stereotypes and, 86; Wittgenstein’s, 157, 158 Antschel, Paul (Celan), 3, 135–37, 138, 150, 151, 187n35; metamorphosis into Paul Celan, 137–38. See also Celan, Paul Apollinaire, Guillaume, 51 Arditti, Bernhard, 119 Arendt, Hannah: The Origins of Totalitarianism, 15–16 Arnheim, Rudolf, 13 Ashbery, John, 84

Ashton, E. B., 184n9 Atemwende (Celan), 130 Auschwitz, 150, 184n9. See also antiSemitism Auto-da-Fe (Canetti), 121, 122 Ayres, Lew, 175n9 Babel, Isaac, 112 Bachmann, Ingeborg, xiii, 3, 13, 121, 125–26, 127, 130, 131, 143, 146–47; love letters of/to, 138–40, 141, 142, 146–47, 147–48, 149, 183n2; on Wittgenstein and Heidegger, 184n12; works: Die Wahrheit ist dem Menschen zumutbar: Essays, Reden, Kleinere Schriften, 183–84n5; “The Good God of Manhattan,” 149; “Ludwig Wittgenstein—Zu Einem Kapitel der Jüngsten Philosophiegeschichte,” 184–85n12 Badiou, Alain, 161, 167, 183n3, 192n23, 194n37, 194n39; works: Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 167, 194n36 Bance, Alan, 178n6 Bartók, Béla, 113 Batchelor, David, 27, 173–74n2 Baudelaire, Charles, 123, 150–51 Bauer, Otto, 9 Baum, Wilhelm, 189n6 Beckett, Samuel, 128 Benedikt, Moritz, 9, 25, 33. See also Neue Freie Presse

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Benjamin, Walter, 13, 24, 95, 188n43; on Karl Kraus, 12–13, 37, 38, 172n23; on media, 24 Berg, Alban, 120 Bernhard, Thomas, xiii, 3, 143, 176n27 Bernstein, Charles, 188n43 Besson, Jean-Louis, 175n20 Bingham, Fred, 174n2, 177n36 Bismarck, Otto von, 19 Black, Hawk, 178n4 Boehm, Philip, 187n25 Bolshevism, 12 Bosteels, Bruno, 194n36 Boycott, Captain Charles C.: and etymology of boycott, 29 Bradley, F. H., 154 Brahms, Johannes, 154. See also music Brecht, Bertolt, xiv, 4, 24, 111–12 Brentano, Bernard von, 178n9 Broch, Hermann, 120 Brody, Galicia/Ukraien, 3, 48, 49 figs. 1–2, plate 1 Brogi, Susanna, 189n49 Brooke, Rupert, 24 Brook-Shepherd, Gordon, 172n16 Brown, Marshall, 186n18 Brownjohn, Alan, 174n2 Burton-Page, Piers, 176n24 Bukovina, 4, 135, 140. See also Czernowitz Bulgarian (language), 113 Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress, 159 Calvino, Italo: Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 90, 181n23 Cambridge University: Wittgenstein and, 153, 157, 162, 167 Canetti, Elias, xiii, 3, 5, 7, 11, 18, 81, 121, 130, 143, 153; autobiography, 101–23, 168, 182n5; on Oedipus complex, 182n9; works: Auto-da-Fe, 121, 122; The Conscience of Words, 121; Crowds and Power, xii, 120; “Geburt des Bruders” (My Brother’s Birth), 122; The Play of the Eyes, 102, 112–14, 120–21, 123; The Tongue Set Free, xiii,

7, 101–23; The Torch in My Ear, 102, 111–12, 118, 120; The Wedding, 120 Carson, Anne: on Celan’s language, 129, 186n19 castration motif, in Canetti, 182n5 Catholicism, 10, 154, 160; Canetti and, 118; Drury on, 193n28; Wittgenstein and, 163–64, 168–69. See also Christianity; religion Celan, Paul, xiii, 3, 7, 11, 13, 14, 18, 125–51, 153; language of, 127–31; love letters of/to, 138–40, 142, 146–47, 148, 149, 183n2; paranoia of, 184n7; translations, 138; works: “Antwort auf eine Umfrage der Librairie Flinker, Paris, 1958,” 185n13; Atemwende, 130; Agora, Number 1, 138; Bucharest poems, 136–37; “The Arrow of Artemis,” 136–37; “Cologne, Am Hof,” 146–48, 149; “Corona,” 140–48; “In Egypt,” 138– 40; “Engführung,” 150; “In Egypt,” 138–39; letters, 140; “Love Song,” 137, 142–43; Mohn und Gedächtnis, 140–41; “One Day and One More,” 148–49; Romanian Poems, 137; Snowpart, 151; Speechgrille (3 vols.), 126, 130, 143, 149–50; “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, 185–86n17; Sprachgitter, 126, 149–50, 184n6; From Threshold to Threshold, 143; Todesfuge, 133; “Totnauberg,” 150; “Tübingen, Jänner,” 150; “White and Light,” 143–46, 147–48. See also Antschel, Paul; German language; translation Celan’s Kreidestern (Chalk Star) (Eisenreich), 126 Chalfen, Israel, 133–34, 135, 137–38, 185n15, 187n32, 187n35, 188n38 Christianity: Wittgenstein and, 159– 69. See also Gospels; religion; St. Paul, epistles; Wittgenstein, Ludwig Christian Socials, 8, 9

i n d e x   |   197

Christophe, Henri, 175n20 Cianci, Giovanni, 194n40 Cioran, E. M. 185n14 Clemenceau, Georges, Prime Minister, 1 CNN (news program), 21–22 Cockelbergh, Peter, 187n28 Coetzee, J. M., 178n12 comedy: in Musil, 95–96, 98, 99 Cometti, Jean-Pierre, Musil philosophe: L’utopie de l’essayisme, 79, 180n9 Communism/Communists, 15, 25, 27, 31, 41, 48, 64, 83, 99 concentration camps, 135, 175–76n21. See also anti-Semitism; Nazis/ Nazism Cooper, Anderson, 21–22 Corngold, Stanley, 25, 174n7, 175n12 Creagh, Patrick, 171n1 Crefeld, A. H. “Feldpostbrief,” 21 fig. 2 Croggon, Alison, 176n22 Crowds and Power (Canetti), xii, 120 culture: as religion, 154 Czech (language), 112–13 Czernowitz, Bukovina, 3, 4, 16, 125, 131, 132 figs. 22 and 23, 133, 134 figs. 24 and 25, 135–36, 150, 151, plates 1 and 8 Dada, xiv, 22 Dafoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe, 109 Daily, Patricia, 192n25 Daive, Jean, 183n1, 185n15 Dambacher, Eva, 174n3 Darby, David, 182n9 decency (Anständigkeit): Roth and Wittgenstein on, 53 Der Neue Tag, 177n1 Derrida, Jacques, 129 Dickinson, Emily, 131 Diderot, Denis, Rameau’s Nephew, 52 Die Fackel, 12, 21, 22–23, 25–26, 27 fig. 3, 39, 51, 55, 118, 155, 172n22, 173n30, 177n35, 177n38, 43, plate 4. See also Kraus, Karl Die Neue Freie Presse, 10

Die Neue Rundschau, 81, 174n7 Dimendberg, Edward, 173n26 Dimitrova, Svoboda Alexandra, 182n8 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 9, 80–81 Donne, John, 188n40; “The GoodMorrow,” 148 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Brothers Karamazov, 156, 190n8 Drury, Maurice, 155, 162–64, 169, 193n27; on Catholicism, 193n28; “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” 162–66, 189n1, 192n22 Dual Monarchy, 1, 3, 4, 22, 67, 69, 83– 84, 102. See also Habsburgs duels, 59–61 Ebner, Jakob, 187n27 Eiland, Howard, 172n23, 175n11 Einstein, Albert: conversation with Freud, 13–15, 173n26 Eisenreich, Brigitta, 126–27, 131, 134– 35, 188n41, 189n47; works: Celan’s Kreidestern (Chalk Star) El-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 21 Engelmann, Paul, 157, 190n8, 190n12 Engelova, Penka, 182n8 English (language), 109, 114, 115, 121, 122 eros/thanatos, 150; Freud on, 15 essay: as genre, 78–79; etymology of, 78, 180n7 “essayism”: in Musil, 77–79, 180n9 Fascism, 15, 25, 48, 83, 90, 92; versus Communism, 99 Felstiner, John, 187nn29–30 Finckh, Jens, 189n49 Fioretos, Aris: on Celan’s language, 129, 186n18 Foell, Kristie A., 183n13 Föhn wind, 149, 150 Fontane, Theodor: Effi Briest, 59 Ford, Anna, 173n2 Fort, Jeff, 192n25 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke: assassinated, xi, 19, 24, 66, 117

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Frankfurter Zeitung, 5, 48, 178n5 Franz Josef, Emperor, xi, 41, 133, 179n3; in Musil, 75; in Roth, 46–47, 62, 65–67 Franzen, Jonathan, 177n37 Frazer, Sir James: The Golden Bough: Wittgenstein and, 158, 160, 165, 191n19 Frege, Gottlob, 155 Fremdenblatt, 31 Freud, Sigmund, xii, 10, 81, 105, 107, 182–83n9; conversation with Einstein, 13–15, 173n26; The Interpretation of Dreams, 105; on war, 14–15 Frisé, Adolf, 172n11, 180n13 Frisch, Max, 126, 184n7 Frontkämpfer, 120 Fuchs, Anne, 182n5 Futurism, Italian, 22 Galicia, 49–50 figs. 11–13; 51, 116–17. See also Brody; Lvov “Geburt des Bruders” (My Brother’s Birth) (Canetti), 122 George, Stefan, 90–91 German (language), 11–12, 51, 69, 107– 8, 110–11, 112, 119, 121–22, 127–28, 129–30, 133, 134–35, 149 Gnad, Peter, 33, 38 and fig. 7; 177n33, 177n39 God: Wittgenstein on, 156. See also Christianity; religion; St. Paul, epistles; Wittgenstein, Ludwig Gode, Alexander, 174n2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 18, 20; works: Faust, 135 Goll, Claire, 184n7 Goll, Yvan, 126, 184n7, 186n21 Gordon, Peter E., 173n25 Gospels: Wittgenstein on, 153, 160–62, 192n22 Graben (Vienna), 73 fig. 17 Graf, Günter, 179n2 Grillparzer, Franz, 18, 127 Grietzer, Peli: on Conceptualist writing, 26, 175n16

Grosz, George, 111 Gypsies, 105–6 Habsburgs: xii, xiii, 2 fig. 1, 3, 4, 6, 11, 19, 29, 68, 75, 79, 178n8; decline/ collapse of, xi–xii, 13, 18, 46, 48, 75, 102, 103; nostalgia for, 52–53, diversity within empire, 103. See also Dual Monarchy; k. & k.; individual names Hacker, P. M. S., 194n41 Hamann, Brigitte, 172n15, 172n17, 179n16 Hamburger, Michael, 188n39 Harrison, Thomas: on essays, 78, 180n8 Havergal, Giles, 27, 173n2 Heidegger, Martin, 4–5, 13, 127; Bachmann on, 184–85n12; “Being-in-theWorld,” 4–5 Heine, Heinrich, 18 Heller-Roazen, Daniel: Echolalias, 112– 13, 183n11 Hellinger, Mario, 27, 177n35 Hermann, Rudolf: The Rumors (“Das Gerücht”), 35 fig. 6, 36 Hitler, Adolf, 14, 39, 48, 52, 89; Canetti on, 120; Musil on, 83, 90, 117; preference for German, 69 Hitler–Stalin Non-Aggression Pact, 135 Hoban, Wieland, 183n3, 187n37 Hobsbawn, Eric, 6, 171n3, 171n9 Hoffmansthal, Hugo von, 127; works: “Austria’s Reply,” 23 Hofmann, Michael, 50–51, 67, 171n8, 177n1, 178n2, 178n6, 178nn11–12, 179n15, 182n4, 189n3 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 135 Hollander, Dana, 192n24 Höller, Hans, 187n37 Holocaust (Shoah), 18, 67, 133, 150. See also anti-Semitism Horn, Gretl, 176n27 Hötzendorf, Field Marshal Conrad von, 32, 33 fig. 5 hudba (music), 112–13. See also music

i n d e x   |   199

Huebsch, Benjamin, 172n3 Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 186n21 Hulse, Michael, 182n6 “Internationale, The” 69. See also music Isherwood, Christopher, 16 Jackson, Virginia, 187n24 Jäger, Lorenz, 184n9, 186n21 James, Henry, 76 James, William, 156 Janácek, Leoš, 113 Janik, Alan, 2, 190n8, 190n11 Jay, Martin, 173n26 Jennings, Michael W., 172n23, 175n11 Jephcott, Edmund, 175n10 Jesus Christ, 161, 192n24. See also Christianity; Gospels; religion “Jewish Question,” 97. See also antiSemitism Johnston, William M., 172n20 Joris, Pierre, 150, 185n14, 188n39; on Celan’s language, 129, 186n20, 187n28, 187n30, 189n53 Joyce, James, xii, xiii, xiv, 173n2; works: Ulysses, 44 Jünger, Ernst, 24; works: The Storm of Steel, 23 k. & k. (kaiserlich and königlich), 2, 3, 68, 79, 80, 103, 126, 131–33, 187n30 Kaes, Anton, 173n26 Kafka, Franz, xii, 3, 130, 135, 143; works: Trial, 44 Kakania, 3, 79, 80, 81, 91, 92, 99, 102–3, 131, 180n12, 187n30 Kaminsky, Ilya, 129, 186n23 Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Pure Reason, 94 Keats, John, 167, 194n38 Kelly, Robert, 189n50 Keynes, John Maynard: association with Wittgenstein, 17–18, 157 Kierkegaard, Søren, 156, 162, 165 Kislinger, Peter, 176n24

Klagge, James C., 189n2, 191n19 Kleist, Heinrich von, 135 Klimt, Gustav, xii, 2, 154 Koschl, Christine, 183n3 Kracauer, Siegfried, 13 Kraus, Karl, xii, 5, 10, 13, 15, 16, 43–44, 47, 48, 75, 81, 143, 153; Benjamin on, 12–13; Canetti and, 115, 118–19, 121, 165, 174n13; “Roundtrip of the Battlefields by Motorcar,” 175– 76n21; works: Advertisements for a Trip to Hell, 27; Die Fackel, 12, 21, 22, 25–26, 27 fig. 3, 51, 55, 118, 155; “Die Sprache,” 12, 39, 172n22; The Last Days of Mankind, xiii, 4, 7, 16, 19–40 (esp. 28 fig. 4 [poster advertising]; 38 fig. 7 [still from recording of ]), 81, 115, 172n10, 173n2, 176n25; The Rumors, 27, 51; “On the Theory of Language,” 37; Third Walpurgisnacht, 18, 173n30 Kristallnacht, 53. See also antiSemitism Kundmann, Rudolf, 176n31 Lackner, Ruth, 128, 135, 139, 150 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 129–30, 150, 151, 186n24, 189n52 Laemmle, Carl, Jr., 175n9 Large, David, 190n8 Last Days of Mankind, The (Kraus), 4, 719–40, 81, 115, 172n10; abridged version, 26; Jonathan Franzen on, 177n37; poster advertising, 28 fig. 4; translations of, 171–72n10, 175n20. See also Kraus, Karl Lawrence, D. H., 157 Le Cadavre exquis (Surrealist game), 136 Lee, Desmond, 177n44 Lehmann, Jürgen, 189n49 Lensing, Leo A.: critique of productions of The Last Days of Mankind, 176n25 Lermontov, Mikhail: A Hero of Our Times, 138

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Lestrange, Gisèle, 126, 151 liberalism: in Musil, 80, 89 Livingstone, Rodney, 172n23 Long War (Second Thirty-Year War), 1–2. See also World War I Lorenz, Dagmar C. G., 182n5 Lueger, Karl, 10 Luft, David S., 179n2, 179n4, 180n14, 180n16, 181n19 Lvov (Lemberg), Galicia/Ukraine, 48, 50 figs. 13–14 MacDonald, Robert, 27, 173–74n2, 175n20, 177n34, 177n36 Mach, Ernst, 180n9 Magris, Claudio, 102–3, 107, 121, 171n1, 178n7, 182n6 Mahler, Gustav, xii, 2, 10, 120, 154 Maier, Moses: takes on surname SeynWittgenstein, 154 Mandelstam, Osip, 186n20 Mann, Heinrich, 174n8 Mann, Thomas, xii, xiv, 23; works: Betrachungen eines Unpolitischen, 174n8; “Thoughts in Wartime,” 23 Mannheim, Ralph, 182n3 Man without Qualities, The (Musil), xiii, 3, 5, 7, 14, 71–99, 102–3, 168; epigraph to, 179n1. See also Musil, Robert Marclay, Christian: The Clock, 84 Maria Theresa, Empress, xi Marie Antoinette, Queen, xi Marinetti, F. T., 22 Marvell, Andrew, “To His Coy Mistress,” 141, 188n40 Marxism, 13, 112, 155; Musil on, 94 Matisse, Henri, 138 Maximilian, Emperor, xi May, Markus, 189n49 McCormick, John P., 173n25 McDonald, Ronald, 33 McGuinness, Brian, 189n5 McVity, Jonathan, 174n4 Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (von Rezzori), 16–17

Metaphysical poets, 141 militarism: as theme in Roth, 41–68 Milestone, Lewis, 175n9 Miriam (biblical), 139, 140 Mirsky, Mark, 172n11, 180n13 Monk, Ray, 171n7, 173n28, 189n4, 190nn 7–8, 190n12, 191n14 Montaigne, Michel de, 77 Moore, G. E., 11, 154 Morris, Adelaide, 175n17 Most, Franz, 178n3 “mother tongue” (Muttersprache), 107– 8, 111, 113, 119, 122, 128, 129–30. See also German music: in Canetti, 112–13, 114–15; in Roth, 41–43, 42–43 figs. 8–10, 44, 45, 56, 68–69. See also individual names and titles Musikverein (Vienna), 41, 42 figs. 8, 9 Musil, Robert, xiii, 11, 13, 15, 18, 23, 78, 128, 130, 143, 153; editor, Die Neue Rundschau, 81, and Tyroler Soldatenzeitung, 82; fights in World War I, 81–82; works: 82; Der junge Törless, 81; Diaries, 83, 94, 180n13, 181n28; Die Neue Rundschau, 81, 82; From Which, Remarkably Enough, Nothing Develops, 71; “Helpless Europe: A Digressive Journey,” 94; “Kakania,” 79–84; The Man without Qualities, xiii, 3, 5, 7, 71–99, 168, 179n1; Nachlass, 84; Notebook, 82, 99, 180n12; “Panama,” 82; posthumous papers, 85; Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, 94–95, 99; “Ruminations of a Slow-Witted Mind,” 93–94; Tagebücher, 181n19; Tyroler Soldatenzeitung, 82 Naomi (biblical), 139, 140 National Socialism, 25, 89, 90. See also Nazis/Nazism Nautz, Jürgen, 172n13 Nazis/Nazism, 17–18, 135, 136; Canetti on, 117; Celan on, 186n21; Eisenreich on, 126; Kraus on, 25, 39; Musil

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on, 83, 89, 90–91, 93–94; Wittgenstein and, 157–58 Nestroy, Johann, 18 Neue Freie Presse, 19, 25, 29, 33, 108 Neue Rundschau (Berlin), 93 Neugroschel, Joachim, 173n27, 178nn6–7, 182nn1–3, 183n12 Neumann, Justus, 27 newspaper: Walter Benjamin on, 24. See also individual titles New Testament, 158, 160; Romans, 161. See also Christianity; Gospels Nietzsche, Friederich, 18, 23, 91, 98, 180n9, 181n24 Nordmann, Alfred, 191n19 Nyman, Heikki, 190n13 Oberbombenwerfer, 37–38 fig. 7 Ogden, C. K., 190n10 Old Testament: Wittgenstein on, 160, 164–65, 193n35 On the Eve (Wasserstein), 10 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 15–16 Owen, Wilfred, 24 Parallel Campaign, 75, 84, 95, 96, 99, 179n3, 179n11 Pascal, Fania, 191n16 Patey, Caroline, 194n40 Paul, Denis, 193n30 Paul, Saint, epistles of: Agamben on, 161; Badiou on, 161, 192n23; Taubes on, 161; Wittgenstein on, 160–61, 162, 192n22. See also Christianity; Gospels; religion Payne, Philip, 172n11, 179n2, 180n13 Perloff, Marjorie, 7, 174n2, 174n6; 175n17, 176n30, 177n32, 182n4, 187n28, 187–88n37, 189n48, 189n53, 189–90n6, 194n40; on avant-garde, 174n5, 174n8; on Derrida, 186n18; lecture on Kraus (YouTube), 174n2; review of Party in the Blitz: The English Years, 182n4; works: The Futurist Moment: Avant Garde, Avant-

Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, xiii–xiv; Unoriginal Genius, 7, 188n43; Wittgenstein’s Ladder, xiii, 184n11 Pfäfflin, Friedrich, 174n3, 175n21 Pichler, Alois, 190n13 Pike, Burton, 93, 171n5, 179nn1–2, 179n4, 181n26, 182n7 Pistorius, Agnes, 38, 176nn26–28, 177n40 Plato, Symposium, 77 Play of the Eyes (Canetti), 112–14, 123. See also Canetti, Elias Pound, Ezra, 39, 117 Prague (Czechoslovakia), 112 Princip, Gavrilo, xi Prins, Yopi, 187n24 Protestantism, 154. See also religion Proust, Marcel, xii, xiv Pushkin, Alexander: Eugene Onegin, 59 Question-Réponse, 136 Radetzky, Field Marshal Joseph, 41, 68 fig. 15, 69 Radetzky March, The (Roth), xiii, 2, 6–7, 41–69, 75; translations of, 178nn6–7 “Radetzky March, The” (by Johann Strauss the Elder), 41–43, 45, 54, 55, 58, 61, 66, 67–68, 68 fig. 15, 114, 178n3 Raimund, Ferdinand, 18 Raphael, Frederic, 179n15 Rathenau, Walter, 181n27 Reifenberg, Benno, 5–6 Reinhard, Kenneth, 192n25 Reitter, Paul, 175n13 religion: Wittgenstein and, 153–61. See also Catholicism; Gospels; Paul, Saint, epistles; Wittgenstein, Ludwig Remarque, Eric Maria, All’s Quiet on the Western Front, 23, 24, 174n9 Renner, Karl, 9 Rezzori, Gregor von, 3, 4, 172n3, 173n27; works: Memoirs of an AntiSemite, 16–17

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Rhees, Rush, 171n7, 178n14, 182n10, 190n7, 191n16, 193n27 Richards, I. A., 168 Richter, Hans Werner, 187n29 Rilke, Rainer Marie, 128, 135; works: “Five Songs,” 23; “Herbsttag,” 141 Rimbaud, Arthur, 123, 135; works: Le Bateau ivre, 128 Rippberger, Helmut, 172n3 Ritter, Elfriede, 31–32, 176n27 Ritter, Ilse, 176n27 Roberts, Andrew, 175n17 Rodin, Auguste, 154 Romanian (language), 137 Roth, Henry, xii Roth, Joseph, xii, 5, 6–7, 11, 13, 15, 18, 47, 143, 153; works: The Hotel Years, 177n1; letter to Benno Reifenberg, 5–6; letter to Stefan Zweig, 52–53; Letters, 53; The Radetzky March, 2, 6, 14, 41–69, 75; The Wandering Jews, 51–52; 154 Roth, Philip, xii Rothenberg, Jerome, 188n39 Rothhaupt, Josef, 194n40 Russell, Bertrand, 154, 155: Wittgenstein writes to, 11, 157, 179n14 Russell, Michael, 171n10, 173–74n2, 176n25, 176n30 Rustchuk/Ruse (Bulgaria), 3, 104 figs. 21 and 22, 105, 107, 109, 115, 117, 182n2, plate 7; ethnic makeup 102–3 Ruth (biblical), 139, 140 Santner, Eric L., 192n25 Sassoon, Siegfried, 24 Schalek, Alice, 32–33 Schardt, Bill, 190n8 Schiele, Egon, xii Schiller, Friedrich: William Tell, 26 Schmiedleitner, Georg, 176n25 Schnitzler, Arthur, 10 Schocken, Gershhom, 187n35 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 18, 23, 87, 156, 181n22 Schorske, Karl: Fin de Siècle Vienna, 2

Schubert, Franz: Unfinished Symphony, 126. See also music Schüller, Richard, 7–8, 172n13 Schulte, Joachim, 194n41 Schulte-Michel, Thomas, 176n25 Scofield, Paul, 173n2 Seipel, Ignaz, 9, 11 Semalian, Julian, 187n33 Sengl, Deborah, 176n25, plates 5 and 6 Shakespeare, William, 20; works: Richard III, 32 Shmueli, Ilana, 187n31 Silverman, Lisa, 9, 171n1, 172n12, 172n16 Skinner, Francis, 191n17 Smith, Gary, 172n23 Social Democrats, 8, 10 socialism/socialists, 9–10; Musil on, 89, 94 Socialist Party, 8–9, 25, 120 Socrates, 36 Solomon, Peter, 136 Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, xi Spencer, Malcolm, 178n8, 181n24 Spencer, Stuart, 184n9 Spengler, Oswald: Decline of the West, 94 Stall, Andrea, 187n37 Strauss, Johann, the Elder, 41–42, 178n3. See also music; “The Radetzky March” Stravinsky, Igor: Les Noces, 113 Surrealism, xiv, 136–37 swastika (Hakenkreuz), 39, 177n41. See also Nazis/Nazism Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels, 109 Swiss, Thomas, 175n17 Tarnowski, Andrea, 186n24 Taubes, Jacob, 161, 192n24 Thiher, Alan, 181n24 Thompson, Dorothy, 53 Thornton, Thomas, 172n15, 179n16 Threepenny Opera, The (Bertolt Brecht– Kurt Weill), 111–12

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Tiedemann, Rolf, 186n21 Timms, Edward, 10–11, 12, 25, 36, 39, 52, 172n19, 172n22, 173n24, 173n30, 174n2, 175nn14–15, 177n36 Tolstoy, Leo, 157, 169, 190n8; works: Gospel in Brief, 156; War and Peace, 59 Tongue Set Free, The (Canetti), xii, 7, 101–12, 114–17, 122. See also Canetti, Elias Torch in My Ear, The (Canetti), 111, 117– 20, 121. See also Canetti, Elias Toulmin, Stephen, 190n8, 190n11 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 53, 65, 78, 127, 155–56. See also Wittgenstein, Ludwig translation: Canetti’s, 122; of Celan, 187–88n37; Celan’s, 128, 130, 138, 184n7; illusive, 173n2, 188n37; of Musil, 180n12. See also individual names and titles Treaty of Versailles, 83 Trieste, Italy, 182n6 Trotsky, Leon, 9–10 Tyrolean jacket (Celan’s), 135 fig. 26. See also Celan, Paul Tzara, Tristan, 22, 185n14 Ungar, Frederick, 174n2 Verlaine, Paul, 135 Vienna: early twentieth-century photos of, 73–74 figs. 16–19 Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists, 157 Vossenkuhl, Wilhelm, 194n40 Wade, Allen, 193n29 Wagenknecht, Christian, 173n30 Wagner, Richard, 23, 90 Waldrop, Rosmarie, 183n1, 183n4 Wasserstein, Bernard: On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War, 10, 172n18 Waugh, Alec, 191n15 Weidenbaum, Inge von, 183n3

Weigel, Hans, 138 Weill, Kurt, 111–12 Weimar Thought, 13 Weimar Republic, 13, 99, 112 Weininger, Otto, 191, 191n14 Welles, Orson: The Third Man, 126 Welser-Möst, Franz, 41, 43 fig. 10 Weyr, Thomas, 172n15 Wheen, Arthur Wesley, 174n9 Wiedemann, Barbara, 187n26, 188n38 Wilhelm, Kaiser, 81, 179n3, 181n27 Wilkins, Sophie, 171n5, 179n1, 180n12, 182n7 Wilson, Woodrow, 2 Winch, Peter, 190n13 Winter, J. M., 175n12 Wittgenstein, Hermine, 155, 171n7, 182–83n10 Wittgenstein, Karl, 154 Wittgenstein, Ludwig von, xiii, 5, 7, 10, 11, 15–16, 17–18, 58, 81, 82, 95, 98, 143; and anti-Semitism, 157– 58; Bachmann on, 184–85n12; on Catholicism vs. Protestantism, 164; on Christianity, 160–69; and Dostoevsky, 190n8; on Epistles of St. Paul, 160–61; on Gospels, 160–62; as Jew, 158; on language, 39, 58; in military, 155; on Old Testament, 164–65; and religion, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159–69; as teacher, 157; and Tolstoy, 169, 190n8; writes to Keynes, 17–18; writes to Bertrand Russell, 157, 178–79n14; works: On Certainty, 165–66; Culture and Value, 158, 159, 167; diary, 53, 112, 154–55, 156; Lectures, 39; Notebook, 78, 167–68; Notebooks 1914–1916, 156; Philosophical Investigations, 39, 79, 127, 158, 168; Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, 159; Remarks on Sir James Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” 159; Tractatus L ­ ogico-Philosophicus, 5, 53, 65, 78, 127, 155–56, 157, 166, 167, 169, 171n6, 184n12. See also Drury, Maurice Wittgenstein, Paul, 154

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Wolfson, Susan J., 186n18 Woolf, Virginia, xiv World War I (the Great War), xiii, 19, 23–25, 44, 53, 66, 78–79, 82–83, 94–95, 97–98, 114; Canetti on, 116– 17, 120; Musil enlists in, 81–82; Wittgenstein volunteers for, 153, 155–56 World War II: Wittgenstein and Drury in, 163, 167 World of Yesterday, The (Zweig), 8 Wright, G. H. von, 180n6, 180n9, 180n13, 193n30 Wright, Sue Ellen, 174n2

Yeats, W. B., 123, 165, 183n15; works: letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, 165–66, 193n29; “Sailing to Byzantium,” 189n46 Yiddish, 11, 98 Zionism, 52, 119, 135, 157. See also antiSemitism Žižek, Slavoj, 192n25 Zohn, Harry, 175n11 Zweig, Stefan, 1, 7, 8, 154, 172n3; Roth’s letters to, 52–53; The World of Yesterday, 8